OK so the don’t actually disappear but something odd does happen than can get you worried if you’re not expecting it.

If you have more than one page of applications applying the update will cause a small glitch.  The addition of the Voice Memo app will cause the application in the bottom right of your first page to move, it puts in on a new second page without any other applications.

Panic not all your other applications are not gone but on pages 3+ and moving the single application from page two will fix the issue and remove the unwanted page.

And thanks to Mashable for their post about the immediate problems that can occur post update: iPhone 3.0 Problems? Here?s the Solution.

For those that are not aware, Guiness Surger is the ultimate Guiness gadget.  It allows you to get an almost perfect pint of Guiness in the comfort of you own home.  When it was originally released the Surger cans were distributed soley through Tesco’s Extra stores, now it would appear that they no longer do them.

Am I just unlucky or has Surger finally died a death?

For those that haven’t seen it in action here’s a video I posted to YouTube a while ago.

When Google Checkout was launched in 2006 it’s unique pricing model brought online payment processing to a point where it was cost effective for small and large businesses alike.  It had a low transaction processing cost of 1.5% + £0.15 per transaction and rewarded AdWords customers by waiving the transaction charges on up to a total of 10 times their monthly ad spend.  For small businesses this meant that there was a cost effective method that allowed them to add card payments to their available payment methods.

On March 11th Google issued an email informing Checkout customers that the pricing structure would be changing effective 5th May.  Free transaction processing from AdWords has been removed and the simple transaction processing change has been replaced with a tiered model not too dissimilar to other providers ranging from 1.4% to 3.4%+£0.20.

These changes mean that transaction processing changes will increase for all customers who process less that £55,000 per month, in the case of those processing less than £6,000 the charges will double.  And that is before you take into account the removal of the free processing.  Google stated reasons for the pricing increases as this:

Google is committed to the continued growth and development of Checkout. These pricing changes are necessary in order for us to continue to enhance user features and functionality going forward.

I have always supported Google, their innovation has helped drive our industry forward and this has rarely been at the expense of their customers.  I understand that Google must set their prices in a way that allows their business to grow and move forwards, however,  I find it disappointing that in the current economic climate that Google have chosen to implement pricing changes that put further financial pressure on many small organisations who are already finding times hard.

Full information about the Google Checkout pricing model can be found on Google’s Checkout Fees page.

I logged in on Tuesday night with the sole intention of doing the Cooking and Jewelcrafting dailies to find queries in guild chat for anyone interesting in joining a Naxx raid.  As I hadn’t planned to stay on long I decided to give it a miss but after several nudges via /w I thought “What the hell, let’s do this”, so I joined.

Now the title of this post is slightly inaccurate, strictly speaking I have raided three times previously.  Twice to spank Archavon the Stone Watcher as part of a sponta 10 man and once to join the end of a Naxx 25 man a week previously to take down Loatheb.  However at the point of joining on Tuesday I didn’t realise that I had already done part of the instance.

I crossed my fingers and turned on Teamspeak hoping that it would not kill my mouse and eventually crash my PC as it had done the previous week.  With a small feeling of trepidation I clicked on the button to accept the port and dashed upstairs to get a drink, determined that I would not make a fool of myself or do anything daft…

Of course just having those thought immediately cursed me for the rest of the raid Upon getting back to my desk I said Hi to everyone TS and the realised I was the only person from the guild still at the summoning stone, so silly question #1 “Which portal do I take to get to you”.  Thus began my comedy or errors which I’ll now recount boss by boss.

Noth the Plaguebringer

The door to my office open as the strats start to be given and my wife starts using the printer to copy some paperwork for school.  So for those of you that are unaware, the strats for Noth are “This bost has two phases… whirr, clunk, clack, whirr, kchug, kuchug, whirr, buzz why isn’t this bloddy thing working… hirr, clunk, clack, whirr, kchug, kuchug, whirr, buzz etc.”

So the fight starts and I try to translate the photocopier noises into a coherent plan, yeah fat chance.  So I asked a fellow mage what to do, “DPS boss AOE adds when called”, ah cool something I understand.  I then realise that as we’re all huddled in a corner that I can’t see anything other than a load of name tags and the area above but I assist the tank and start spamming my spell rotation, see what I think are adds and something that looks like Blizzard and start casting AOE myself.  Blah, blah rinse repeat dead boss… “There seemed to be an awful lot of AOE on the boss there…”  D’Oh /hide

Loot is called, I ask in TS what the loot rules are but my questions seem to fall on deaf ears, so I /w a friend to find out but by the time I find out the piece I was thinking of has gone.  No biggie, on to the next boss…

Heigan the Unclean

Ah the dance, the ready call comes, I press by talk button and ask for a strat run down as I haven’t done it before and the dialog disappears.

 ”Are you really AFK  Spangles?”

“No, I just asked about strats”

[Raid] Spangles?

/raid Bugger I think my mic is fubar, ready

My eyes fall to my headset controls… oh no all that time the mute switch had been on! Damn the kids!

Cast, cast, run, run, run, die, watch, res, cast, run, die… yeah the rest of the fight went on without incident as I watched from the floor.

/dustoff pride on to the next boss…

Loatheb

Hmm, this bridge looks familiar…

“Anyone not done this boss before?”

“Me”

“You got the achievement after the last boss, you have done it before”

“I did, oh is this where I can last week.”

Finally I know what I’m doing Fight goes well and Loatheb drops [Mantle of the Lost Vanquisher] which, thanks to a couple of people passing at they notices that I was only wearing a blue item, I won

Conclusion

I must admit I had a great time and my [Valorous Frostfire Shoulderpads] are really nice. I have already signed up for next Tuesday’s run and have read the starts for the instance so I should be better prepared

I’m definitely not the first to blog this and certainly won’t be that last, last week saw freelance web develop Jason Roe get into a row with staff from Ryanair when he blogged about a bug in their web site.

The thing is when I was reading this comment:

Ryanair Staff #1 Says: 
February 19th, 2009 at 5:25 pm

jason!
you?re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
you?ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they?re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

All I could hear in my head we the voice of Roy from The IT Crowd ranting away.

Anyway it’s a great article that really brightened up my day yesterday, thanks to @veloce for the article RT.

Well today was meant to be a day of cellebrations with Jo starting her new job and it being our 18th wedding aniversary, it’s amazing how the careless actions of others can change things…

Jo has started work as a teaching assistant at the same school that the boys attend, but rather than spending the morning getting to know her new role she spent it in A&E.

At the end of morning play there was a incedent with Sean and three other boys that resulted in his face being smashed into the floor with enough force to break his glasses and cut his head

The school are taking the matter very seriously but that doesn’t remove the downer it has put on the whole day. I’ll have to make things better with some good food and bubbles tonight

Judge dismisses Google lawsuit via BBC NEWS | Technology.

I’ve gotta say this one made me smile, I’ve even created a new tag for it “only in America”…

A legal claim by a Pitsburg couple, The Borings, that a picture of their house on Google Street View caused them “mental suffering” blah, blah, blah!

I for one am happy to see this case thrown out of court.  The whole “sue you” culture that has evolved in the US and is now spreading into UK culture is wrong, in my opinion it lessens us as a people and trivialises true suffering .  

It would have been so easy for Google to pay the $25,000 to make this go away, they could have paid the money and essentially press the same button the Boring’s didn’t even bother to.  But to have done so would have lent credence to this idiotic claim, so Google stuck to their guns and won.

Got any other stories of ludicrous “sue you” cases being thrown out?  Leave a comment.

NOT!  Well not yet anyway, however I have this week been introduced to a web site that allows you to assess you IMBAness and recommends which pieces of gear, including enchants and gems, you need to look at upgrading.

The site I am refering to is Be IMBA! whose purpose, to use their words, is:

to guide World of Warcraft players to maximize their PvE effectiveness. The carefully selected checks and advisories help to identify common pitfalls and mistakes whether they are talent or gear related. We hope that our service presents a useful guidance for the casual and hardcore PvE player alike

The site queries the World of Warcraft Armory and wowhead.com for you character and gear information and makes recommendations accordingly.  You do not need to register with the site but if you choose to do so you can force character data to be refreshed directly from the Armory, if not a cached version is used

Does being IMBA really matter?

TBH the answer to this question all depends on you, IMHO being IMBA is not worth sqat.  So why am I posting about it then?  I regularly do HC instances with a group of friend from my guild and we normally breeze through them, however looking at my DPS in recount I noticed that I was lagging severly behind my friends.  No one had an issue with it but I don’t like to think that I’m not making a valid contribution or that people are carrying me.  Chatting with my friend about the issue brought Be IMBA to my attention, so off I went to have a look.

It’s now only 4 days down the line but using the information from Be IMBA I have managed to take my DPS from ~900/sec to ~1,400/sec on average and have even started to have to pay attention more ot Omen 3 as I am starting to gain more agro  This transformation has cost me roughly 500g most of whiich went on [Wispcloak], I also got [Slithering Slippers] and [Living Mojo Belt] from HC Gundrak, [Prison Manifest] form HC Violet Hold and [Sundial of the Exiled] using Kirin’Tor rep.

Anyway don’t just take my word for it, check out the site and see for yourself

Yesterday Google released Google Mobile App for the iPhone an application that provides a central point to launch all your Google applications from, it also features a search facility that is location aware and boasts voice recognition.

TechCrunch featured an article First Look At Google Mobile App For iPhone: Great But Not Second Coming which examples the applicaiton features and compares it’s results to those shown my google in their demonstration video.

I this article I’m going to look at how well the application performed when I tried some basic searches in the office this morning.

Google Mobile App: Settings

My first observation was the the voice search button was not on the search dialog, slightly deflated and wondering if the feature was not available on the UK version I headed to settings to see if there was anything there that could be done.  A quick review of the settings revealed that Voice Search was not enabled by default and needed to be switched on.

 I also noticed that there was a caveat stating that it worked best with North American accents, so considering the number of accents there are in North America I thought let’s see what if makes of a proper Northern accent

The Test

To make the test a fair one I decided to pick some common things that people are likely to search for… or at least I would search for  I picked four broad categories Food, Drink, Entertainment and Travel and tried to search for things within them, so my chosen search terms were:

• Food
  Pizza, Chinese Food, Indian Food, Supermarket 
• Drink
  Pub, Beer, Lager, Vodka 
• Entertainment
  Cinema, World of Warcraft 
• Travel
  Train Station

Six out of the eleven searches returned the right results, well actually six and a half, Vodka initially returned Monica but I decided to try again and got the right results.  Here are the screenshots of the search results for each search in no particular order.

Well it’s now just under a week since the Blizzard’s second expansion to World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King was released.  In that time I’ve managed to level Spangles to the dizzy heights of level 72 and thought I’d post some of my thoughts and experiences.

The day of release

The day of the release was a frustrating day for me, I had ordered my copy of WotLK from Amazon and had received notification that it had been shipped two days before the launch date.  I sat a home eagerly awaiting the arrival of the postman… and I waited… and waited…  Didn’t he realise how important today was, surely he could have delivered to me first and then gone about his day!  Eventually patience gave way to frustration and by lunchtime I was down right p’d off!!  So I jumped in the car and droving into Bolton to buy a copy from Game, I even found that I had £10 on my points card so I scored a copy for a mere £9.99.  Upon returning home I discovered that Postie had been waiting around the corner for me to leave before delivering our mail and more to the point there was no post from Amazon*

Anyway enough rambling… disk in… install… patch… here we go!!!

I teleported to Stormwind, mounted up, ran to the harbor.  As the harbor started to come into view I was feeling quite excited, so excited in fact that I forgot to turn right for the path and ran off the walls and crashed to the floor losing half my hit points, not a Good start!  Not letting this minor mishap put me off, I dusted myself off and boarded the boat to Northrend, zoned and the game crashed!  I could tell it was going to be one of those days, several crashes and one or two choice words later the game was stable and I was ready to go.

Borean Tundra

Upon arrival in Valiance Keep I was initially concern that it would be very difficult to get things done due to the vast amount of people there.  However this concern was short lived as it became apparent that all required mobs were spawning fast enough to allow everyone the change to complete their quest reasonably quickly.  The vast number of people in the zone also had another advantage, that being there is no shortage of people to help complete group quest with a group invite often getting sent as you arrive in the area where the required mob is.  I did find it very amusing when there was 3 or 4 groups both Alliance and Horde all huddled in a small cave frantically spamming their AoE spells to try tag the mob upon re-spawn   As I ran through the quests I was good to see that each quest chain has been given a good deal of thought and generally have good story lines, with one or two twists.

My First Instance

I have a group of friend who I have recently started going TBC instances with and they invited me over to do a run in The Nexus, Coldarra.  It was great to get away from the manic questing to be able to take the time to view a zone without it being cluttered with other players.  It was great to go into an instance without all the strats down to pat and have to work things out for ourselves, the first two bosses we fought Ormorok the Tree-Shaper and Anomalus were not too much of a challenge and were quickly dispatched.  The fun started with Grand Magus Telestra who likes to throw you around the room, thus forcing you only to use instant cast spells, this caused us some healing problems which all came to a head when she played her next trick.  Half was through the fight she split into three aspects, one fire, one frost and one arcane, after our first wipe we put a mage on the fire and frost aspects (yes, we have two mages in our group) to sheep them and then tried to DPS down the arcane, again we wiped as sheep kept breaking quickly.  Third time lucky, we played this exactly the same as the second time but this time the mages just constantly sheeped their target until the arcane mob was down, then we killed the other two in turn.

On to the final boss a red dragon call Keristrasza, I love dragons to be honest they are one of the reasons I played games like wow, I want to see dragons… and kill them  Keristrasza casts a a debuff that slows you casting and attack speed, so yet another fight where we were having to rely on instant cast spells most of the time, as we started to wipe I Ice blocked and then when everyone else was down proceeded to kite Keri around the outside of her room.  Unfortunately she caught up with me before anyone else managed to get back in and get some agro so she re-set  Second attempt we did the same thing except this time I kited while everyone else rezzed and buffed then we finished her off, but not before she killed me and unfortunately the she went down before I got back into the instance so I didn’t get the achievement but I did get a nice new pair of boots [Attuned Crystalline Boots] 

All in all I really enjoyed my first day in the new expansion and think it will bring many more hours of fun, more about some of my favorite quest lines and most hated areas in furture posts.

*FYI the copy of WotLK eventually arrived two days after launch, well worth pay for First Class delivery… NOT!