Diablo 3: 60 and Climbing

Defeating Diablo might mean beating the game to some, and even more to people who hit 60, but it's far from over.

3 Week Gold Challenge: Raise as much money as possible (by this, meaning actual cash as well as gold) via equipment and commodity sales as well as loot drops in three weeks. 1 dollar will covert to 3.4 million gold based on current conversion rates.

There was almost no way to do something like this after one playthrough, so the last week was spent bringing up a character to lvl 60.

Notes:

• The campaign can by any means be called 'short' - it takes approximately 8-10 hours to complete at MP-2 if you're just completing the main objectives. (Note: There are achievements for completing each Act in less than 1 hour.)
• Leveling up here is quite quick (approximating 30 minutes with the proper skills, up to lvl 50, at which point you need to be on Hell difficulty to level up effectively)
• MP-2 is quite manageable with normal gear, after that point you should overgear via auction house.
• Was xp farming at the rate of 740k EXP / hour on Nightmare difficulty. and approx 2.75M xp/hr peak at Hell.

Current Strat I'm Using:

Note: It might not be the most effective, but works for me.

• Start game in normal mode (no MP), go up to lvl 10 or something.
• Accumulate enough gold to overgear via auction house (using Flawless Square gems for sockets)
• Play at MP-5, adjusting as necessary to get though the game by Lvl 30 or so. (If I'm doing a lot of overkill on enemies, MP is raised). Reduced to Normal after hitting 50 before Hell dif, and back up to MP-2 onwards.
• Accumulate as many subtle essence via blacksmith (by breaking it down) and sell via auction house (this sells for around 700 each at time of writing, far more than selling inferior magic items alone. If it's rare and has good stats, sell via AH.)
• My Barbarian Build for XP: here (Prior to inferno)
  • 1. Frenzy + Sidearm to build up rage quickly (and has high dps, with Sidearm more so)
  • 2. Rend + Ravage - used to take out standard mobs quickly. Note its total damage is 700% weapon dmg over 5 seconds, and MP level as well and dps was prioritized so it can take out common mobs on its own.
  • 3. Sprint + Marathon - to get from one enemy to the next faster.
  • 4. Revenge + Vengeance - to build up fury + regen health faster between mobs
  • 5. Battle Rage + Maurader's Rage for the dmg bonus. (Latter swapped with War Cry in Inferno)
  • 6. Ignore Pain + Ignorance is Bliss, since damage taken is quite high in some places.
  • Passives to increase atk, def, and regens rage.

Results:

The challenge concluded on January 6, 2013, raising over 110 million gold in the process, and not killing a single creature in the last week, relying entirely on gem and item flipping. The most successful sale was Depth Diggers (bought at 12M, sold at 36M - 9.99 USD before fees and converted.)

(Sea) Turtles Board

Silly Eagle, you're not a spirit turtle. (Placeholder image, waiting for Spirit Turtle to arrive)

Can someone tell me how it matches up? (notices turtles) Oh, right, the release of the Spirit sea turtle (also appears in several places on the board). Wonder what it does...

Strategy: This is hard to gap effectively since there's little room to gap on top, and they roll slower towards the bottom, making it less effective. Even more so to curve clear since the second curve will almost always get in the way. Use a Spirit Eagle and focus on the fruit.

I had a very hard time getting a 10m here, relying on a lucky 2:08 et for the eagle. Let's see how well the turtle performs - hopefully it releases this week.

Recommended Powers: Gapple Sauce, Epic Fruit, x3, Timelord, Spirit Eagle. Use Combo Corn if you have it, it helps a lot when it comes to gaps.

If Spirit Turtle is available, use Curvy Fries, Timelord, Epic Fruit, and Inferno Frog. Five hot frog shots every ten seconds can take out a curve pretty quickly.

Sea Turtle: Coming out of the deep, it is rumored that it can instantly fire hot frog shots after consuming a fruit as well as doubling your speed bonus.

Near-Finals Week Treats

This is actually sweeter than it looks.

Who sets aside a box of treats (more specifically, cookies and pastries, one per person). My professor for my grad class does. He offers the box to everyone, and only one person comes up. Then slowly, another person gets up and grabs one, and another...

Sugar to keep awake during class, he says. In reality, I'll need this stuff to keep awake at night while studying before finals, that's more important.

Excel VBA Macros: Borders and Formatting

Borders seem very complicated when you record a macro for borders, do any kind of text of text formatting, etc., and look at it in Visual Basic. There are a few ways to simplify this.

Border Formatting Example

You record a macro, make a selection, and set borders. You immediately get something like this:

    Selection.Borders(xlDiagonalDown).LineStyle = xlNone
    Selection.Borders(xlDiagonalUp).LineStyle = xlNone
    With Selection.Borders(xlEdgeLeft)
        .LineStyle = xlContinuous
        .ColorIndex = 0
        .TintAndShade = 0
        .Weight = xlMedium
    End With
    With Selection.Borders(xlEdgeTop)
        .LineStyle = xlContinuous
        .ColorIndex = 0
        .TintAndShade = 0
        .Weight = xlMedium
    End With
    ...

Need a TL;DR? Essentially it is

1. Removing any diagonal borders through the cell, and
2. replacing each border with a medium size black line.

The details are:

• .Borders(Direction) indicate which border you want changed.
  • xlDiagonalDown affects the line from the top-left to bottom-right of each cell selected.
  • xlDiagonalUp affects the line from the bottom-left to top-right of each cell selected.
  • xlEdgeLeft, xlEdgeRight, xlEdgeUp, and xlEdgeDown affects the left, right, top, and bottom borders of your selection. That means it treats your selection as a box, and the sides are what the code affects, see the above image for details.
  • xlInsideVertical and xlInsideHorizontal affects all the other vertical and horizontal lines (respectively) in your selection that the above didn't cover.
  • If you don't specify a direction, then all
• The parameters you can set for borders are:
  • .LineStyle controls the line style. See the top for details.
  • .Weight controls how thick the line will be.
  • .Color controls the color of the line. You can use RGB format.
  • .TintAndShade controls tint and shade, but they can be ignored if you're using RGB values.

You don't have to stick to just the current selection, it can be modified so that you can change the borders for any cell without having to select it (and there are some good uses for this), so you could substitute Selection with stuff like:

    With Worksheets("Sheet1").Cells(6, 1)              ' This way you can use variables when accessing. 
       .Borders(xlEdgeBottom).LineStyle = xlContinous
    End With

- OR -

    With [D2].Borders(xlEdgeTop)
       .LineStyle = xlContinous
       .Color = RGB (255,0,0)
    End With

Text Formatting

The same can be done with Selection.Font (the parameters above work on this as well). I am listing only important values.

• .Color controls the color of the test (use RGB)
• .PatternColor controls the color of the background (use RGB)
• .HorizontalAlignment controls text horizontal alignment (equal to xlLeft, xlRight, or xlCenter)
• .HorizontalAlignment controls text horizontal alignment (equal to xlTop, xlCenter, or xlBottom)
• .WrapText = (true to wrap)
• .ShrinkToFit = (true to apply)
• .Orientation = (what angle to rotate it by)
• .AddIndent = (true to indent)
• .IndentLevel to determine how far to indent (whole numbers only)
• .MergeCells to merge or remove the merge on the affected cell(s). To not do anything with the cells structure, don't include it.
• .Name = (font name, enclosed in quotes)
• .Size = (font size)
• .Strikethrough = (True to make it strikethrough)
• .Superscript = (True to make it superscript)
• .Subscript = (True to make it subscript)
• .OutlineFont = (True to put an outline on text, but it apparently does nothing)
• .Shadow = (True to put a shadow on text, but it apparently does nothing)

The UOP Banquet Sounds of Service

Each item, save music instruments, are raffled off.

This banquet - not like any other. Unlike last year, it has more interclub students than new members (at least 2:1). It occurs in Grace Covell, but in a different room. (At first sight - it was a dark room, yule log, was it really a nice party going on? Nope, it was actually in another room.)

Good to see there was another historian - it seems like they must have dSLRs, but I was dissuaded in the past to carry one due to its large weight - a hybrid like the Sony DSC RX-100 would suit my needs perfectly - provided I can afford it, of course.

Events:

• Two icebreakers (or minigames) - Song Poncho (exactly the same as the event last year as a family competition, including the word) and Ipod Wars (guess the song)
• Song played associated with each new member (that was their favorite song) - note it was planned (but wasn't done) last year's banquet.
• Chicken Platters - despite the wording, they're exactly the same as every other chicken dish in past UOP Banquets.
• The raffles - the violins were just for show, but tickets were buyable for everything else at a quarter per ticket.
• The piano was played... by a Sac Student.

Note: I will be unable to make it to the next day's event (Santa's Gift of Service), due to lack of transportation options* and as such the related blog post will be unavailable.

A Clockwork Board

Beetle runs like Clockwork here.

It's like a remade version of Major Mouthful. Only the curves are slightly shorter, and you can't use the same technique for double gapping like in the previous island. With gapple sauce, however, you can get more per double gap. And score much higher than you usually would (My PB here is nearing 15 million.)

Ginger Up is now available, where the only thing it does is... well, prevent the hot frog meter from going down, but that's about it. (Note: Just because the hot frog meter doesn't go down doesn't mean the speed of your balls won't either.)

Strategy: A medium sized gap near the end of the curve (or two, if you're fast) should do the trick. Do double tapping after that point, for up to 250k per double gap. Make sure that the curve is two layers deep before gapping, or your gap shot bonus will decrease significantly. Fruit shouldn't be a main goal here - there's at least two spots where you have to go through two layers of balls to get to it.

Recommended Powers: x3, Time, Warp Ball, Gapple Sauce, Spirit Beetle. You may sub Warp Ball for Wild Shot if it works for you.

Black Friday Shopping - including Costco

When it comes to hard drives, Costco apparently sells out 30 minutes before the store officially opened.

Black Friday sales start today. No lines like last year at least in Stockton (I heard about the 'no camping' rule until 10pm), but to compensate stores opened really early. By that, meaning some stores started their sales as early at 8PM - in which waiting lines formed inside the store to get that 100 dollar TV (see note at bottom). Black Friday sales just went from starting overnight... to last night.

I've also gotten Diablo 3 in an attempt to cover the costs. (Note: it's tough but possible to sell your in-game items for real cash) I'll have to try that during Winter Break though. Just a a few weeks away...

TV Recommendations: I typically use Vizio and Sony - more expensive, but also better in picture quality. You might find extremely cheap HDTVs during the sale, but they lack slightly in a few areas.

Additional Hard Drives: Costco had them at 3TB for $100, selling out very quickly due to 'overwhelming demand'. They actually opened before the advertised 9am date - and others got to them first. It's good to see that space isn't an issue anymore (note) - with this many drives the only major issue would be running out of drive letters to mount a drive at. I don't need all the space - redundancy is more of my interest. Placing them in a RAID 1 config would be a much better use for them.