I'm on my way to the Penny Arcade Expo (www.penny-arcade.com) for three days of nerdtacular fun!

This is my first time going to PAX. I'm so excited!

I always said I wasn't going to be one of those "unboxing" people, but that's before Apple started becoming so awesome.

Plus, it's a fun way to break up the working day.

The iPad is a great little device. I was worried I would have nothing to use it for, and yet in less than a day I've read Moby Dick on it on the bus home from work, looked up new movies and watched trailers with my wife on the couch while watching TV after dinner, streamed video from my Media Center using Air Video before I went to bed, and watched professional Starcraft (MSL Round of 8!) games on it while getting ready for work in the morning.

I think it's part of my life now.

After having driven into Silverpine Forest last night, I decided to stop at a convenient farmer's cottage. I woke up early in the morning, eager to explore. First thing I found was a field of pumpkins!

There was a lonely Lich floating in the middle of an abandoned field a short distance to the west. Maybe she should ask Arthas out on a date?

After skirting a mine full of spiders, I ended up at the eastern coast of the continent. A wrecked Alliance ship greeted me. Those Alliance sailors need to take some navigation lessons!

Nearby was an undead fisherman. I didn't tell him that, as undead, we didn't need to eat anything, let alone fish!

I headed back east and found the main road again. A very sullen undead named Astor Hadren was in my way. He seemed preoccupied with something...

There was a road leading to a dock to my left, advertising a "Decrepit Ferry". Well, I waited for ten minutes for a ferry to show up, but it never did.

Then I realized that it was pointless to wait for any form of water transport, when I have amazing Frost powers!

I made it to the island, Fenris Isle. There was a scary looking abandoned castle on the island, but it had been overrun by stupid gnolls. I left and drove back over the lake to where I had started from.

Down the road a little bit I ran into a nice Undead village called the Sepulcher. Here I met a very nice Blood Elf named Eraldora. I told her I was on a driving tour of Azeroth and she told me to be careful not to crash!

Down south a little way was an entrance to a dark, fortified town called Pyrewood. It looked foreboding...

Inside was no better. The town was strangely constructed with huge wooden barriers constructed where the ground had been excavated, and the whole place was overrun by Worgen! None of them would even talk to me, so I drove up a winding road leading east...

At the end of the road was a strange stone with a glowing yellow rune, and over a bridge was a giant fortress! I had heard of this place. It is called Shadowfang Keep. I had to go in...

I entered Shadowfang Keep, fought my way through disgusting wolf warrens and jails, and climbed my way up to the top of the ramparts. It was worth it, as there was a very good view...

Going back inside, I met this giant wolf hound. He wasn't very pleased to see me.

The final room contained a mad mage named Arugal, who thought he was quite powerful, but he really wasn't.

After clearing out Shadowfang Keep, I drove back along the main road to the south. A sign pointed to a large township called Ambermill. Nobody here was really friendly, even when I went to the town hall. The major was some kind of Archmage called Ateric. He wouldn't talk to me at all, so I had to kill him.

Wandering around the hills were these poor dumb saps who called themselves "Dalaran Protectors". Apparently nobody had told them that Dalaran had not only been rebuilt, but had been teleported up to Northrend!

I left Ambermill and its motley crew of Dalaran rejects, and travelled south. My progress was impeded by a giant structure called the Greymane Wall, which I could find no way around or through.

Eventually I gave up and took the road back east. Farewell, Silverpine! I'll miss you!

Having left the Undercity, I drove up a bit to the north and entered the happy little town of Brill.

I parked my Hog and stopped in the inn. There was a group of Level 80s doing some role-playing inside. They didn't seem too pleased to see me. Hey, dudes, I'm just passing through town!

I headed out again to visit Brill's main attraction - the largest graveyard in all of Azeroth.

Here I am passing through one of Tirisfal's historic covered bridges:

Over to the west, nearing the mountains, I came across what looked like a well-guarded fortress:

Turns out it was the starting zone for all Undead, except for me for some reason, as I started out life as a Death Knight. I found a crypt and drove down the stairs, to be greeted by a rather morose innkeeper:

He thanked me for waking up and had some very trivial tasks for me. I had to tell him politely: "Thanks, but no thanks", then I headed out again.

I had a good time in Tirisfal, and my batling companion met several of his elder cousins. Nevertheless, it was time to move on south. With the massive bulk of the Undercity to my left, I continue on to newer pastures...

I'm a big fan of World of Warcraft, and I'm excited about the massive changes coming to the world of Azeroth with the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. However, knowing about these changes made me want to travel through Azeroth one last time, capturing some memories along the way.

I chose Amaethon, my Level 80 Death Knight, for this journey for several reasons, but mostly because he is an undead Death Knight who rides a Mechano-Hog. What better way to take a tour of a fantasy realm than on a self-built motorcycle?

Here is my planned route:

I started off in the Undercity, my home city. Before I set off, I thought I should get a haircut:

This is going to be a long trip, so I'd better stock up on supplies! Let's see... pet toys for my Tirisfal Batling, some flares, my collection of human Crusader skulls...

And with that I'm ready to leave the Undercity. In the distance you can see the Horde Zeppelins taking off from the towers, ready to fly heroes to and from Northrend and Kalimdor...

Well, I've fixed a couple of things. I installed the Help module for Views, and understood it a little bit more, enough to re-create the Knotty Geeks views module. Unfortunately it would work in Gallery Live Preview mode, but gave a 404 error when I clicked the link. I had to end up changing the link from jeremyreimer.com/views/knottygeeks to jeremyreimer.com/audio/knottygeeks, and then magically it worked again. Maybe it just needed a /views/ subdirectory to work, because I had an /audio/ subdirectory already.

Then I fixed my Book problems, where my entire book hierarchy had gone missing. This is a known issue, and the solution is actually not that hard:

1.) drop table book in D6 (if there are no diffs to your backup of D5)
2.) reimport table book from D5
3.) run update_6000 for the book module (2nd page of update, Select Version, choose 6000 in the drop-down-box for book)
4.) check your book hierarchy

I took my original full database backup and restored it to new database called 'backup'

CREATE backup;
USE backup;
SOURCE dbcontent.sql;

Then I exported just the "book" table:

$ mysqldump backup book > book.sql

Then dropped the table from the Drupal 6 database

USE mydbname;
DROP table book;

Then just re-imported it from the book.sql file

$ mysql mydbname < book.sql

And then ran update.php from my site, and selected "6000" from the "book" table, and voila!

Now that everything is working, I'm going to stop fiddling with things.

I found a better theme at the Drupal Theme Garden. The theme is called Ad Novus. I had to tweak the font sizes a bit, and I took out the textured page background and shifted the banner up a bit (the original had way too much screen real-estate devoted to the page banner).

I've re-installed the various modules I needed to get Audio (for Knotty Geeks) pages to work again, but there is a big problem with the Knotty Geeks View. I converted it to Drupal 6 format, but it didn't work, and now it just shows the entire blog. The new AJAX-based view editor doesn't work at all, and just spits out a Javascript error whenever you try to do something. I changed it to a non-AJAX view, which apparently a lot of people do, but now I'm at the point where I am completely unable to comprehend what any of the options mean. I think the Drupal people know this, as they suggest installing a help module on the View editing screen. Thanks, guys, but couldn't you just have made it usable in the first place?

The other huge thing, and something that really annoyed me, is that my book, Edge of Infinity, got completely lost. The pages are all still there, but the chapter structure just disappeared. Apparently this is a known bug! The solution involves exporting the entire table from the old database, and importing it manually! And nobody is fixing the problem! Unbelievable!

I really like Drupal, but it seems like they are pretty sloppy when it comes to writing the upgrade scripts for new versions. It weakens my trust in their whole code maintenance strategy, to be honest.

You'll notice the site looks a little weird, as the new "Zen" theme for Drupal 6 is a lot different (and more sparse) than the old Zen them for Drupal 5.x.

I also still have to enable a bunch of modules, like Audio and Captcha, but I think I've done enough damage for one day...

The Lego Server has been retired, and my blog is now running on a much faster P4 server in a boring box.

Everything else is exactly the same--the external IP, URLs, content, everything. Which is why it's a bit weird that suddenly I am seeing ten times the usual traffic. I'm assuming this is just the robots and spiders that found a hiccup and are now reindexing the site, but still, it's a bit odd. Seeing something like "70 guests online" is cool!

One way, according to Lulu.com, was to use their services to create an ePub version of your book for you, now for a limited time at 50% off!

I was excited to see this, until I saw the price. It was about $350. Even at half off, my time isn't worth that much.

But the blog post on Lulu said that there were many free options for creating ePub books, so I looked into them. I found a program called Calibre that was available for Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux.

At first I thought I could just import the PDF that I had created from Lulu, but that didn't work too well--the result had the page numbers smushed directly into the main text, didn't have chapter dividers, and generally looked ugly.

There was talk of some macros for Microsoft Word that would create an ePub-friendly document for importing, but here I ran into the horrible truth that Word 2008 for Macintosh does not support Visual Basic macros! I thought about trying it on my PC, but they suggested a different solution.

Word has a Save As HTML feature. It creates horrible code and everybody hates it, but here I thought it just might work. The Calibre documentation suggested using the "Save as Web page (filtered)" which creates much cleaner code, but it seemed like the Macintosh version of Word didn't have this feature! I turns out that it is just labeled a little differently in the Mac version. You select "Save as Web Page (.htm)" and then select "Save only display information into HTML".

The result is an .HTM file that can be imported into Calibre and produces a perfect ePub book, suitable for uploading to Lulu.

Who would have thought that Word's Save As HTML would be actually useful? Well, me, as it turns out. I once used that feature to create a single-sourced HTML Help document from a 100-page Word manual, but that involved some custom programming and is a completely different story. I'll tell that one another time.

Here is the link for the ePub version again: http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/edge-of-infinity/8519263