Got this idea last weekend from a friend of mine, I forget the situation (and am too lazy to grep my GAIM logs at the moment, hate mornings) but what one listens to whilst programming came up. Apparently there’s many misconceptions out there about, something like “Only listens to death metal”, or some such. THis is simply not the case, and I thought I’d give you a top 10 albums and songs I code to, and why.
Finally hit 375 Jewelcrafting the other night. Also hit level 70 today, which was cool. I think I’m more excited about the jewelcrafting, however, because its a really cool craft. For those that don’t play: The basis is jewelers can make some items that give stat bonuses, rings and necklaces. These aren’t as sought after as our jewels. High level items have “sockets” that gems can be set in that give small stat bonuses, and if you match the colors correctly it’ll give an additional bonus.
Now, I’ve always believed in free combines (customer gives me the materials for it, and I charge nothing) because of repeat customers. When I was big on Engineering, I had a few people that would come to me specifically to make bullets 20 stacks at a time. They’d tip, of course, but the asked price would be free. This is when I learned how to intice customers by just plain being friendly. With Jewelcrafting I now have 10 “repeat customers” who come back a few tmes a week for upgrades. One tips as high as 20g a cut. Its all because I put myself out there and treat them with respect, and take the time to make recomendations. So, my next goal is to be the best known jeweler on Lothar, which I’ve got a decent leg on so far. Have people that know my ads by heart, and whenever I’m in a cap city I’m offering my services.
Unfortunately, I had to drop Engineering. I ppicked up Mining, instead, so that I’ll have my own stream of mats coming in. With my own mining I crunched some numbers and think I’ll make between 50g and 100g a day just from gems I sell. This will also enable me to make higher-end items for raids, and should help me pay for my flying mount.
This is just a quick update about the story I posted last week regarding a nice security hole in a major Internet Site. The tech support there have actually been really, really great in working with me to fix this problem. They emailed me an intial “Hey we got your report” the day I sent it out, and later this email I’m sharing with you. I initially expected to lose that account (and at one point today, I kinda wish I had), but so far it hasn’t been locked or damaged in any way that I can see. I got en email from them that I’d like to share as an example of doing things the right way.
I don’t think I’ve said it publically yet, so a little heads up, I’ve gotten my first contract as “Three Planets Software”. Rather (I hope) easy site in PHP/MySQL and some other goodness, but you’ll hear more about that later when I put out a call for Beta testers. So I coded up all the login and registration pages two days ago, and now am working on some other fun stuff. Some fun stuff that required more than one user to test. Ideally, more than 10. I did *not* want to sit in phpmyadmin creating 20 dummy users that would only be used in testing, so I turned to perl.
Its really pretty out today as we already had a bunch (a bunch for here, not a real state) of snow on the ground and its snowing again today. Not the harsh/nasty wintery mix we had a few days ago, but really nice fat sowflakes, lazily falling around the evergreens outside my window. Well btween that and the coding binge I’ve been on (forgot how much fun Friday nights can be with just me, a coupla computers and a goal for X lines of code) has put me into a nice melancholy mood, which is making me wax poetic for the first time in a long time.
I got a request earlier today from a friend from #simud, Allaryin, for a little hack on Blizzard. He’s requested a few addons from me before, but I’ve never had time, this one was quick, however. Right quick I’ll tell you that Blizzard distributes World of Warcraft patches via Peer-to-Peer transfers. They’re actually using an early Bit Torrent protocol, I believe. Sounds great, right? Since Torrents are so fast? Well, somehow my Blizz downloads go slow as heck, seriously it sucks. So we’d like to be able to use real torrent software to track and download these patches, especially the huge ones.
So I was feeling kinda down a few days ago, and I turned to the thing that always cheers me up, hacking. Nothing malicious, just seeing what bugs I could turn up. Found a great one dealing with why sites should use HTTPS instead of HTTP traffic by default. Oh, I’ve taken the liberty of attempting at clearing out all links to my accounts. Don’t worry, my account doesn’t use that security question any longer. Also, because this post isn’t malicious, I’m omitting the name of the site I found this on (and really, it could be any of the major sites out there, they all act a lot the same and I’ve yet to go check some other major ones) because they deserve anonymity as much as I do.
Last year I had a fairly, bleh, Valentine’s day post. It was rushed, poorly done, and all over the place. This year, this year is different. You may notice that this is BEFORE Valentine’s day… that’s true. I’m putting this out early, with the same hopes as last year, that some geek out there might score a date for the rest of us! Now, my plan this year, is a personalized Linux LiveCD that I’m calling the LoveCD. So, this post is going to be 10 fun ways to personalize a CD for that special someone (or laptop, in my case).
Lately I’ve been really frustrated with myself over the issue of time managemet. I’ve never been very organized, and a habitual procrastinator. But this semester I’ve had an awesome schedule, only class two days a week, so that I could work the other three. Well, it turns out I played much more games than working, and time not spent on games was wasted Internet browsing. To quote Trace Adkins in “I Want to Feel Something”: “Damn it all to hell I’m done, ‘Cause I don’t like what I’ve become…” Now, he said those words in regard to relationship issues, but that song (a favorite of mine for a while) kinda spurred me to realize I’m fed up with wasting so much time when there are people my age that spent free time coding and are millionaires now. Not that I just want money, but something to feel proud about. 8 straight hours of WoW, or Quake 4 (if you haven’t played Q4… go get it, now) yields absolutely nothing, whereas 8 hours of coding would give me a site for Three Planets Software, which still needs one. So here are my resolutions:
Saturday I got a letter that I thought I’d share. It’s really interesting to me, since I’ve dealt a lot with phishing emails, and this real letter set does many of the things that both phisers, and unfortunately legitimate companies, do. If companies would stop doing these things, Phishing would get harder! This is gonna be a long post, please bear with me. Without further ado, I give you: The Care Registration Scam (which later turned out to be legit).