Under roof, Chinese unemployment line, in the back

Once again last night Cindy and I spent most of the evening working on the chicken run.  We now have the run completely under roof thanks to mostly Cindy’s efforts.  I was annoyed that after buying 100 more panel screws at Home Depot after work that we are exactly ONE short of what we need to finish completely.  Yet another HD stop will be on the agenda for today.

I also put the hardware cloth on the door to the run.  It went ok except for the three or four puncture wounds on my shins where the cut wire banged into them.  After they started bleeding I had swarms of gnats feeding on my wounds, it was lovely. I also sealed up the gaps on the front and back of the run where it meets the shed.  I did so with a combination of scrap wood wedged together Tetris style, secured by 3 inch screws.

The chicken run is really starting to come together, if I could get a solid four hours I think I could get the run itself done.  Once that happens there is additional construction that has to be done to turn the interior of the shed into a chicken friendly area.

So anyone that has played WoW has probably heard of “chinese gold farmers”.  For almost as long as the game has been around, gold farmers have as well.  At first gold farmers used “bots” to have their virtual selves repetitively and incessantly kill high profit virtual targets in the game to generate gold, the game currency.  They would then in turn sell this virtual currency for real world dollars to individuals that did not want to invest the time to make the gold, they just wanted to pay for it.  This has always been against Blizzard’s terms of service and they have waged a never ending battle against these farmers.

As time progressed the methods used to gain gold by farmers became much more devious and criminal.  They started hijacking accounts using malicious web sites and malware to capture a player’s game password.  Once they got access to the account they would strip every character the player had of all of their items and gold, shipping it off to be sold to someone else.  This problem was rampant and forced Blizzard to develop and implement much more secure authentication to the game, including using separate authenticator devices to prevent hijackers from simply stealing passwords.

Well this week Blizzard may have put the final knife in the back of Chinese gold farmers with the introduction of the WoW token which is basically a way for players to buy gold legally in game, something they never have been able to do before.  A WoW token is a virtual brass ring that if bought by players in game on the virtual auction house is worth 30 days of game time, something that normally costs, roughly $15 a month.  It allows hardcore players to pay their monthly fee totally with virtual currency.

The people looking to buy gold (me), purchase a WoW token with real money ($20).  When they do so you are shown how much gold that $20 will get you in game, the amount changes based on supply and demand in game.  Once somebody buys your token in game you are sent the amount of gold shown when you bought the token.  When the token was released on Tuesday I immediately bought one.  I was curious how it would work and I also could use some extra in game currency.  When I bought the token I locked in a value of 30,600 gold for it, which I got in the mail the next day.

As I mentioned the amount of gold you get for that 20 dollars will fluctuate, possibly greatly.  When I checked on Wednesday how much gold it was worth it had dipped significantly, down to 23,000.  I felt fortunate to jump in when the getting was good.  Regardless I think the WoW token is a good thing on several levels.  Anything that squeezes out the farmers/criminals that literally stole from people to fund their business is a good thing.  Being able to buy gold instead of having to spend hours upon hours earning it in game is a nice luxury as well.

I think from Blizzard’s business perspective this is pretty brilliant.  Basically what they are doing is getting $20 for a 30 day subscription instead of $15 from every WoW token transaction that takes place.  Somebody deserves a raise.

I saw the video of the Charleston police officer putting 8 bullets in the back of the black man that was running away from him.  Just like everybody else  I found the video disgusting.  The officer deserves whatever punishment is handed down, no matter how severe.  Surely this incident will put more momentum behind the body camera push for law enforcement where literally every second of their interaction with the public is caught on tape.  Although I can understand the value in recording all police interactions, it’s still sad to me that this is what society has come to.