Both my kids (currently 5 and 10) have started playing in the last month, and both are really enjoying it. If you’ve ever played World of Warcraft, you’ll recognize a lot of familiar features in Wizard101. In fact, Wizard101 is really a slimmed down version of WoW for kids (and adults, too).

If your kids have been pestering you to pay $15 a month to play WoW, I highly recommend you steer them over to Wizard101. The beginning of the game is free, and then you have the option of paying to open advanced levels or buying a monthly subscription.

Oh, speaking of World of Warcraft, if you haven’t logged in and secured your free Battle-Bot, click the banner below and do so now:

Apparently, it’s slated for PC and Console, so us Mac users are out of luck.

1. First, I had to enable DirectX Shaders in the Parallels Configuration Editor. As you can see in the image to the right, this is just a check box setting in the Video resource.
2. Next, I had to get the latest version of DirectX 9 from Microsoft. This was a no brainer anyway, since the most recent Civ4 patch (1.74) removes a required DirectX DLL.

That’s all it took to get Civilization IV up and running. The graphic glitches I was seeing disappeared and the game looked fine. But, you’ll notice the title of this post is “Running Civilization IV in Parallels”, not “Playing Civilization IV in Parallels”. Unfortunately, it was pretty much unplayable for me. It was way too laggy and no fun at all.

You’re probably wondering why I would even buy the PC version of this game since a Mac version is available. Part of the reason is that the PC version is at least $20 cheaper than the Mac OS X version. The other reason is that my wife loves the Civilization games and she uses a Dell Vostro 1500.

One final bit of information regarding the configuration of my iMac, since that might be relevant. At the moment, I’m running Tiger (10.4.11) on a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB of RAM.

• Courtroom Testimony –
• A Gamers’ Manifesto –
• ChessProblems – I’m no chess expert, but this is pretty fun.
• Antiarc’s WoW Sig Image Generator – Cool looking signature generator for WoW toons.
• Seven Levels of Perl Mastery – A little Perl humor to brighen your day.
• 41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks | Performancing.com – Most of this is common sense of course, but there are a lot of useful links here.
• Business Survival Guide: 8 Practices of a Long Term Freelancer – FreelanceSwitch – The Freelance Blog – FreelanceSwitch is always a good read for any freelancer / independent contractor, but this particle post is better than most.

“hunter pence” world of warcraft

I don’t rank terribly high for that particular combination of keywords (second page as of 2007-12-02), but I’m cool with that.

This has me wondering something, though. Is there some rumor floating around that Houston Astros outfielder Hunter Pence plays World of Warcraft? The only MLB player I know of that was also an MMORPGer is Todd Pratt (Ultima Online). It goes without saying, I certainly hope he does.

Here’s another question — if Pence does play WoW, what class does he play? The obvious answer is Hunter, but I think he’s got a little Rogue in him.

If you know, please leave a comment!

If you’re just looking for great WoW Hunter blogs, try Big Red Kitty, Hynjoku, and Mania’s Arcanium.

By the way, the Hunter Pence photo above is by AP photographer Kathy Willens. I’m hoping to not get sued for using it.

• List of common misconceptions – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia –
• The People’s Mario – Flash, but still worth the watching.
• NxE?s Fifty Most Influential Bloggers at Weekly Articles About Blogging – NxE –
• TOP 100 Make Money Online Blogs by 45n5.com – 45n5 has come up with a ranking system to track who the best Make Money Online bloggers are.
• The Orion Nebula – 1500 Light Years From Earth – m42_hst_f.jpg (JPEG Image, 1280×1280 pixels)

• Card Trick Type Index – Card tricks are fun, too!
• Rules of Card Games: Alphabetical Index – It’s always good to keep a card game rules handy.
• WordPress ? Blog » WordPress 2.3 – WordPress 2.3 is going to be a pretty major upgrade. Upgrade with caution.
• Web 2.0 Logos and Headers Starting at 10$ –
• Astronomers Find Enormous Hole in the Universe – Wow.

• From Nobody To Somebody – Part 1 – John Chow has been challenged to prove that anyone can make money online, even without a major name. This should be an interesting series to follow.
• Duels – I’m really hoping to try this out, but unfortunately TechCrunch and digg have it down at the moment.
• Galaxies clash in four-way merger – Wow!
• Biofuels Are Raising Beer Prices, Killing Your Buzz : Generation X Finance – While I don’t expect to be switching to “The Beast” any time soon, I can certainly sympathize with rising beer cost.
• US coal mine collapse traps six – This is absolutely awful. Let’s hope they get these miners out OK.

World of Warcraft Client Patch 2.1.3

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

General

• Read in-game mail will now be kept for thirty days instead of three.
• The Warlock spell Incinerate has had the performance of its graphical spell effect improved.
• The “Show Launcher” option has changed so that it now defaults to “On”. Players will now see the launcher when running WoW by default.

User Interface

• Improved the performance of conditional macros, slightly increasing the framerate.
• Fixed a crash triggered by many unit frame AddOns.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue with the movement of Archimonde’s Doomfire.
• Fixed the wand missile art on most Shadow based wands to show the correct graphical effect.
• Infinity Blades will now despawn properly when the encounter with Kael’thas resets after a wipe.
• Gan’arg Underlings and Felhound Defenders are now properly classified as demons.

Anyway, I’m hoping to find some decent video of the event today. When I do, I’ll post it here.