This is just a short one - my brief rant about the early abandonment of a promising network card.

I bought a KillerNIC M1 at the end of 2008 in order to reduce ping time in online games. I have tended to stay well back from the top of the line where the general purpose CPU is concerned in systems I build for myself, so I had high expectations about the benefit I would see from this card offloading additional work.

I was pleased with the overall performance of this card on my 64-bit Vista system once I upgraded to the latest beta drivers at the time (4.1.0.36).

But here is the problem - those beta drivers were the last drivers they ever ‘released’ for this card - and you can only get those by digging around on the beta forum. Windows 7 is on the horizon and there is no word on any support for these cards other than reports of BSODs from early adopters.

I am having flashbacks to my driver experience with ATI video cards back in the day (around 2000) when it took them forever to get new drivers out for newer platforms.

So here is my message to you Bigfoot - I NEVER buy ATI cards. I don’t care what their benchmarks or feature checklists show. NVIDIA always gets my business because of the terrible support I received from ATI almost a decade ago and because of the awesome driver support NVIDIA has always provided.

Someday maybe - if NVIDIA drops the ball - I may take another look at an ATI card.

Right now Bigfoot is in the doghouse - you guys can forget about any more business from me and I will recommend against your products every chance I get.

Rawr Mage with all the buffs set shows the following relative value for mage dps from the buffs:

click the image to see full size.

With full buffs my mage’s theoretical max dps in current gear is 6175.47.

If I reset the simulation with actual buffs available during last week’s Sapphiron fight, we get the following chart and my theoretical max dps drops to 4520.38. I think this illustrates for the whole raid how important it is to stack all the buffs/debuffs that we can. I have heard from another raiding guild that when they look at the stats for a recruit they add another 1000dps to determine what they will do in their raids.

Here are the buffs I used to make the rawr charts - I may have missed some because of different naming conventions:

I recognize that optimizing for the mage is not necessarily in the best interests of the raid as a whole. I wrote this up just to point out that we may be missing some significant dps because we are not stacking all the buffs/debuffs that we can.

This site provides a detailed analysis of level 80 WoW characters. It can show you at a glance where your gear, enchants, or gems are weak. It also provides a very nice visualization of where you should be looking for gear and what raids you are geared to run.

The guild reports are downright awesome. Be.imba allows you to pull up to 40 characters in a shot by class or guild rank.

Some of these are not accurate because the character is in PvP gear.

I was digging through some old World of Warcraft screenshots today and thought I would post them since the old guild sites are gone or are going away.

Ugs, Saura, Rhino, Velan, Nisha, Glad, Smia, Griff, Leo, Benjji, Achilles, and many others - thanks for introducing me to the end game! To borrow an Aaron Sorkin favorite - ‘What a long, strange trip its been’

Happy raiding!

This may have been my first time in Karazhan

Resolute in Zul Aman - my first kill of the bear boss Nalorakk

See those bones - Dont move in the flame wreath!

dazed and amused chillin at the horde camp in mount hyjal

Most of the old Resolute landed in Dazed & Amused and finally got into some 25-man content. D&A had already mastered Gruul and Magtheridon; they were progressing steadily through Serpentshrine Cavern when the Resolute folks came over and filled out the raid. That coupled with the removal of attunement for Mount Hyjal got D&A rocketing into Tempest Keep, Mount Hyjal, and Black Temple.

We still banged our heads against Vashj and Kael for a long time, but the downfall of all of the baddies was inevitable.

Dazed and Amused finally takes on Illidan

Back in the good old days when I seemed to have more spare time for that sort of thing I played with selling some mp3 and CD recordings of multi-track hymns I recorded.

Well, crocketthopper.com has been defunct for a couple of years now, and I don’t see myself ever getting back to attempting to sell the music - so here it is:

Free for your listening pleasure

oh-jesus-my-savior

tallis-evening-hymn

return-oh-god

oh-tell-me-no-more-of-this-worlds-vain-store

supplication

samanthra

almighty-king-whose-wondrous-hand

Greetings friends, family, cohorts, peers, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera!

I expect the focus of this blog will evolve over time - but for the moment I plan for this public diary to span personal, political, and professional topics ranging from Software Engineering to liberty to the value of human life - body, soul, and spirit.

I have read that most blogs are read by at most a dozen people - so I will approach this public/private endeavor with an expectation that most of my readers are already acquainted with me in some way. Clay Shirkey makes some great observations about the weirdness of this phenomenon in his book Here Comes Everybody - writing a blog is like having a conversation in the food court of a mall - it is sort of private, but eavesdroppers abound. In the blogosphere however, this behavior is encouraged