Peter's Blog

Maecyn

Maecyn was 27 and a bit so she quested mainly in darkshire for the grind up to 30.

Most interesting part was going into the ogre den and meeting Fire Mages with their fire shields. WTF not just restistant to Fire spells but immune to them! Had to raise her own fire shield and blast away with frost spells which aren't so plentiful and since the Fire Mages are casters there is no kiting them. Counterspell didn't seem to work on their fire shields. This fighting was slow and hard, lots of mana breaks and plenty of time for ogres to respawn behind me. By the time I had killed the ogre boss I was fed up so rather than fight my way out again I just ran for it with Mana Shield, Frost Nova and Blink providing an escape vector. Sitting here writing this I remember the existance of sprinting pots, must make some.

She coped well with Worgen Dark Runners: she cleared a couple of camps. She was mainly long-range pulling with Pyroblast, if she pulled two then she sheeped the add. There was one fight later on where I left something sheeped and forgot about it, I only came across the sheep when running back. It's nice pyroblasting sheep but I really hate it when a pyroblast is resisted, especially on a sheep

She was without rest bonus for most of 29 and the quests were starting to get thin so she went back to wetlands, killed the pirate captain, swam to southshore, killed some turtles and Forsaken for a couple more quests, then back to darkshire again. The problem in darkshire was that I wanted to do the Worgen Tainted one quests but whenever I went to their area it was devoid of any worgen: level 33's in groups were laying waste to the place

The scrabbling for lvl 29 quests even led me down the Stalvan quest chain as far as Stalvan himself but he was 32 and too tough so had to run away. At least Mages can dispel curses so they don't have to run around with a purple cloud around them for ten minutes.

Eventually found a ghoul grinding quest in west of Raven Hill and dinged 30. It was a bit of an anti-climax, too much grinding and I was fed up, even buying a red Mechanostrider didn't seem like a big deal. The skill only costs about 30g with gnomish discount.

Level 30 also saw next ranks of all Maecyn's main fire spells: Fire Blast, Fire Ball, Pyroblast. Tried them out on Stalvan and this time it was HIS turn to run away, didn't save him though The reward was a blue that was actually useful: a +mana ring. Thanks Stalvan.

Need to research what use Ice Block is to a soloer if I can't cast spells. Is 'Evocation' a spell? Bandage?

Maesyn

Oh it was good to get back onto Maesyn after a few hours of Maecyn. Travel Form is SO FAST, killing without mana breaks is SO NICE. She went to Searing Gorge where at level 47 she faced enemies of 46-49, just right. She could kill the 49's and handle the odd add.

I tried bear form on Duo's of dwarves and coped but on the whole it was faster to do them in cat form. Bear form makes it easier since she can kill one and then bash for a stun long enough for a Healing Touch 100% heal. It's much faster in cat form where she kills one, regenerate, cat form, then kills the other. Not a big deal.

Other Business

I bought Maecyn a nice looking off-hand trinket and tried for three levels to get her a half-decent main-hand to go with it with no success. My guess is that EVERYONE is levelling enchanters as there is bugger all worth buying in the auction house.

Maesyn is only just getting into the levels for gathering rugged leather which will enable Maezyn to make leathergoods from which Maexyn can disenchant materials to get her the last 20 levels or so to 300. Maexyn has a couple of nice enchants going and can give the others +7 intellect or whatever which is most beneficial to Maecyn (I still find it odd that there is no minimum item level that highish enchants can be put on: there is a limit for armour kits).

The range of leather gear that a leatherworker can make is fairly weak, she can't make Maesyn an entire wardrobe, only stuff like a belt at level 42 and some bracers at 48, pretty piecemeal but with the AH the way it is the only option for some greens (and blues).

I have more herbs than I care about, I may do another trademark u-turn and switch Maecyn to skinner/tailor. The mats required to level up a tailor are extrordinary so I may also have to contemplate the fire mage thing: a frost mage must be able to AoE farm cloth pretty nicely. Maecyn's 21 point talent was a fire equivalent of cone-of-cold but dazes rather than slows, not sure what use it will be except in desperate moments where she needs to blast away with everything.

Maesyn

The latest project was to get Maesyn from 48 to level 50, mainly so that she could get the 41 point Feral talent Mangle. To this end she quested in Azshara, Feralas and Tanaris.

She went first to Azshara, I'm not sure why as she was level 48 but I thought the mobs were level 50+. Well either I was wrong or the levels have been altered as the mobs on the two quests when you first enter were levels 45-47 and quite grindable.

Next I decided to do some mopping up in Feralas: Ogres, Yeti and the Sprite Darter camp. On the whole the mobs were easy, levels 43-45 but the Sprite Darter camp is a bugger as there is an escort quest with a druid who has a death wish and took delight in drawing extra mobs into the fight. The mobs included healing shaman so the fights were endless if these weren't taken out and all the mobs were runners and bear mode only has Feral Charge and Bash to stop runners and then only if there is rage for it. My bear seems a bit too easy going, I don't think it has ever got more than 25% rage in it's entire life. Anyway, it was a good test of my bear mode. It took a couple of goes as the barmy druid died twice.

Maesyn hit a landmark in Feralas, with Feroscious Bite crits hitting 1000 damage but that was on these low level mobs.

Finally Tanaris and the pirates. This was fun, a farming session really. She was 49 by now so the kills were easy. She could deal with runners by saving up enough energy for a Claw/Feroscious combo killer blow when the mobs were down to 20% health, just before they ran.

Level 50 and mangle. This is an interesting attack, for cat it's as spammable as claw so I've replaced it on the action bar. Mangle deals damage and makes bleed effects like rip 30% more damaging. It was certainly more effective, she was taking out equal level mobs in under 18 seconds. What struck me most was how much better she was in fights that didn't start from stealth: opening with Feral Faerie Fire, Mangle and rip and then spamming mangle and the mob was dead in about the same time a stealth attack took. As for stealth attacks, I experimented with opening with Ravage rather than Pounce and it seemed more effective: Ravage could give 800 crits and leading with Ravage/Mangle/Rip meant she had three combo points up in no time. Her crit rate is now about 21%, boosted by a pair of Stormshroud Leggings, blues with +crit that were a snip at 12g.

I spent a while in the Blasted Lands gathering entrails and experimenting with attacks. She could kill level 51's in under 20 seconds, had no trouble with adds, not even needing bear mode and no downtime at all, no eating/drinking/pots necessary. Ruthless.

Kitty mode mangle is as big a boost as the Felguard was for Maexyn, they are both efficient grinding machines now, although kitty has the fast running between kills and the Felguard needs bandaging every few fights.

And I haven't tried the Bear version of mangle yet.

Argh

I'm writing this now because the server has developed this annoying login problem where it connects but stays with the connect message permanent for a few minutes before being kicked out. I had a look at lugulus on Aerie Peak as I'm toying with transferring him rather than level a new rogue. I can't be accused of rolling Yet Another Alt if I carry on with an existing one.

Server's connected, gotta go.

Recruit a multi-boxer

Hum, latest recruit-a-friend-to-trash-solo-quest-sites-with promotion could lure me back to multi-boxing:

Our new Recruit-a-Friend offer rewards you even more for bringing your friends to Azeroth and, what’s more, they can get some great in-game benefits too!

For each friend you invite you could get:

• An exclusive ZHEVRA in-game mount when your friend pays for 60 days of game time.
• 30 Days of FREE WoW gametime when your friend pays for 30 days of game time.

Also, from the moment your friend creates a character and starts adventuring with you, both of you will receive these additional in-game benefits:

• You and your friend will earn triple the experience when grouped together!
• For every two levels of experience your friend earns, they can grant one level of experience to any one of your characters of lower level than your friend.
• You and your friend will have the ability to summon each other from any point in the world.

If a player already subscribes to an account (under his or her name) but wants to start a new one (also under his or her name) through the Recruit-A-Friend program, will that second, new account receive these benefits?

If the new account was created using an Authentication Key from an email invitation sent from the Recruit-A-Friend webpage, then yes, it will receive the benefits.

One wonders whether the 3x experience boost is after the experience sharing effects of grouping have been deducted.

It would suit a new pair of alts levelling up together. I've been wondering recently whether a priest/rogue duo would kick butt? Or is that just the same as running a druid?

I Can't Resist an Interesting Project

M and M

Yeah I did it, I signed up for a second account to cheat take advantage of Blizzard's new refer-a-friend scheme. After five minutes deliberation I set up a draino priest (Mayzyn) and a gnome warrior (Mayxyn). I corpse-ran the priest to the gnome noob area and I had two level 1's to play with. I multi-boxed (or rather ran two instances of wow on one pc) and in the space of a weekend got the warrior to level 18 and the priest to level 17. Because of the refer-a-friend thing, the rate at which they levelled was very fast, they were level 14 before they left dun morogh (spelling?), the experience bar is permanently blue while they are partying. For a long time they were equal in level, dinging on the same quest turnin, but the warrior had two warrior quests to do and just that put her a whole level ahead.

I set the pc up using KDE so that I can switch between the two players just by moving the mouse from one app to the other, no need to click. I haven't cheated in that I don't have the keyboard set up to send key presses to one character or the other, I have to switch apps to control each character. I have set up some macros for the priest: I set up the whole of the bottom left action bar to duplicate the normal action bar but with macros that work on the focus (the warrior) or the focus target. In a nutshell, this means that pressing 2 causes the priest to smite her target, pressing F2 causes the priest to smite the warriors target. For the warrior I set up F2 to deal a Heroic Strike so I don't have to change keys in a fight. Hence, a vanilla kill attack is:

• Warrior: Charge
• Warrior: Rend (a DoT and nice agro draw)
• Priest: Mind Blast
• Warrior: Herioc Strike
• Priest: Smite
• Warrior: Herioc Strike
• Priest: Smite etc till death ensues.

This was quite easy with a little practise, and most things died in under ten seconds. At level 10 they found a level 11 elite to kill and this again was easy, just swap some of the smites for healing.

Tackling groups was harder. I was trying gnoll camps in westfall, tanking with the warrior and healing/blasting with the priest. It was all ok until the priest drew agro, then it would fall apart big time. I would try Fade with the priest but inevitably she would still have some agro and taking it off with the warrior wasn't easy (in hindsight I should have a macro set up on the warrior to assist her and taunt). The priest kept dying which was a bugger as she had to do the corpse runs and she was the rezzer Also in hindsight, keep the rezzer alive at all costs, let the tank die!

These fights are very tricky, it is too much for my tiny brain, silly things happen like the warrior kills one mob then stops and stands doing nothing while I am fiddling with the priest. If anyone thinks multi-boxing is an easy cheat, they really need to try in. Two multi-boxed characters are not equal to two seperate characters.

It doesn't help that I only got Sissle (priest) to level 13 and that was ages ago so I've forgotten priest play, and I've never played a Warrior. I'm having to learn two classes at once and I'm also having to worry about agro/threat a lot more. In the tricky fights above, I was forgetting about the priest shadow word: shield and I've only ever used it once, so that the two of them could jump down a cliff. For reasons I don't understand this macro:

/cast [target=focustarget] shadow word: pain

refused to work although

/cast shadow word: pain

did and other target=focustarget macros worked fine.

The warrior is very tough, in a way it is nice to be playing a tough character again. I've had two wipes and in both cases the warrior was last to die.

Talent-wise, I waited till about level 15 before deciding what would be most useful and put the Warrior into Arms (which seems to be a compromise between protection and dps) and the priest into shadow for more damage and lower threat. I could make the Warrior protection and the priest holy and the two would be extremely tough to kill but I do want them to be able to kill things quickly too, especially if they ever split up and solo.

The refer-a-friend gives a VERY handy summon-a-friend feature that has a one hour cooldown. I did the run to Westfall by grouping the warrior with Maevyn and using her Aspect of the Pack to run them both at +40% speed. Once there Maevyn was replaced in the party with the Priest and the warrior summoned her to Westfall. Very easy and so many possibilities. I could have flown Maevyn there, got her to summon the warrior, logged out for an hour (or played another alt), then got the warrior to summon the priest.

When it comes to Kalimdor, I can have each hearthed in a different continent.

Really, the possibilities of this Refer-a-friend and the power it gives are op (overpowered).

Maysyn

Refer-a-friend gives the friend the option to say thanks by granting one of the referrer's other alts a level, but only to lower level alts. I created a Draino Shaman (the last class I haven't played) and was able to immediately level her up to level 5. I have a level five Shaman that has never even moved! I'm going to save the grant levels from now on, I'll see if I can get them past Maecyn so she can have some levels granted and also I'd love to team a fire mage with a warrior: AoE fun galore.

Professions

I've made the priest a tailor and the warrior is a miner. I may make the warrior an engineer too: goblin jumper leads would be very handy! I made the priest a tailor as the greens are still scanty and overpriced on the auction house and the two of them are reaping in linen quite nicely. I may train the warrior in first aid but not the priest, not enough cloth in the game for that. The priest's second profession slot is empty and I can't think of anything to do with it. Maybe a third alchemist for another cooldown and more income. I'm sick of skinning and herbing.

Ma??yn

The Ma??yn thing is getting much too confusing, especially in the blog so I'll try to bung in the class names as much as possible. It's even more confusing in-game when I have to remember which one I am mailing something to.

Zhevra

If I sign the second account up for two months I get a free Zhevra mount. If I decide it's worth the expense then I'll give it to Maexyn. I may transfer Pooky to the new account where he can help the other girls out, possibly levelling with Maezyn.

I didn't realise that now you can pay to change a characters name, £6. I may change pookypoo's name if I can think of a suitable masculine variant of may-sin. So far I've come up with ray-sin but it doesn't make sense for a paladin to be named after dried grapes. Hey Blizz, how about a paid sex change service? You can call it the blizz-snip.

Guilds

Someone was at the gnome/dwarf noob area hassling people to sign a guild charter so I signed it twice. Hum, good place for it, level 1's aren't normally guilded and maybe welcome a 1g tip for their first class training. I might just set up a solo guild now that I have a character that can invite the others to join it.

Need a good guild name:

• Team Ma??yn
• petersblog dot org
• Alt Mighty
• what raisins can do (geddit? amazing <what raisins can do> You have to be familiar with obscure 70's chocolate bar adverts).
• multi-boxers AREN'T cheating

No new developments but I thought I'd expand on my Multi-boxing setup.

It's not actually multi-boxing but two instances of WoW running on a single computer. It has an nvidia graphics card and is running with two monitors so I have the warrior leading on the main screen and the priest following on the second.

I didn't do anything special at all to set up the second account, just applied for it online through my main account, sent an invitation email to one of my many email addresses, clicked the link in the email and set up a new account with all the same details as my main account (it is important that the accounts are similar: it stops you signing your own guild charter but allows you to transfer characters between accounts and it reassures blizz that you aren't a gold farmer).

I fired up a standard wow instance on linux, logged in with the new account username/password and created the warrior. I fired up a second instance and logged in on that to my main account. From my dabbling in WTF files I am aware that the settings for different accounts are stored in different subdirectories of the WTF directory so I didn't think there would be a clash. I had no problems with the wow instance on the new account except that it defaulted to loading all my add-ons, even old rubbish that threw up errors and died. I've altered this now and only enabled my must-haves: tbags and titan. Sometime I will get round to setting up a pair of wow directories with their own WTF directory but linking to single copies of the umpteen gigabytes of everything else.

When I log in I set the priest's focus on the warrior and I use the macros I mentioned yesterday for the priest to heal the warrior and blast the warrior's target. I also have a simple

/follow [target=focus]

macro to make the priest follow the warrior. The following is a little buggy and the priest can get stuck at the sides of doorways and stuff but I am learning to use my peripheral vision to check she is keeping up. Any movement of the priest on her own will break the follow so it's good to have one button (F1) to start it again.

When the warrior charges the priest follows at her own gentle pace and arrives a couple of yards behind her in the fight. She cannot smite or Mind Blast until she has stopped moving but that's cool, it gives the warrior time to get agro and cast a Rend (the talents the warrior have thus far mean the charge generates enough rage for an instant rend). When I'm setting up for bigger tanking fights I have learnt to park the priest some distance away so she isn't drawn into the fight so easily.

Speaking of tactics, something else I forgot to use in my gnoll camp endeavours (against four or five gnolls I might add) was the priest's Inner Fire armour buff.

I've done more research into multi-boxing and apparently Blizzard are cool with the idea of a single keyboard controlling more than one character, as long as there is someone there typing at it. This means I could set up something that would, for example, redirect F1-F12 on the warriors keyboard onto the priests action bar. That would make things a bit easier than mousing between screens throughout each fight.

I want to reassure the world that I am doing this for two reasons:

• to level my alts up faster.
• because it is an interesting variation on the game

I'm not planning on dominating arenas or farming heroic 5-mans single handed. I think it's safe for me to say that:

• the best arena teams are not multi-boxers
• the only advantage of multi-boxing in pvp would be well-coordinated focus firing and generally good communication within the team.
• even multi-boxing wouldn't make me a good enough player

Having four or five mages simultaneously fireblasting from a single keypress might not be cheating but is not sportsmanlike.

I didn't get to play a great deal in the last few days, problems with broadband which I will blog about once they are resolved (long story, much moaning).

Mayzyn

Mayzyn's mining was lagging behind her level so I sent her on a couple of ore farming trips to get her to at least level 65 where she could mine tin. She did all this solo, there was no need to drag the priest around. She could kill equal level mobs but they can leave a big hole in her health: she really needs to learn bandaging and her dps could do with a fix.

To this end I decided to have Pookypoo run her through deadmines. This went nicely, Mayzyn lagged behind pook and let him do all the work but scooped up all the greens and blues. She now has a nice blue two-hander. Mayzyn died once, pookypoo's vengence had procced and he was off on a single-shotting rampage and left her behind where a patrol found her. No probs, pook just ressed her.

I had assumed that Mayzyn would get very little experience from being run through deadmines by a 65 but in fact, probably due to the 'refer-a-friend' bonus, she ended the run just shy of level 19, she made about half a level. I didn't even take time to pick up any deadmines quests before I went in.

I've made Mayzyn a miner/engineer. The engineering is just for a bit of fun, poultryisers and all that, although it does mean she could make Mayxyn some goggles, clothy headware being a bit scanty below level 30.

Gnomes in Space

The most blindingly obvious use for the 'Summon a Friend' ability of blizzards new referral thing finally hit me.

Gnomes in Space

Maevyn grouped with Mayzyn and summoned her to Shattrath. An hour later, Mayzyn grouped with Maexyn and summoned her to Shattrath. Next for the trip is Maesyn.

The group leader does the summoning and it doesn't matter what their relative levels are or which is the 'friend'.

Now Maexyn is in Outlands she can work on >lvl 300 alchemy with the aim of getting her transmuting and paying her way.

Although her gear is all greens I think she looks kinda cool for a 54. The totally aesthetic weapon enchant was worth the hassle!

I'm starting to find gnomes cute. Until you pair them up with tall strapping dwarves you don't appreciate them. With her little shield on her back Mayzyn looks like a beetle scurrying along.

Mayzyn and Mayxyn

This post is little more than to show off this screen shot:

I found a nice shady spot

The Warrior and the Priest spent some time in Westfall fighting defias lowbies in a cave. I had one wipe which was enough to pursuade me to have the priests Inner Fire up at all times. The fight was a tricky one, the warrior had a couple of melee guys going and the priest had a caster lobbing fireballs at her. The caster was too far away for the warrior to pull agro with a thunder clap. The priests 'Fade' had been serving me well but it was on cooldown. I'm learning a lot about agro management. Hunters/warlocks have threat generation on autocast, I'm having to do it manually.

The next thing I need to remember is Power Word: Shield but there is a lot to learn here.

The Warrior was weilding her new blue two-hander and very nice it was too, two-shotting level 13's. She had to level up her two-handed mace from 1 to 90 but that is easy with a priest around to spam Renew heals.

Warrior dinged 19 early on and the Priest ended the session very close to 18. I discovered that I had neglected to pick up the stormwind flight point on the priest as she was summoned straight from ironforge so I ran her back to Stormwind killing pigs on the way. It was interesting to try solo priest play and as I suspected, it sucked, still boring with lots of mana breaks. Anyway she dinged 18.

It took a few days but the girls Armory profiles are now working. Nice that Mayzyn has level 16 engineering. She's never made anything but for once I am exploiting a racial profession buff.

I'm mildly tempted to have Mayxyn as a jewelcrafter except I have absolutely no interest in Gem cutting. Gems are for raiders and pvpers that would grind for a month just for 3 more agility. Methinks Gems make bugger all difference in 20 second solo fights.

Where do I begin. This is a long story so better get a coffee.

When I first got broadband nearly two years ago I chose pipex. That saga is documented here. It left me regarding pipex as being devoid of customer service: if I had any problems then tough, I may as well go in the garden and scream at the daisies as try to get information out of pipex.

A few weeks ago I was having disconnections when playing wow. This was frustrating as I knew there was no point in complaining to pipex. To make things worse, a few traceroutes told me that I was going through the Tiscali network. I knew that Tiscali had bought Pipex but now pipex is being firmly swallowed into Tiscali. If you try to sign up for pipex now you are redirected to Tiscali. I have never heard a good thing about Tiscali and their advertisements on the TV are all about price leaving me with the impression that they are bargain bucket broadband. If I wanted cheap crap I would be looking at sky or talktalk.

My disconnection problems went away but I was still in a mood to change broadband providers.

I looked around and was attracted to the BT Total Broadband Anywhere package. For £30 a month you get:

• Wireless-N router (the 'home hub')
• Phone handset to make voip calls
• so many minutes voip to landlines
• their international voip rates would halve my wife's phone bills to her folks
• A 'BT ToGo' which is actually a windows mobile smartphone which typically gets 7/10 in reviews, no iPhone but not worthless. This phone can do wireless voip as well as normal mobile over the vodafone network which has good coverage for me. The phone has a mini keyboard and would be much better for moblogging than my dumb phone.
• 50 minutes mobile calls a month
• so many minutes on BT openreach wireless access points
• membership of the FON network where people share out 512kbps of their bandwidth so that other people can use mine and I can use theirs if I am in range.

A very attractive package that would save me money AND give me new toys to play with.

Before I could do anything I needed a MAC code to get away from pipex so I used a thing on the BT site that automatically sent pipex a byebye email. In a day or so pipex emailed me the MAC, wrote me a letter and rang me to make sure I had it. It gave me the impression that either they were glad to be rid of me or the ombudsman has been slapping them about.

I applied for the BT Total broadband Anywhere package on their website as they said it would be faster than ringing them. I got an automatic acknowledgement email for my order. Then nothing. For five days. The connection date I chose came and went and nothing. Their online order tracker couldn't find my phone number. I was amazed that they could be so useless so for my amusement I tried applying through the website again and the same thing happened. For the third time I tried using Internet Explorer and Windows but again it happened. I thought about ringing them but the thought of having to recite all my details down the phone filled me with dread. They publish no email addresses so there was no way of moaning.

I looked around for an alternative supplier and plus.net seemed promising. Their service is tailored for gaming with low latencies, they are honest about the traffic shaping, static ip address and five pounds a month cheaper than pipex. Their website seemed ok with more technical details than BT so they seemed more on my level. So I signed up for them. Here is a timeline:

7th August

signed up

13th August

connection date. Came home to find broadband broken

14th August

got message from plus.net saying my connection date was being reviewed on 28th August, two weeks later with no indication as to why. This made me flip and I left them some messages telling them to stick it. I wanted out pronto, damage limitation. Later I got a message to say the order was delayed due to a 'Faulty Tie Pair'. They would try to find out from BT what was happening on 15th August.

15th August

Nothing from plus.net. Found that my home landline phone was broken too so registered a fault with BT.

16th August

Land phones started working again. Message from plus.net, addressed to me but one department in plus.net trying to get another department to investigate the delay.

17th August

Got an automated message from pipex saying welcome, my line is now connected. Indeed, my pipex broadband was working. It was probably working the day before but I was optimisticly trying the plus.net username/password.

18th August

Sent message to plus.net saying it was working and to please cancel the order. They replied to say ok but they want to sting me for £40 for the abortive ADSL connection and I will possibly pay £40 to connect to anyone else due to the 'Tie Pair' problem. I didn't answer immediately, they have no problem keeping me waiting. In a way I was happy, my broadband was working, albeit with pipex but that was a problem that could wait for another day. plus.net would soon be out of my life.

19th August

voicemail message from plus.net. They had been on to BT and they said something about a second BT engineer visit having the same outcome as the first. They were going to review the situation on 11th Sept (over a month after my initial order). My broadband and phones were still working so I have no idea what they were talking about but I believe it would be fruitless to ask.

That's the state of play right now. I have two threads of support going with plus.net, one wanting to sting me for £80 for (failing) to connect me to ADSL (which was already connected and is still connected) and another trying to progress a problem that seems to have been resolved on 16th august.

My biggest worry at the moment is that one of plus.net's flailing limbs is still going to get BT to mess around with my connection and break it again, even if I have told them not to.

In terms of customer support, well do I sound like a satisfied customer? Apparently plus.net try to get new customers via a referrals scheme rather than advertisements. I am hoping that this blog post will deter at least one potential customer. If you get any technical problems then be warned you are going to get 'review dates' that will reach further and further into the distant future. They will miss their deadlines in getting feedback from BT by four days. They will charge you for the privilege of getting BT to bugger up your phone and broadband. They offer a 90 day 'risk free' guarantee but there is a risk that they won't be able to progress any problems and you do risk being stung for £40.

I'm tempted by Zen broadband who get very high customer service ratings. I'm not too bothered about price, customer support that gets things done and doesn't cause me sleepless nights is a top priority. I imagine that the root of all broadband woes lie with BT but are there any UK broadband providers out there that have the ability to get firm deadlines from BT and relay them to their customers? I am patient enough to wait but I absolutely hate being kept in the dark.

Sorry to vent but I had to let it out. Blogging for stress relief. Venting here means my final messages to plus.net very calm and dignified.

UPDATE: cancelled now. This made me laugh. And only three years before plusnet were cool with tiscali LLU

I've tried various ways (cygwin, andLinux, vmware, even remote X etc) to get a mixed linux/windows working environment. I think I've almost found the nicest solution, certainly it is looking good so far.

Seamless

A nice mix of linux and windows. How is it done? The host is kubuntu, a desktop environment that I am appreciating more and more. The windows boxes are running in windows 2000 under the open source version of VirtualBox. Why Windows 2000? Well if I only need windows running to be able to tweek access permissions on the file server and check how things look in ie6 then windows 2000 is all I need. Windows 2000 runs blazingly fast, by modern standards it is a bloat-free o/s.

VirtualBox is set up in 'Seamless' mode which means the windows desktop background disappears and the windows windows appear on my kde desktop. Windows 2000 has the virtualbox applications installed and hence I can cut and paste between systems.

For the kind of linux/rails development I am doing at the moment it is much nicer to be running on linux than windows. NetBeans rails integration runs much more smoothly, rspec tests run many times faster, networking is seamless, it's just better all round.

Note that in the DOS box I am looking at my linux home directory, accessed via VirtualBox's shared folder mechanism.

I'm liking VirtualBox more than vmware. When I tried running linux in vmware on windows I found it annoying to have to wait two minutes for the machine state to be saved when I was closing down my pc to go home. VirtualBox under linux is doing it in seconds. Startup time for snapshots is good too.

I've set VirtualBox up with a permutation of networking that lets me log into the windows domain network from Windows 2000 as the VirtualBox instance appears as a pc on our network. By default it appeared behind a NAT translation and windows networking (Netbios and all that ancient stuff) was broken.

Incidently, trying to install windows 2000 on VirtualBox I kept getting end endless reboot loop. The fix for this is in the VirtualBox user manual. Apparently when they wrote the windows 2000 setup program they didn't allow for 2GHz dual core processors and virtual disks so the setup program crashes due to a timing condition. So much has changed in the last eight years.