WOTLK Rogue Patch: Shadow Dance / Relentless Nerfed, North American Regionals This Weekend

What about the rest of the cast?  Hoodrych hasn't played in a while and Didy is a full tier below Glickz as seen in MLG Orlando matches.  Kollectiv left Mazud & company (or "kicked" as Mazud would put it) and I doubt they will have any momentum.  Having said that, Rhaegyn did not participate in the last ESL tournament, and I am concerned about his playing shape.  Given the strength of warrior/lock/druid, and how Hafu/Glickz with a second hand warrior finished 3rd place on foreign soil, one controversial disconnect away from the grand finals, if they are healthy (Hafu-chan's monthly window of vulnerability is always the x-factor), they are taking this tournament.

On a side note, I am very disappointed about how little attention Blizzard has given its own tournament.  I still can't find a stream anywhere yet for this upcoming weekend's live blog.  The Korean regionals ended 72 hours ago, and there is still no results on Blizzard's arena page.   They are putting in more money than say, MLG by paying full travel expenses for their players, but what is up with the total lack of effort when it comes to presentations?  Even an intern can keep the public informed.

I am a huge fan of Google products and Chrome, even in beta status, felt very smooth.  I can't tell you how many times I tried to look up someone's armory while putting up a blog, and the armory crashed my entire browser, wasting a ton of time.  The fact each and every tab is in its own sand box is a tremendous feature for me, and very well worth the extra system resources.

Speaking of system resources, from the initial installation to auto-detect of browser version (I installed Chrome on three different machines already, each with a different browser), everything felt light and responsive.  My Thinkpad only has one GB of ram, and it is still more agile than internet explorer.  Google software engineers are the gladiators of programmers.

I like Firefox, but common sense tells me that a small shop can not keep up with mega corporations forever.  There are still sites I can only open in IE, and it is really annoying that Mozilla still hasn't fixed incompatiability issues.  Internet Explorer is always a part of the Windows OS so it is hard to compare it against stand alone products straight up. Google is the perfect company to take browsing into next generation.  They are hungrier than Microsoft, and have way more ammo than Mozilla.

Try it, you are going to like the way you browse, I guarantee it.

When my career as a pro gamer I meant day trader (they are actually very similar) ended in 2003, I had a very hard time getting back into RL.  I took a sales job for 35K a year base, even with quarterly bonuses it was a huge step down from my day trading days.  It felt like minimum wage to me.

To make it worse, I really felt some of the senior guys on my team had no clue what they were doing!  Maybe it was because they were there for too long and got lazy? Maybe it is because I was more talented than them to begin with?Maybe because I was too shortsighted to see the dirty work they did for the company?  In any case, I performed extremely well during my first three months, everyone acknowledged my talents, I already received higher level responsibilities than these who started with me, but I wasn't happy with my role.  

I wanted a more lucrative offer, I walked up to my manager and completely forgot I was there for only three months.  I questioned my teammates and reported negative comments from our clients.  My manager said "If I took everything the clients said in face value, I would have quit a long time ago." I was frustrated that he wasn't giving me what I wanted, and said "maybe you should sometimes".  Three days later I was fired from the job, I received a personal email from the owner of the company, who acknowledged my talents, but said he was sorry that I couldn't fit into a team environment.

Two years later, a friend at the company (who was nowhere near my performance at the time) moved into my apartment and became a roommate.  I saw his paycheck one night on the coffee table, I couldn't believe how much the company grew, and how much he made.

A little patience goes a long way.  We all have to pay our dues.  Learn to hide the dagger even if you intend on backstabbing someone, it sounds like common sense, but it is funny how we forget it in the heat of the moment.  I am handling things much better nowadays, getting a significant promotion in just a little over a year at the job.  Because I understood no matter how valuable you are to the company, you can not make yourself an immediate threat to everyone around you.  You have to put a smile on your face, and keep all the dark chakras inside.

That was the lesson I learned, and hopefully, you won't have to pay a hefty price in RL to learn it.