M-x Kelsin

So I saw my first TMBG show tonight and I really liked it. I can see why so many of my friends (all through my life) have liked this band. Before today I didn't even own an album. Turns out tonight's show was one where they were going to play the entire Flood album in order. This made me buy that album and listen to it all day. It's a pretty amazing piece of artistry.

The two bad things about this show? The lights and sound quality. They had these BRIGHT AND BIG white lights they kept shining on the crowd. The Berklee Performance Center is DARK. VERY VERY DARK. Shining lights in our eyes like that just hurts. They did it a lot... a whole lot. Anyway past that the sound quality was awful. Glad I listened to the Flood album ALL DAY cause I would have not heard ANY lyrics otherwise.

Back to the music, the whole album was great. They had an amazing trumpet player.

I'm going to be moving my mail to my linode soon (basically want to stop using GMail for most things) and in the process I'm learning about setting up webmail. To do this properly I did want to get my apache set up using a self-signed certificate. Clearly I don't need my personal server to be signed by a CA since it's only for me, I just don't want people sniffing packets.

I used these two links to do this. The guide is great and worked flawlessly for me!

sudo port install mutt-devel +imap +idn +ssl +sasl +gnuregex +headercache +gdbm +deepif +sidebar

This is just a quicky but I had to setup a new laptop and remembered how easy it is to install a new git home directory into a clean Mac OS X home directory. I'm using the Mac OS X git binaries gotten from their google code page (also linked from the main git site).

From my home directory on the new mac:

git init
git remote add origin username@repo
git config branch.master.remote origin
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master
git pull

Obviously replace the username@repo with your home directory repository.

So the office move is done and I love my new cube area. The desk is very simple but nice. The rollout drawer thingy with the cushion top is great for when people come by to work on stuff. I feel like I have more desk space so I brought in all of my programming books. The desk behind my chair is a shared space for me and the new programmer once he starts. There is a book shelf on the end of it as well. I'm trying to push for a mini-fridge to go beneath it but we'll see how that turns out!

The one thing I do think I do well is keep people moving during raids. From the first Karazhan runs I started leading I got a reputation for being very impatient and speed oriented. This wasn't a goal but I think some usefull tips did come from this.

Loot Takes FOREVER

Anything you can do to speed this up is good. I've trained my tanks currently to run to the next trash and start pulling as soon as enough people are there to take the pull. People move to trash when they don't want something and wait by the body otherwise.

My guild also uses a Suicide Kings queue so no need to spend time bidding. Pieces that lots of people want are the quickest. Anything you can do to speed up loot will help a lot. If you know only one or two people can use a certain item blatantly ask them (provided your loot system of course) if they want it. This could speed up the process a lot.

Explaining bosses

Explaining bosses is normally the next biggest time waste. When you are running an instance with 80-90% people that have done it before, make the new people read strats ahead of time. Don't waste time explaining. Explain the fight during the trash up to the boss even. Tell them to whisper someone of the same role. As a raid leader you know who your great players are, so make sure to tell the new people to whisper them with questions. Sometimes I even start at the good player: "Hey, can you tell so and so about the next fight while we pull trash."

Chain pulling

Once your players get used to this you can pull FAST. Never have a tank not pulling something. That's the rule. When the offtank is free of his current mob have him pull the next group. Seriously. This rule clearly doesn't apply when trash is hard or new, and your tanks have to be smart. But seriously the only time they shouldn't pull is if ALL healers have NO mana. Healers will learn very quickly how to sneak drinks in between pulls and mana shouldn't be an issue. Once you're good at an instance healers barely go out of mana anyway. Use cooldowns like innervate and stuff when you need to as well. Even as a kitty druid in raids I would just pull stuff to keep the pace up. Once trash is easy treat it as such and don't waste time on it.

AFK's

Let people AFK whenever. Trash is easy. Make sure people know that you DO NOT want an AFK right before a boss or during boss attempts. Make sure they whisper an officer and of course if too many want to afk at once (especially all of the healers) make sure they go in spurts instead of all at once. AFK's shouldn't slow down the raid at all. They don't need to if you do them right. If you let people take an AFK right before every boss fight? That will slow down the raid a ton.

Ready checks

The official /readycheck should be the ONLY ready check needed. Never say stuff like "Is everyone ready?" That only wastes time. Ready check forces a quick answer which is what you need. Asking vocally will only confuse people and make the answer back be very slow. Also asking questions like "Any questions" is better cause a few seconds of silence should be the answer. Waiting for positives takes forever, waiting for the 1 or 2 possible negative is much faster.

Honestly for our raids I follow these guildlines all the time. Even on new stuff. Our raids ussually are very efficient. Steps 1 and 2 are the ones that are saved till later on. When we were ready to finally do Naxx in one 3 hour clear steps 1 and 2 are what brought us under the 3 hour mark. The night you stop taking a long time on loot and boss explanations is the night your raiding time drops dramatically.

We traveled up to Maine today to visit Linda Clifford's store. Trip was long but we succeeded in the purpose which was to have Caitlin and I pick out our wedding rings.

Hopefully you can guess which one is for me and which is Caitlin's. I wanted something to match her choice and she had seen this one on the website a while ago and figured it was the one she wanted. So we dipped into the wedding account and placed our order. Now it's going to be made (over in Ireland) and then we'll pay the rest and have them ship them to us after that.

Luckily I didn't leave empty handed:

I finally got around to creating a ruby app template. Of course my recent ruby work is not centered around creating new apps but I'm still glad I did it. Will save my some time!

You can read more about app templates or what a great screencast about them at other places. I don't want to just repeat what others have already said but basically I created one so far and put it up on my github account.

The one question I have is about running this on a server without the haml gem already installed. I don't really want it to try and install the gem in my home directory so we'll see how that works out next time I have to do it. For now on my current linode it sets up a new rails project pretty nicely for my needs.

The one other interesting aspect of my template is my config system that I just wrote. It's only two lines and it's heavily stealing from other blogs. I never really had a good app config system and I don't really want to use a plugin so I quickly wrote my own. It basically supports one config file (config/config.yml) and lets you setup default settings and then override / add to the defaults with per environment settings as well. For my wow raiding site this is working pretty well.

Here is the initializer file (config/initializers/config.rb):

CONFIG = YAML.load_file("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/config.yml") || {}
CONFIG = (CONFIG['default'] || {}).
           symbolize_keys.merge((CONFIG[RAILS_ENV] || {}).
                                  symbolize_keys)

And my config.yml file from my raid site. This site uses a development environment (all defaults) and then two different production environments since I run the site for two different guilds. You can see how the "dota" environment inherits the auth setting while the "cod" environment adds a forum setting that I use when using phpbb authentication.

default:
  guild: Your Guild
  auth: login

cod:
  guild: Cake or Death
  forum: http://forum.cakeordeath-guild.com
  auth: phpbb

dota:
  guild: Daughters of the Alliance

Pretty simple and now I don't even have to do anything to new rails projects to use it!

So when I got my macbook I spent all evening installing BFD2, Logic Studio (with all content) and World of Warcraft (plus other blizzard games, go battle.net!). The next day (Sunday) I immediately started recording the proposal song.

First off the sound card did not seem to like being plugged in via the hard drive. I didn't think much of it. Plugged the hard drive in via usb and sound card via firewire.

Right after adding drums the sound card started producing static and heavily distorting/detuning the output. I got afraid I was overloading the CPU/HD even though neither meter was very high. I did a lot of testing but really couldn't get anything working that whole day.

Monday night I decided to test everything and eventually ended up uninstalling/installing the Duet's software (plus full power offs in between of course). I also unplugged EVERYTHING including my USB mouse. The only stuff plugged into my computer was the Duet, power, DVI adaptor for second monitor and Ethernet cable. This let me play guitar for about 20 minutes before it started producing static again (I couldn't drum cause I wanted to test without ever opening BFD2 and without using any USB midi devices). I got fed up and send lots of emails describing what I did in detail to the Apogee tech support line.

Tuesday came and the email back from Apogee impressed me. Basically it was like "This could only be a bad unit or a bad firewire cable" which proves they actually READ my novel's worth of emails I sent and actually had nothing else to try. A+ to Apogee for not wasting my time!

I have no other 400-800 firewire cable to try but I did have my hard disk plugged in via USB that I could test. So I plugged that in via the 400-800 cable and sure enough in about 5 minutes I got the mac "Drive disconnected improperly" message even though I hadn't touched the cable. This pretty much meant it has to be my firewire port (unlikely) or the sound card.

This morning I returned the cable for another one at the Apple Store. I want to take a second to talk about this too. I called at 8:45 to ask the Apple Store if I need to print my emailed receipt to return the cable. They said no. They don't open till 9am so I was very happy they answered the phone. When I got there I said I needed to return an item and the guy said "You're the one who called? Awesome, head right up and grab a new one and let me see the old one." I go pick out another one and on the way down another employee said "You're the one returning your cable?" to make sure I wasn't just taking it away. He said good luck and when I got back downstairs the original guy told me to head to the back counter and they had me all set. Sure enough the guy in the back was like "Here you go" and handed me a new receipt for the cable and I was done. Talk about efficient use of my phone call and multiple employees to make my experience awesome. I love this place.

Anyway, since this morning I've been listening to iTunes on my laptop via the Duet at work and no static so far. Lesson learned? Always have spare cables to test with!

So this morning I check my tracking info and it says that the package is in Watertown MA and that the delivery date is Monday. I decide to call them and find out if it's possible for me to pick it up. The automatic phone system says "You're package is out for delivery".

This clearly makes me very excited.

When I get an agent on the phone I ask to confirm this and she says "Sorry, the automatic message must be mistaken you're package is not out for delivery. It will be there on Monday." After confirming this again and confirming that I can't go pick it up I hang up.

We go out to breakfast, we get home to a notice on the door saying they tried to deliver a package from Apple Computers.

I call them immediately and finally get someone on the phone. The nice lady (who of course I didn't get the name of) says that they will get a research team on it and try to find the package and get the driver to bring it back to my apartment. I say thanks and she takes my phone number down.

Now that it's an hour and a half later I call back wondering about the status and of course get run through 3 different people who all can't find a record of any of what happened 1.5 hours ago. The most recent guy keeps saying that my phone number might have been taken down wrong? WHY DOES THAT MATTER! We are talking about the same package designated by my invoice AND tracking number. Why should my phone number be required to figure out what happened an hour and a half ago? Are all CS requests filtered by phone number and not package number? He also had the balls to tell me that anything communication I would get back should get to me by Monday and that they don't guarantee any communication back on Saturday. WHAT??? We're talking about you guys screwing up and then your guys telling me I'll get a call back soon about the driver bringing me my package! Getting a call on Monday means NOTHING.

So now I "supposed" to have a manager call me back within the hour. I hope that freaking happens. This is ridiculous. If UPS didn't TELL ME ON THE PHONE that my package was not out for delivery I would have it by now. Not to mention calling back to try and get a status is impossible cause apparently NOTHING of what my first agent told me got saved to any type of note on my account.

EDIT: The Supervisor DID call me back thankfully. And she called back with results. Before she even called me she knew that the package was at a UPS Store ready to be picked up by me (all the drivers already returned)