Who put the help in 'help'desk?

Last week I finally managed to convince my better half to accept a free trial for World of Warcraft. I already got him to play Diablo 3 and Aion, so unsurprisingly he quite enjoyed himself, running around in Azeroth. Subsequently he went for an official trial account and I got 10 days of free play time on my existing account. Lovelorn, here I come! Or so I thought...

Username: check
Password: check
Authenticator code: check

I managed to log in without a hitch, until suddenly a message appeared on my screen, saying I had been inactive for too long, and my account was blocked as a precaution. Very considerate of Blizzard to be so protective of my account. All I had to do was reactivate the account, right? Well... that sounded a wee bit easier than it actually turned out to be.

Enter your first name here: Bugger, that was 10 years ago! Did I use my full name? My initials? My player name?
Enter your last name here: Same story, did I use my full name? My last name? Was there even a last name required back in the day?

Sigh.

So I decided to try the most likely combinations, which soon led to the message: "Too many attempts, your account has now been blocked permanently." Nooooooooooooooooo! "Please contact our helpdesk" *dead link*

Would you like to chat to one of our helpdesk employees? Yes! Please login here. Sigh.
Would you like our employees to contact you by phone? YES! Please login here. More sigh.
Would you like to send a ticket (= help request)? YES!!! You may login here, or send a ticket without logging in. Hallelujah!

Within 4 hours I got a friendly yet automated reply, listing the additional information required to reopen my account. Naturally, this came from a no-reply@ account, which meant nowhere to send it to. Ticket #2...

All in all it took 3 days to reactivate the account, but yay, Lovelorn's back. And I got a pretty panda!!

Pretty clouds

Maybe it's because we are so tiny and therefore not only very grounded but also extremely close to the ground, but gnomes tend to love clouds. As sister Agnes would say:

Today the sky was adorned with some of the prettiest clouds I have ever seen. I tried to capture them in all their stunningness, but they were quite far away and the fact that we were speeding down the highway in Perry didn't help much either.

Anyway, there was this absolutely beautiful cauliflower cloud, which was pretty much an entire landscape of its own:

And there was a humongous cloud on the other side as well:

 

I'll happily admit to watching movies and series, so it's probably a bit too much Independence Day, but I swear, there was a UFO hiding in there!!

And the bit on the right contains a lovely topping of lenticular clouds.

I don't believe I'd ever seen those before, but the thing is, you usually don't notice these things until you actually find out about their existence. I came across the phenomenon lenticular cloud when I was looking for the name of a mindbogglingly odd cloud I came across when I was in Denmark:

It turned out this particular formation is called a Kelvin-Helholtz formation. Which was of course immediately added to the Gnomish Dictionary!