The new Blizzard game World of Warcraft is now accepting people to beta test on their sign up page. It’s only open for a week so get your chance in now before Feb 4.

I interviewed with Sun Microsystems for a tech support position. Originally I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take a job in tech support, but it turns out this is the highest level of tech support and requires strong programming skills. So I’m actually pretty excited about the opportunity if they make me an offer.

I did my somewhat regular bike and run time trials this weekend. The 3 mile run was at about 7:39 pace, for a 22:55 finish. The 7.6 mile bike ride was at 23:15. Not bad times, but nothing spectacular.

So I called SMC tech support and it looks like they don’t support Win98, only Win98 Second Edition. Of course on the box and in the packaging it doesn’t distinguish between the two at all. I can’t say that’s really a surprise anyways. It might be time to upgrade that machine, but I’m not sure what to. I am pretty sure that Tracy would deal with it if I put Linux on it, all she needs is Mozilla and Gaim. But there might be some other thing which I’m not thinking of that could cause a problem. Even the digicam we have should work with linux. Of course that would require some setup and configuration as with everything Linux.

So a couple of weeks ago I read Microserfs by Douglas Copeland. It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I expected to. I have very little patience to read that kind of stuff anymore. I’m not sure why. I still like a good sci-fi book occasionally, but in general most of what I read is current events and technology news.

Bah. Stupid SMC wireless card. I can’t get my Win98 PC to recognize the card. I expect to have problems installing it on linux, but 98 should not be this hard. I am going to try and call their tech support.

I ordered wireless network gear again. We’ll see if it works this time. About 6 months ago I tried to do it with Linksys wireless equipment, but it failed due to lack of linux support so I had to return everything. I’m trying this time with SMC cards.

So I started playing a bit of Magic: The Gathering online. It’s fun, but it does seem kinda weird playing a trading card game online. The interface is a bit difficult to use, because the rules for the game are relatively complex if you want to play well. I joined a league for pretty cheap. It only requires about a $16 investment, and you get a fair amount of play out of it.. The problem is that it’s a terrible environment for learning how to play. It’s not bad if you’ve played before you just learn how the computer version works, but you can’t use the online version at all if you know nothing about magic.

You can also resell the online cards(some people trade cards for a living) but it’s a sizable market, so the margins are slim and it’s somewhat time consuming. They really need to improve their trade system as well. It’s sort of a chaotic bazaar and there’s no good way of matching up buyers and sellers.

I’ve been digitizing some of my old CD’s lately, and I realized how far we’ve come. I can rip a cd in about 4-5 minutes, unlike the old days when I was lucky if I could play the CD faster than rip it.

Oh and Tracy put up some pictures of our Rose Bowl trip. Nothing too exciting, but it’s something.

Tracy has the idea of going on the South Beach diet. I have no idea what it is really, but there ya go. I did resolve to get down to 160 by the end of June this year. Although I’m not sure if that is going to hurt my triathlon performance this year. It might be too light for me. It’s about 15+ lbs less than I weigh right now. I actually don’t feel that fat right now, but I need some motivation to increase my workout intensity.

Just got back from the LA, where we watched UM get beat by USC 28-14. It wasn’t that close a game, but it could’ve been if UM had made a few key offensive plays that they didn’t.

We also hung around LA for a few days, we went to Universal Studios, and hung around Santa Monica and Venice Beach. We had another celebrity sighting. While we were in line to see 21 Grams(which I liked, but Tracy wasn’t thrilled with), we saw Sean Hayes, best known as the uber gay Jack McFarland on Will & Grace.

We ate at this place called Tony P’s down in LA, they had the hugest plate of onion straws you’ve ever seen. We also had dinner at a southwestern place called the Border Grill which was good.

Annoyingly Halo keeps crashing on me. I can’t get it running right.