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Bring on 2006

I'm not going to make a New Year's Resolution this year. Last year, for the first time, I made one. I didn't even come close to following it through. While I exceeded my expectations in other areas, the one I had promised myself to improve on was left hanging and has pretty much diminished. And as such, I broke a New Year's tradition this year. Instead of going over to a friend's - who has hosted a radass New Year's Eve party for the past 5 or 6 years, Deanna and I went and saw King Kong. We'll ring in the new year with our daughter Hannah at the stroke of midnight while sipping on our drinks of choice - a cool Keith's for this guy and Spumante Bambino for my lady. Sounds good to me! It's been quite a year. On the family front, we sorted out everything we needed to in regards to our daughter and Deanna's ex. All the paper work is done and things are great. We received the official government document verifying Hannah's name change on December 23, which was by far the best Christmas present we could have asked for. She's now an official Brett! When they moved here from BC nearly 4 years ago, we all had last names. Deanna used to call us a mutt family. Hah!

Introducing FeedIcons.com

I knew while I was working on reproducing the feed icon that some folks would find it useful. I had no idea it would take off as it did! I'm extremely stoked that so many people have embraced it and accepted it as the new standard icon. Feels great knowing that I've created something that others can benefit from - all for the sake of a better internet. A ton of eyeballs have seen this site in the past 48 hours and that's rad as hell - but who wants to read some dude's long-winded article and have to scroll all the way to the bottom of it to download the icon package? Figured that this icon is important enough to give it a proper home. And thus, I present to you feedicons.com.

Minty Goodness: Session Tracker And Friends

I've been using Mint for a few months now and am fully addicted to it. I've used other stat tracking software before, but I've never had so much fun! And just when I thought things couldn't get better for Mint, a dude by the name of Beau Collins released a great Pepper called Session Tracker. As you probably assume, Session Tracker records the path of your visitors... in real time. Not only where they've been on your site - but how they got there, how long they spent on each page and now thanks to Download Counter and Outclicks, what they downloaded while on your site and where they went when they left. It also shows you how many people are currently on your site. Seriously good stuff!

The Importance of Proper Cooling in a Gaming PC

Over the past couple weeks, I've barely played any games at all. I got back into F.E.A.R. and have almost finished it, but my system has not being running so hot lately - actually, it's been running very hot, which brings me to the topic of this post. Over the past year I've replaced just about every piece of hardware. I started with the motherboard and worked my way out. Most recently replacing my 266MHz memory with a pair of 512MB, 400MHz Corsair XMS ProSeries RAM. Since my CPU has a front side bus of 800MHz, I was looking forward to a pretty significant performance increase. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case at all. After installing the RAM, I noticed no increase at all. Still the same hiccups and lags remained. It was time to do some serious troubleshooting - having dropped so much cash on my machine over the past year, I wasn't ready to give up on it just yet. I knew there had to be a cause for the slowdowns and poor performance I'm seeing.

The Advertising Dilemma

If you've come and gone a few times over the past couple weeks or taken a look at my changelog, you may have noticed various ads popping up in random spots across the site. I've been trying out some of the more popular affiliate programs from the likes of Google and Amazon. If you take a look around now, you won't see any of them. I simply cannot live with advertising on my site. I worked for a company whose soul purpose was to sell advertising. The ads out-weighed the content visually, there was every kind of intrusive/annoying ad you could think of and even ads disguised as content. Worst! I was thinking it would be nice to get some sort of financial return for all the time and effort I put into this site and thought some simple ads would do the trick. I sold myself on the idea by deciding to only display targeted ads specific to the content or subject matter.

Configuring Your Xbox 360 Controller For Windows

Last week I wrote about my recent purchase of the Xbox 360 controller for Windows, most notably, the lack of support from Microsoft and the inability to tweak it. Not that this should come as a surprise to any Windows user. But still quite disappointing. Since then, I've received quite a few hits from people searching phrases like "xbox 360 controller deadzone", "configure xbox 360 controller for windows", "xbox 360 controller for windows mapping", etc. Needless to say, I'm not the only one been who's looking for a solution. Luckily, thanks to a few (very lengthy) anonymous tips, that solution has been found!

Xbox 360 Controller For Windows: Review

I may be able to wait to drop a few hundred on an Xbox 360, but I couldn't resist picking up a controller to use on my PC. They don't come cheap - I paid close to $60 (CDN) and I almost wish I hadn't. For whatever reason, there hasn't been a whole lot of chatter on this topic. Which is why I was so eager to pick one up. I have a couple Logitech gamepads, but they're nowhere near as good as the Xbox controller. Since the first time I squeezed those triggers, I've never looked back. Best game controller design ever! Especially for racing games. With most gamepads, it's all or nothing. With an Xbox controller, the triggers act as a third axis (z) allowing you to apply as much or little pressure as desired. Since I've been playing Need For Speed Most Wanted a lot these days, I was itching for those triggers and picked up a 360 controller on release day.

Dissecting My Site: Part 2

When I determined how much content I wanted to deliver up front, I knew it would be a challenge to differentiate each section at first glance and to present it all in a way that wasn't overwhelming or seem cluttered. This is where the use of colour comes into play. I love pink, and pink and black is the hottest combo ever. So pink represents this guy right here - whether it be the body of a post or a comment I've left. Green is "external" or off-site links and blue represents user feedback.

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