BrainBeat Productions Multimedia blog

Ding level 70. After about a month after World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade has been released I have finally gotten my main character (Bbg) to level 70. This put me just outside the first 1000 people on my server to level to 70 and significantly longer that the fastest person in the world who managed the feat in on 28 hour. Almost immediately I went to get my standard flying mount and started flying around. The process is similar to that use while swimming but using a mount and in the air. The cost of the flying mount and training while was not cheap the 800g for the training and 100g for the mount was easily attainable by questing for 60 to 70 while picking up and selling the odd blue BOE.

With the Burning crusade came a whole lot of extra armor and weapons which are vastly superior to what was found at 60. I have at the moment when in my full tanking gear up to 13000 hit points and nearly 12000 armor when buffed and that is still wearing about 4 green items. At 60 I would be lucky to have 9000 hp and 9000 armour fully buffed this is an huge increase for only 10 levels of itmes. All of this new armour and hit points goes to great use against bosses who like me also have a lot more armour and hit points and do a lot more damage to me too.

I must say that the way blizzard has structured outland is a lot more logical than Azeroth as all zones are clearly layed out is a way the you go from one quest to another with little backtracking. This made the leveling process a lot more enjoyable as most of you time as spent leveling and not traveling. The designs for the zones is good too with each having some familiar elements to zones on Azeroth.

AS you will know from my previous posts I do a lot of pvp and now that i am 70 there is no difference. I have joined an arena team made up of a group of guys who I had been doing a lot of premade battlegrounds with. We have at the moment not been going so well as the other teams seem to be better geared and have better strategies that us but eventually I am sure we will work out what we are doing. I think also the mele clases have the hardest time in the arenas as we can only do serious damage when we are up close but all the casters and hunters can stand back and do heaps of damage to you from range. On a battle ground front the new battleground call the Eye Of The Storm is a combination between Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch where there are 4 towers you have to try capture and hold and a central flag to capture by taking to a tower you hold. I have found it to be enjoyable to play as you can either be a defender, attacker or flag carrier. There is nothing that has really changed with Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch but with Alterack Vally they have increased the level of the guards by 10 levels to compensate with the higher levels and gear. I think however they have made they hit a little harder than they shoud and have too much hit points as at 60 I could easy kill the bowmen in the tower with them taking me down to about 50% hit points not they take me to 20% or less, and I could taking Galv in berserker stance in my full damage gear and easy take 5 hits without a heal now he will 2 shot me. i suppose this will become easier when i get all level 70 gear.

I have also created a Draenei Shaman as I was interested in trying out all their new lowbe quests and I can say for certainty they are the best of all the alliance ones. I also wanted to get a jewel crafter so as they have a racial ability the gives them 5 levels for free. At the time of writing my shaman named Bbd (I know I don’t have very imaginative names for my characters but I find that short names a easier to remember and type) is level 25. By the time I had gotten Bbg to level 70 there were already a handful of blood elf and shaman 70’s which is a great feat by their players.

In a previous post I highlighted the BOINC project which is a global distributive computing shell which allow research group do to use users idle computing power to process data and so help with their research. That leads me to this post where I thought you might be interested in looking as some stats on how much data I have been processing. The below two images are both for all the projects we run here. The reason that there are 2 is that half of the my brother (dns) join us up for and the other I did and we have not bothered to combine them. Both images are generated real-time by the BOINC stats website and are linked to it. If you ever want to find out more information about how you are going with respect to the rest of the world or even you self a few months the BOINC stats website has it all there layout out in a neat and easy navigable way.

I thought I would also put the stats for the team we are a part of ( Boinc@Australia) too.

long time reader of this blog will know that I have had problems with my Netgear DG834g router since I upgraded my internet account to ADSL2+ where is would at time drop out every few minutes. Now with Internode my isp offering annex m on their ADSL2+ extreme plans I decided to bite the bullet and get another. After much searching I decided on the Billion BiPAC 7401VGPM router as I if fully ADSL2+ and annex M compliant.From a lot of reviews I have read it is one of the best routers for throughput while maintaining good line stability. The router also has many other useful features like a b/g wireless capability, VOIP port, strong Firewall, 4 port Ethernet switch.
From my testing of it over the last few days I have found it to be a lot more stable that my previous with me only having it lose syince once other that the times I have restarted the router etc. I have also found that it was it has synced and good speeds but still falling significantly short of the the theoretical maximum speed of ADSL2+ for downstream but on upstream it has been very good with the bes sync of 2.38Mbps. on a throughput front I have been able to download files at up to 1.5MBps and upload at up to 260kBps which are both very good. It seems that the strength of the signal from the wireless antenna is slightly higher that what I has previously making the wireless experience better and faster.

When Setting up the router I was presented with a very large range of options with which you can set. Some reviews have stated that it is too complicated to set up, to some extent I would have to agree that it is not a great router for a beginner as you can certainly get lost in the options. I however feel that the more options available the better as you can set it up exactly how you want it to run as apposed to what some quick setup page can produce. On the web interface I found it to be nice and clean and well laid out It can be hard to find some options as they are places in places where you would not expect them or requiring to go through another page to get to them. Throughout the setup I only came with a few problems one of which as when I turned on the firewall on at all a majority of programms that require acces to the internet could not connect to get the working requires opening the ports they use to connect to the Internet. The other was with my website where I set up a ‘virtual server’ to point to my website but when I tried accessing my website from within my network I was unable to connect and the page would time out. I did some testing and found the it was still working to the Internet but not to my intra net. I ended up finding the only soluting was to set the router to its factory defaults and setting it up again and have found it to be working fine now. I am thinking that there may be a bug in the current firmware causing the problem.

Overall I have found that this is a much better device that what I had been using previously and would recommend anone who is looking to buy a new router to take a look at the Billion 74x range of routers.

For those who are wondering what annex M is, it as a ADSL2+ standard which increases the theoretical maximum upload speed of an ADSL2+ connection from 1.2Mbps to 2.4Mbps. And I hear you say why is this important and the simple answere is the higher the speed of my upload (or bandwidth) the more people who can connect to my website and at faster speeds.