No seriously… go! Now!

Ok if you are still here, check out some helpful links:

• For you Mac people – Windows 7 vs OS X Snow Leopard
• For your XP users – Going from Windows XP to Windows 7
• The official Microsoft site

Ok, so you are a Euchre pro right? Ready to jump right in? Tell me — what is so hard about Euchre? Why can I never seem to get anyone to grasp the game? Am I a terrible teacher? Are the rules too difficult? I could never understand how my siblings and I could pick the game up at a young age, but our friends in the south never could figure it out. Maybe I haven’t tried enough, but that’s about to change. Anyone who knows me will never stop hearing about this game

Oh and p.s. — memorize the Ten Commandments of Euchre. You might also want to re-read the section on stealing the deal, as you will be playing with the master.

Now before you try to rip into it as an unoriginal idea, read what he has to say. He is taking a complete look at characters and guilds instead of isolating PvP OR PvE prowess.

From the US-Frostmane Realm Forums (misspellings and all)

Greetings Frostmane,

You may remember me, I used to play here with Kinetic pre WOTLK. As some of you might have heard, I have been working on a new type of wow ranking webpage. Check it out! It is quite different from any other site out there, so give it a visit, read below for more info.

I come to introduce you all too the newest member of the world of warcraft rankings community, http://www.wow-ranks.com . This webpage brings an entire new type of rankings to the community.

Wow Rankings ranks characters, guilds, realm factions, realms, battlegroups, and countries for both Europe and the United States. Rankings are based upon a combination of achievements, gear, and arena. Therefor the highest ranked characters are the best at all aspects of the game. Guild are based upon the average of their top 25 players, so that means the guild with the best players in all aspects of the game will rank the highest. Realms and realm factions are based on the best guilds, and so on. Unforunately we do not have ranking pages for the 4.7 million level 80 characters in our database, we do have them for the top 100,000 however. For the rest of the players though, if you search and locate your profile, you will be given your a percentage telling you how much of the country and world you out rank.

Though they are not ranked directly, you may also visit realm and realm faction profiles for the top guild rankings on those servers if you do not appear in the 50,000 guild rankings that we display. The same goes for rankings of the members of your guild, they may be found in that guild’s profile.

Scores are calculated on the idea that the last few achievement, arena, and item points are all worth far more then the first few. This is why in our scores gaining 100 arena points when your total score is 7000 will make a large difference where as 100 points when it is 1500 will not. The same idea is used in arena and achievement scores and it is due to this that I believe this is an effective ranking system.

In addition to daily top character and guild updates, players may request up to 4 character updates and 1 guild update per day. In addition to this the crawler will complete a world crawl in two to three weeks.

Again if your character is not in the top 100,000 chances are your character hasn’t been scanned in 2-3 weeks, and as long as you aren’t this will continue to be the case. If this is applies to you, just submit a character request and it should be updated soon.

I hope you enjoy the webpage. The rankings will always be debateable, but please be respectful. I feel that it is a fair system that recognizes those that truly are the best, at everything. If you find any bugs, please either email me, or visit our forums and make a post. Chances are there will be some sort of small one that went undetected but other then that things should be working 100%.

Enjoy, we hope you visit us.

~Morphling
Webmaster of wow-ranks.com

So there you have it. Give the website a look and please give him any feedback you think will help the site.

In Windows XP, it was as easy as finding the site listed in My Network Places and adding a shortcut to that on the desktop. In Vista and Windows 7, My Network Places is replaced by the Network and Sharing Center.

Here is how you can create a shortcut to the Windows Explorer version of an FTP site:

1. Open “Computer” either from your Desktop or from the Start Menu.

2. Right click on an empty spot on the background and click “Add a network location”

3. The “Add Network Location” wizard will popup. Click Next to begin.

4. Depending on other services installed (Windows Live, etc) you may have more listings. Click “Choose a custom network location” and click next.

5. Type in the ftp address as shown in the examples and click Next.

6. You will now be asked to specify whether to logon anonymously or with a specific username. If you choose to logon with a username, you will have the opportunity to enter the password when you connect to the site. Once you have chosen, click Next.

7. Add a name for the location. By default it adds the address to the network location. When you are finished, click Next.

8. You are done! By default it will open the network location when you click Finish. Simply uncheck the box if you do not wish to open the location at this time.

9. Here is what it will look like when you open “Computer” again in the future.

From here you can create a shortcut on your desktop if you like. I hope this helps and drop a comment if you have any questions

So what have I been doing with my life the last 2 1/2 months? The only thing that comes to mind is really softball. Seriously — adult softball is the best I played on a co-ed team over the summer and am currently playing in a men’s league on Tuesday nights. The rain has not cooperated nicely, so we have only played on two of the three scheduled nights. Starting on the 13th we have four triple headers in a row.

Other than that it has been business as usual. Hopefully I will be able to post some things up more consistently. I do plan on adding a post about something I came across at work today very shortly. Stay tuned!

I am going to try and add a photo, but don’t know where it is going to show up… Apparently this app is still in beta and not as robust as the iPhone version…

Let Me Google That For You (http://www.lmgtfy.com/) – “This is for all those people that find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than google it for themselves”

Beware all ye faithful, I have a new weapon in my arsenal and I’m not afraid to use it.

I actually have wanted to blog extensively about the ‘joys’ of buying my first home, but that is going to require me to step back and take the emotion out of it (for now at least).

In the meantime, check out this article on wired. I have recently talked a friend into buying a big screen LCD tv. We were talking about purchasing a sound system, etc because I knew he would not be impressed by the sound. To make a long story short, he didn’t buy a sound system just yet. Enter – the article. My ’savior’. I have been planning on saving for an upgrade to my Vizio 720p 37″ LCD. I must now wait (or find a killer deal on a sound system on Craigslist). We’ll see.

Well Day 1 already provided me with two apps I did not know about and I’ll briefly talk about them.

Shazam

Create and share music moments and stories. With Shazam you can identify music tracks, buy them, and share the tags with friends. You can also learn more about artists; find out what’s hot and grow your music collection.

With the launch of App World, they are offering a 60 day free trial. I have used it already like 7 or 8 times today. I used it with some obscure songs from a random mix cd my friend made me some time ago.

FlyCast

FlyCast delivers music, talk, weather, and traffic to portable devices. Introduced in January 2008, the network has grown very rapidly from 80 channels to well over 1000 in a nine month period, and more channels are added weekly.

The coolest thing I found about it was the local station availability. Also, you can choose to exclusively use WiFi or just ‘prefer’ it. I tested it out with a few stations and the app really runs well on my T-mobile Curve 8900 (over Wi-Fi… I refuse to try it w/out Wi-Fi).

Check it all out for yourself at BB App World here.