Exam period is once again ravaging my mind (although, this time, my meta-algorithm seemed to go a lot better than last time). I havn’t gotten the grade yet, but I’m quite certain it’s near the top. Should be revealed in a week or so. On top of that, I’m in the middle of an intensive 3 weeks programming-project, which is quite entertaining, taking the hard work into consideration, as we just finished the “introduction”-week, and got to know the details of our main project, which is to be finished by the 25th.

World of Warcraft-wise, I had my first 1 month anniversary as a Wowhead Moderator. Some might have seen it in my Tweet-feed, but I thought I’d mention here as well, for good measure, as it has indeed affected how I spend my online-time. It feels great to be able to give something back to the community, by ensuring that the Forums are a nice place to discuss various stuff – and it has so far indeed been a pleasant experience to be a part of the team, and getting the experience in moderating.

On top of that, I’ve begun conquoring the heroic content of Icecrown Citadel 25-man raiding, which is steadily progressing. I’ll probably also look a bit more into how the Shamans are looking for Cataclysm, when more information is showing itself. For now, my previous post still seems up to date, which can be combined with the newly released official talent calculator preview.

Lastly, I feel like reminding everyone that R.A.G.E wasn’t just an empty idea – I just don’t really get that many random ideas for crazy stuff to write nowadays, or the most immediate thoughts are published as Tweets, as they’re simply too short to deserve a post of their own (although I might do more of those semi-short ones). I do however want to get back to look more closely at the Diablo-universe, and continuing my theorizing about it, in different shapes or forms.

In essence, Rebirth isn’t really a fitting title, Reawakening probably covers it better – unless I’m mistaken for a phoenix made of lightning instead of fire… and not be a phoenix after all, but a gnu instead.

Yesterday, I was in the Zoo with my girlfriend, which is around 5 minutes on bike, from where I live. Good stuff. Naturally, I was looking forward to seeing my gnu-brothers, especially now that I live so close to them, and got myself a seasonal card. However, it turned out that the trip ended in sadness. Upon entering the Zoo, we noticed that the dear wildebeests wasn’t on the overview map, but discarded the thought, as not every animal was on there anyway. Sadly, the fear was confirmed – there wasn’t any wildebeests to be found, and they weren’t hiding.

So, in my disappointment, I wrote a mail to the Zoo later in the evening. I figured it might be good to keep it in a natural tone, as the @gnueless.com-part might give the false illusion that I was trolling. I translated it to English for your reading pleasure:

Hi Zoo,

I had a trip to the Zoo yesterday, and was as always looking forward to seeing the wildebeests again. Sadly, it looked like they’d been removed, and isn’t anywhere to be found in the park anymore. What’s the reason for that, and is it temporary or permanent?

Kind regards,
Emil Erik Hansen

This morning, I got a reply back, which itself it somehow a miracle, but I was somehow shocked at the contains of it. Again, translated to English.

There was sadly a bit too much trouble with the wildebeests – so Zoo have been forced to sending them away – they’re at the Palmur Zoo in France.

The thought is to get water bucks instead – they are a little delayed and probably won’t be here until the fall.

Kindly,
[name]

Disregarding the fact that nothing can ever replace wildebeests, it seems like they were causing trouble. There’s no real details as to why, but my immediate thought was that they got into one little fight, and their handlers got scared, and said “You’re moving in with your auntie and uncle and in Palmur”.

• Walk past a kebab-shack (I wonder what the correct expression for such is anyway), realize I could really use one, but thinking it was probably better to wait till I was home 15 minutes later, and get some proper lunch.
• Going up the stairs to the train, spotting that the train wasn’t there until 9 minutes later.
• Going back down, figuring I might just spend those 9 minutes getting a kebab.
• Buying and eating said kebab.
• Internally discussing with myself if I should tweet or blog this, and ending up with the latter, as there would be no way I’d fit it into 140 characters, and I didn’t want to do a 5/5 tweet.
• Realize that I’d would be the first time in ages that I’d have done 2 blog-posts in one day.
• Further realize that my problems probably weren’t that bad after all.

And yes, these were actual minutes, not Copenhagen ones.

As you know, a laptop’s keyboard is rather integrated into the computer itself, and spilling liquid on this will, without doubt, prove rather fatal very quickly. I had a cup of warm tea besides my good old trusty laptop, and – as fate has it – accidentally struck it with one of my arms, causing the almost boiling-hot tea (with honey, mind you) to spill all over the laptops keyboard. 2 seconds later, the computer shut itself off.

This should, without doubt, cause panic of epic proportions to most people, and I admit that I was very close to yelling a lot of very bad words out loud. Luckily enough, I realized that there wasn’t any immediate smoke and sparks flying, and got my hopes up a bit. Disconnected the power supply, wiped as much as I could off the keyboard, got my girlfriends hairdryer, and started going berserk with the getting sure that there wasn’t a single drop of tea to be found anywhere in, or on, the laptop. After that, I left it to cool down for a few hours … and tried what would eventually be needed to check if everything was ok.

It booted fine, but made my heart skip a beat, when an error-message almost instantly popped up:

The computer was shut down for safery-measures, because of over-heating. Check the (…)

Insanely enough, the heat from the hot tea had caused the computer to shut itself down before the liquid had any chance to damage it. Lucky? Quite.

So, did my computer survive without a scratch? Not really. The keys on the left side of the keyboard (where the primary “splash” had hit) are crunching quite a bit when pushing them, most likely a result of the honey in the tea drying. I might have to clean it completely eventually, when it starts to annoy me enough. For now, I’m just happy that the laptop still lives.

I have a lovely plant (a Peperomia Acuminata, I think it’s called), which I’ve had for around 1,5 year at this point. Having “green fingers” isn’t exactly a natural feat of a guy in his middle twenties, so I have somehow become rather attached to the thing. My own power plant, if you will (pun intended naturally), as it has grown quite a bit since then.

Not too long ago, I walked by it, and thought it looked a bit thirsty, and thus watered it a bit – as you do for thirsty plants. One of the countless things I learned through this long period of professional gardening (self-irony also intended). The strange thing was, that after that, I almost instantly got thirsty, and went out to drink around 1L of water.

Having never really thought of thirst as a contagious feeling, this was a rather strange moment. Not only that, but it came from a plant. I must repeat this: a plant. I guess Boston puts it the best, because it certainly must’ve been. That, or it was a coincidence.

… but what are the odds of that?