Gnomish Army Knife – no tool for RRoD

Welcome to Monday.

Cue fireworks.

Been a crazy week, and not a lot of WoW has been happening for me or to me.

In between work, Thanksgiving, a wedding and various RL obligations, I didn’t get more than 6 hours in game over the last five days.

I DID however reach exalted with the Tuskarr early on Thanksgiving day, and quickly grabbed my penguin pet, epic fishing pole and blue breast plate. High five.

Also hit 437 (or something) last night in engineering after a painful stretch of mats-intensive items like Sonic Boosters, Noise Machines and Heartseeker Scopes. Thankfully, I was able to get into Gnomish Army Knives at 435, and I’m back in love with the profession. I love this tool – jumper cables (useable by engineers only), blacksmith hammer, mining pick, skinning knife, flint/tinder, arclight spanner and gyromatic micro-adjuster all in ONE. SINGLE. SLOT. Awesomeawesomeawesome. AND it’s not soulbound or bind on use. You can trade it around if need be.

I sent one to our guild blacksmith last night, and linked another in guildchat for whoever else wants one. I love that so many non-engineers can find multiple uses for an engineering item. Easy mats, too. Only 10 saronite bars, a hammer, a pick and a skinning knife.

Level-wise, Paquita remains at 76. More guildies are hitting 80 each day, and I’m fairly sure I won’t be the first guild hunter at level cap. I seem to be a in a rut with questing. The motivation for dings just isn’t there. Maybe it’s the quests – I’m wandering aimlessly around Sholazar Basin these days, tapping every saronite node I can find and only doing incidental quests for Nesingwary and the two warring tribes in the zone. I had been working through Zul’Drak, but that place is incredibly dreary and a pain in the ass to run through unmolested.

I probably just need to lay off the engineering for a while and focus on getting to 80.

Actually, I picked up Gears of War 2 on Saturday and was prepared to put WoW aside for a few days, but apparently Microsoft had other plans.

The Xbox 360 dashboard (OS) update hit last week, upgrading the menu system and implementing a new Wii-ripoff avatar landscape. I hated the idea when I first heard of it and saw the cutesy avatars, but after the update I found I could live with it. I made my avatar look ridiculously stupid, so I was happy. And the menu system is actually very nice…if you can ignore the frequent screen tears and system crashes accompanied by LOUD static bursts.

Yeah, it’s fucked. I was able to just restart the console after the first couple of times, no problem. But it got to the point where just starting it up and flipping through the menus would trigger the frozen screen and static sound.

Then, on Saturday, as I started it up to pop in my freshly-purchased copy of Gears 2, it froze for the last time. I restarted, and the 360 only took a few seconds to give me the glowy round finger in the form of 3 flashing red lights. Fuuuuck.

Thankfully, I only purchased it back in February so it is still under warranty. I called the Xbox service line, and encountered the dreaded automated repair technician, which was of absolutely no help whatsoever. I did appreciate the “hip” voice intonation though, no doubt provided to exude a cool, X-games competing, Mountain Dew-chugging, Pac-Sun employee vibe. So I now have Microsoft sending me a pre-paid shipping box, which I’ll use to send the console back for repair. Who knows how long that’ll take.

I find it amusing how every time I try to switch between game genres after a while, it costs me a pretty penny. Had to buy an Xbox 360 in February to get back into consoles after almost 2 years of WoW. Tried to return to WoW in late June, only to find that my video card had crapped itself, and I had to purchase and install a new one.

And now that I’m in danger of burning out again on WoW, I wanted to lay off a bit and enjoy a little console action. But it looks like I have to pay for it. Not in dollars, hopefully, but it’s still a pain to box it all up and send it back to Microsoft. Plus, I’ll be without a DVD player for a while.

Bugger.