BlizzCon 2011 Photos (Better Late Than Never)

And I post this two months or so later. Oh well. Long story short, BlizzCon, our self anniversary gift to each other was fun. So fun that we both started up WoW again after a 4 month absence, then kind of stopped playing again when Skyrim came out a month later. I kind of haven’t logged in for patch 4.3 yet and I swear that I will one day if I can make it past the pile of games yet to be played. Speaking of which, it’s probably already too late to buy it but the Humble Indie Bundle #4 is a fantastic deal.

I think I like the idea of playing WoW on a more casual basis. Should I decide to log on consistently, it would be nice to raid again at some point, though I am not sure that I am interested in another fixed weekly raiding schedule. I’ll give Looking For Raid a try at some point. By the way, the cross-server Real ID friends dungeon running thing is a great feature. Being able to instance with my friends is again is pretty sweet, huzzah.

So the con: We ended up watching quite a few of the StarCraft 2 matches more than any other particular activity at the convention. Being able to attend the GSL finals was a real treat by the way ( both the main hall ad the RTS stages were packed). I really really wanted to stay until the end but since I was falling asleep in my chair, we ditched out at around midnight.

Here are a couple of photos. I suck at taking pictures by the way :/.

Proposed HTPC Build (AKA Merry Christmas to us!)

Bah, long time no post. In short: Skyrim + whatever else I was doing was so fun and engrossing that I had negleted to do anything else including signing onto WoW and posting here. I also have BlizzCon photos from 2 months ago that I keep meaning to blog about or at least post. Anyway, let’s just say that Santa was good to me this week so our self Christmas gifts year will be an HTPC a bit over my original budget ($400 to $500 originally). Using the PS3 and various software to stream videos to the TV isn’t turning out to be all that great of a solution.

Component Item Price
CPU Intel Core i3-2120 $119.99
Motherboard ASRock Z68 PRO3-M Micro ATX LGA1155 $109.99
Memory G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1600 $29.99
Graphics PNY GeForce GT 430 1GB $55.98
Storage Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM $157.27
PSU Antec 380W ATX12V / EPS12V $44.99
Case Lian-Li PC-C37B HTPC Case $159.98
Optical Samsung SH-222AB DVD/CD Writer $22.98

Total:

$701.17

I really wish harddrives would go down in price. Paying that much for a 1TB drive when they were going for less than half that price a couple of months ago kind of sucks.