I don’t mind coordinating goals with friends in games, but often with strangers I find only extremes. In my experience Pick-Up-Groups (PUGs) go either very well or very disastrous and when disaster strikes it’s not just the failure of the game challenge that gets me down, but a feeling that I just wasted an hour, or more, of my time when I could have been doing something fun.

In 2004 World of Warcraft popped up and while I hadn’t played any of the Warcraft games my friends were excited about it and as a result I started my adventures with them on day one. World of Warcraft received its success because it targeted a demographic no other MMO had ever thought to consider, the casual player. For the first time in an MMO you could solo your way through quest after quest, level after level, achieve max level and still have things to do. It was great. I didn’t have to rely on five other people who didn’t want to do what I did and each had an agenda, but I could choose when I wanted to interact with others I got along with.

For those looking for more of an end-game challenge, forty-person raids were available. Groups participating in these raids, such as the original Blackrock Spires and Molten Core were tough for my Warlock to get into. It took a lot of convincing, I had to install Teamspeak and Ventrilo, purchase a headset and learn to coordinate with others who often had very different goals than me. These goals mostly focused on loot dispersal issues and the complaints from others as well as myself on progression versus favoritism versus DKP (Dragon Killing Points). The game eventually lost its fun factor for me at this time and I canceled my subscription.

However, Blizzard did some studying and found that only a very small percentage of their players were participating in this epic raid content. This caused them to consider the logistics and time consumption that went into organizing a forty-person raid and by the release of Burning Crusade raid content was reduced to ten and twenty-five person instances which still allowed challenges for players, but with much less hassle. I came back to WoW at this point, said goodbye to my Undead Warlock and began a new as a Blood Elf Paladin. This was also the first time our guild of friends began to successfully run our own raids, with no outsiders, and eventually things became farm status for us and I was in love with the game.

Due to work and moving states I took another break, but returned in Wrath of the Lich King. At this point many had started to become burned out on WoW and as a result I began taking part in my first PUGs. For me this was a bit rough as once again I had to spend time organizing others with different goals to cooperate together. Fortunately Blizzard introduced a thing called the Looking for Group tool, which evolved into the current Dungeon Finder Tool that by Cataclysm was perfected into a great way to skip the often time consuming logistics of organizing a group, go to specific dungeons and ultimately keep me playing the game rather than trying to micromanage other players. The other element of this tool meant that if my PUG experience was anything less than favorable I had the option of leaving and joining another group quickly. I was hooked to WoW.

At some point, and I’m not entirely sure when, I gave City of Heroes and later on City of Villains a try. A fun game with a great character generator, but it didn’t feel like a finished game and I never subscribed to it after my initial free play period.

Shortly after Cataclysm I decided to try out other MMOs. It seemed as if a plethora of MMO titles were coming out and while I loved the game of WoW, the world and lore have never interested me. I can honestly tell you after seven years of playing WoW I don’t know or care to understand the relationship between the Horde and Alliance, I’m not sure who Arthas is other than I killed him sort of, Sylvanas is this sexy chick who I think may be undead and the last thing I did in the game was essentially a genocide of many Egyptian looking creatures which I’m not sure why other than their names were red and someone wanted them dead.

So I left and began a journey through what I call MMOlandia. As someone who ran pen and paper role playing games in high school, and eventually created their own D20 based game, I was very excited to try DDO, Dungeons and Dragons Online. While I fortunately missed its subscription based release it’s Free-to-Play incarnation was entertaining for about a month. I quickly found myself stuck in a city with everyone else who after finishing the quests then did the same quests but with more difficulty, then again with higher difficulty, then again and again. My Cleric could only kill so many Rats and Gnolls on difficult before I just got tired of the repetition.

A friend of mine then talked me into LOTRO, Lord of the Rings Online. I had been a fan of the books as well as the movies so what wasn’t too like? While I admit my Hobbit Minstrel was an interesting class to play, the game made me think of WoW rather than Lord of the Rings, though a game not as polished as WoW.

Then Rift came along and everything changed for me. The class diversity, the auto-grouping, outdoor raid system, and multiple paths for loot progression – I was in love. I felt like all my favorite things from WoW had been improved and put into this game. It was fantastic. Unfortunately I couldn’t convince any of my friends and guild mates to make the jump to Rift. To them it wasn’t that the game wasn’t better, it was simply that so much time had been invested in WoW that to leave or even try another fantasy based MMO just didn’t make sense to them. To a guild of friends who had spent seven years of their life together online, WoW was essentially our own version of Facebook where we could chat and catch up regardless of where our real lives had taken us.

So with Rift out of the way I decided to check out space. Star Trek Online came out and as a fan of the Original Series and Next Generation, and with a two hundred dollar lifetime subscription offer, I gave it a shot. It reminded me of City of Heroes. I liked it, but there wasn’t enough going on in the game to get me to keep playing. Two years later it’s a much more polished game, but it’s still lacking content to the point where I’m glad it’s going Free-to-Play and I’ll be getting an allowance to buy fluff things in the game and not have to spend real money.

EVE was my next adventure into space and a game I really wanted to like. The ships are beautiful, space feels very much like how I imagine space and ship logistics feel very plausible. While I’ve always played WoW on a PVP server and enjoy Battlegrounds in games that have them, I’m not a hardcore competitive gamer. EVE has some PVE elements to it, but the game quickly lets you know it’s all about PVP. Never trust anyone, fire first and don’t fly anything you can’t afford to lose. It’s a well made game, but not a game I could support or get any of my friends to support. These days I much prefer the likes of LoL, League of Legends, for my competitive game play as it’s quick and fast and doesn’t cost me a subscription.

Things then went in an entirely different direction for me and I began to try numerous F2P games from Perfect World. Jade Dynasty was very pretty and I like the feeling of playing in a world that reminds me of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but the game also had a lot of elements that just didn’t provide me with any fun factor after a while. Monsters never attacking me, quests that just focused on me killing ten, then ten more, then yet another ten more of whatever creature was in the zone got boring fast. I jumped to Forsaken World and found myself loving the look of my huge tits anime chick as she punched creatures in the face with a cross in her skimpy armor. However, like much of my feelings with many anime it’s only entertaining the first couple panty shots then I want to watch something else. Rusty Hearts was installed on my system and then deleted.

Finally, this winter Star Wars came out and as I’ve already written on I find it to be a great game. It’s missing a few key pieces, such as a Dungeon Finder, or should I say Flashpoint Finder tool, but based on the developer blog posts they’ll be patching in many new goodies over the next few months. But the real reason for my excitement with this game is that our WoW guild has taken interest and we have many of our key players setting aside their Fireland epics to pick up blasters and lightsabers.

So what will come with the rest of 2012 and beyond? I don’t know.

What I can tell you is that while I, and probably many of you out there are feeling burned out on the MMO genre in general, I don’t know if we MMO addicts will ever really stop playing the MMO’s we like. I can honestly say I’ll probably pick up my WOW subscription for a little while when I can kill Panda players. I don’t really want to, but I will, log into EVE for the next two months to train skills because I paid forty dollars for a six month subscription that doesn’t end until March. I will probably log into Star Trek Online every few months to see what ship costumes I can buy. While I should probably support great game design companies like Trion Worlds, I probably won’t go back to Rift except for free weekends and instead I’ll continue to play Star Wars the Old Republic as long as my guild mates are playing.

Want to know more about my explorations in these worlds? Check out my reviews and articles on MMOSite and Examiner.

Stanford University’s Residential & Dining Enterprises’ projects was focused around migrating existing website content from their six university websites into Drupal and utilize the university’s newly developed Stanford Modern Theme. The fourteen month project began with discussions around developing new content and imagery versus relying on existing materials. Three web contractors including myself were involved with the project along with a project manager and each division’s director dedicated a project champion for their site’s migration plan.

Team San Jose’s project involved developing a new site from the ground up; built on Drupal; Thoughtmatrix was brought in to develop a custom theme for the site, while Cintara handled much of the User Interface Design. For this six month project I was originally brought in to project manage the development, setup the hosting environment on Amazon’s EC2, later on Rackspace, and facilitate content production and management for the site. After launch I took on site management for the following nine months.

Nugougo’s project was a one month development time to produce a site focused on investor specific information and existing customer product information. The site was built with Drupal along with some of the latest modules available on a cloud hosting environment. New developments are being discussed, but focus is currently on the development of new features for the mobile applications where I work on icon creation and color scheme design.

The Americans for the Arts is an organization that meets yearly within the San Jose area. As a preferred customer to Team San Jose we were tasked with creating a landing page for the group profile local art and cultural entertainment venues in the city. The landing page was created within a week from request along with an in-house graphic designer.

The National Forum for Black Public Administrators is an organization that meets yearly within the San Jose area. As a preferred customer to Team San Jose we were tasked with creating a landing page for the group that would carry on their existing site’s theme, though profile local businesses and events related to the group’s interests. The landing page was created within a week from request along with an in-house graphic designer.

Having worked for Colliers International for over eight years I developed many featured property websites for the commercial real estate brokerage’s available listings. Stallion Mountain Golf Course was one of my favorites. Created in HTML with Photoshop touch up work on the aerial; the design was simple yet extremely efficient. The hosting environment for other sites utilized ASP on Windows .Net framework.

Excessive sweating (hyperhidrosis) is a rare, but not uncommon condition that often affects the palms, underarms, feet and face. The condition can cause embarrassment and interfere with daily activities by sufferers often having to change their clothing multiple times within a single day. Since hyperhidrosis can be a side effect other conditions, such as with “night sweats”, you can not self-diagnose yourself. People with hyperhidrosis sweat excessively only when awake and regardless of external factors such as activity and temperature surroundings.

But there are a number of effective treatments for the disorder listed below.

In most cases of Hyperhidrosis, sweat is isolated to a specific area of the body, such as palms, feet, forehead or underarms. While rare, it’s not uncommon for the condition to cover the entire body, or for any treatment to cause other areas of the body to begin to sweat excessively. Therefore, many treatments are designed to target specific body areas rather than the whole body.

Excessive Sweat Treatments for specific body areas:

• MiraDry, a non-invasive treatment option that provides permanent reduction in underarm sweat by using electromagnetic energy to eliminate excess sweat glands
• Iontophoresis – specifically targets the hands and feet areas by passing a low-level electric current through the skin and is repeated every so often based on the individuals condition
• Antiperspirants target the underarm area. Drysol is one of many types of antiperspirants applied daily to the underarm area.

Excessive Sweat Treatments for any body area:

• Botox injections – these can temporarily paralyze sweat glands for an average of six months per single injection and can usually be given underarms but can also be injected on the face, hands, feet or groins
• Endoscopic thoracic sympathectomy (ETS) where the nerves controlling the sweat glands might be removed and skin grafting may be required. It’s often considered a last resort option when the above are not available
• Oxybutynin (brand name Ditropan), propantheline bromide (Probanthine) and benztropine (Cogentin) are several anticholinergic drugs designed to treat hyperhidrosis, although it has important side effects, which include drowsiness, visual symptoms and dryness in the mouth and other mucous membranes.

Natural Excessive Sweat Treatments

• Certain diet habits and over the counter products such as baking soda have been known to help some people or even acupuncture. If you’re apprehensive about consulting your physician, this may be something you want to try first.

Treatments to Avoid

• Antidepressants and anxiolytics were formerly used on the belief that primary hyperhidrosis was related to an anxious personality style. Essentially it was prescribed to relax and calm overly stressed personalities. If you have excessive stress and sweat excessively, this may NOT be Hyperhidrosis. Hyperhidrosis is a medical condition that occurs when outside factors, such as physical activity, stress and temperature are all considered to be within normal limits.

If you’ve used any of the treatments above or know of a new treatment option, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll update the lens with more information.