Blog Archive

416 articles

The Blackness Cometh

Judging by the amount of emails I've received over the past couple days asking "you're playing Black? how is it?", I'm assuming people actually check out my Currently Playing section. So, how is Black you ask? It's just as rad as you were hoping it would be! Criterion have taken their desire for extremely fast paced action with tons of shit blowing up that made the Burnout series so great and applied it to a first person shooter. I was fully expecting this game to be pure run-and-gun, but it's not entirely. There's actually a strategic element to it where you're forced to use cover to get around well hidden enemies. It's very tough at times as just about everything in the environment can be destroyed. So that concrete wall you're hiding behind might not be there in 5 seconds.

Sales People Can Suck a Nut

We've all heard tales of pushy and/or less than knowledgeable sales people, without a doubt. I had a few 'experiences' this week with these types of sales people that I just have to share. Shut up! Shut up! Just, shut up! I'm in the market for a capture device so I can grab video from consoles. I have it narrowed down to a few that I have to order as no local stores carry them. I was in a local independent shop the other day and as I was making my way towards the checkout, I decided to ask if they had any decent capture devices. They normally only carry Allinwonder's or those cheesy firewire PCI cards. Sure enough, that's all they had. When I told the guy what I was looking for, he immediately jumped into a pitch for this 9800 Allinwonder. I stopped him in his tracks immediately as I'm not a fan of ATI - had some wicked bad experiences with them in the past which resulted in me taking a picture of my ATI card amongst some rotting food in the garbage and sending it to them with some carefully worded hate mail.

Running IE 7 Beta 2 and IE 6 on Windows XP

Microsoft made a some big waves today by releasing the first public beta of Internet Explorer 7. Unlike the previous beta, which was closed to developers. This one features many crucial fixes as far as how it renders pages. Tons of the most notorious CSS bugs have been squashed and some other nice-to-have features been added. Transparent PNG support made it into the first beta, so there's 2 huge things right there that should make all web designers rejoice. Now [Microsoft], finish this shit up and roll it out to the masses, stat! Being a designer and a Windows user, I was obviously anxious to see how IE 7 was coming along. I installed it right away and no surprise, it replaced IE 6. Probably not a big deal for the average user, but I still need IE 6 for testing purposes. I remembered having older versions of IE 5 and 5.5 back in the day and after a quick search made my way back to evolt.org - Browser Archive. Low and behold, in the standalone IE directory, there's a version of IE 6. I quickly downloaded it, fired it up and sure enough, it works!

FeedIcons.com Update

Since January has almost come and gone and the full FeedIcons.com site is yet to be unveiled, I figured I should probably post a bit of an update on the situation. First off, I'm still floored by the response to this all. I really didn't expect it to take off as it did, but I'm sure glad it has. I've seen the icon being used on websites from around the world in various languages. Some of the more well known web services have picked up on it and even some popular desktop software for both Mac and PC. The icon itself has been downloaded around 20,000 times from the site, which is not bad at all for being online for just over a month. I had full intentions of taking on the site on my own, but once I started brainstorming I realized that wouldn't be possible. A few months ago I started up a new business with a couple close friends of mine. Due to our conflicting and ridiculously busy schedules, we're yet to roll out any projects under the new banner.

Four Things

Apparently I've been tagged (thanks Paul!). This isn't the first time I've been tagged, but it is the first time I've actually followed through and continued the chain... Four jobs IÃÆ'Į'ÃÆ'‚¢ÃÆ'ƒÂ¢ÃÆ'¢â‚¬Å¡ÃÆ'‚¬ÃÆ'ƒÂ¢ÃÆ'¢â‚¬Å¾ÃÆ'‚¢ve had in my life Website Manager Web Designer Web Content Coordinator Grass Cutter Guy Four movies I can watch over and over Gladiator Saving Private Ryan Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Super Troopers

Like a Kid in a Candy Store

The past few weeks have been so insanely busy for me. I know I've said this before, but I really don't think I've ever had so much to do in my entire life. I've been working so much that I actually grew intolerant to my chair. I would sit down and immediately stand back up. Just couldn't do it any more. And since this chair is home base for work and play, I found myself in need of a new avenue for entertainment. Since selling my Xbox back in July and Hannah claiming the GameCube as her own, I've only really had my PC for gaming. For whatever reason, I haven't been into watching movies for months now and we might have rented a handful of movies since the summer. Deanna and I used to watch a few movies a week, but for whatever reason, that just stopped. I decided it was time to re-establish some old relationships with my DVD player, GameCube and even picked up another Xbox. And that would be a regular old Xbox, not a 360. Even if I wanted to get an Xbox 360 right now, I couldn't as they're still, 2 months after launch, hard to come by. Now that's just fuckin' ridiculous!

Widescreen Gaming Woes

Man, was I ever stoked when I brought home my 21" 16:10 LCD monitor. Unfortunately, that feeling didn't last as long as I had hoped. It seems there's several issues which hamper widescreen gaming that aren't exactly common knowledge. Even after doing hours of research into pros and cons of having a widescreen LCD, I was met with many challenges and frustrating roadblocks that prevented me from jumping into the games I had been playing on my old 19" CRT. With the growing popularity of widescreen monitors and LCDs quickly taking over the monitor market share, I thought it would be a good idea to share my experiences and hopefully cut down the hours you might spend troubleshooting should you pick up a widescreen LCD. First thing's first. There's some terminology you need to know and understand...

My First Rip!

Fellow 9ruler Volkher sent me a little heads up this morning that this site looks shockingly similar to mine. Indeed it does - it seems I've been ripped! Surprisingly enough, I wasn't the least bit angry. I thought for sure if this ever happened, I would be irate. Especially in a case as blatantly obvious as this one. But I wasn't at all. I was actually laughing as I viewed the source and CSS to find out he hadn't even bothered to change selector names and all of my comments are still in place. I mean, you know you're a jerk when you rip someone this bad, but you're a real lazy jerk when you can't be bothered to change it up under the hood. The hover link classes are even the same for the main content areas. The one thing that has got me a little upset though, is that this rip has been featured over at CSS Mania. Now that just sucks. Hopefully this dude has a little decency and will email them to let them know he's not worthy of being featured. But honestly, I don't see that happening.

A Few Days With an Xbox 360

I've tried to completely ignore the Xbox 360 until the pre-meditated hype dies down. But a friend of mine recently picked one up and has been showing me screenshots and bragging like a bastard, so I decided to drop the $750 deposit and rent one for a few days. The 'package' I got came with 2 wired controllers, a memory card (yuck!) and the standard cables - composite and component. I also had my choice of 2 games. Since the pickings are slim, I decided to go with 2 truly 'next gen' games... or rather, games that were developed specifically for the 360 - Project Gotham Racing 3 and Perfect Dark Zero. I didn't even bother hooking it up to my TV (a 27" Sony Trinitron) but instead, went straight to my new monitor. It has component inputs, which worked out lovely! The colours were great - super bright and vibrant and the picture was really crisp. So, it looks nice... but how does it play?

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