Visit the Apple Retail Store from 5:00 pm and let our Specialists show you round the features, help you choose the perfect model and set everything up just the way you like. Or buy iPad online and get free shipping – directly to your door.

This is also confimed on Apple’s UK web site.  However, there is still no sign that you will be able to pre-order your iPad2 before this time – most frustrating!

But, to the point.  Following the release of World of Warcraft Cataclysm in December I have been working on a side project.  If you’re not a World of Warcraft player I would recommend that stop reading now, or start playing and come back once you are familiar with the game!

I had been finding it increasingly difficult to keep track with what items enchants do what and consequently finding the right enchants for each item.  I trawled Google hoping to find a handy little tool to help me out but there was nothing, plenty of sites to explain what enchanting it but nothing that suited my needs, what I needed was something that would tell me “You can put these stats onto that slot” or “To improve stat X you can use these enchants for these slots“ .  So spotting a gap in the WoW fan site arena I took a break from levelling and decided to fill the gap, and so Warcraft Enchants was born.

The site is very simple it allows you to filter all available enchants by stat and/or item slot and then shows you the details of each enchant and a link to the full details on Wowhead.  Currently only enchants created by the enchanting trade skill are covered but I am looking to add others in the future.

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.

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.

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.

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 [item]Mantle of the Lost Vanquisher[/item] 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 [item]Valorous Frostfire Shoulderpads[/item] 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

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.

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

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.

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 [item]Wispcloak[/item], I also got [item]Slithering Slippers[/item] and [item]Living Mojo Belt[/item] from HC Gundrak, [item]Prison Manifest[/item] form HC Violet Hold and [item]Sundial of the Exiled[/item] using Kirin’Tor rep.

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