Crimson Crux

That gamer is no other than yours truly. I’m several days removed from my five-day vacation in Kalibo, Aklan (my clan’s home province), and I’m still savoring the experience. That experience includes, lo and behold, a foray into the sumptuously addicting DotA. And just when I thought I would be leaving all tech- and game-related stuff in the metro!

For the uninitiated, DotA (Defense of the Ancients) is a free mod for the game Warcraft III. In the Philippines, it has become an addiction, rivaling the famous MMORPGs around. Having evolved into this generation’s Counter-Strike (remember it?), you can even consider DotA as a “sub-game” of Warcraft III — packs of gamers troop to Net cafes not to play “Warcraft”, but rather “DotA”. (more…)

To the Filipino, the fierce, untiring, and unbowed pride of the Malay race: Raise your head to the sun and exult, for today your nation celebrates its 108th Independence Day. Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!

Last night at Sunday Mass, our Burmese priest Fr. Joseph (who speaks good Tagalog and English) was again delivering one of his great sermons. One theme that has been recurrent in his homilies is his belief in the great destiny of the Philippines.

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“Multiplayer games may be the best kind of training.”

This is the gist of a Wired Magazine article written by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, interestingly titled You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!.

So who says gaming’s only for dorks and awkward bums? Vast experience in the world’s biggest MMORPG (see related article at WoW Gold Source) helped this guy land a lucrative job at Yahoo!:

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Okay, I know this post has absolutely nothing in connection with tech stuff, but hey, it still screams “Geeky”.

Yours truly is a Dungeon & Dragons (or let’s just say “role-playing”) fan, and while not a hardcore gamer or even a one-time Dungeon Master, I can say that I’ve my own ways of expressing my loyalty. I regularly read issues of the Dragon and Dungeon magazines, not to mention having a pile of D&D-related novels (mostly on the Forgotten Realms setting). I was addicted to several D&D-related PC games, too, such as Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale.

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On a decent dial-up connection of 45.2 kbps (Pacific Internet), without any other data transfers running in the background, loading on Mozilla Firefox:

Yahoo! Mail Beta — 12 seconds (this is far better than at other times)
Gmail ‘Beta’ — 7 seconds

Of course, this doesn’t take into account server loads and other factors. While the above ’statistics’ are not what you’d call ’scientific’, they can nicely sum up my general loading experience with these email services.

I used to think that Gmail was hostile to dial-up users, but with Yahoo! Mail Beta proving to be slower…oh well. Let’s see if Yahoo! Mail’s perfomance improves once it gets out of Beta.

I’ve just updated to Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.4, and my browsing experience has gone haywire. Since last night, I’ve had about seven Firefox crashes and two sudden reboots while using the browser. And to think I’ve just gotten a clean reformat a month ago. What happened? Grrr.

I’ve just been reading the release notes for 1.5.0.4, and the only reasons I can think of right now are the extensions and themes I’ve installed. (Been using the sleek AbstractPC theme.) Right now I’ve turned them off and waiting to see if Firefox acts a lot better.

(I absolutely hate posting this entry, because Firefox is a browser I love and advocate. Oh well, I guess there’s really a thin line between love and hate!)

It’s gaming news and opinions galore again as the 15th Carnival of Gamers gets underway at Kim Pallister’s blog. Yours truly is one of the carnival’s participants (just search for “Crimson Crux”); I chipped in the Greatest Gaming Engine Ever? entry from this blog.

See you at the carnival!