Breaking Windows

Radiant is the latest site I have completely developed in Movable Type. It is also the last site I create in MT 3.3. Shortly after starting production on this site, two other sites went into production, and I have started them out with MT 4.1 and man I love it.

The process of developing a web site using 4.1 is miles ahead of what it was with 3.3. It is truely outstanding how far Movable Type has come.

This site utilizes a message board and a mailing list. And it has a light-weight events calendar that I coded in MT

If you have been reading my Twitter feed, you would know that I have had Arkanoid DS for about a week now. It is just that I have been playing it too much to really blog about. I talked about it on this week's show, and will have a full review up soon.

I ordered it before Christmas from Play-Asia.com, of course, but it did not arrive until last Friday. I wonder if it is selling well. I bet it is.

It comes with a paddle controller. You plug it into the GBA slot, and it makes Arkanoid DS into Arkanoid from the arcade. Smashing fun time. 

If you import games from Japan, I highly recommend this one. 

Funny story: I shoot alltop.com an email asking to include us in their gaming.alltop.com aggregation page. I knew Alltop was the brainchild of Nononina and Guy Kawasaki, but I did not expect a personal email from him.

But that is just what I got, and after a bunch of back-and-forth, BC Gaming is listed on their Gaming page -- which is a great list of gaming sites.

On their Gaming page if you click "Acknowledgements" my name is listed; pretty cool. Guy had not listed GamePolitics, which is a crime in itself, so I suggested them, too.

As Brian said on the radio show "we're Internet famous!" 

Dear god. Get this series out on DVD tomorrow guys.

The final chapter is freakin' hilarious, especially the outtakes at the end. Without spoiling anything, the two guys on the street fighting with the pan shot going up was too perfect. Total geek out moment.

This one is courtesy of Njiska, a picture of a screwdriver kit, not to be inserted into penis. It even has a (SFW) diagram on it. Never seen that warning before. Reminds me of the Bill Engvall "Here's Your Sign" skit that talks about the warning not to put a curling iron into any orphus, or to not use a blow dryer while sleeping.

So remember kiddies, don't insert precision screwdrivers into your penis. 

My G5 is three years old now, yes, I know, it is ancient in computer-years. But man is it a workhorse. Until I can't turn it on Friday. I run the Apple diagnostic CD and it tells me I have bad RAM. I took it to the Apple authorized dealer in Toledo, they tell me I have bad RAM.

So off to Crucial I go. The RAM arrived Monday. I installed it. Life is (basically) back to normal. Monday things were still very flakey and because of that, I did not get much done. Tuesday we were back to the races, a full day of work.

Although in man-hours I just completed Friday's work. So I am behind. I hate computers sometimes. What sucks even more is that my G5 is just outside of the three-year AppleCare Protection Plan I purchased for it.

Doesn't it always work like that? It is a conspiricy, I tell you. 

From the IEBlog entry:

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

I'm sorry, what? No, really, I just fell off my chair, can you please repeat that? 

Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do. 

Is it April 1 yet? No? No. Man, they even have a press release about it. I am shocked. And awe'd. I can't believe what I am reading. Seriously, go read the IEBlog post. Read it twice even (I had to).

This is ginormous news for web development. I guess it will put the IE Box Model hack out of business. Thank you Microsoft, for coming to your senses on creating a web browser. Now lets not fuck up the implimentation of IE8.

Do you think the standards-complient browsers such as Firefox and Opera had anything to do with this decision? 

News from the VGVN:

Thanks in part to the swift action of New Mexico members, the New Mexico House Business and Industry Committee rejected the bill on a 9-0 vote. Many New Mexico legislators had never heard a constituent defend video games. By taking this step, members across the country can actively participate in defending future legislation.

I didn't think that bill held any water.

Short film on people who hoard stuff. Good thing I don't know anyone like this.

That said, aside from the first guy who seems to have some idea of what he has, the other three are bonkers. The woman has toilet paper rolls saved. Seriously? It's about 20 minutes long, but a must see.

So, that tax rebate we're all getting at some point this year? Well, the government has decided to let you know about it via snail mail to the tune of $42 million.

The only logic I can see here is that with all of the identity theft and scams out there, they want to be sure to let people know this is legit. But seriously, if you don't already know about this, it's your own damn fault and you probably don't deserve the check in the first place. Then again, what if people think the letter is fake? Do we need to send them another letter letting them know the previous letter was real?

I meant to post this months ago. Boxxet.com (yea, me neither) has been listing Blogcritics articles. Not just Gaming, but Movies, Music, and other categories.

At first I just thought this was another content scraping service. Blogcritics is highly prone to that crap. But I talked to the owner and while they are technically scraping, they are doing the right thing - they do do not pull full text and they link back to the source article.

I'm a moron (save it, I know I opened myself up with that).

For 24 years, I've watched Ghostbusters regularly. It's one of those movies that I can recite pretty much every line right along with the actors. Same goes for Blazing Saddles (Anybody got a dime?), Animal House (Otis, my man!), and Ninja Turtles (You put anchovies on that thing...).

However, in all of my years, it never dawned on me that the "Keymaster" and "Gatekeeper" is a brilliant stand in for sexual innuendo. I watched it last night on HD Net (the premiere of the flick in HD around here; bring on the HD-DV... err, Blu-ray!) and damn it if the first time Dana asks Peter if he's the Keymaster it just came together. I blame my innocent youth and simply not paying enough attention, both excuses which I'm sure will come back to haunt me.

Thanks to Jason for sending this link in. Geared squarely at Matt of course, who is not a Shadow of the Colossus fan at all.

We laud innovative game designers for forcing us to make morally ambiguous choices about ourselves and the characters around us. Unfortunately for us in the post-post-pre-metamodern crowd, games as a medium fall short in one crucial, yet easily overlooked, way: They only go half of the distance. 

Good read, be sure and check it out. 

It took a week and a half to get the box from Microsoft after calling them to report what has become the inevitable these days. I called on the 27th of February, the box didn't arrive until the 7th of March.

The UPS guy who delivered it knew when I opened the door what had happened. "Had a 360 huh?" Yeah, yeah I did. He also told me they won't pick them up anymore and I had to take it to a UPS store to drop it off. I did it that day, the 7th. As of this very moment, the 13th, it's still not there. Yeah. This sucks.

Itchy. Tasty.

UPDATE: I do not appreciate being used in some embroiled WP v. MT argument. Thanks but no thanks (for those not playing along at home, I refer you to this post). My point in this post was not to voice frustration, merely point out the differences.

I have been a non-paying, and paying customer for years. Before MT cost money, I donated. Because I did that, I -- like many others who donated -- were given free personal licenses for MT 3 when it came out. That was a very kind gesture for them.

My comments below are a stepping off point, and I am not merely "trying" to use MTCS for a client. I am using MTCS for a client. I have yet to come upon a situation where I am butting heads with the software, the difference in MTCS being that many parts of the coding, specifically the use of many global templates, is not found in MTOS or MT 4.1 Commercial. Movable Type as a whole is very malleable software. I have been successful in using it in very different ways, and that is why I am a huge supporter of the platform.

I have had the opportunity to work with a number of the people at Six Apart, and they are great people to work with. Their paid support is amazing, and fast, and the user community over at the community forums and ProNet are equally amazing.

It is amazing to think that I have been using Movable Type for five years. I have created many sites and blogs in it. Now I am moving on to something bigger, much bigger: Movable Type Community Solution.

I cannot tell you who the client it, but lets go with "big secret client" for "big secret project."

If you have Bully Scholarship Edition for the Xbox 360, Rockstar today gave you one more reason to play the game - a patch that fixes a bunch of known bugs. The game has framerate issues, and a number of hard crashes.

There sits my Xbox,
deader than a box of rocks.

They don't care for you like I do,
and they probably treat you worse than a shoe.

I'm sure you'll be fixed soon,
and then we can back into a gaming boon.

Until then I say,

GET ME BACK MY GOD DAMN SYSTEM YOU LAZY BASTARDS!

Ahem. Sorry.

This is yet another reason why I hate most Facebook apps, they can be easily hacked. Nice programming guys, really. YouTube video via The Consumerist.

Why else do I hate Facebook apps? They have poor user interfaces, they clutter an otherwise clean site, they are just plain stupid and serve no purpose, they don't work correctly/ are half baked,.. I think I will stop there. 

Xbox 360 DRM is too restrictive to loyal, paying customers. We are not cheating bastards trying to pull one over on the behemouth Microsoft.

While I am glad to hear that Microsoft has done the right thing for a Consumerist reader, I have the same problem as one of the commenters on that article.

My referb/replaced Premium was a complete POS (not another RRoD but drive issues, freezes, etc) so I went and bought an Elite. My Sega XBLA games are now only playable online.

Andy and I have talked about this at length. I guess we know which console system got hacked first. Sadly this news does not surprise me in the least. Strait from Sony:

We have found out that there has been a possibility of unauthorized access to personal information on the PLAYSTATION®Store through PCs, a content download service of the PLAYSTATION®Network. Although unlikely, it is possible that the passwords of a small percentage of PLAYSTATION Network users may have been changed through unauthorized access, making it possible to view users' personal information and/or use the Wallet for the PLAYSTATION Store. PLAYSTATION Network accounts do not display entire credit card numbers, so any unauthorized access to your PLAYSTATION Network account is very unlikely to compromise your credit card number.

We have taken immediate measures to rectify this issue and system security is restored.

We have investigated the extent of unauthorized access and possible alteration of passwords that could have occurred before corrective measures were taken, and are directly contacting customers who may have been affected by this incident. In order to verify that your account is intact, we strongly suggest that PLAYSTATION Network users sign in to the service. If you can successfully sign in with your pre-set password, your account is not affected by this incident.

Please follow Sony's advice and see if you can login to your PSN account. And once you are there, for god's sake, change your password.

Now, apparently, it's okay to have sex with your picnic table. I mean, you bought it. What you do with it is your business. However, what you shouldn't do in this situation is do it four times, each time ON CAMERA in front a school. Big no no. That folks, is a felony.

More proof Idiocracy is the most important movie of the century... Some dumb ass 18 year old tried to rob a muffler shop. When told the manager was the only one who could open the safe and he was at lunch, the kid gives the store his cell phone number to call him when the manager gets back. Not only does the store call him with an obvious police presence ready, he actually does come back to demand the money where he's shot in the leg and arrested. Brilliant. Just human brilliance.