“Don't start me to talkin, I'll tell everything I know”
-Sonny Boy Williamson
So this past week at TechEd, while hanging out and doing my thing (whatever that is), I met the fabulous Jeff Julian. After arguing about some random stuff (those of you that know him will not be surprised that our first conversation started with arguing (just kidding) (well, ok, maybe I am not kidding, but see this is the exact reason I didn’t want to blog to begin with. I will get to that later though)), we got onto a topic that I find much more interesting than random stuff. World of Warcraft. That’s right, I said it. World of Warcraft.
Jeff came up with the idea that I should blog about my experiences, or more importantly, my Night Elf Ravindra’s experiences in the Warcraft World. So after much prodding, here I am. Blogging.
Before I get on to that topic though, let me tell you a bit about myself. I am a Senior Marketing Manager at Microsoft, and my specific area of focus is the developer community in the US. I am the primary liaison to INETA for North America, I manage the Codezone program for the US, and I work closely with other internal teams at Microsoft (especially the Developer Evangelists) helping to organize, collaborate on, promote and otherwise manage community programs for devs. This November will be the 6 year mark for me at the company.
Ok, enough about work stuff and back to WoW as those of us in the know call it. I have only been playing it for a few months now, but I love it. I find that it meets so many of my basic needs as a person. When I am pissed, I can go kill a bunch of stuff and that makes me feel better. I mean seriously, what makes a person feel better than leaving carnage in their wake? When I feel like I am not making any progress on things in my own life and need a little boost in the accomplishment department, I can easily go complete a quest and check something off the old quest log, which makes me feel like I am making progress of some kind. If I need some help getting something done, you know, like killing Bloody Buccaneers down in Booty Bay and I don’t have the necessary experience yet to do it on my own, I can find a neat group of temporary friends to help me, thus making me feel better about mankind in general, while also avoiding any sort of long term commitments. When I feel like spreading some good will, I can go help some people that are a few levels below me. If I want to do some shopping, I can just go hop on a hippogryph and head over to Stormwind City or my favorite city, Iron Forge, and there are no traffic jams. Although in general, I am not much of a shopper real world or on WoW.
So anyway, to finish off this first post, as I mentioned earlier, I have been very resistant to blogging over the years, not because I didn’t really have anything to say, but more because I have way too much to say and I felt (and for the most part, still do feel) like I could minimize the damage I could create for myself by not broadcasting everything I have to say to a wider audience than whoever happens to be standing near me at the time I feel compelled to say whatever it is I want to say. After arguing about blogging for a while, Jeff convinced me that I should try it out, and that I could stay mainly on the topic of WoW since I love it so much and it is relatively safe for me to run my mouth about.
So who knows, maybe if things turn out well, this can be some sort of cathartic experience for me as I can occasionally get some things off my chest (isn’t that what most people do with their blogs?), provide some info as to the goings on at MS, and most importantly talk about how awesome WoW is, thus earning my geek title.
And to be honest, I can probably for the most part still have a certain amount of safety from myself just due to the fact that most blogs are not widely read so there is no reason to expect mine will be either.
I guess we will see if my interest sticks and I finally embrace blogging. If it does, the next post should be about Ravi, as I like to call her. Just whatever you do, don’t ask me about her Elf dance…