I'm sorry to have been away for so long, but I have returned! Now that unpleasantness is over I can read over all my emails, and such. Hmmm. Nothing here? WHAT?

Nobody missed me, nobody cared. It was like a million voices continued on while I was away from Slashdot. I suppose being on a spec in the middle of a sandy beach of specs in the floating massiveness of universialitude, I could not be missed had I evaporated and rained all over the prairies. Alas, some things on Slashdot have changed.

What is all this Javascript? Looks good! Things appear to be much more interesting! Hey I've got achievements!!! LOL

I'm not sure I'll have time for Diablo 3. I will definitely buy it (for use on patch tuesdays).

I wish I could be at Blizzcon. I'm currently in the WotLK beta and sadly haven't had much time to play it because I'm levelling up my rogue now that mutie rogues are OP and I like the idea of being OP (as my main is a pve/pvp lock lol ie: t6 or 550 resil atm, take your pick lol).

I played the beta for a very short period, and when I did, I realized two major things:

1) I don't have enough gold for the expansion on my live account, because I'll need loads of gold in order to buy all the stuff I'll need on both my toons.

2) Inscriptions sell for a boatload of money, with very high gross margin so that said -- you will need to have one toon that can do them or you're at the mercy of the free market (ouch, bad idea).

I've flown all over the beta, and each area looks very straight forward enough.

The focus then shifts towards getting my characters ready for what is to come.

I don't know how long this kind of insane pricing will last on the live realms for inscriptions, but I decided to get my alt ready to be my inscriptions toon, so I dropped enchanting and picked up herbalism which is now 375. I have an empty profession ready to go for when inscriptions become live.

Hai. Finally got in the WotLK beta. Learning the quests to 80 and roughly how to play a lvl 80 warlock will maximize my time. DK is going to be lvl'd after I hit 80.

So far it's pretty amazing. It's really wierd seeing my character getting xp points. Man it's been so long since lvling to 70... I forget how much fun it was. The advance of stable questing mods since BC has also made things much easier.

Northrend looks great, but I sadly have not had much time to play. Some of the mods work and there is a list of them that doesn't take long to find through Google. I have a bar mod, xperl and some other less important ones.

Well off to Toronto for a weekend of partying and D&D!

I am an avid World of Warcraft player, and I've been looking for some time at getting good Anti-Keylogging software. Right now I have what I consider to be a good setup to protect against security, but I'd like to tighten the noose a little. Does anyone have some good suggestions as to a software package that not only keeps people from hijacking my account, but also doesn't hurt my system performance while raiding the new content?

I would urge people to join me in calling for an end to openly racist comments on /. directed against developing nations, principally India, or at least for them to be modded 'Troll.'

Every time a story is posted on /. concerning a technical development in India, there are usually a small number of comments about the technical merits of the article, but a huge wave of blatent racist comments that poke fun at Indian cinema, food, the accent, and just about everything short of the colour of their skin. It's as if the concept of a non-white person achieving anything complex is a source of amusement. What alarms me even more is the fact that these comments receive 'Funny' mods and are not treated as the trolls they are.

I recently got into a flame war with one of these racists who openly justified his racism because of outsourcing. His view was that Indians deserve to be the butt of racist jokes because they are taking jobs from good white Americans. The debate about outsourcing is not one I'm going to get into here, but whether you agree or with outsourcing or not, there can be no justification for racism.

Anyone with mod points, use them wisely. Use them to fight racism, not promote it. It is totally unacceptable and we must point it out as such whenever it shows up. /.ers must be made aware of what they are doing so that they can change their behaviour.

I'm currently reading In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions...When It Counts as one of the first main books in my new O'Reilly Safari library account.

What an amazing book! Such insight! Such intrigue! I am going to make a zillion dollars with this secret knowledge of how to handle accusations from unruly people. I am certain that God himself would have wanted a copy of this to field all of Satan's accusations. Satan would have wanted a copy of it as well.

Today I received a seemingly innocuous email from a complete stranger, regarding PHP. That did not strike me as odd at all because I am somewhat of an expert on the subject.

The message was a typical plea for help and it started off claiming to have seen me posting on the newsgroups and forums, which was possible but unlikely, as I haven't posted on the PHP newsgroup in months, so I was immediately suspicious of the email.

The sender claimed they had a couple questions and then asked me to answer them for them and that they would like to hire me to do more consulting if they liked my response.

I responded as I always do to such requests, with a link to rentacoder.com and I asked the sender to let me know what their username was so that we could begin a business relationship together. I figure that if I am going to be spending any time helping a stranger, I might as well get paid for it, or I will be the one choosing who and when to help!

The person or bot on the other end of the discussion responded with a strange comment that seemed unrelated. I quickly fired back that they need to do what was asked before I answered any of their questions and that I would not discuss business over email because it has proven to be less than fruitful (and it really has).

The person quickly fired back an angry response so I told them to piss off and that I knew their trick was to get free writing samples from me.

Amateurs!!! :-) I get paid if I have to write anything (except this journal)!!!

So beware of this trick and don't fall for it. If you don't know them, give them a challenge question.

FINISHED! WOOOO HOO!!!!! ;-)

NOTE: I don't normally support the use of all caps, unless it's in response to someone finishing all their holiday shopping.

(from the inside) RAC caught some bastard trying to buy an IMSI Catcher. How stupid could you be advertising you need something like that? Jeez I thought this idiot was stupid.

Can I just say... it's about time! Oh it's sooooo nice!!!

AJAX and CSS perform wonderfully. There are still lots of little bugs but I think when they are ironed out it will be a pretty amazing experience. I'm quite pleased that Slashdot is evolving and you can really get a sense of how it will be so much better in the future.

Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it's for the best. Not really sure but it's happening now. *sigh*

(any cute nerdy chicks in my fanlist? send pix hehe j/k)

New dupe notice:

I am afraid to comment on this duped Slashdot story due to Hindsight Bias.[1][2][3] (where each number is linked to the dupes available)

The new article stubs on the front page really work for me, but I'd like to see each new story remain a stub until enough 5-Insightful/Interesting/Informative comments become visible. In other words; everything starts sectional and earns the right to be on the front page based on quality -- not quantity (as others have suggested).

We should also have a new mod category: "Flag".

The Flag mod will indicate that an admin should read the comment because it's important. Typos, spelling, dupe notices etc can all fall under this category, and editors could re-thread the site to see these types of comments first. Reward moderators who correctly flag comments as a system notice with extra mod points. Keep the Flag comments collapsed for regular users, so the meat and potatoes comments all frequent higher.

Working on some new projects... a set of sales tools that might be picked up by a big corporation. Very cool stuff, yet no linkage yet. Does anyone know anything about interpersonal sales tools for retail? I've been studying up on it for this project, which I am in charge of, and it's fascinating me. PK is getting pretty damn spiffy when a n00b can go from being hired to appearing like an expert almost immediately... although there is a level of intelligence for using this kind of tool. Just working out UI issues now, and coming up with ideas.

From the customer perspective, what would you want to be able to do with a salesperson say for COMPUTER SALES, in order to make your sales experience better?

Anyway, hope all is well with you guys and let me know what's going on in your lives! ;-)

There is nothing much going on. Okay, there is lots going on right now in my private life, but I'm not sure I want to share it just yet. Maybe closer to New Years...

How are my friends on Slashdot? Any complaints?

Looks like I can comment again... but I posted something that might be considered funny, so you know I'll be banned again in short stead...

Truth be told, I wasn't sure I was allowed to post yet, so I simply hit submit, expecting the confounded comment-banned IP/Subdomain notice... but it went.