There’s a Starbucks on the ground floor of the building I work in. I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but the sheer proximity of the place means that I spend a lot of money on over-roasted coffee. Or, at least, I used to - because about a week ago, they opened a Dunkin’ Donuts almost directly across the street from my building. I went in for the first time this morning. The coffee isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly passable and quite a bit cheaper. Also, while I frequently skip breakfast or eat it at home, their food is better than the food at Starbucks (especially the bagels).

It’s true that I have a slight but definite affinity for Dunkin’ Donuts, apart from all of that. It’s a Massachusetts chain, originally, and I actually worked at one in my hometown when I was in high school. Employment aside, I also spent a lot of time hanging out in or around various Dunkin’ Donutseseses with my friends, because that (for some reason) was our default destination in the absence of other plans. So the orange and pink decor may be awful, but it reminds me of home and of the summer after my senior year, which was a good time to be alive.

That said, I tend to avoid the donuts - I think every former Dunkin’ employee develops a sort of horror of them. Everyone eats entirely too many the first week they work there, and then never feel quite the same way about glazing again. (I have been known to make an exception for the occasional Krispy Kreme.)

That site design I was working on? Yeah, I scrapped it. Not the backend, which I’m still very pleased with, but the design itself - it just wore thin before I finished it. I’m seeing if it can be saved by redoing certain elements and altering the colors a little bit, but the longer I work in web development the more it becomes clear to me that I am not a graphic designer and don’t particularly want to be. I can tell good from bad, sure, but that doesn’t mean I can do it. At least not without a great deal of futzing and frustration.

It’s been a year already since I graduated from NYU. I find this a little disturbing, mainly because it’s more evidence of how rapidly time is speeding up - it feels like it’s only been a couple of months since I turned in my cap and gown. I still want to go to grad school, but it seems unlikely to happen for at least a few years, if only because it’s so fucking expensive (both in the sense that I would be in school and that I would not be working).

Oh, before I forget: I’ve got a floor ticket to the Monday NIN show that I’d like to trade for a mezz ticket. I won’t be around this weekend, but if that trade is amenable to you, drop me a line and maybe we can meet up at the venue.

Obligatory Warcraft update that will interest almost no one: I’ve been running Dire Maul lately with my hunter and have picked up Backwood Helm and Ogre Forged Hauberk, as well as the hunter version of the Royal Seal of Eldre’Thalas. I still need to get Leggings of Destruction (best item name ever) and Tarnished Elven Ring. Honestly, that place is loot heaven, at least for hunters. I’m not sure why it’s so hard to find a group - maybe everyone else got their fill while I was avoiding the game, but surely there are people hitting 60 all the time who want to go. That +crit mail armor is arguably as good as or better than the comparable Beaststalker set pieces, except perhaps for the belt (Warpwood Binding).

Normally this is the kind of thing that goes over in the much-neglected links column, but I need to emphasize that you must, you must download and listen to the two mp3s on this page.

I continue to be interested in Audioscrobbler, as its record of my listening habits becomes more accurate. Of course, two weeks of information is really just a drop in the bucket. I’d like to see its recommendations for me a year from now.

And speaking of, um, scrobbling, I know I should update my book list. I wish it were automatic - I’ve read tons of stuff since the last time I posted anything, but I never get around to adding it. I’m working on a new tool to make things simpler, but free time is not something of which I have a great deal. A while back, I read Ender’s Game and loved it (I may have mentioned it at the time). Recently, I tried to read Ender’s Shadow, and hated it. I started it twice and gave up on it, and haven’t picked it up since.

I needed to go to the bank during lunch hour yesterday, which is never a good idea. Not only was the line really, really long, but I got stuck between some moron with crappy earbuds and bad taste in music in front of me, and a creature making horrifying mouth noises behind me. Body odor was also involved. It was bad enough that I actually left the line to get away from them.

My Wednesday night drinking is off for the summer, since most of the people I drink with are on an academic schedule for one reason or another. This is both good and bad. It’s bad because I don’t get to drink on Wednesdays with my friends for a couple of months, but it’s good because Thursday hangovers are pretty rough. We used to go out on Thursday nights, which are like college Fridays, so I could just sleep it off the next day. Now, not only do I have to get through the following day without dying, I still have to come back the day after that. Which is, in fact, today.

That’s what I get for graduating, I guess.

The weather’s been so perfect lately - it continues to feel a lot more like October than like May. I wish it had been this cool during my (outdoor) Commencement last year. I guess I’ll be happy enough if we just get a few more nice days before the awfulness begins.

79 honorable kills for the past two days, and most of them are all mine, or more than half mine. Hunters, after all, are not known for AoE, and I haven’t been grouped during any of it so I’m not getting kills from anyone else. Of course, I did kill the same tauren shaman many, many times. So I’m sure my contribution points are nothing to be excited about.

Much better PVP last night at Orgrimmar. There were twentysomething Alliance players and a slightly larger number of Horde going back and forth between the city gates and the auction house. Chris, despite his Forsaken affiliations, acknowledged that we were pretty badass when we held the entrance for two hours, even after becoming significantly outnumbered. There weren’t enough of us that we felt up to trying for Thrall, but there’s always next time. He’s already been killed twice on my server in the past week, so maybe we should leave him alone.

Near the end of the fighting, I died well inside Orgrimmar and when I got back to my corpse I discovered the the line of Alliance had been pushed back to outside the gates, leaving me as a wisp surrounded by hostile 60s. Eventually I resurrected and tried to convince them that I was an orc, but I think the elf ears gave me away. I did manage to get my corpse a few yards closer to the gate, and the second time I resurrected I succeeded in mounting my epic and making my escape.

I had a little time on Sunday to play Warcraft for the first time in a very long while. I actually had a lot of fun - I farmed enough to get the last of my epic mount money, then went on an UBRS raid. I tried to get some PVP at Tarren Mill by slaughtering Deathguards for half an hour, but the Horde weren’t biting. I found out last night that the reason is that everyone looking for a fight now hangs out in front of Orgrimmar. It’s a little pathetic that the Horde on my server won’t fight us unless we show up flagged at the gate of their capital city and are outnumbered, but whatever. I gather that on some servers the opposite is true, I guess because of the population disparity, but that’s not the case on mine. I did get some good fighting in before everyone stopped doing anything, and we all just stood there staring at each other out of hunter range until our flags went away. Pretty sad.