Why I hate Blizzard and Diablo 3.

I have never been a fan of WoW but I enjoyed playing Diablo II and Starcraft. I once enjoyed playing Diablo 3 but Blizzard doesn’t want to allow me to do that anymore. Sure I paid for the game and I only play the game single player but I don’t own the game and Blizzard has made that painfully apparent.

You see like many Blizzard customers I have had my account compromised  At the time I had an 11 character password and I’m not sure how it was cracked but it was. It seems like it is a common issue for Blizzard Entertainment customers. So I took the steps on their website to recover my account and even had progress automatically rolled back on my account. After I took all their steps I also added an authenticator on my cell phone to act as a second defense for my account. I now had a 16 character random name, number, symbol password (boy I hope that is long enough). After I did all that was my actual Diablo 3 game unlocked? Not at all. I have still been denied access to the game I paid for. The game I only want to play on my own and not online.

I have submitted another help ticket but my response from “Game Master Ryavale” was to perform again the exact same steps that did not help me in the first place. Those steps would include rolling back the progress on my game again, an action you can only perform three times.

At this point I am surrendering my account to Blizzard. I’ll play something that I don’t have to worry about how their server security works to play on my own. I guess that means more money for the Humble Bundle guys along with the charities and developers involved there.

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Wii U: Teardown

In a new addition of Iwata Asks a pictoral hardware tear down is conducted and discussed. I found the discussion concerning power consumption, performance and design to be very interesting.

I purchased a Wii after it’s launch but due to hardware shortages it took several weeks of searching. In this environment of increaing numbers of iOS and Android gadgets, I wonder what is the outlook for console makers like Nintendo. I find myself wanting to wait and see. As a new father I find I have little time for games and the bit of time I do have is used primarily on my desktop or Andoid phone. I have only broken out my NES and Wii since moving in for a quick test to see that both work… well and a few levels of SMB.

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The WordPress and Debian Experiment

Prior to moving, my wife expressed an interest in having her blog on a simpler platform. I previously had it on a Drupal 6 installation which she often found the admin panel to be over whelming. I was self hosting my blog, her blog and a few other sites on an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS machine prior to the move. The server was in a 12 bay server case with and AMD Processor. I felt the hardware was a little larger and more power hungry than I needed for a home web and file server. Taking that all into account I decided to reinstall on an old Aspire One Netbook that I had.  

I decided this time around that I would use Debian as the Operating System. While Ubuntu LTS had been good to me, I run Ubuntu on my desktop and I wanted to diversify slightly. For the blogging platform I decided to go with WordPress as it has a reputation of meeting my Wife’s requirement of simple. I decided to “eat my own dog food” and I migrated my blog over to WordPress also.  Since WordPress is FLOSS software it also still makes me happy on that end of things.

The move hasn’t been all that simple. First was the hurdle of migrating blog content. Then there were the hurdles of setting up Plugins. I recently had a Google+ Plugin go haywire and repost a bunch of old content to my Google+ stream which I had to clean up. So far my wife seems to like having an Android app she can post from and I think she is happier with her blog.

If you know of any must have WordPress Plugins, please let me know about them in the comments. I would love trying a few things out.

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