Mists of Pandaria – why the hate?

There has been a lot of discussion within the WoW community over the next expansion called “Mists of Pandaria.” The expansion takes World of WarCraft into the mysterious land of the Pandaren, so far only represented in lore by Chen Stormstout, a character in the Horde campaign of WarCraft III. A lot of the discussion has been negative, with the expansion overwhelmingly being called a rip-off of “Kung Fu Panda.” Even my wife has joined the hate, doubting whether or not she will get the expansion for this reason.

I really don’t understand this attitude, since Chen & the Pandaren were introduced in 2002, vs. “Kung Fu Panda” in 2008. If there is any relationship between the two other than coincidence, I would say the film’s character was inspired by the WarCraft III character, not the other way around. Either way, I am excited about the expansion. When World of WarCraft was first announced back in 2004, I told my wife I wanted to make a Pandaren Brewmaster since I thought the character of Chen was pretty cool. I was actually pretty disappointed when I found out that you wouldn’t have that option. Now, with the “Mists of Pandaria” expansion, we will.

Anyway, just my two cents worth on the topic. Below is a Blizzard image of Pandaren concept art, with an inset of Chen’s in-game portrait from WarCraft III.

 

Skyrim Rules. That is all.

The title says it all.

Engage Thrusters.

Well, I finally broke down and bought Skyrim. It’s probably safe to assume that any spare time I previously had will now vanish.

A blog puts things in perspective

One thing about having my own blog… it shows me once and for all that I have nothing important to say.

Finding mismatched features after SharePoint migration

I recently performed a migration of a site collection from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 using the DocAve migration tool. Afterwards, whenever I tried to access the Site Collection Features or Site Features screen on the 2010 site, I would get the oh-so-helpful error message sporting a correlation ID and not much else. In most cases, the next step would be to find the correlation ID in the ULS logs and troubleshoot accordingly. In this case, however, the correlation ID listed in the error didn’t show up anywhere in the logs. So, after much head-banging and silent cursing, here’s what I came up with:

Overriding Styles in SharePoint 2010

This is actually a well-known trick in CSS, but I’ll post it here in case anyone out there forgets about it like I did. When designing a custom stylesheet for a SharePoint 2010 site, I kept banging my head against the desk trying to figure out why my changes weren’t showing up. Turns out, it was something very simple – I needed our old friend the override tag!

Product Plug: MiO Water Enhancer

So, I’m trying to lose weight now, which means cutting back on the sodas. Unfortunately, the only thing I have available to drink at work all day is coke or water. And I hate drinking water – even the bottled kind. My wife suggested the little packets of tea/punch that you add to water, but I’ve tried the Crystal Light stuff and it was horrible. But… since that was a few years back and I really do want to get skinny again, I decided to try again.

Dieting & Soda Addiction

Like many Americans, I struggle with being overweight. I’m not huge (I see people every day who are waaaaay bigger than me), but I’m still fat. For a person my height, I should be around 200lbs and I’m closer to 300. And, having just hit the big 3-5 a couple weeks ago, I’ve finally realized that I don’t want to stay fat anymore, and that the only thing to do about it is lose weight. Sounds like a no-brainer, but that’s harder logic than you’d think for those of us who aren’t skinny. And I can honestly say that dieting is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

My Review of Captain America: The First Avenger

I realize I’m a couple of months late, but I wanted to post my review/thoughts on the recent Captain America movie. Part of Marvel’s new “cohesive movie universe” strategy – this film is meant to fit within the same continuity as other recent Marvel films Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, and Thor. In fact, the “movie universe” (or, at least, the Avengers-related one) has even gotten its own designation within the comics multiverse now – Earth-199999 – which is about as official as it gets in comics continuity. Because the Avenger-related movies are in a different continuity than the Fantastic Four movies from a few years back (that’s Earth-121698), Marvel decided to use actor Chris Evans - who previously portrayed Johnny Storm in the F4 films – as Steve Rogers, aka Captain America. Whether or not that was a good decision is something I’ll discuss further down.

Anyway, the film itself is a pretty nice showing for Cap fans. Due to a slight bout of unemployment, I wasn’t able to see it when it initially came out in July, but was finally able to go see it a couple of weeks ago thanks to that beautiful thing called a paycheck. So, without further ado… here we go:

Blog Launch

Well, I finally bit the bullet and started my own blog. Only time will tell whether or not this is a good idea.