So...now what happens?

This article was published this morning:

S.Korean warship 'hit by N.Korean torpedo'

SEOUL (AFP) – South Korea's military believes that a North Korean submarine launched a torpedo attack to sink a South Korean warship last month near their disputed sea border, the Yonhap news agency said on Thursday.
The assessment was reported to the office of President Lee Myung-Bak and the defence ministry immediately after the ship sank last month, an unnamed senior military source told Yonhap.
"It's our military intelligence's assessment that North Korean submarines attacked the ship with a heavy torpedo," the source said, adding that the subs were armed with torpedoes with 200-kilogram (440-pound) warheads.
"Since February last year, North Korea has strengthened training that showed the possibility of it launching a guerilla warfare-style provocation, rather than a skirmish."
The South's military intelligence command had also alerted the navy ahead of the March 26 sinking of the Cheonan that North Korea was preparing an attack, Yonhap said.
The South's defence ministry refused to comment on the report.
Seoul has so far refrained from directly accusing Pyongyang and said only that an "external explosion" was the most likely cause of the disaster which cost the lives of 46 sailors.
Pyongyang has denied it was responsible.
South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae-Young has already raised the possibility that a mine or torpedo may have sunk the ship, following deadly naval clashes in 1999 and 2002 and a November firefight.
The November incident left a North Korean patrol boat in flames and local media reports said one North Korean sailor was killed and three wounded.
The North has vowed "merciless" military action to protect what it sees as its Yellow Sea border.
South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper meanwhile quoted defectors as saying that North Korea had formed suicide attack squads known as "human torpedoes" in its navy.
It said the North's navy operates a brigade of suicide attack squads, which have many mini-submarines capable of carrying torpedoes or floating mines.

I hate to say it, but I called it. So then, what is the ROK's next move? Retaliation? Rhetoric? Nothing? What say you? Is the 2nd Korean War upon us?

Quel'delar

I'm back after a short absence - I have been trying to find a good upgrade for the default template that Blogger provides, and I believe I've done it. It wasn't just "plug and play," however, to my chagrin. I've had to hastily learn about CSS and HTML to figure out what I needed to edit in order to get the look I was after, and fix a few things that didn't look right. Several days later, I think i've got it...

One of the nice things about WoW is that there is so many things to do, whether you are a casual player or a hardcore raider type. I've gone in cycles, but never really approached "hardcore" status, nor have I ever wanted to. One of the better end-game "casual" activities that can be done is to run the Battered Hilt questline. It's not cheap for a casual to do - the item to start it costs an arm and a leg on the AH. But, since my AH skill have improved, I made enough money to pick one up. My wife and I ran the line together, and the reward at the end of the semi-epic quest is a very nice weapon, much better than anything else obtained outside of raids.

We really needed it, too - we are trying to get better in the Arena, which is hard to do if you can't beat the other team quickly! Quel'delar has been a fine addition to my Unholy Death Knight's arsenal. If you have the means, and no raiding of ICC in the foreseeable future, definitely take a look at it! The Battered Hilt drops from Heroic ICC 5-man instances, and more often than not finds its way onto the AH. But, with a bit of cleverness, you can work a deal on the side and get a much better price! Good luck.

No way anything but a weapon did that

So, South Korea just raised the stern section of the corvette that sunk under mysterious circumstances about three weeks ago. Looking at the raw video and photos that are now available on the web, it's clear that this ship broke in two. There are few things that can cause a ship's back to be broken enough like that - and two of them are torpedoes and mines. I highly doubt that anything internal to the ship could cause this kind of damage.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate...that this was likely the result of the ship hitting a mine or being struck by a torpedo (in which case, we have a deliberate attack). Either way, it is bad all-around.

Do you think this was deliberate?

Retro Game Timewarp

Let's go back in time to the early 90's for a moment. I mentioned in my very first post that one of my first forays into the world of PC gaming was the original Wing Commander. In this game, I found an amazing experience that I still fondly remember today (along with its sequels). Set in the distant future (2364 if i remember correctly), you, the player, are thrust into the shoes of a newly-minted space fighter pilot assigned to a carrier on deep space assignment during a bloody war between the Terran Confederation and the Kilrathi, a feline-humanoid hybrid species. You fly with one other computer controlled pilot, who acts as your wingman during each mission.

The whole experience was immersive and cinematic - from the cartoonish "cutscenes" where you advanced the plot, to the frantic music that played when you were rushing to your cockpit, to the satisfaction that you gleaned from each successful engagement. If you did well in your missions, you could even earn medals and accolades. What encouragement! I replayed many missions over just to fill out my chest with "candy." I still remember the few mission where you encountered one of the enemy "aces" - they were noticeably better than the typical cannon fodder, and downing one usually resulted in a loud "YEAH!" from the player (Yes, I'm guilty!).

All in all, what an amazing experience for a 14 year old playing one of his first PC games ever, in MS-DOS, on a 486SX with 1MB of memory and a 120MB hard drive. Those were the days!

Warship Naming Epic Fail

Okay, this morning I am going to put on my Navy hat and respond to some news. Serving as a naval officer for nine years left me with a great knowledge of Naval customs and traditions; a personal interest in naval history (that dates to long before I entered the U.S. Naval Academy) in general only serves to magnify this. Thus, for most of my life, I have had a great interest in the Navy and its history, and naval affairs in general.

Now, on to the meat of this post: this morning, a major Navy-focused news site proffered this story: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2010/04/navy_murtha_gator_041310w/

The majority of the Navy blogosphere has already responded to this, and the overall opinion seems to be negative. I could not agree more with them! Why all the fuss about naming a warship? Because this is a decades-old issue that always seems to recur. for inexplicably political reasons alone. The LPD 17 class of amphibious ships is new to the fleet; so far, each ship has been named for a U.S. city. Now, the revelation that the latest ship will be named after a recently deceased member of the House of Representatives that was not the strongest advocate of the military (even though he was the chair of the House defense appropriations subcommittee - the main reason this is happening in the first place).

In the past, the Navy stuck to a generally concrete convention for the assignment of names to its ships. Aircraft carriers were names for famous battles; cruisers for U.S. cities; submarines for maritime fauna; destroyers for naval heroes and other persons of great importance in Navy history. Somewhere around the late 1960s, sporadic exceptions to these conventions began occurring (USS GLENARD P. LIPSCOMB; USS HYMAN G. RICKOVER; USS THOMAS S. GATES; and so on). This USS JOHN MURTHA, however, is one of the worst names ever conceived for a warship - in ten years, when the warship has been in active service, who (aside from the crew assigned to the ship) amongst the general populace will recognize this name?

Please, just pick a naming scheme and stick with it!

Playing the Auction House

There are a plethora of well written blogs that deal with just this subject (some of which are shown here on my blogroll. I have read each of them and tried to incorporate some of their wisdom into my own quest to pad my coffers. I have found it is a rather addictive thing to do! When I got back into the game a few weeks ago after a 4 or 5 month break (to rest, then play Star Trek Online - more on that in another posting), I had roughly 3,000 gold saved up. After upgrading my Dalaran ring and doing some other odds and ends, I had basically about 1.5k to begin this experiment.

All in all, I've been doing modestly well, but nowhere near the amazing returns that others are experiencing. Part of this is due to my own reluctance to go "all in" when playing the AH. Then, there is the bad business decisions that I make from time to time. Case in point - I saw a LOT of Lichbloom for what I thought was an absurdly low price. So, I bought it all up, to the tune of over 1,000g. I had not dabbled in herbs before, and didn't think I would be undercut so fiercely as I was. Within minutes of posting all the materials I'd bought, I was undercut by several people. Misha seems to have several people that post in bulk, and are trying to do the same as I in dealing with buying and selling. Thankfully, after more undercutting episodes, I have finally offloaded most of it, but I am out 500-600g because of it.

Most of what I have been successful at is when I flip items, which can be lucrative when I buy low enough and resell at a modest rate. I'm still new to this, though, so I haven't quite gotten a good feel for the market yet. But, I'm getting there - I am just short of 10k as of this writing. It goes without saying that you need to use add-ons such as Auctioneer to help you with this, if only for the scanning and semi-automated posting features. I also picked up Postal (thanks to Hit the Cap!) and was amazed that I no longer needed to spend wasted minutes manually opening each piece of mail that came in.

I'll keep you all updated how it goes, and will share any helpful tips that I come across. Of course, my exact experience on Misha will be different from yours, but the general ideas should translate well.

Stepping into the Arena

Before I get into the meat of this post, a bit of background. We play on the Misha PVE server, and have since it was created in advance of the Burning Crusade expansion. Prior to Wrath of the Lich King, I only had one character, a Human Rogue, that I used. Alts never really interested me all that much. At Level 70, my wife and I tried out 2 vs. 2 arena matches, and experienced the severe gear disparity that newly created arena teams often face (along with general inexperience in this type of PVP). Once Lich King came out, we essentially forgot about Arena and focused on PVE. We even got into raiding with our mains (my wife's is a Human Fire Mage - she has more toons than me!) and got them decently geared in Naxxramas armor. Last year, we relocated to a new home, and WoW took a back seat to many other things.

Fast forward to recent history... About 2 weeks ago, I finally finished levelling the Death Knight alt that I'd made 1 1/2 years ago. Prior to that, I hadn't really given Nuadu much focus - my Rogue wsa always my main and that was all I cared about. But, the DK has grown on me. I have grinded BGs to get him fitted out in the best of everything available for honor points - not the best there is by far, but it's almost mandatory to even enter at the ground floor of Arena. So, finally finished, we started a 3v3 team with a friend of ours and tried to see how we did. Our team is this: Unholy DK, Resto Shaman, and Balance Druid. We don't really care what's the best composition, because these are the builds we like.

Our experience was mostly for learning - and we learned a lot. And also found that we lost, a LOT. I tend to get very frustrated when I don't produce results, but much of this is due to (as we found at Level 70) insufficient gearing and lack of experience in the Arena. So, hopefully with time we will progress and learn what it takes to be moderately successful.

"You are standing in an open field west of a white house..."

Hello! For those of you of appropriate age to remember Zork 1, the title above will take you back a bit... Seeing that phrase meant you were at the beginning of one of the earliest and most popular adventure games of the early home computer era. Much as that phrase meant the beginning of a new adventure, so it does again here for me - I am new to the blogging world, and hope to impart some of my own experiences and thoughts as I continue through my own adventures from day to day.

A bit about me - I am in my early 30s, and a former U.S. Navy officer with nine years of memorable service under my belt. I served aboard several ships, deployed overseas many times, and got to work with some of the finest men and women the country has to offer. It is an experience that shaped my early adulthood, and one I would not trade for anything. It is because of that service as well as a prior interest in all things Navy that I intend to post thoughts about various aspects of that realm here from time to time.

I have many interests, one of which I share wholeheartedly with my wife - World of Warcraft. Though we would not by any means term ourselves "hardcore," since beginning play in December 2006, we have seen 90% of what the game has to offer, and we still love to play. I have been an avid computer gamer most of my life, from the time I wrote my own BASIC programs on an archaic Mattel Aquarius computer connected to the TV (and had no means to save my programs when the power was shut off!), to many years of a love affair with the Commodore 64, and into PC gaming in the early 90s with our family's first 486SX that I played the original Wing Commander (and MANY others) on.

So then, welcome, adventurer! I shall endeavor to make each post thought-provoking...or at the very least, interesting enough to make you want to bookmark me and come back for more!