I’ve been a Warcraft player since the very first Real Time Strategy Game and an enthusiastic World of Warcraft player for about nine years. When Sarah Peed from Del Rey got in touch early last year to ask if I was interested in writing a tie-in novel for Blizzard, I was intrigued, to say the least. When it was revealed that this was to be about Illidan, I could not refuse. Read more…

I finally gave in and took out a subscription to Spotify. I’ve probably listened to more new music in the past couple of weeks than I have in the previous couple of years. I haven’t really regarded myself as a big music fan since my teens, when I was obsessed with 70s rock. (Well, it was the 70s.) Even so I have somehow over the years acquired well 40 Gb of MP3s from iTunes, Amazon and my old CD collection. If you combine this with the 40 GB plus of RPG PDFs I have acquired over the years, my gigabytes Read more…

I bought this machine for my upcoming trip. I don’t fancy traipsing through hostels and tourist areas with a top end MacBook Pro or a Surface Pro and this looked like a good solution. It was very cheap– less than £170 for the basic version and just over £200 for the 64 Gb version which is what I bought. It’s light and it comes with Windows 10. It’s basically the modern equivalent of the netbook. What I did not expect was that I would like the machine so much. It looks great. It’s well built and it has an excellent Read more…

I’ve not put up anything here since the start of the month. So whatever happened to daily posting? In part, life got in the way. A sick child, an interesting business meeting that overran by a couple of hours, a deadline and suddenly days had gone by without anything being done on the blog. That was only part of it though. Some of it was intentional– honest! I wanted to see how things went without the discipline (or perhaps tyranny) of the daily post. The answer is that, as far as my work is concerned, they went very well. I Read more…

I’ve had a number of comments and private messages about my rant about my MacBook Pro. People have pointed out that their Macs are reliable and they’ve never had a problem with them. People have also told me that their PCs are very unreliable. My initial response has been that’s all well and good, but it’s not been my experience. On reflection my sour response is not really fair. My friends and commenters are simply telling me what has happened to them, just as I am telling them what has happened to me. They clearly live in a world where Read more…

Warning– middle aged man ranting about first world problem alert. I am just venting about my recent problems with my Mac. Feel free to ignore. After the last couple of operating system releases, the wifi on my Mac has always been hosed. It’s been glitchy, with dropped connections, greyed out icons for Dropbox and OneDrive and browsers telling me that they cannot connect. It was bad after the El Capitan upgrade but this last week it has been plain awful. My Mac won’t connect to the Internet at all in the co-working space I frequent, and it struggles at home. Read more…