World of Warcraft has been eating up most of my spare time in the last week. I’ve forgotten how much fun it can be, even though at it’s core it’s a experience treadmill (not anywhere as close to some other MMOs). I think the real draw is that it is the type of game you don’t typically think of as something anyone can pick up and enjoy. I’m not saying that grandparents everywhere are playing WoW, but it is a supremely well designed experience in my opinion. Of course I still get pissy when I get ganked while doing questing, but that’s the tradeoff of playing in a PvP environment. You are almost never truly safe just minding your own business. Anyway, here’s my Armory Link.

Valve Software (more specifically, the team that does the Steam platform) recently started the public beta offering of the Steam Community service. If you’ve used Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live service before, it might feel similar in what it does. I gave it a shot today, poking around the web app they have as well as the updated interface to the Steam client. At it’s very core, it beefs up the Tracker (aka ‘Friends’) features significantly, making it a far more reliable IM service than previously offered.

I must say, it feels sort of like a cross between a messenger and a social networking app. A Facebook tailored for gamers. I’m intrigued as to how it will pan out. I’m all for better experience when it comes to matchmaking features. At the very least once it’s rolled out to the entire population of gamers that use Steam, it will be a good user profiling tool for Valve . I really dig the closely tied infrastructure between the Steam Client and the web app, it makes for a pretty seamless experience moving between the two.

P.S. I’ve added a few more photos to my NYC trip Flickr set. It looks like I’m about half way through culling the best of the best of what I took.

As for the photos, skimming through them when I first got back, I’m glad I fired off as many photos as I did. I am by no means a good amature photographer, and it was quite evident when some of the photos ended up being pretty blurry. I also have a bad habit of not checking the camera settings before I go off and take a whole bunch of shots. For example, I had bracketing enabled for a couple dozen shots before I realized that it was on. Of these, 1/3 of them are exposed correctly. I’m going to try and sort through most of them over the weekend, and upload them to my newly “pro-ized” flickr account.