Oh No! Not another MMO!

Lord of the Rings Online… Ok, it’s not super new or anything and I was in the beta where I had less than a stellar impression of the game, but a guild mate has been playing the free trial over the Thanksgiving holiday and says it’s much better than it was in beta and thinks it could hold our guild’s interest until Warhammer is released – unlike Hellgate. Don’t get me wrong, Hellgate is a blast, but it just doesn’t have the staying power that a “real MMO” has. It’s great to run in, do a few skirmishes and log out, but it really doesn’t have that “epic” feel of a traditional MMO.  So I’ve spent the night downloading the high-res trial and will probably be logging into Middle Earth sometime this evening.

I have no idea what race or class I’ll choose, I guess I should go research the game a little bit before I login. Hopefully by the weekend I’ll have a mini-opinion ready.

In other news, my web jukebox project is coming along nicely, although I have had a few glitches.  With my server behind a 1.5Mbps DSL connection, I noticed quite a few pauses in the playback as the player caught up with the buffer quite easily.  On the LAN I never get pauses, so I’ll probably just use the streamer around the house (LAN/WiFi) until I upgrade my DSL to the 7Mbps speed (only an extra $10/mo and still significantly cheaper than the locally avail. 3Mbps cable).

I also have nailed down the wpl streaming, I still prefer the m3u format though.  I’ve made progress on the rss stream, but it still isn’t being read correctly from my PSP – it works great from other PC’s though. So there’s got to be some special tweak somewhere to make the PSP recognize rss properly. Hopefully I’ll have that worked out by the weekend as well.

I love having my full music collection available and shuffled, I’m getting music that I haven’t heard in years that I still love to listen to (Queensryche/Warning is playing now – Woot!). I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner! Once I get everything figured out and fully stable on my jukebox server, I’ll try to write up some kind of “how to” document – the toughest part is getting your various feeds configured and served properly.  The longest part is getting your CDs converted to MP3’s.

Anyways, hope y’all had a great Thanksgiving Holiday and I’ll post my own TG adventures later this week – oy, it was an interesting weekend to say the least…


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