My name is Zim and my tank is full

It’s just one small step for a single, but one giant step for every dungeon group on Nathrezim and the whole entire realmpool. I reached level 79 at around 01:00am in the morning and I am now about 80 percent away from the level cap. According to the fact that I am soon will be level 80 I bought my paladin some new gear that he’ll be able to wear when he’s on maximum level. I had to buy this stuff because I don’t think that I’ll find much time for active raiding and most of my gear will be farmed in the three dungeons situated in Icecrown. The rest will be bought with ‘Emblems of triumph’. Sounds like a lot of farming though.

Blood Elf Paladin

I was on a kind of ‘killing spree’ during the last levels but it ended yesterday in the instance ‘Halls of lightning’ because the paladin who was in the group pulled the first boss while he was loaded with energy and lightnings and after a short struggling fight I received a very unhealthy one hit and bit the grass. Anyhow, I am very satisfied with my tank abilities and the fact that I can finish nearly every Northrend instance in 20-30 minutes. Can’t wait to enter the last three Northrend instances and kick some mobs ass.

Finish it

This week is the week of the finishing line. Project “Straight Edge” in version 1.0 is going to end on 15th July and on the other side I am pretty sure that my paladin in World of Warcraft will reach level 80. He’s level 77 right now and I’ll kick him up to level 79 this very evening. I bought my first part of the tier-9 set, some real nice shoulder armor that I can send the old shoulders to my undead warrior. Yep, yep, yep account bound items rule

But back to straight edge and a preview of version 2.0 of the project. There’s no doubt, version 2.0 will last for twelve month and there will be some rule changes. I was recognizing a lot of rule breaks when it comes to nutrition. You might remember the change to rule #5 because there was a kind of backdoor in consideration with sweets. So I decided to introduce the exception meal where I can whatever I want but only if rule #7 is fulfilled. I personally think that this kind of connecting rules with each other will make the whole thing more interesting and a little bit exciting to me.

Unfortunately is the weather absolutely exhausting these days because the temperature increased drastically but the humidity did not decrease. This like a murder to sports especially when you’re overweighted and your stamina is not as good as it should be. I was on a good way to get a better stamina but with conditions like these I definately have to do a step backwards and I cannot do sports at least four time a weak. If I am able to have two gym sessions a week I could very happy. It’s more a torture than an amusement. I guess I can do two sessions this week and then my vacation and trip to France will start.

If I’ll ever get the chance to do some kind of sports on my vacation I’ll definately grab it by the hand and do it. Meal exceptions are not allowed though it’s my vacation and it mainly there for recovery and fun. Hopefully I’ll be able to do some nice pictures with my Canon EOS 500D. I haven’t touched my baby for nearly two month and before it comes to vacation I have to shoot some pictures on a marriage. I fucking hate taking pictures of people. Portraits are okay but only if it’s a person I like or I feel comfortable with. But these stupid snapshots of a dumb ass party crowd are what really pisses me off. I haven’t bought my camera to do stupid snap- and mugshots, this is what grannies and old daddies do with their ugly ultra-compact cameras.

Problemiwigo

Unfortunately did I mess up the bloodreaver gallery application here on this website. I did a simple auto-update and after this simple update was I standing there with a much more complex problem. The Piwigo gallery application needed MySQL 5.x as a minimum requirement and at the moment the whole webserver has got a MySQL database version 4.1.2. I also did not find a solution to do a downgrade or better said, I haven’t found the nerve or the time to fix it. I finally switched over to Coppermine, which will hopefully serve me well, and re-uploaded most of the pictures that were content of the old gallery. A few pictures are still missing, mainly in the photography category, but they’ll be uploaded later.

It’s Ziiiiiiim…

After getting hacked for a few times I finally got back to World of Warcraft to continue levelling my paladin. I was a kind of disappointed that I was not able to play this char to level 80 as fast as possible. On the one hand my good old Throll hunter bores me and on the other hand I must say that the paladin is a lot of fun to play. It’s strange to get directly to the first row in combat when you were watching every encounter from the last row for years. Seeing some of the dungeon bosses from this close in combat makes me feel like, “Hmm, I never realised that this boss actually looked like this.

Playing hunter in combat makes you feel as if you are doing damage but you do not get this feeling as if you are completely smacking the mob while playing a paladin. With a hunter the mob feels a few pricks from your arrows but with a paladin you totally beat the shit out of him, especially with this one attack spell that makes this beautiful emboss sound.

If there’s one thing a paladin always forget – it’s dying. In one out of ten dungeons runs we actually wiped and when we wiped the healer was mostly a complete dumbass, a rogue felt as if he was the tank or I simply pulled too many mobs. Last but not least, the highest fun factor as a tanking paladin aka Tankadin is the power of total control. You say when to continue. You say when stop. You say when to pull. And you say how fast to get through the instance. I had a lot of disappointing dungeon runs with my marksman Throll hunter, mainly because of lame tanks or the healer was crap. Well I guess I’ll also level the hunter to level 85 when Cataclysm is out, but for now the paladin is my main and hopefully level 80 pretty soon.

New media experience

I bought me a new TV a few weeks ago and yesterday was the first day where I integrated my unused but very powerful third PC into the whole multimedia system. By now there is no OS installed but in the near future I am going to install Windows 7 and Fedora on this PC. Windows 7 will be a kind of gaming console replacement system (DMC4 on a 40″ TV will kick ass) and the parallel installed Fedora will be the media center and “internet-machine”. I have chosen Fedora because the overall performance of the system is way better than Windows 7 and I don’t like the MC which is integrated into Windows 7 very much.

Actually I am not very sure about running two systems on a media center but the file handling sharing options are much easier than they are on Windows. Like I said Windows 7 will only be there for gaming, such as a nice Street Fighter IV session or a competition in Pro Evolution Soccer and Fedora will be the movie master. Another thing I am not sure about for the moment is, which media center software I should use under Fedora, mythTV or moovida, or if I should completely leave it and just use VLC or SMPlayer and customize the GUI of Fedora in that way that it is minimal but ultra functional.

One thing that is really annoying and disturbing is that the case, where the whole hardware is installed, is pretty loud and noisy. I am going to fix this in the nearby future by simply moving to another case that uses less but bigger fans and includes more 3.5″ slots. By now I have a lot of cooling boxes built in to the case for my hard drives but all these 40mm fans do too much noise so you’re not able to watch a movie in a friendly and silent environment. Well, well… there’s still a lot to do, but there’s no hurdle that cannot be taken…

Heating edge

This week is by far the weakest week in my straight edge project. I made it only one time off to gym and it felt like a torture. You must know that the summer broke in to our country and the temperature increased drastically. It feels like you’re melting away the whole day. Another point why I didn’t made it off to gym is my nowadays tiredness. I feel a kind of burnt out and pretty exhausted at the moment because everything simply stresses me and I can barely catch a clear thought while concentrating on anything.

Straight Edge - wallpaper by ~x-vegan-x

I am proud to announce that there were no backlashs. I resisted alcohol and cigarettes and I kept to my latest rule change. My weight also did not increase and is a kind of stable for now. By the beginning of next week and after catching a looooot of sleep over the weekend I will definately go to gym every workday. There’s still the goal to reach 96kg (211.64lbs) by the beginning of my vacation in two weeks and by reaching the last milestone in this very first straight edge project of mine. Straight edge 2.0 is on its way…

The good old Seattle style

Sometimes a friend of you asks you if you want to come with him to an event because nobody else wants to give him some company and enjoy it with him. So it happened to me that my girl was asking me if I would like to join her visiting the Pearl Jam concert in Berlin. I have to admit that I am anything everything else than a big fan of this band. Actually I know three songs by name and the rest was just floating through my ears and just faded away from my memory.

Pearl Jam by ~idolise-me

What shall I say, seeing Pearl Jam in concert was a truely remarkable event and this concert made it definately to the top five of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. Tool and the Smashing Pumpkins are still on top. What I really liked about the performance of Pearl Jam was the authenticity and the honesty of the band. You can see and feel that everyone in the band is not just doing a concert job, they perform with all their heart because it’s their hobby and their passion. This band is definately not a show act that needs a lot of fireworks and pyrotechnics or anything else because the real show happens between the audience and band. There was something special in the air this evening that I’ve never experienced on a concert before. The Kindlbühne in Berlin is an arena that can capture around 17.000 people, but for some reasons Pearl Jam made it, that the concert felt like a cool club gig, which was pretty cool because I really like club gigs.

I guess I will try to dig deeper into the music of Pearl Jam in the future because this concert impressed me a lot.