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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. #

• Seriously. Pirate Ninjas would totally rock the house. They’d be unstoppable. #
• According to the MMO Gamer quiz, I am an EAKS. What are you? http://www.guildcafe.com/zQuest.php #

• Flight of the Conchords are my favorite band now. Who’s the boom king? Bret is the boom king! http://tinyurl.com/2hwaxt #

• Configuring grails with acegi for security. The plugin makes it pretty brainless. #
• Learning about Domain Driven Design. It is a different way of thinking than I am used to. http://tinyurl.com/2kles2 #

• Back at work today, feeling a lot better. #
• Twitter needs more design customization. #
• Decoupled Twitter and Facebook status updates. Twitter should have more depth in my opinion. #

I’ve been thinking about Grails again. There’s a very easy-to-use Grails plugin for creating RSS feeds (and Atom, and a lot more) for your application. I was surprised at just how easy it was to start from scratch and create an RSS feed from your existing domain model.

Seeing how easy using that plugin is, it made me want to revisit the idea of rebuilding this weblog as a complete Grails webapp instead of relying on Wordpress for everything. Nothing against Wordpress at all–it is an excellent blogging tool–but there’s something to be said about rolling your own and getting it to work. Call it a pride thing, or even just plain and simple hubris.

I’d have to consider a host of features that I currently rely on Wordpress to implement for me: posts (obviously), categories, tags, comments, spam filtering, RPC for remote posting via ScribeFire, RSS feeds for posts and comments, integration with Twitter, easy-to-use design templates, and so on. The list is huge when you look at it.

At the same time, if I write my own blog software, I want it to be full yet not over-flowing with options that it turns people off. I need to think about what a blogger needs from blog software and start from there. I can build up a set of basic requirements and start there. For instance, I’m wanting to aggregate a lot of my current points of presence on the web. It’d be nice to be able to go to one place and be able to update all locations, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Should I include support for RDF? OpenSocial? True restful web services for publication?

It’s a lot to think on.