Reminder to myself and the non-iphone world.

http://www.twitip.com/twitter-on-your-blackberry/

Some CoH newbie advice.

If you want to get started early on City of Heroes, here are some tips.

Currently, good pvp characters include ice/super strength tanks, and anything with the force field power (available for controllers and defenders), which allows use of personal force field (PFF).  If you are inside PFF in Bloody Bay (the first zone pvp area, available to enter at level 15), then you are pretty much invulnerable.  Other defense-based characters are also effective later on, but not so much at level 15.

If you like to play solo, play a scrapper.  I suggest either Martial Arts/Regen or Dark Melee/Regen (my favorite) — which are not currently the best at the upper levels but are very good at low levels of play.  Ask me which powers to select at each level, if you wish.  I will give a specific sequence to follow.

To make money, go to Wentworth’s and buy second-tier salvage (yellow) that you can sell to NPCs for 1000 for less than that.  Once you have 20-30K influence, begin buying level 45 recipes — defense, resistance, fear, hold, any of those — for about 12-14K.  You can then sell those recipes at a profit to NPCs, and this will take you all the way up to 1M influence fairly easily.  Or, you can contact me in-game at @Gotcha and I will simply give you 1M influence — that would prolly be lots quicker, actually.

Don’t buy any enhancements (other than accuracy maybe), until you get to level 8 at least.  It’s stupid.  Use the ones that drop, but don’t waste money on the trainer enhancements.  No point.

Go through the tutorial when you first create your character.  Most experienced players don’t, but you should.  Choose Atlas Park as your starting point.  Try to catch a sewer team in order to get to level six.  As soon as you get to level six, go to King’s Row and do the newspaper missions until you get the protect the bank mission, which, if completed successfully, gives you a jet-pack allowing you to (slowly) fly.  Once  you get to level 8 or so, go to Steel Canyon and do the newspaper missions until you get the jump-pack, which allows you to (more quickly) jump.

Once you get to level 10, do the Steel Canyon missions available at the university.  By that time, we should be able to get together and group play up to level 15, at which point we will go to Bloody Bay and die some.

Quizzes posted.

CMMNA400 and CMMNA100 students will find their respective quiz posted within their respective online folder (along with the class syllabus, schedule, etc.).

Also, CMMNA100 students:  I have placed the official Vivian textbook powerpoints, covering all chapters we have discussed so far, on the class blackboard site.

Technology and tyranny, episode eleventy.

Obama gets this in order to avoid this, while China does this, which is really not that different from section (b) of this.

Do you have a phone?

Do you play a game?

Then you have a number

right by your name.

When does your number come up?

Inauguration day.

Inauguration day is not a news day.

The news day was when Obama was elected.

Tuesday is a ceremony day.

I do not like it when ceremony becomes news.

News has more than enough ceremony in and of itself.

However, when news becomes ceremony — as will definitely be the case on inauguration day — then news becomes easier to study as form rather than content.  And, since, even when news does have a little content (as when Obama was elected), the form of news is probably more important and influential than its content, inauguration day will be a good news study day.

Here’s some stuff for news study day.

1.  As you probably know, Obama is into the social networking thing.  Of course, maybe that’s just his campaign manager’s idea or something.  But he does at least speak the words “network neutrality” now and again.  So that’s good.

2.  On the open internet, here’s what you what you might find.

The National Post

The CNN semi-live feed (think it’s going to have bandwidth problems?)

and the CNN facebook thingy

The LA Times, summarizing the ceremony

The NY Times, plugging the mobile tv companies

and NPR, with what counter culture would look like if counter culture were basically a wine-tasting

and, finally, with NPR’s help, what counter culture would look like if counter culture were paid for by the same people who were selling the wine that was being tasted at the wine-tasting.

Put pogo.com on your list.

Mail, search, shopping, and casual games.

Build it free and they will come.

http://www.hitwise.com/datacenter/rankings.php

ur gov and u

You may not have seen this since you were probably so busy trying to find out what Michelle O is wearing to the inauguration, or watching football, or learning of all those Bush accomplishments over the past eight years.

http://www.financialpost.com/reports/legal/story.html?id=1158985

The gist of that is this:

“If Paulson was still an employee of Goldman Sachs and he’d done this deal, he would have been fired,” he [2001 Nobel Prize winner Stiglitz] said.

Paulson declined to comment…

Now which is better…

…I wonder.

1.  The digital dropbox on Blackboard.

Or this:  http://drop.io/CMMNX237#.

2.  Emailing everyone through Blackboard.

Or this:  http://twitter.com/CMMNX237.