WoW Journal - 31-July-2005

Raslebol did his first Stratholme raid last night. We fought our way from the entrance to the live side, and killed the postman there. Then we finished off the live side, killing cannon master Wiley and Balnazzar. I lost a roll for a 40 dps one-handed mace, but then won the roll for Balnazzar's Hammer of the Grand Crusader. Okay, okay, this is *not* exactly a warrior weapon. But it is dealing far more damage per second than anything else I have. I've had a guildmate put a +5 damage enchantment on it, finally found somebody selling dense weightstones and sharpening stones, and by all this significantly increased my damage output. The downside is that I cannot wear my shield and not use my shield-related talents if I use the hammer, but for farming lower level mobs it is pretty good.

Some of the raid group wanted to continue doing the undead side of Stratholme. But some didn't, and I had a headache and decided to leave too. Which lead to the comment that "tank is gone, raid is over", which made me feel pretty bad. We need a couple more warriors of level 60 in the guild, it puts too much pressure on me if I'm the only one online and the others can't raid without me.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:37 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 30-July-2005

I somehow don't get around to play my new shaman a lot, there is so much other things to do with the other characters. My female gnome warlock, Honey, was invited to a virtual marriage between two guild mates. So I tailored her a selection of dresses, bought a bunch of flowers to hold in hand, and went to Goldshire, from where a procession to the Stormwind cathedral was planned. Turned out that while I hadn't played her, the marriage had been postponed by a week, and I was standing there in my best dress with flowers in the hand all alone, looking foolish. Well, I didn't plan to play her this week, so she can wait for the marriage there. On the now defunct Grimwell Online we once discussed that a part of MMORPG is playing "Barbie Online", dressing up characters. That was very much a Barbie Online moment. Fun actually, although only for a short time.

Back to the Runetotem server, I played Kyroc, my priest, up to level 24. Nearly always teamed up with my wife's mage of the same level. We finished all quests in Silverpine Forest, and started doing quests in Hillsbrad. We also visited Stonetalon Mountains for a day, there are some nice quests around level 20 there too. The team is working well, even if I have to tank with my priest, which isn't really what he is made for.

Raslebol, my main, followed the advice of you guys and found better places to farm money. The graveyard in Scarlet Monastery gets my vote for best place. Especially since a guild mate told me how to reset an instance: Your character in the instance invites another character from another account, who is outside. Any friend or guildmate who isn't currently grouped will do, he can be anywhere, but it must be you who is the group leader. Then you log out, log back in, and voila! you will find yourself back at the start of the instance. And all mobs, including bosses, are back. And the chests are also back. There is one chest in the graveyard, one boss who is always there, and one who only sometimes turns up. If you do all three of those and all the non-elite ghosts, you earn yourself a pretty penny. I even found a blue Zealot Blade once in a chest, and sold it for 20 gold. Must have been a warlock who bought it, who else needs a sword with bonuses to intelligence and spirit?

Then Raslebol spent two evenings doing groups in Blackrock Depths. Not raid groups, just regular 5-man groups. More fun that way, and I got several quests done. But even after doing it twice we didn't get further than to Golem Lord Argelmach. We still need to do the tavern and continue to the end boss. I like BRD, it is a fun place, although maybe a bit too big for my tastes. But with keys allowing shortcuts to the latter part it isn't that bad to do it several times.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:05 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Ups and Downs

Looking at my Sitemeter stats for visitors of this blog, I notice that the number of visitors peaked in May, and is going down since. Well, I hope the trend doesn't continue and is just a mix of me having been on holiday and people surfing waves instead of the internet in summer.
Still interesting to see that with the daily WoW blog I attracted so many readers, and even surpassed the previous peak, where I was slashdotted last year.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
First Article on GamerGod

I started writing on GamerGod, having followed Grimwell there. My first article, a Guide to World of Warcraft (part 1) has been published there. It is mainly targeted towards new players, explaining how to choose a server and create a character. I'm not going to reproduce the guides here, I guess you already know how to play WoW. :)

[Edit 01-August-2005] The article got slashdotted.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:25 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 28-July-2005

Finally got around to play Waldin, my orc shaman, a bit more. Leveled him up to level 12 in Mulgore, probably the only orc at that level around there. I often was out of mana, something I remember happening a lot to my beta shaman as well. Asking some mage of the same level revealed that a mage has about 50% more mana than the shaman has, and that's without his intelligence buff. Well, now I know what kind of stats I'm looking for in my equipment with this character. My spells also deal less damage per mana than a mages, but I'm a lot sturdier in melee combat. I'll have to play accordingly and use damage spells more or less just for pulling, not as the main damage source.

This week I played Raslebol a lot more than I wanted. There was a raid to UBRS on Tuesday, and another raid to MC on Wednesday. UBRS went like a breeze, with a full raid team of 10. Only loot for me was a plate chestplate which was slightly better than my previous one, but only green. MC we teamed up with a bigger guild, so we got a full 40 level 60 players together. That helps! We managed to get to the first boss, Luciferon, and kill him. He drops two purple items, but they were for Mage and Warlock, so no luck for me. But by an odd 1-in-40 chance it was my turn to loot the less-than-green junk loot from Luciferon, and so I got 3 Hearts of Fire, and 6 Elemental Fires. That covers at least the repair bill. Well, the repair bill actually wasn't that bad this time, we only got wiped twice, and I was neither main tank nor main assist, so I didn't get hit that often.

But with funds being low and repair bills sometimes high, I tried different strategies of money farming. Somebody recommended farming Essence of Air in Silithus, but the air elementals that drop it are hard to kill for a warrior, having lightning shields. And farming high value items is a lottery, I tried for over one hour and got nothing. So I switched strategy and tried killing undead in Western Plaguelands instead. They carry cash, runecloth, and the occasional grey to blue loot item. Well, I got one green item, but at least the basic cash flow was okay, earning about 2 gold per hour. Then I remembered the rock elementals in the Badlands I had recently farmed with Honey for the Nifty Stopwatch. Raslebol can kill these without losing noticeable amounts of hitpoints, and they drop lots of grey stones that sell quite well. I did a test, with Telo's InfoBar on to check progress, and managed to earn about 5 gold per hour.

If anyone has any better gold farming tactics, I'd be grateful. I'm considering soloing mid-level instances and selling all the green loot, but I'm not really sure the yield is better. On the other hand I could then use the interesting green items from there for my priest and shaman low level alts.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:32 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Review: The Battle for Middle-Earth

Occasionally I'm playing other games than MMORPG, for example strategy games. I picked up "Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth" (BfME), published by EA, to have some light strategy fun. And light it certainly is.

BfME is a classic real-time strategy (RTS) game. In most battles you got a base camp where you gather resources, build units, and command them in real-time. There is no way to speed up or slow down time, and if you pause the game, you can't see your units any more. The resource gathering part is simple as could be, there is only one resource, and you just build resource-gathering buildings like farm, and the resources come streaming in. So all you have to do is to select your armies and battle. Except for heroes, every produced unit consists of 5 men, which means that you quickly have large numbers of men, which looks good on the battlefield. Combat is fast, and there isn't any time or opportunity for much strategy. Not a very deep game, but ideal for a quick orc bashing.

Besides single battles, against the computer or other players online, you can play two long campaigns, playing either the good or the evil side. This plays out on a beautiful huge map of Middle-Earth, and basically follows the story of Lord of the Rings. The movies, that is. This game got it's license from New Line Cinema, who made the LOTR movies, and is leaning heavily on that license. You have voice-overs from the movies, scenes from the movies running in the little info window, screenshots from the movies on the load screens, and so on. That makes you forget how simplistic the game is. It simply is more fun to lead Eomer and the Rohirrim against a pack of Uruk-hai, than to lead standard cavalry against standard infantry. You get to play practically all the characters from the movies, there are some battles where you don't build units but just lead the fellowship of the ring.

There is a "role-playing" element to the game too. Your heroes and units gain ranks, and you get to keep them for the next battle. That is good for the heroes, but kind of stupid for the units. The number of units you can have is limited by your command points, and with taking your old army with you into the next battle, there is not much room to build new units. And without building new units, your unit-building structures don't level up, and you don't get any upgrades. But you certainly don't want your high-level units to die, just so that you can build new level 1 units in their place. As there is no way to disband a unit, you end up taking your lowest level unit on a suicide mission, so you can rebuild it and level up your building. So in the campaigns you play a strange game in which you try to preserve your units, and heal them back up when they are wounded, while the enemy is sending wave after wave of disposable units after you.

In summary, The Battle for Middle-Earth is a strategy game for times when you don't want to think. It has beautiful, large-scale battles, with a strong Lord of the Rings atmosphere to them. They just aren't very strategic.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:45 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
This blog on your Google homepage

I mentioned before that Google is now offering a personalized "portal" page, where you get selected information instead of the classic huge blank space under the Google search bar. What is new is that there is now more choice in the "add content" section. And you can now add your own feeds of choice.

So: Set your homepage to "www.google.com/ig", click on the add content button in the upper left corner, click on "Create a Section", and enter "tobolds.blogspot.com/atom.xml" in the field there. Now click on GO, and your homepage will have a feed from this blog. :) Of course you can add all sorts of other feeds as well.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:14 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Book Review: Everquest Companion

The Everquest Companion by Robert B. Marks is an interesting, if outdated, book on the Everquest game series. It tells the history from the ancestors of computer games, via Everquest, to Everquest II. Having been published in September 2003 it obviously misses the information on how MMORPG went mainstream with City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars.

What the book does offer is insights into the development process of the Everquest games. It also has tons of concept artwork, plus some photos of Everquest developers and fans. The book doesn't shy away from discussing public relations disasters, and difficult issues like player killing, and player ownership of virtual items. Again, being dated, the book claims that SOE is against trading virtual items, a position that has significantly changed since. The book also discussion "addiction", including Everquest-related suicides that have caused controversy in the past.

While it is good that controversial issues are discussed in the book, the author is putting a very Verant/SOE-friendly spin to things. He has obviously been paid for by SOE, John Smedley is writing the introduction, and the author got all his information from SOE themselves. So you get to see the whole history of Everquest from the point of view of SOE. Some of the opinions on game design are put as if they were absolute truths, and I don't agree with all of them. And then there is a constant "Everquest is the greatest" theme underlying the whole book, argumented with their "huge" subscriber numbers of over 400,000. Which kind of pales against Blizzard's latest news of 3.5 million subscribers, just having gained 1.5 million chinese players.

Don't get me wrong, Everquest was a very important step in the development of MMORPG. It paved the way for the things to come. But on this foundation much greater things have been built since, and the Everquest Companion was written two years too early to get that point.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:50 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
My first Molten Core raid

We got our guild and an allied guild together and did a raid on Molten Core on Sunday night, my first time there. Man, is that place tough. We were "only" 31 people, and the place really needs 40 level 60 players. We got as far as the imps, but couldn't get past them and the surgers, they repeatedly killed us. So after 3 and a half hours, we abandoned. What took so long was getting wiped out so often. :)

The mobs in Molten Core are all on different respawn timers, and some of them repop rather quickly. So if you get one bad fight and you get wiped, you might have to do a good part of the dungeon again. Well, we got one epic ("purple") item for one of our hunters, and one green drop, and that was all.

This was also the first raid on the new guild raid point system my guild introduced. You get 10 points for every raid you do (less if you come late or leave early, more if it is a particularly long raid), managed by the officers of the guild. Then when in a raid something drops that you absolutely want, you can use your raid points to buy a +50 bonus on the /random 100 roll. If you win that way, you lose all your raid points. The system is designed to reward people who go on raids often, without making it impossible for casual players to gain anything.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:32 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
WoW Journal - 24-July-2005

I spent the last couple of days leveling Honey from 37 to 40. That usually meant doing quests in Desolace, the Swamp of Sorrows, Arathi, and Dustwallow Marsh during the day soloing, and dungeons with the D&D guys in the evening. But now that I'm 40, I think I'll stop leveling for a while. There are two of my D&D friends who are still below 40, one other at 40, and 2 above. And if we don't watch it, we drift too far in levels from each other.

I spent some time in combat experimenting with the warlocks transfer abilities. A warlock my level can drain 350 mana from an enemy for a cost of 155 mana, and gain it for himself, but only if the enemy has mana, of course. He can also drain life, at my level 210 life drained in 5 seconds for 185 mana. The drain life is interesting, because I can convert 214 life into 214 mana with life tap. So a life tap / drain life combo works on every mob, and basically costs nothing, but ends me up with 30 mana surplus, and the enemy with 210 hitpoints less. The last interesting transfer ability is health funnel, where I spend 279 hitpoints over 10 seconds to heal my pet for 640 hitpoints. The channeling makes these spells slow, and easily interrupted, but they enable me to still do things when my mana is empty.

I'm happy I managed to reach level 40 without having to do Stranglethorn quests, I really don't like that place, and I did it too often. It meant traveling around more, as the quests in other zones weren't that numerous. But I found a couple that I hadn't done yet. And from level 40 on I can do the Alliance quests in Hinterlands and Feralas, which are new to me as well.

In dungeons I did both Gnomeregan and the Scarlet Monastery twice. And managed to find not a single blue drop for me. Even the quest rewards weren't all that useful for warlocks. In the monastery there is a hidden room in the cathedral with an undead High Inquisitor Fairbanks. He used to be easy to kill, and drop three green items. But it seems some people camped him, so he got nerfed in the last patch. He is now dropping always the same Inquisitor's Shawl, which isn't that good. And it's "unique", meaning you can have only one, which should stop the farmers. We also had more trouble killing him than before, but I might be imagining that.

On the last expedition into the Scarlet Monastery there was one noteworthy experience: We had a group of 4, and couldn't find a 5th in Ironforge or on the way the monastery. So I clicked on the meeting stone in front of the dungeon, hoping to get a fifth member. Nothing happened. After waiting a bit in vain, we entered the cathedral and started killing. We just had reached the inner cathedral door, when a dwarven fighter joined our group through the meeting stone. Seems that entering the dungeon doesn't turn off the search. That was the first time I found a group member with a meeting stone. Even now that you can access them from any inn, they aren't used all that much, and clicking on them while alone never got me into a group. But for finding a 5th group member it seems to be not so bad.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:27 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW and Coke team up in China

Seems this advertising video is running in China to promote both Coca Cola and World of Warcraft at the same time. Now that's some interesting cross-marketing. And probably works better than /pizza.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:29 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Everquest Journal

Tired of reading a World of Warcraft journal? Then head over to Mr.X's Everquest Character Journal. He blogged the adventures of his Everquest characters in 2004, and of his Everquest 2 characters in 2005. Nice to see people are having fun in other games too.

Maybe one day I'll return to EQ2, it's main flaw was that it wasn't ready on release. But then, there are so many new games, I sometimes wonder how I will find the time to play them all. On an impulse, I pre-ordered Auto Assault this week. There is a high risk that I won't play that one longer than the one free month. But I am really interested to at least test it, just because it seems to be so different from the usual sword and sorcery MMORPG. Even most Sci-Fi MMORPG, like AO or SWG, just replaced fireballs by flamethrowers, but were basically the same game as Everquest. I wonder if AA will be different.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
TV on demand

Since early this year I'm using a DVD / hard disk recorder (Philips DVDR725H) instead of a video cassette recorder. The Philips machine isn't quite as intelligent as a Tivo, but maybe that is a good thing. Tivos only seem to be available in the USA anyway.

So since I have this new recorder, my TV habits have changed. I don't watch much, but now I only watch recorded things, no more live TV. It is so much more pleasant to have the machine automatically record my favorite TV series, never missing an episode.

Then I started buying TV series on DVD. The Sopranos for example, which never ran on TV here. Or Northern Exposure, a TV series I liked a lot in the early 90's.

Now I'm thinking how all this is changing the face of TV. It used to be that the TV set your schedule, you had to be there on time or miss the programme. Video recorders were a stopgap measure, usually resulted in cutting off either the start or the end of the program, and you were always hunting for empty cassettes. Now the Philips machine has an electronic TV guide, you click on the programme you want to record, and it'll record it even if the emission is late for some reason. It will still record the ads, but you can skip them with the jump forward button. (Obviously advertisers aren't happy about the latter feature.) With programmes on your hard disk or bought on DVD you watch what you want, when you want. It has become TV on demand. I wonder how this will evolve further. When will I be able to choose a TV series and episode and get it streamed directly from the cable company to my TV?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:06 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Journal - 20-July-2005

Mainly played my warlock, Honey, today. While I was away, my D&D friends continued playing, and I need to catch up to them. The holiday rest bonus being used up this went slower, but I still gained 1 level to ding 37. I did some quests in Arathi, first alone, then with a pickup group for the Stromgarde Keep elite quests. Then I teamed up with the level 41 priest from one of my friends to do the quest series for the Nifty Stopwatch in the Badlands. That is one of the earliest, and most essential, trinkets you can get.

I finished the day doing the level 35 warlock quest for the Staff of Noh'Orahil. Interesting quest in that I had to choose the path of the infernal or the path of the felhunter. If I had chosen the felhunter path, I would have gotten the Staff of Dar'Orahil, which is nearly identical, but boosts shadow spells instead of fire spells. I also had to choose between taking the staff or an orb, a left-hand item, but I prefer staff. I found that from all the classes I played, the warlock has the most class-specific quests and items. Very interesting. Oh, and I needed help for finishing this quest, because one step involves killing a level 40 elite demon in less than 3 minutes.

In the evening I planned to play Raslebol, as my guild had a raid to Stratholme planned. Now that raid went in a classic way: 9 people waiting in front of the dungeon for the priest to show up, and abandoning the idea when the priest didn't come. But we had two warriors, which is the other essential class for raiding. Nothing changed since the bad old days of Everquest, at least for raids. If you don't have a priest and a warrior, you don't raid. And of course priest is the least played class in the game, because it is one of the hardest classes to solo and level to 60.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:34 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 19-July-2005

The second part of my holidays is spent at home, and thus involves a lot of playing. Originally I wanted to concentrate on my alts, but it seems there is a raid or something else to do for Raslebol every day. Sunday I was in a 13-man raid to Lower Black Rock Spire (LBRS). Two "of Valor" armor pieces dropped, but it was exactly the two I already got, probably need to raid a different dungeon to get the others. But at least I got some nice blue boots which were better than what I had before.

Monday we had a smaller raid, 9 people to Black Rock Depths (BRD), to do the quest which gives access to Molten Core. We managed to do the quest, but I didn't get any loot. And the servers were behaving a bit weird, with lots of lag spikes and disconnects, causing several deaths.

But while the evenings were spent raiding with Raslebol, I still had lots of opportunity to play Honey during the day. With the rest bonus from the holidays I leveled her up from 34 to 36, mainly in Desolace and the Badlands. I tried to get a group for Gnomeregan, but couldn't get anyone interested. I even tried the meeting stone system, now accessible from every tavern keeper, but it seems nobody is using it.

I have problems finding quests that I haven't done yet with Honey at this level. I certainly don't want to do Stranglethorn Vale again, and that is where most of the quests are. I spent quite some time simply grinding random animals in the Badlands, for leather and xp. I still have to check out Alterac Mountains for mid-30's quests, but I'm afraid most of them are elite and my warlock doesn't find groups as easily as my warrior or my healers.

So out of boredom I followed the instructions at www.ironforgeairport.com and visited the hidden airport you fly over when taking the griffon from Ironforge to Menethil. I even made a screenshot to prove I was there, here it is:


In other WoW news, there is a very funny video about a guy named Leeroy Jenkins, who managed to become so famous that the video is mirrored in many places. You can even buy T-shirts with his battle cry on them. The video is staged, but nevertheless hilarious. It tells the story of a guild raid to UBRS where the players engage in endless discussions on how exactly to approach a difficult fight, until Leeroy, who had been AFK, just rushes the monsters with a battle cry of "Leeerrooooyy", and gets everybody killed. Some people now use his name as a verb, so don't be surprised if somebody warns you to "don't leeroy this" in a raid.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:18 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
WoW Talent System

While I was on holiday, World of Warcraft was patched to version 1.60. In this patch the talent trees for warriors and warlocks were reviewed, several talents changed, and all players from these two classes got all their talent points back to redistribute. My main is a warrior, Raslebol, and my second highest active character is a warlock, Honey. Time to have a look at the WoW talent system.

The system is simple enough. Starting from level 10, and up to level 60, you get 1 talent point per level, a total of 51 talent points over your career. Every character class has three branches over which to distribute these talent points. But you can't just choose any talent you want, at the start you can only take the low level talents of each branch. Putting 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, or 30 talent points in one branch opens up the next level of that branch. Sometimes there are additional requirements of having to take one specific talent before you can chose another.

So how do you distribute your talent point? Well, as you need 30 points to unlock the highest skill of one branch, plus 1 additional point to take that talent, your 51 points aren't enough to get the best talent of more than one branch. So many people put 31 points in one branch, and distribute the remaining 20 points over the other two branches.

Raslebol, pre-patch, had 31 points in Arms, 5 in Fury, and 15 in the Protection branch. That was a rather common build, because the top talent for arms is Mortal Strike, which gives an additional attack. Before the patch, both the top Fury and the top Protection talent weren't much good, and having an extra attack was just too important to miss. Fortunately Blizzard noticed that too, and the v1.60 patch changed the top Fury and Protection talents to give an extra attack too. Now warriors have a real choice.

Post-patch Raslebol has 11 points in Arms, just enough for tactical mastery and anger management, and 5 points in Fury, for the important cruelty talent. The remaining 35 points I put into Protection. That fits well with Raslebol's shield plus one-hand weapon build, optimal for groups. Besides better protection this build gives me the nice improved shield block / improved revenge combo, the important improved taunt, the stunning concussion blow, and the shield slam extra attack. If I had wanted a more solo-friendly build, I could have gone for a build specializing in Arms or in Fury, both of which seem quite viable now. Arms probably better for two-handed weapons, and Fury for dual wield.

With Honey, my warlock, the situation looks differently. The changes to the warlock talents were not that important as for warriors. But I had decided that going for Affliction was a mistake, the talents of that branch being relatively weak. Demonology not only has the much better top level talent, soul link, but it also has the better talents on the way there. So my current build has only 5 points in Affliction for suppression, and the remaining 20 points (I'm level 34) in Demonology. The combination of fel domination and master summoner means that once every 15 minutes I can summon a demon in half a second, instead of in 10 seconds, which makes combat summoning a lot more viable. And all my demons are a lot more powerful than those of warlocks who went for the other branches. So basically the patch saved me from spending money on changing my talents. Nice.

A friend of mine has put all talent points of his warlock in Destruction. The talents sure look good, but that is a matter of how you want to play your warlock. A Destruction specced warlock plays like an inferior mage, with the pet doing some additional damage. Aggro will be on the Destruction warlock most of the time, and rarely on the pet. The Demonology / Affliction warlock is a totally different beast. Aggro is on the pet most of the time, and the pet is typically the voidwalker, while the mob is slowly dying from lots of damage over time effects. A lot subtler, but slower, than the Destruction warlock. Both are viable, but I prefer the subtler approach.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
A Farewell to Grimwell Online

Since August 2004 I've been visiting Grimwell Online. In the same month Grimwell invited me to cross-post my longer blog articles on Grimwell.com, and I've been "staff member" on that side ever since. So now I'm really sad that Grimwell.com is closing down. Grimwell himself got a job a editor-in-chief of GamerGod. But part of the staff and community on his old site didn't want to move with him, and founded Real Name Gamers as a new home.

Sadly Grimwell Online was more than the sum of its parts. Splitting a community up means destroying it. Neither GamerGod nor Real Name Gamers will be like the old site. On GamerGod the influence of Grimwell will be diluted by whoever else is already on that project, and by the fact that it is a commercial site. And RNG will be a lot smaller, and by the intricacies of search engines get only a fraction of the hits that Grimwell.com did.

Farewell, Grimwell Online, I will be missing you.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:34 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
York Holiday Blog

Writing this on an "Internet Kiosk" in the Leeds airport, on my way home from my holiday in York. In spite of 2 weeks of total computer abstinence, the holiday was a smashing success. York is a wonderful medieval city, with lots to do if you are into history, and a very nice landscape surrounding it. We were lucky with the weather and had only 2 days of rain, with the remainder being ideal sunny, not-too-hot holiday weather.

Getting to York by plane and train was easy and cheap. The appartment we rented wasn't cheap, but made up for this by being located close to the city center, with a wonderful view over the river, and being equipped with everything from dishwasher to DVD player. We didn't have to rent a car, everything was accessible on foot or by public transport.

The Jorvik viking museum turned out to be a dud, horribly overpriced, small, and disneyfied. But the York Castle Museum made up for this, by giving a very good overview of the life in York over the centuries. We also visited a number of other good museums, and made a nice day-trip to Castle Howard, an 18th century castle with an impressive estate around it.

We managed a good mix of relaxing, seeing things, shopping, and enjoying ourselves. So if anyone needs a recommendation on where to make a holiday in England, I can recommend York.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:15 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments