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Three for three: Friday's trifecta of Snow Leopard upgrades
If you joined us Friday night for the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard liveblog, you probably saw me say that I didn't have many issues with the upgrade. That's an understatement -- I think Snow Leopard is one of the smoothest upgrades I've ever performed with any operating system. You've probably already read the reports of fellow bloggers David Winograd and Mel Martin, which noted many similar findings. During a four hour period after the delivery of my 5-install Family Pack by FedEx, I upgraded three Macs. The experience with each of them was slightly different, which is something you'd expect since all three are completely different models, but in each case the end result was essentially the same. All had about 10 - 15 GB more hard drive space than when I began, all were more "snappy" in terms of response, and the display looked crisper. After surprising the FedEx delivery person with my HD video camera (yes, there's going to be an unboxing video coming later this weekend), I ripped open the box, pulled out the Snow Leopard box, pulled off the plastic, and then got the disk ready to go. I had done a final Time Machine backup of my MacBook Air just to make sure I had captured the last changes made on documents, so I plugged in the MBA's external SuperDrive and popped in the disk. I'm not exactly sure what I did after starting up the installer, but on the MacBook Air, I was asked to reboot the machine and then the installation began.
BlizzCon 2009: The Guild Panel Live Blog
The Guild was at our meetup last night (bloggers and Internet stars -- guess who's who above), and now they're about to take the floor at BlizzCon. We're standing by to hear what Felicia and the cast have to say about the new season, the upcoming comic book, and the geeky tour de force that is The Guild.Liveblogging starts right after the break -- newest at the top. Should be fun!%Gallery-70707%
BlizzCon 2009: What we're bringing
We're spending our day traveling to BlizzCon, so we figured while we were still in the air, we'd let you in on a little trade industry secret: what we're bringing to the show. The gallery below offers you a look at just what it takes to turn out the kind of BlizzCon coverage we'll be bringing you this weekend -- the tech, the gear, and the, er, beverages.We're just hoping security lets us through with all of this stuff. Especially Alex -- oh sure, the hammer's fine, but that JCVD-endorsed caffeinated gum is the kind of thing that will get you pulled out of line. If he's not there in time for the meetup tonight, you'll know why.%Gallery-70540% BlizzCon 2009 is here! WoW.com has continuing coverage, bringing you the latest in Cataclysm news, live blogs, galleries, and reports right from the convention floor. Check out WoW.com's Guide to BlizzCon for the latest!
WoW Insider Show Episode 103: Lots in common
Great time on the show again last week -- Lesley Smith and Patrick Beja (of, err, all the stuff he does) joined Turpster and I last Thursday afternoon to chat about the biggest news in Warcraft recently, including what we've heard about the new expansion, Ghostcrawler's attempt at comedy, and the re-emergence of Onxyia. How exciting! And of course we chatted live with folks in the Ustream chat and answered all of your emails (which you can send along to us at theshow@wow.com).Next week, our show will be a little bit different. Instead of the usual Saturday at 3:30pm show, because of BlizzCon, we'll instead be doing a live broadcast straight from our meetup on Thursday evening at 7:30pm Pacific. It won't be a formal show -- rather, it'll be your chance to sit in on the meetup, and meet and greet some of our bloggers live in video person. Both Turpster and I will be there (along with a bunch of other folks from the WoW.com staff), so if you can't make it to BlizzCon, you can still tune in and see what it's like and chat with us (we'll try to save some giveaways for you, too).We're also planning two different live podcasts next weekend, one each night of BlizzCon, so stay tuned on the site for more information about those. We'll probably combine those into one for iTunes next week (so even if you can't be around live, you can still listen in). More on that later -- meanwhile, enjoy the show, and hopefully we'll see you via Ustream at the meetup on Thursday night.Get the podcast:[iTunes] Subscribe to the WoW Insider Show directly in iTunes.[RSS] Add the WoW Insider Show to your RSS aggregator.[MP3] Download the MP3 directly.Listen here on the page:
A peek inside the TUAW offices
Each day the TUAW crew awakes from our hyperbaric chambers, slides down the firepole in our historic 2-story firehouse and gathers around the Surface table to discuss what we're going to write about. Oh wait, that's in an alternate universe I just made up. In reality, the TUAW team is a diverse group of freelancers based all over the world, working from their home offices to find Apple stories for you. There's no office except our chat room, no break room except our Twitter feeds and no daily editorial bull session with the team. It doesn't work like that. Instead, we all wake up at different times, read different sources, write different stuff and share different opinions. Everyone has a "day job" of some nature outside of TUAW, be it cubicle farmer or freelance pixel pusher. I'm pretty thrilled we've been able to do this for over four years now and our independence and focus hasn't changed. While you can't take a tour of our real-world offices, some of our bloggers are sharing pics of their workspaces. Everyone has a very different setup, as you can see. Want to share your own setup? Tag a picture on Flickr with "tuaw" and we'll check it out. %Gallery-68997%
Blogatelle signs off
One more major WoW-related blog has closed its doors. Too Many Annas, among others, notes that Blogatelle has called it quits, saying that Sean and Jess over there both feel they've come to the point where they've run out of things to say. While the blog itself is definitely a nice achievement -- it was an excellent blog centered on roleplaying (we've mentioned it before here on the site as an excellent resource for RPers) -- they will unfortunately leave a number of series behind, including the Katafray project, which followed a roleplaying Paladin up through the levels in Azeroth. As Anna says, they definitely deserve a hat tip, both for giving the RP community a solid and steady blogging voice, and for being accessible enough to bring in new RPers.This closing follows the shuttering of a few other WoW blogs lately, most famously those of BRK and Resto4Life. You might say three is a trend, sure, but on the other hand, we've seen a lot of blogs and podcasts grow as well lately. Four years in, there are going to be all kinds of people in the community, in all kinds of places regarding their interest to the game. Anyone who sees a few bloggers step away to do other things and cites it as a sign that the game is on its last legs needs to keep looking. We're sorry to lose some popular bloggers, but it sure looks from here like the community is stronger than ever.
Children's Week Child's Play auction is live
Children's Week is here, and with it this year comes our friend Brigwyn's Child's Play auction. You can look through all of the available items in his on-site catalogue, or head on over to eBay and start bidding on whatever you like. All of the proceeds from the auction will go to help Penny Arcade's very worthy Child's Play charity, which goes to help put videogames in hospitals where sick children can play with them. Brigwyn himself has experience with their work (which he's written about over on his site), so he knows just what kind of good they can do.And of course, we'll point out our own contribution to the auction page -- we've donated a free guest spot on our podcast, the WoW Insider Show. If you've ever wanted to tell me in virtual person how wrong I am, or encourage Turpster's already oversize ego, or weigh in with us during the Meat of the Show, now's your chance. With your bid there, not only are you helping children who are going through some terrible experiences, but you might also get the chance to speak your mind about World of Warcraft right alongside us on the show. Oh, and we'll poke around our WoW Insider prize closet for some other fun stuff for you, too -- maybe loot cards, a Turpster drawing, or whatever else we've got sitting around.So please bid -- on our item or any of the others. There's also some loot cards, some items from BRK and other well-known bloggers from around the community, and lots of extremely fun one-of-a-kind WoW items (Sure, this original signed art by Cadistra of WoW, Eh? is nice, but a Hooter's t-shirt? That's Epic if we ever saw it). The bids are coming in already, so please get yours in there ASAP!
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.
Resto4Life is closing its doors
Sad news on the druid blogger front. Phaelia of Resto4Life fame will be closing her doors on March 19th. Resto4Life is, in many people's opinions, is one of the best Druid healing blogs out there. Phaelia is one helluva intelligent resto druid, and a funny blogger to boot. Phaelia posts that she's ending her bloging for a number of reasons, chiefly among them is that there is a new baby tree that her and Mr. Phae are expecting. So despite our sadness at seeing her go, there couldn't be a better reason!The community over at Resto4Life is really quite a good one, and as such Phaelia is going to make a final post in March comprised of all the reader submitted screenshots and artwork she gets. And to add to the coolness of it, she's randomly awarding a Belkin Nostromo Speedpad N52TE to someone who submits some artwork, purchased with the money she's made from the site.Class act all around, and a great site that will be missed.
Merry Christmas from WoW Insider!
It's Christmas Day today, so from all of us here at WoW Insider to you and yours, have a great and safe holiday, no matter where you are. Hopefully whatever you find under your tree, be it virtual or real, is exactly what you were hoping for.And don't forget that Winter's Veil presents go up ingame today as well -- the rumor going around is that it's a racecar (and who doesn't want a racecar, seriously), but the only way to find out is to head on into the capital cities and go look for Greatfather Winter's presents.As always, thanks for all you do for us -- your support throughout the year helps us deliver all the WoW news and views that we post every day. Posting will likely be a little light over the next few days, as our bloggers spend the holiday with their own families, but of course we'll be back soon with a brand new set of posts for you to come and unwrap every day.
WRUP: I loathe/love achievements edition
Whether you enjoy achievements or not, Winter's Veil has arrived in the world of Azeroth with a full set of achievements and its own title. (Doesn't everyone want to be a merrymaker?) And just in time for the holidays we're launching WRUP (read as "what are you playing") where the WoW Insider team talks about what they're going to be up to this weekend in-game and we invite you to, as well. But what's this about achievements? I point you to Daniel and Daniel's weekend to-do lists:Daniel "BigRedKitty" Howell: Cramming guildies through heroics, running 10-man Naxx and Satharian, putting down the tools after getting leatherworking to 450, chugging through Sons of Hodir, and trying to find the one quest I need in Borean Tundra to get that zone done, thus completing the achievement for getting all zone-quest-achievements done. I loathe achievements. Daniel Whitcomb: Trying to ding 80 on Death Knight and get revered with both Wyrmrest Accord and Argent Crusade while also finishing up my Winter Veil achievements. I love achievements.I think this is the start of a beautiful argument. For the rest of the team, read on.
Yet another introduction
Greetings, TUAW faithful! I'm Todd, and after writing for Download Squad for a year, I'm fortunate enough to be able to write for TUAW. A MacBook Pro is my primary machine and I'm rarely without my iPhone 3G (who isn't?).By day I'm a systems admin for a school district in central Pennsylvania where I manage a network of about 1400 PC's, 600 Macs, and 35 servers (a handful of which run Mac OS X). I handle all of the Mac client management, system imaging, and podcast-related functions. In addition to my day job, a few nights a month I teach at a local career institute covering topics like Apache administration, Active Directory management, and Cisco configuration. I get to work with small classes in hands-on environments which allow the students to get a taste of the real "IT" world.Drawing from these experiences, I hope to offer insightful articles ranging from the use of Apple products in the classroom to creating Mac system images for mass deployment. I look forward to interacting, sharing, and learning from you and the other great TUAW writers!
WoW Insider Show live with Phaelia of Resto4Life tomorrow afternoon
Our weekly podcast (we're working on a new graphic for the new theme, don't worry) goes live again as usual tomorrow afternoon at 3:30pm Eastern over on Ustream, and this week we are thrilled to welcome one of our favorite bloggers: Phaelia of Resto4Life. Listeners have requested some Resto talk, so we invited everyone's favorite tree Druid to come and let us know what things are like from the healer's perspective. And speaking of healers, we also invited a Priest and a Paladin along: Matt "Matticus" Low from World of Matticus (and our own Spritual Guidance column) will be on as a man of the cloth, and our producer Elizabeth Harper will be aboard as a woman of the plate. Looks like I'll have to rep Resto Shammy so we can get all the healers in the mix.Additionally, we'll be talking about patch 3.0.3, and all the chaos in the runup to the expansion, including where we're going to get our copies, and what we're going to do right after install. And we'll take a look back at the beta, and see if there's anything else we'd like to say about it one last time before we step into the same place on the live realms. If you've got questions or comments for the show, feel free to drop us an email at theshow at wowinsider dot com, and you might even hear it on the air.And of course you're welcome to join us during the recording for the live chat, our in-show polls, or a (hopefully not shortened this week) aftershow session with the guests. We'll be live at 3:30pm Eastern (time zone calc) on the Ustream page, or you can just join us right back here -- there's an embedded stream right after the break. See you then!
CCP Games highlights community efforts of EVE bloggers
It's been pretty eventful lately in terms of EVE Online news. As a recap: the Quantum Rise expansion was announced, new features are on the way, the backstory was advanced through a new video, controversy and even outright rage ensued over disabling ghost training, a Quarterly Economic Newsletter was released, and there have been concerns over the future of EVE given Iceland's economic woes. While some of these news items are mentioned in the latest EVE Online newsletter (aside from the ghost training fiasco), CCP Games has also given some attention to the EVE community itself, something Massively has been been taking note of as well. It seems our friend and EVE community puppetmaster David Perry (aka CrazyKinux) has just gotten the nod from CCP for his latest effort.
BlizzCon 2008: WoW Insider's second annual BlizzCon Reader Meetup
We had our second annual Reader Meetup last night here in Anaheim at The Lost Bar, and it was a blast. Tons of people showed up (maybe 200?), and every single reader we met was completely awesome. We introduced all of our bloggers (Adam Holisky, Daniel Whitcomb, Alex Ziebart, Krystalle Voecks, Elizabeth Harper, Dan O'Halloran, and myself were all there), we drank plenty of libations (the bartender, unfortunately, wasn't moving as fast as we would have liked), and we gave away a bunch of swag, to all kinds of readers, for everything from answering trivia questions to just saying hi.The Horde, I have to say, seemed to have the higher population, but Alliance made a good showing as well. And a few full guilds came out to see us: shoutouts to Thee Unforgiven on Destromath (the good folks above), Keine Neuen on Malganis, and Dread Pirates on Blackrock, not to mention all of the other awesome readers and guilds that stopped by. They're all in our gallery below -- thanks to everyone who came out for making it such a great time.%Gallery-34196%
Reminder: Meet WoW Insider tonight at The Lost Bar at 8pm
Don't forget -- if you're in Anaheim for BlizzCon tonight, our meetup starts in just a few hours at 8pm. We'll be over at The Lost Bar -- you can follow the map above, and from the convention center entrance (where you're grabbing your passes today), it's just about a 10 minute walk north and then west of Disneyland. It's a big open air bar -- we'll be sitting, chatting, and drinking, so walk right up and say hi (just look for the folks going through the BlizzCon goodie bags greedily and talking about the latest beta changes).We'll be there late this evening (and later on, we'll do some trivia and giveaways), so even if it's kind of late and you've just made it into your hotel, feel free to come by and say hello (and if you're stuck at home, stay tuned for a post live from the meetup later on this evening). And don't forget that even if you can't make it to the meetup tonight, we're taping our podcast in front of a live audience (with WoW Radio and The Guild) tomorrow evening, so make sure that's on your schedule as well.Have a safe trip to BlizzCon if you're coming down, and we'll see you at the Lost Bar this evening!
Warhammer Online NDA lifts tomorrow (August 19th)
The Warhammer Online NDA is expected to lift tomorrow, according to Mark Jacobs, GM of Mythic Entertainment. The announcement has popped up in a few places, but the message is clear: the NDA is lifting. Jacobs' announcement also touched upon why they're running the Open Beta as they are and early client downloads, but it's the NDA lift that seems to be catching most everyone's attention. Jacobs said, "We expect to lift it tomorrow morning. I was hoping it was going to be today but I wanted to wait till I got the beta reports from the weekend and we just didn't have enough time to get everything coordinated with our partners in order for the press release to go out today." Jacobs also stated that he'll explain the reasons for the delayed NDA release tomorrow. WAR bloggers everywhere are already freaking out (in a good way) over the news, so expect a literal flood of Warhammer Online info for tomorrow. Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out all of our previous Warhammer Online features, and don't miss any of our ongoing coverage as Massively goes to WAR!
WWI Predictions by WoW Insider
The 2008 Worldwide Invitational is going down this weekend in Paris, and everyone is abuzz about what might happen. Will we see a release date for Wrath of the Lich King? What is that teaser on the Blizzard page all about? And will we finally, almost eight years to the day since the last game was released, see a new Diablo game? You've got questions, we've got predictions. We here at WoW Insider have put our collective heads together to predict exactly what we'll see at the press conferences and ceremonies this weekend, and each blogger's predictions are after the jump. We're putting it all up front now, so that afterwards, we can see if we were right or wrong. And you're welcome to join us -- put your prediction (or just agree or disagree with ours) in the comments below.Of course, we're all guessing based on rumors and hearsay at this point -- we won't know for sure what's going on until Blizzard confirms it this weekend, and of course WoW Insider will be there to let you know right away. But in the meantime, here's what we think we're going to hear about from Paris in the next few days.
Glenn Beck proves how much of a jerk he is
So, reader Steven is, like, the greatest guy ever. He got some time in with Glenn Beck, who apparently has a radio show (as if having his mug on TV for however long he's on each day isn't enough) and, we're convinced the guy is just a jerk, plain and simple. Instead of, oh, we don't know, treating Steven like a human being and having a civil discussion, Glenn Beck instead decides to pull out his big book of clichés and takes the time to place every stereotype gamers above the age of 12 suffer from onto Steven. Real mature, Glenn, real mature.Also, what else comes off as comical to us is Glenn's recollection of his remarks that game bloggers are losers. He says it was a joke, that he said it in a joking fashion, yet, when we watch the video again, we don't see a smile, a smirk or even hear a chuckle. Glenn looks pretty darn serious when he says it. But, then again, we're often busy losing at life and converting our parents' basement into the bridge of the Enterprise, so we're not really sure how emotions or human interaction work. We are gamers so that's how it goes, right Glenn?Hit up the link below to download the segment for yourself. Around the 6:50 mark is when Steven calls in.
Glenn Beck doesn't like game bloggers too much
Okay, now this bit on Glenn Beck's show revolves around that GTA IV game, but he does manage to say something relevant to us (and, in turn, you all reading this). He thinks game blogs are a waste of time and their bloggers are "losers," citing that he could care less about video games overall, even though he has a pretty lengthy segment on his show about them (we imagine he's had other gaming-related topics on his show, but we steer clear of shows with hosts on power trips). We can only imagine what this implies about you, the reader, who spends their time keeping current on the industry news with us.It honestly cracks us up, because not only is he calling us losers and pretty much saying video games aren't worth his effort, but he's being such a toolbox as to say his supposed opinions during a video game segment on his show. You tell us what is worse, fine readers: a person who blogs about something they're passionate about, or a guy on TV who talks about what his producers say are the day's hot topics and blatantly shows no regard for the subject matter?[Via Go Nintendo]
