The more my little WoW toon is nearing lvl70 (he’s @69 now), the less space in my mind is occupied by the game. I am actually thinking about personal coding again, i.e. building more stuff outside the office.

I am not relieved or shocked by this observation, it feels right. My love for the game isn’t decreasing, neither is my love for coding increasing. Both stay the same, yet something is changing once again.

Vor ein paar Wochen wurde ich fürs Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin interviewt—es ging um Avatare und die Leute dahinter, i.e. um die Charaktere, die Menschen in Onlinespielen spielen.

Heute wurde es veröffentlicht.

Hendrik, der auch interviewt wurde, hats sogar ins Print-Magazin geschafft, ich war anscheinend zu hässlich und kam “nur” in die Web-Ausgabe. Aber hey, das passt schon. Was ich etwas schade finde: ca. 90% von dem, was wir gefragt wurden und was wir gesagt haben, haben sie nicht verwendet. Schande!

Wie dem auch sei, hier bin ich zu sehen und hier ist Hendrik. Und hier ist ein Screenshot, für die Nachwelt erhalten. (Klick darauf geht zur großen Version.)

YUI hosting. Nate on Free Hosting of YUI Files from Yahoo!:

Coinciding with this week’s release of YUI version 2.2.0, the one year anniversary of the YUI open-source release, and as announced at the YUI Party just moments ago, we’re opening up free YUI hosting from the Yahoo! network to all YUI implementers. If you’re using YUI for your own project, we’ll serve the files for you — gzipped, with good cache-control, using our state-of-the-art network, for free. You can count on these files being continuously available because they’re the same files, served by the same source, that we use for most YUI implementations at Yahoo!.

This is big, folks. Smart move, too.

Dell IdeaStorm. Dell.com’s new suggestions site kind of looks familiar. That said, I really like the idea of companies publicly gathering and displaying ideas from their users—when done right, this can be a win-win for everyone, so power to every company implementing one of those. Anyways, the one suggestion that made me grin?

Have Michael Dell try actually buying a PC using Dell.com

Google Apps. Business 2.0 Beta (how’s that for a blog name?) asks Are Google Apps’ Customers For Real?.

Here’s what Procter & Gamble actually says: “P&G will work closely with Google in shaping enterprise characteristics and requirements for these popular tools.” Translation: “One of our sysadmins is going to sign up for an account and send you bitchy emails about missing features.”

Don’t get me wrong, I like their web-based office tools, even though I don’t use them regularly. They’re well done, no doubt about it. But by now I find it somewhat unnerving that every single time Google launches something, it is hailed as the holy grail of the intarwebs.

Warcraft Lore, told by jokers. WOW Insider’s ‘Know Your Lore’ segments are pretty good. Every now and then they pick a person or event from the rich Warcraft history and recap it quickly in a fun way.

Arthas was the son of King Terenas Menethil, ruler of Lordaeron. As a youth, he trained in the art of combat and joined the Silver Hand, a group of paladins. He became known for his exploits in battle. He also briefly dallied with a young mage named Jaina Proudmoore, but it didn’t work out because long-distance things never end well. They decided to remain friends, which is as big a sign of impending doom as one can get.

CWO is again. Here’s to good times ahead.

For months, Hendrik and I were playing WoW with a guy we’d never met before, Christian. Nice fellow, fun to chat with, one helluva warlock.

Today he was making a stop in Munich (travelling by train), and we met for a quick snack, since he and his girlfriend only had half an hour or so until their train departed.

Turns out sometimes the nice people you meet in a game are nice people in real life also. Cool beans!