slaggle dot com

• Time flies when you are coding PHP. I should take a break and get some dinner. #
• Going to eat lunch at an Irish pub. Hooray Irish food! Hooray beer! #
• Bought a mic stand for Rock Band #

• I listened to MC Frontalot loudly on the drive to work this morning, so I’m going to have to be careful speaking to my customers today. #
• @feliciaday Congrats on the YouTube Award win! #
• Parts of my job really suck. I’m too nice of a guy to be a team lead sometimes. #
• Google’s AJAX Language API is pretty sweet: http://snurl.com/22bas #
• ytcracker + awesome subwoofer + php coding in eclipse = EPIC WIN! #
• If you can’t tell, I’m listening to a lot of nerdcore today. Next up: MC Hawking #
• @drinkinstein Thanks! I’ll be sure to download your music and give it a listen! #
• @scobleizer It was surreal watching you through @kevinrose ’s quik videos too. You guys have too much fun! #

• Nooeeesss! My cable is out and I was supposed to run Karazhan!! #
• Need sequence diagrams in a hurry but can’t be bothered with StarUML or Visio? Try this: http://www.websequencediagrams.com/ #
• Cable is back on, yay! I managed to watch a disc of Death Note tonight but didn’t get to raid or work on any web site stuff. #
• @goldteam is the winning team! Go @goldteam go! #
• How to build a twitter bot with Groovy and Grails in like 10 minutes: http://memo.feedlr.com/?p=11 #
• Looking at VPS webhosts. I bet I can find a new host with better offerings for a cheaper price than my current host. #
• I’m off to eat some Thai food and plan the return of an old podcast (ohh.. did I say too much?) #

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of being connected on the web. I’m really into the social aspect of the way the web is evolving and I am usually among the first to try new things online. I’m also very fond of having an idea and immediately trying to do something with it.

That last part gets me into trouble sometimes. I will have an idea for a web site, start putting it together, and then realize that it is just not what I want to do. I have about half a dozen “idea sites” out there that don’t get any real traffic and don’t really do anything important. I’m too impulsive, I guess.

So over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I think it is time to buckle down and get serious about my online presence. I can’t just start something spur of the moment without putting a lot of thought into it, and whatever I do it has to be something I can pour my heart and soul into. It can’t be something that I only have a marginal interest in maintaining.

That being said, I’m going to go through my domain list on my web server and start shutting some things down so I can focus. This in and of itself isn’t an impulsive act, but something I’ve really been considering for a long time. It is time for me to choose what I am going to be serious about.

As of now, I plan on keeping slaggle.com up and running, because it has become my de facto weblog for many years. It started out as a test site for new ideas for Cold Hard Slag as a new search idea for toy price guide info (now you can see where the name came from!) but eventually it just became a blog.

I’ve already decided what it is I’m going to focus on, but I don’t want to be very hasty in announcing it. I need to solidify some ideas first, to see if it is viable. Feel out the waters, so to speak. Once that is done, I’ll just have two web sites. This one and the other.

I will give you a hint about what I plan to focus my energies on: It will be something huge. Very big. And it is a dramatic evolution of something I’ve already done before. Don’t worry, I plan on moving forward with this so you will know very soon what it is I have planned.

• The estimate on repairs to the car was around $500. A lot better than I thought it would be! #
• Running Tempest Keep: The Eye right now. About to pull Al’ar. #
• We didn’t get Al’ar down, but we learned a lot about the fight. My warlock topped the damage meters by far. Yay! #
• In other news, I’m almost finished with my redesign of slaggle.com. Then I’ll focus on content convergence issues. #
• Off to bed. Otherwise I’m going to be up refreshing Twitter all night. #
• What would life be like if caffeine were a controlled substance instead of being considered a safe food substance? #
• @istarman I’ve been there! I spent hours cursing AdSense wondering why it didn’t work. AdBlock Plus was messing me up. So am I a hypocrite? #
• Yay! The Insurance adjuster is sending a check for our car repairs. Quickest turnaround ever! #
• Looking forward to either watching Death Note or the new Appleseed movie tonight. #
• I may have to do more research. Zude didn’t grab me like it did @scobleizer. #

My World of Warcraft guild is progressing onward from raiding Karazhan and Gruul’s Lair. We’re moving on to tackle The Eye in Tempest Keep, a 25-man raid that is the starting point for Tier-5 raiding. It marks an exciting step for our raiding group because we are maturing quite a bit and starting to work together well.

To learn the first couple of bosses and to become more cohesive as a group, we’re raiding The Eye on two nights. Tuesdays and Saturdays. Tuesday nights we are working on learning to fight the first boss, Al’ar, and on Saturday we will work on the second boss Void Reaver.

The reason we are doing it like this is that there aren’t as many trash mob pulls to Al’ar so it fits well with our limited play time during the week. Yes, most of us have real life obligations to consider. But the weekend isn’t as limited on time, so we can spend more time on the arguably harder trash mobs to the second boss.

I know a lot of people focus more on Void Reaver first. You can actually get to him and skip the first boss, and Void Reaver is easy to the point that people call him “Loot Reaver”. But really the mobs you have to fight before him require a LOT of coordination we’re finding.

Anyway, last night we made our first attempt at Al’ar. People telling us that “oh you don’t have the DPS for this” and “he’s so hard, let’s just skip him”. I am happy to say that while we didn’t get him down, it wasn’t because of a lack of DPS or healing. We wiped because we’ve never faced him before and don’t know the fight very well. Our tanks were struggling to keep coordinated so we kept getting Flame Buffets hitting the raid, and some tanks couldn’t get away from the Flame Quills . Nothing that practice won’t solve even if we don’t change up our gear too much. It was pretty exciting.

I had the privilege of being the Warlock to stay on top of the threat meters. I removed the Blessing of Salvation buff, changed up some gear to output more raw DPS, and threw everything I had at Al’ar constantly. The reason behind this is that in Phase 1 you can’t pull aggro from the tanks but in Phase 2 the main tank needs to build up a lot of threat. So the idea is for me to get as much threat as I can, and as Phase 2 starts and Al’ar makes a beeline for me, the main tank Taunts him and I Soulshatter, dumping all my threat. It basically slingshots a ton of threat to the main tank. Quite a neat idea!

Doing that gave me the honor of easily topping the damage meters for that fight. I was quite pleased by that and look forward to continuing our progress in this raid.

• Ugh! We were rear-ended on the way to work this morning. The rain makes people drive stupid. #
• No injuries in our wreck this morning, but now I’m really tense and in a bad mood. #
• Going to head to the body shop to get a repair estimate for my car. #

• Too many ideas churning in my head. I gotta try to focus on work this morning! #
• MyFaces Orchestra: Conversation scope without using Seam? Interesting. http://tinyurl.com/32fxn4 #
• @leolaporte having taken notes just today with my iPhone camera, Evernote looks like a great solution! Thanks for sharing that! #
• Headed to the gym, gonna be thinking of data convergence with the social web as I run. #
• Trying out Twhirl on Windows. Adobe Air seems to have some quirks, but the app itself feels nice. #
• @istarman Geotagging everything is invasive to privacy if it is compulsory. Optional tagging would be the way to go to avoid scary stalkers. #
• Gak. Eclipse keeps forgetting my user libraries. Might be time to hunt for another Java IDE if the problems keep up. #
• @istarman Totally agree it is scary. Even worse, think of children who might accidentally geotag online data elements? The mind boggles. #
• Blizzard Devs say patch 2.4 is coming VERY soon. http://snurl.com/21yoq #
• Time for a dose of caffeine, aka the best drug ever invented. I’m a big fan, personally. #
• I always want to party when I get stubborn unit tests to pass. I’m such a nerd. #
• I don’t know how I feel about this. There’s a sequel in the works for The Lost boys. http://tinyurl.com/ywmkdv #

I think I’ve been spreading myself a bit thin here in the past few months. I have this unfocused blog which covers Java, Groovy/Grails, my gaming obsessions (mainly World of Warcraft), and a few random musings. All of it is peppered with daily digests of my activity on Twitter. On top of that, I also have a weblog on scribul.net, a weblog on uberhealer.net, my personal site timgourley.com, and so on. I think the fact that I have so much going on makes it so that I end up not updating anything, which in turn makes things not very interesting for you, the reader.

So over the next few weeks I think I will see some consolidation and focus. How that will be achieved is still uncertain, but I definitely want to try to create something people will be interested in reading. That means a lot of changes on my part. The amount of content, the quality of content, and the topics of content will all have to be addressed.

I’ve also been thinking a lot of about consolidation as it is concerned to data on the social web. Think about your average web 2.0 nut and the kind of sites he visits: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and the list can go on and on and on. There isn’t a really good way for all of that to be consolidated yet. So if you are seriously interested in tracking someone you find interesting (read: you want to stalk), you have to keep track of a lot of different points of connection. There has to be a good way to centralize all of that.

We’re getting to the point where the web is a very social creature, and it is overwhelming at times. @istarman on Twitter brought up a good question about adding Geotagging to the mess and how suddenly it removes all semblance of privacy. Well, at this point I’m rambling, but there is a lot to think about when considering your online identity and how deep into the social machinations of web 2.0 you want to delve.

Personally, it is something I’m going to have to face and deal with pretty soon. It is spring cleaning, after all.

• I’m officially bored. I’m twittering the fact that I spent the last 30 minutes looking up random domain names to see if they are free. #
• I can’t believe someone registered iamtheverymodelofamodernmajorgeneral.com #
• Kinda sleepy now. Relaxing weekends will do that to a person. #