Day: April 24, 2009

How I Finally Quit Playing WoW

I realized the other day that I’d finally quite playing World of Warcraft (though I still haven’t canceled my subscription). Oddly, it wasn’t that I woke up one day and suddenly said “no more WoW” but rather that I just gradually stopped finding reasons to log in and just sort of stopped while I carried on with other things in my life.

Part of the reason is the Xbox. On the one hand, I have never found playing games on a console nearly as captivating or engaging as games on the PC. With PC games, you feel like you’re playing the game; on the Xbox it often feels like the games are playing you, since they tend to be far more linear and have fewer options.

But that’s not a bad thing in that it is a lot easier to hop on the Xbox and play for an hour or two, and then actually stop and go back to what I was doing. I could rarely do that with a good PC game.

The second thing that’s nice about the Xbox is precisely that it isn’t my PC. So laptop=writing/web browsing/productivity. Xbox=blowing off steam for an hour. And ne’er the twain shall meet.

Still, I can’t bring myself to actually cancel my WoW account — feels a bit like permanently putting my toon out to pasture. Maybe in a few more months I can reach some sort of closure there.

Folders4Gmail Greasemonkey Script

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have a real love/hate relationship with Gmail. For the most part I love it, but Google seems to have Steve Jobs Disease in thinking that for key features there is only One True Way to implement a feature. If you don’t happen to like that way, Google’s support is happy to post friendly “you don’t know what you’re talking about” responses (see, for example, their responses to the completely screwed up way Gmail will associate completely unrelated e-mails into the same Conversation).

Fortunately, there are scripts and add-ons to deal with most of the defects, such as the Folders4Gmail Greasemonkey script which lets the user organize labels into a hierarchical structure. Google says nobody needs this, but I beg to differ. This is extremely helpful. For example, each of my web sites sends out numerous administrative e-mails which I assign labels to. It’s extremely helpful to have a Web Sites –> websiteX hiearchy, so it’s easy to quickly drill down to these particular set of e-mails without cluttering up the labels list.