I gotta hand it to Blizzard. They, for the most part, really know how to take care of their customers. I purchased the old Warcraft III and Diablo II games years ago. At this point the original CDs are just about unusable, for example I figured out I could still play Diablo II, but only if I could start a new game within 6 seconds of the main menu appearing. Now blizzard has set-up a system to allow those of us who have bought their older games to enter our old CD keys and download a non-CD version of the same games. They were definitely under no obligation to do this, but they did it anyways. It just goes to show you that Blizz really does care about their customers, even the older ones who may not have bought anything from them for a while.

I only have one gripe and it’s not even Blizz’s fault. In one of the recent updates to Leopard, Apple removed the 256 color mode (which these older games rely on) for their computers with NVidia cards. So for now I cannot play them, but rumor has it that the upcoming 10.5.5 update is supposed to restore that function and allow these games to be played again.

  So about a week and change ago I decided to completely reinstall my computer. Of course between work and everything else it has taken me a while to get everything reinstalled back to the way it was. One of the only things I hadn’t gotten at this point was installing World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade. After installing all 8 discs(4 for the original World of Warcraft and 4 for Burning Crusade) and wasting an hour and a half while it installed then I found out it was going to be another 2+ hours and just under a gig of downloading. I can only imagine that it will also take a while to run the full patch as well, so chalk up another 30 minutes to an hour for that. 

Blizz I can respect that you want to fix bugs, tweak the environment and add content. But I gotta draw the line at having to download a gig’s worth of fixes if for some reason I have to reinstall. For instance the 3 times that have had patches go bad and been told the only way to fix the error is to delete my installation and reinstall from scratch. Or if for some reason I need to reinstall one of my computers that has WoW installed on it. 

In other news Ken Mehlman will be stepping down as RNC Chairman in January as was announced today.

In a day and age when there is such a push for web standards I find it inconceivable that a major internet company can’t design a new interface that will work in a majority of the major browsers. Some may argue that Safari is not a major browser because it’s current market share is in the vicinity of 3.5%. Fortunately or unfortunately Apple’s OS X is still a major player in the consumer OS market and OS X’s primary built-in browser is Safari. Yes I could use Firefox or Internet Explorer, but when I am on my Mac I prefer to use Safari unless I absolutely have to.

Browser incompatibility isn’t the only reason that Yahoo’s new Mail Beta needs some work. I tried it in Firefox on both my PC and my Mac to disasterous results. The new interface would be better termed as Yahoo Mail Billboard, as in the billboards you see driving down the freeway. There are so many ads that the interface is cluttered to the point of confusion. To make matters worse, in order to maximize their advertising dollars various areas of the page continuously reload themselves and their rotating ads. Since the ads are continuously changing you would expect that Yahoo would be careful about each of the ads keeping a uniform size….they weren’t. The end result of this mess is a page that appears to be having a seizure, each time an ad reloads and changes size the page has to readjust to fit the new size.

The verdict: Yahoo, please please please remove this embarrassment and wait until you have it fixed before you attempt to roll it out again