wednesday
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WoW Insider Show live today on Ustream
Today on the show, it's an all-star cast of WoW Insider folks: we'll welcome Alex Ziebart and Adam Holisky both on the show to talk about the latest news from the World of Warcraft. And as usual, Turpster will join us with his own brand of silliness (don't miss our newest feature, Turpster's Tips, in which he tells you something that may or may not help you play the game better). And what is the latest news, you ask? Why, it's our interview with Tom Chilton (featuring mentions of dance moves, new Druid forms, and player housing), that legendary mace and who it's for, whether the Bloodlust love should have some spreading around, and Alex's general disappointment with the game world lately. The show starts up at May 9, 2009 3:30 PM EDT var date_span = document.getElementById("date"); var date = new Date(date_span.innerHTML); var monthname=new Array("Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug", "Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"); var weekday=new Array("Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday", "Friday","Saturday"); var year = date.getFullYear(); var day_of_month = date.getDate(); var month = monthname[date.getMonth()]; var day = weekday[date.getDay()]; var hour = date.getHours(); if (hour > 11) { if (hour > 12) {hour -= 12} am_pm = "PM"; } else { am_pm = "AM"; } var minute = date.getMinutes(); if (minute < 10) { minute = "0"+minute; } date_string = day + ", " + month + " " + day_of_month; date_string += " at " + hour + ":" + minute + " " + am_pm; offset = -date.getTimezoneOffset()/60; if (offset >= 0) { offset = "+"+offset; } date_string += " in your time zone (GMT"+offset+")"; date_span.innerHTML = (date_string); over on our Ustream page.And we've got a full schedule in the coming weeks as well: next week, we'll be recording the show live on Wednesday, May 13th at 6pm Eastern, so those of you who aren't usually available on Saturday will have a chance to listen in. And then on the 23rd, we'll be back live at the usual Saturday time, not only with audio but with video, as we present our video show, to thank you all for boosting our Twitter page up to over 9.000 followers. We've got a lot of fun stuff planned -- trust me when I say it'll be a cavalcade of guests and jokes and good times.And then after that, we'll be welcoming on a special guest host. Brigwyn's charity auction raised a whopping $2,500 for Child's Play this past week, and some awesome, caring fan paid almost $480 to join Turpster and I on the podcast for a week. So stay tuned for that. We'll have them on soon, and they can disagree with me or argue with Turpster or do whatever they want for the whole show. Should be a lot of fun.
European extended weekly maintenance: 6th May 2009
Good morning, my fellow EU players. Welcome to Wednesday. Yes, despite the May Day bank holiday this week and that Tuesday feeling, I assured you it's once again the middle of the week and patch day to boot. As with the last couple of weeks, we've got an extended period of maintenance. Now I know things on the EU servers are a heck of a lot more stable than those of our friends across the pond, after all, they are our guinea pigs, but we're want them to stay that way right?Once again, realms are down between 5:00am and 11:00am CEST. The downtime might change depending on how well or badly the maintenance goes so just bear that in mind come the top of the hour. However there's plenty to do during the down time, so check out Daniel's post from yesterday for some suggestions. Me? I'm going to read up on how to get the School of Hard Knocks achievement while I sit in the dentist's waiting room.
WoW Insider Show live today (and next Wednesday)
Should be a fun episode of the WoW Insider Show this weekend -- and hopefully, Turpster's new song will be ready to play on the air for you all. Though it's not for certain, unfortunately -- I know he was planning a Wham! reunion just for the song, but you know how tough it is to get all the contracts involved on something like that. Anyway, even if the song isn't ready yet, we'll still have a show, and we'll chat about all the most popular posts of the past week, including our new Time is Money column (and how to make the most money ingame), everything we've heard and seen from Ulduar in the past week, and what else is new on the 3.1 PTR. Be sure to tune in live if you can -- it starts up at 3:30pm Eastern over on our Ustream page, or in the embedded feed on the end of this post.And we've got a special treat for those of you who can't make it to our usual Saturday broadcasts -- next Wednesday, March 11th, we're going to record the podcast at a special time of the week. We'll be starting up on Ustream around 9pm Eastern, which is probably a little late for all of you Europeans, but will hopefully let some people who've never heard the show before tune in (and hopefully we'll catch some WI bloggers who haven't been on the show before as well). This is only a one-time thing for now, so in the future, we'll be on Saturday as usual, but next week we're trying a new time just to see if we can mix things up a little bit.If you can't make it on Wednesday, don't worry: the recorded show will still be here on the site and on the feeds as usual, and in two weeks we'll be back to the normal time. This is just a chance to let people who haven't been able to tune in on Saturday afternoons come and check us out. Hopefully we'll see you there, either later today or next Wednesday evening.
Inside the NFL switching to HD on Showtime
For years, we've wondered why Inside the NFL, with its sweet NFL Films footage and in depth coverage of one of the best sports to watch in high definition, was stuck in SD; but the show's move to Showtime has remedied that. TV Week reveals the upcoming season will be produced for your HDTV, the only proper format considering we get the games live in HD and daily highlights on ESPN-HD, why should a weekly magazine show be any different? If you miss an episode Wednesday night at 9 p.m. (starting September 10), expect plenty of opportunities to see it again with about 10 replays per week, hosted by Cris Collinsworth, Phil Simms and James Brown plus a series of guest hosts. Thanks Showtime, for letting HBO know how things should be done -- seriously, Bill Maher going HD first should have been a crime.
Oceanic maintenance moved away from prime time
We've posted about this issue quite a few times, and strangely enough, though Tseric told us way back that things would never change, it just might be fixed. Oceanic players, including Chri who kindly tipped us about this, are reporting that their maintenance has been moved from the usual Tuesday evening prime time (which is early Tuesday morning for us in the US) to early Wednesday morning their time. In other words, they didn't have to suffer their servers going down during playtime this week.Unfortunately, there's no official word on this yet, so we're not sure if it's just this week, or if Blizzard just didn't have to restart this servers this time around, or what it was. But we do know that Oceanic players are cheering loudly that they didn't have to suffer mistimed maintenance this week, so hopefully Blizzard is taking action as promised on this one.So very good news for Oceanic players, especially since the lag and shutdowns have been a huge problem for them in the past. If this really is a official change, hopefully we'll see Blizzard confirm that they've finally responded to all the player problems down there.
WoW Patch 2.1.0.6729 - shortest patchnotes ever
I'm pretty sure that this sentence is actually longer than the patch notes. I'm also thinking that the image for this entry is going to take up more space than the text. And to top it all off, for once you're not going to have to click through to read the full details for this odd, out-of-place Wednesday morning patch.In fact, this is practically a non-entry, and merely here as a service to let you know that when you get home today you'll have a 1.75mb download for the following: Bugs Fixed a crash in the client. Yep, that's it. Go back to your day, enjoy work or whatever you're doing and brace yourself for this momentous and huge Wednesday patch.
Wii is two duct taped Gamecubes and other publisher rants
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gaming_news/Wii_is_two_duct_taped_Gamecubes_and_other_publisher_rants'; The developers rant is typically a highlight of the Game Developers Conference. This year, to mix things up a bit, there was a heapin' serving of publishers rant. Eric Zimmerman emceed the event and this is what the publisher had to say:Alex St.John (CEO and co-founder of Wild Tangent): The former Microsoft employee went all out against Vista. Speaking about how most games ended up being broken. Essentially it all came down to that Vista's security is so tight that it views "everything as dangerous." St. John said that Vista moves everything around to the point where he says, "It's the only self-breaching security system I've seen in my life."Richard Hilleman (Electronic Arts): This is where the theme for the rest of the rant came about. Leadership, leadership, LEADERSHIP! Although offending some people who believed that alpha males do not help, it was an issue across the board that a stable and competent leadership is lacking in the industry. Hilleman said that people in the industry want to think vision is more important, or reaching for that shining light on the beacon hill. But he says that the people he is seeing and teaching are not capable of providing the leadership for the million dollar projects that come their way. They can't lead beyond groups of three. Once again, the overall theme was leadership, leadership, LEADERSHIP!
iTunes: Free Wednesday
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EU Maintenance Extended
Proving that the US isn't the only one with extended weekly maintenance periods, CM Thundgot tells us that EU realms will be down until 16:00 CEST today. Here's to hoping Blizzard figured out something from the many problems with the US patch roll-out and the deployment over the European realms will go more smoothly.
