So The Burning Crusade, the first expansion for World of Warcraft, got released about a month ago. And I’m thorougly enjoying it. It got a bit boring toward the end, when I hit level 60 with my second character — a troll mage this time; the first character was an orc hunter that I don’t play any longer.

My mage is now level 70 and slowly working on gaining access to the endgame content — heroic mode dungeons and Karazhan.

In addition to the mage I also started playing a blood elf paladin — blood elves are one of the two new races in the expansion, the other one being the squid-faced Draenei. I played a paladin for a bit on another server and quite liked it, but that was on the Alliance side. I’m Horde now, and until the arrival of the blood elves the Horde didn’t have access to paladins, just like the Alliance didn’t get any shamans.

With the two new races both sides have access to all nine classes. There’s some lore involved, but the real decision was probably that it got hard to tune encounters for two different sides, since shamans and paladins bring very different abilities with them. A major gripe has been that playing Alliance was considered “easy mode” for raiding due to all the defensive abilities a paladin has.

Zai, my paladin, just reached level 40 and got her Blood Knight mount, but I also bought the racial mount — the Elven Battle Chicken!

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). PEER

Oh god FSM, the humanity.

When the last 10 posts on your blog spans nearly a full year it’s about time to rethink the whole blogging thing.

Still stuck in southern Sweden. Still doing pretty much nothing at all. Except for playing World of Warcraft. Today it’s new year’s eve, and I treat it like I treat it every year: I ignore it completely.

My sister gave me the first season of Lost for Christmas. Two days later I saw the last episode. 30 minutes later I came home with the second season. The plot pacing is a bit slow, but half the enjoyment is to see the flashbacks and discover how people were before they crashed on the island.

I think I’m going to abandon WordPress and try Mephisto instead. While WP has served me well, the jungle of plugins I need to update annoys me. And I really don’t like the theme format.

I’m moving tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I’m a bit too busy packing tons of crap to even write this.

The bottom fell out of one of my drawers the other week, and I haven’t bothered to put a few nails in it yet. And April doesn’t really want me to, since she’s found a perfect spot to sleep in: the sock drawer!

Ugh. It’s hot.

It’s not the hottest summer I’ve seen, but this heat has lasted for a long time. And I can’t really have the windows fully open for a nice draft; about two weeks ago April decided to jump out from an open window. I didn’t really expect her to try to jump from the second floor… She was away all night, but apparently stayed nearby since I propped the door open in the morning and refilled her food bowl. Two seconds after the rattle of food in the bowl she was inside again.

It’s a tough life outside — there’s nobody there to refill your food and water bowls.

The biggest news right now is that I’ll be moving back to Stockholm in early September. I’m going to give another stab at studying, but the main reason is that I miss my friends and I have nothing to do down here. Studying is mostly so that I can apply for a student loan and afford the rent. Getting an education and a good chance at a job through the school doesn’t hurt, though.

This is pretty cool — a Java applet that renders a HTML page as a graph, where each circle represents a HTML tag. The black one is the root HTML tag. I think the grey “dandelion” cluster is what I have in my <head> tag. All I’m missing is a tooltip on nodes so you can see what is what.

Found via NSLog();.

This spam to my Gmail account had me laughing out loud.

Subject: Ihre Domain www.gmail.com ist nicht bei Google gelistet!

It’s a German spammer trying to tell me that “my” domain, gmail.com, isn’t listed in Google!

So yeah, you stupid spammer dudes at Finke Marketing. Thanks for the chuckles.

Wow, I got kinda serious here. Normally I’d just sit down and crank out some XHTML and CSS, but I decided to make an outline mockup in Photoshop for Kestrel. This image took about ten minutes to do; actually writing a basic CSS scaffold for this layout would have taken five minutes.

Kestrel will be a single-column layout with the data in distinct rows instead. Here’s an outline of the actual CSS classes used.

• header.php
  • #pageContainer: container for the entire page content, centered on the page.
    • #headContainer: container for the header image.
    • #navContainer: navigation menu.
• index.php/page.php
  • #entryContainer: container for the entry section of the page. Individual posts within it will be of the .entryContent class.
  • #metaContainer1: on the front page it will contain a list of older entries; for individual entries the metadata, trackback link, tags and stuff goes here.
  • #metaContainer2: individual entries have comments/trackbacks here. The front page gets the del.icio.us feed and some other junk, possibly in two columns.
• footer.php
  • #footerContainer: the standard copyright boilerplate.

Layoutwise Kestrel won’t be entering uncharted territories. That’s not the goal, I just want to make a nice theme.

Creating the actual design is the quick and easy part — it’s nothing complex, so I did the scaffold in five minutes. All it really needs is the artwork. (And the usual IE5 workarounds, but I’ll save those for later.)

The major part of the work will be tossing the Wordpress tags into the mix. I also have a bunch of plugins that I’d like to support, and I’m also planning to borrow parts of the K2 control panel in the WP admin interface. I like being able to release “sub-themes” for Kestrel in the shape of a small CSS file and some images, just like Vader for K2.

I’m as of yet undecided on Widget support. Since Kestrel will be single-column only, there’s not really any place for a traditional sidebar. I have some ideas for shoehorning it into the “other junk” section on the front page, but it’s on the low priority list.

I just installed the Flickr Photo Album plugin for Wordpress, and I’m pretty impressed so far.

I used to post Flickr images by cut-n-pasting a text snippet I had stored as a Wordpress note and replacing the relevant links with those of the photo I wanted to post. It works, but it’s kinda clunky and slow to do. With Flickr Photo Album you get a bar on the Write Post screen displaying your latest Flickr images, inserting the proper HTML with just two clicks — one to select the photo, another to select the size of the image you want to post. Perfect!

But wait, there’s more! You also get an integrated Flickr photo album (hence the name) — mine is located here. It looks kinda boring, but I’ll fiddle with the design of it later.

Definitely going to support this plugin in Kestrel.

In the other news, allergy season has started. Yay.