World Without Warcraft

Replace all the Tech

Yesterday was a really odd day for my wife and I in that it seemed to end with some results that we never really planned ahead of time.  The key focus of the day was to get out and move around so that hopefully we could get some steps in.  It is funny how the fitbit has gamified our lives, in that both of us want those extra steps whenever we can.  So when we went to a shopping center we parked purposefully way the hell out in the boondocks so that we would have to walk extra steps to get to our destination.  Thing is I find myself doing this little tweak almost everywhere.  It feels like cheating, but I guess in the long run it will be far better for my health to force myself to walk more.  The fact that I get “acheesements” for doing so just reinforces the behavior.

I wish we had gotten the fitbits a year ago when we first heard about them, because it makes me wonder where we could be today if we had.  One of the various errands we had to run was going to Sams Club to pick up a few things.  They have these amazing apples, and I was getting low on oatmeal.  Now that we have one around the corner from my house I tend to go there quite often.  We actually got our fitbits at Sams because they were significantly cheaper than anywhere else, even considering internet pricing without the shipping.  Turns out we need to shop there more often for tech, because we noticed they had the Samsung Galaxy s5 in stock and at a pretty massive savings.  Currently to get one through AT&T the carrier we use is $250 a 2 year contract, through Best Buy it was $199 with the same contract, but Sams had the price down to $160.

After we walked around the store for a bit and thought about it, we decided to upgrade our phones.  My wife decided she would rather have the maroon s4 instead of the s5.  So for about the same amount that we would have spent to upgrade one phone through AT&T we upgraded both.  The best part is that the mobile tech managed to keep our original phone plan.  We have been grandfathered into the AT&T unlimited data plan for years, and if we ever lost it… we would jump providers in a heartbeat.  So really in the grand scheme of things it is beneficial for them if they want to keep us as customers… to keep moving that plan down the road.  We are not massive data users, but I just like knowing I don’t have to ever think about that.

Now I am coming from the Galaxy S2 that I have had for over three years now, but so far I am liking the S5 quite a bit.  It has a lot of features that I had been missing like the extended bluetooth support that allows me to sync my fitbit directly with the phone.  Additionally it works with chromecast allowing me to use my phone as a remote control for plex and other chromecast apps.  We spent a good chunk of time after getting the phones trying to set them back up again for usage.  The battery life overall seems much better than that of my s2, which is odd considering how much larger the screen and everything else is about the phone.  I have not even attempted to play with the camera yet, but I have heard it is a big jump forward.  The oddest thing about yesterday is using our phones without our contacts… since apparently most of them were stored on the sim card and not in google contacts.  Sams did not have a data transfer cable, so I guess that is the one negative about using them to swap phones out.

Chromebook Time

acer-unveils-first-chromebook-with-haswell-for-249 Have I ever mentioned that my wife is amazing?  I believe I have in the past but here is yet another instance of this.  I am a habitual craigsist shopper but I go in slumps.  I will furiously check it daily for something and then ignore the fact it exists for months.  My wife on the other hand tends to do so pretty regularly, and if she knows I am looking for something keeps an eye out.  For awhile now I have been interested in a Chromebook because for me it seems like the perfect note taking machine.  I religiously use chrome already and pretty much use nothing but google docs as it stands.  I wrote my entire nanowrimo novel last year in google docs… and I still need to edit that.  Basically I needed a machine that I could take with me into meetings at work and take copious notes and then have easy access to them later to mail to my boss or anyone else who so needed them.  The chromebook really seems like the ideal solution for this, but I balked at paying full price for one… since really I was only going to use it for a super limited purpose.

At the suggestion of friends I had mostly been looking for an Acer Chromebook instead of one of the Samsung models.  Yesterday my wife asked me “what brand chromebook were you looking for?” which generally means she’s found something on Craigslist.  Sure enough there was an Acer c710 Chromebook for sale that looked to be in pretty good shape for $150.  I hem hawed around a bit and thought about it, and decided that still I did not want to pay that much.  So instead we counter offered $100 and figured that would be the end of it.  After awhile the guy responded back that he would take $120, which was better but was not exactly an immediate purchase type situation.  We were heading on our way to our favorite Indian restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner so we told him we would think it over and get back with him.

I realize it was only $20 but it seemed like a significant difference at the time.  Mostly because I feel like in buying a chromebook I am only going to use it for the most basic of things.  I already have a really nice full fledged gaming laptop, and this is really just for carrying with me to meetings or any place I need to show off something on the web.  My wife’s school system is getting chromebooks for her students, so there was also the side benefit of giving her a machine to play with in seeing precisely what she can do with it.  After thirty minutes or so of discussion we decided to just pass, and tell the guy we really didn’t want to spend more than $100 on it.  Apparently he was wanting to sell it and we were the only decent offer all weekend, so we shifted gears and went all the way across town to meet the guy.

The funny thing is, the kid grew up in the very small town my wife hails from, so any question about reputability was out the window there.  We’ve dealt with some pretty sketchy people over the years of using craigslist and sometimes you just get a bad feeling about things.  Anyone who is willing to admit that they are from a town of 3,000 is obviously not looking to do something untoward.  I actually used it last night while podcasting to bring up our show notes, and so far it seems pretty much what I expected.  Chromebooks are really just a machine that runs nothing but a chrome web browser.  Anything that would work in chrome seems to work great on the chromebook, for my needs it seems like it is going to be perfect.

World Without Warcraft

Last night we recorded our second broadcast of the Aggrochat podcast.  I am shocked, amazed and absolutely humbled that people seem to have listened to the first one.  At last check we were around two hundred downloads, and for our first effort that seems insane.  Last night we followed the same basic format we set up with the first show, and ended up getting caught up in a quagmire of a topic.  There was a thread on twitter during the week where someone made the statement that they thought the gaming world would have been better off without World of Warcraft.  We spent the majority of the hour and fifteen minute run time of this episode discussing what that world would be like, and what things simply would not exist without WoW.  Between the four of us we managed to take a bunch of different angles and the end result was this nostalgia filled romp through MMO gaming.

#AggroChat #GalaxyS5 #ChromeBook #WorldOfWarcraft #Podcast

6 thoughts on “World Without Warcraft”

  1. Are the podcast available on iTunes? If so I will download them and start listening to them. I’m not a regular listener to most podcasts in the winter, but I have a large yard and I do love to get caught up when mowing. So I’ll put you on next weeks mowing rotation.

  2. Hmm we were looking at phones at Sam’s last night, too. Decided to hold off for now. I also just switched to the 10gB shared data plan for me and my two daughters, which saves me about 50 bucks, while distributing the data better than the 3 gB individual data plans we were on before. But none of us ever came close 3 gB anyway. Plus, no more contract.

  3. My wife and I ended up getting S5s last week when we finally upgraded to smart phones. Loving them so far.

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