All The Tech in the World ...

All The Tech in the World ...

If you are reading this then you figured out what I forgot when I ran into trouble getting access to the web while on vacation in Las Vegas. Read on ...

I thought I was prepared to be without my home computer for our seven day stay at a timeshare in Las Vegas. We arrived on Sunday, 27 Nov with a laptop and our still new smart phones. In addition, the resort offered free wireless service.

Warcraft wasn't an immediate priority, of course, but I did want to ensure that Happyface would be able to conduct business on the Auction House, The gold must continue to flow.

The resort's wireless service was capable of handling routine things, but choked on trying to load WoW. It kept timing out. Plus, the resort wireless was unprotected. Our Sprint smartphone service has unlimited data service, but it did not come with one feature that I hadn't thought about - a secure Hotspot wireless connection between the phone and the laptop. Interested in how well that would work, I ordered the service for use during our stay.

Success! I got a very good connection and we were in business. What I hadn't expected was that after successfully logging in, battle.net didn't like me logging in from this strange computer and locked my account. Sigh. I got an email message, though, through my smartphone, telling me how to log back in and validate that it was my account so I could access WoW from the laptop. Ok, no big deal, I'd do that later on, and we went off to do other things. That was on Monday.

On Tuesday I tried to reactivate the account - but of course battle.net was down for maintenance. Uh oh, now I'm worried that patch 4.3 was dropping - this was Tuesday, a maintenance day. I logged into WoW and sure enough there was an 800 MB file to download. Sigh again.

It's just my luck - in the city of luck - that the patch would drop when I was away from home. Maybe I should send an email to my WoW friends and ask? Strangely, I could not access my email. There was no error messages, just a failed connection. I could access any other site on the web I could think of, but not my email. Not giving up, I went to my webmail account through the smartphone, That worked fine, which made the failed connection email connection from the laptop all that more baffling. However, I don't maintain a contact list on my webmail, and did not have any email addresses of my WoW friends.

I'm getting mad, now. Ok, I'm an anti-social networking guy, but I still have facebook. I get on my smartphone - sorry, facebook says, I don't recognize the device and you need to validate your identity. Well, trying to deal with those weird characters I was required to re-type in for "validation" proved impossible over the phone, so I switched back to the laptop.

As I depressingly expected, facebook didn't recognize the laptop, either. I managed to navigate through the squiggly line alphabet soup tests - and then facebook demanded that I identify the faces of several of my friends. I was given a test in which 3 or 4 images were shown with boxes bracketing the face they wanted me to identify - the problem was that the boxes weren't placed very well and sometimes identified different people as the same person. I got at four right, but that wasn't good enough. Facebook gave me a failing grade and wouldn't let me login. Facebook is now locked until I can get on my home computer.

What was even more galling was that every time Silver updated her facebook I would get a facebook notification on my phone, but facebook would not let me respond to it. By the way, I hope you are getting things straightened out with the car, Silver!

Update Wednesday - As all of you already know, Patch 4.3, the Hour of Twilight, dropped Tuesday morning. Wildshard is going to be a week behind everyone else. That means that Wild will be learning the new dungeons with players who have already likely mastered those three new dungeons. The absolute most fun for me is doing dungeons with a group that is seeing it for the first time. I am missing that chance. I am also missing out on earning points for tier gear, and getting into the the new Looking for Raid opportunities. Not to mention the new BG system for earning conquest points. Wild is one sad cow.

I know, a month from now it won't matter. I do plan to spend a lot of time in the new dungeons working on tier gear along with the new LF Raid. I have high hopes for the new raid system. Using LFR, the new raid is divided into two halves so you only do half a raid at a time. The loot rules are very restrictive but should work well for Wild as a healer. Between the dungeons and the raids Wild should be able to catch up.

Thursday Update - I was eventually able to get the patch downloaded and installed on the laptop. However, it appears something went wrong during the process and now WoW won't load at all. Happy is grinding his teeth at the loss of gold opportunities every day. I'm grinding my teeth at being unable to get even a glimpse of the new content.

All that aside, though, we are having fun in Las Vegas! Today the rest of our relatives arrive and we'll be hitting the town pretty hard from now until we leave on Sunday.
PS - if you send me an email to charliewb@cox.net I'll get it on my smartphone. Let me know what you think about the patch!