Category: Internet & Technology

Just when you thought no one could come up with a worse idea than having a business card that you need to put into your computer…now someone has come up with the idea of giving our small portable media players as a business communications tool. Really? Seriously? Who’s going to want to accept a media player as a pitch device – even if it’s a cheap device, there’s a perception there that you’d want to give it back to the person, and you’d probably just refuse it to begin with because most people wouldn’t want the responsibility of having to give it back when they were done with it. I don’t know how much these costs, but even if they’re “only” $99 each, you’re still not going to give them out like you would a business card or brochure…

I’ve been trying all day to get logged into Windows Live Messenger, and keep seeing this:

Instant  Messaging is kind of like email: you shouldn’t offer it as a service unless you can provide virtually perfect reliability.

Courtesy of Mr. Darius Wey, if you add this site as a shortcut to your iPod Touch or iPhone, you should see a snazzy icon. You know, just in case this blog is just SO critical to your daily existence that you want to add it to your iPod/iPhone home screen. Bwahaha…

This is an interesting article about the addiction that some people have to World of Warcraft, and what it can do to a marriage:

“Jocelyn had been friends with her ex-husband Peter since the age of 13, but it took only nine months for her marriage to collapse. “I bought the game for him for Christmas 2004, when it first came out. By May we had our first serious discussion about where our marriage was going, and by September I had moved out,” she said. Jocelyn recalled one particular incident that was typical of Peter’s habits. “I had set aside 30 minutes for us to watch a television show together, and he couldn’t. He was stuck on a raid, and completely failed to understand why I was upset,” she said. Peter’s domestic duties also suffered. He stopped paying bills, she says, and refused to do his share of the housework.”

This is clearly an extreme case, but certainly not unheard of. Anyone with an addictive personality would certainly have trouble resisting getting addicted to a game that has no ending. World of Warcraft is probably at the root of more marriage break-ups than any other game in history, yet if it wasn’t the game it might be any other number of things that person would get addicted to. Should the game come with a warning label on the outside? “Caution: May Be Harmful to Marital Harmony.” I believe that people are responsible for their own actions and that blamings games, music, or anything else is a cop-out.

There’s a new Iron Man trailer out, and it looks amazing – you can check it out in HD if you have Quicktime installed, although I had to chuckle at how badly it works because of Apple’s restrictions on the Windows platform. See, if you have a Mac, Apple lets you view Quicktime full screen – and who wouldn’t want to? But on Windows, Apple gave us a hobbled version of Quicktime that won’t go full screen – unless you pay $29.99 USD for the “Pro” version, which I haven’t done (why should I have to pay $30 to view a video?). So when I clicked to watch the deliciously high-res 1080p version of the new Iron Man trailer, which is 1920 x 1080, it loaded on my monitor (which is 1920 x 1200) with the play button off the screen. I couldn’t start the video until I repositioned the whole window to access the user interface, which was awkward. The fact that Apple considers full-screen video a feature worth paying for is quite ridiculous…

UPDATE: Well I’ll be…Apple added the option for full screen video in a recent dot-release of Quicktime (just press CONTROL+F) and I didn’t notice. It’s unlike most video apps in that double-clicking the video doesn’t make it go full screen, it just pauses it, and I didn’t think to check the menu. Thanks to Janak and Vincent for pointing it out…

Microsoft’s Silverlight technology is really interesting, and it’s pushing new ground in a lot of ways – including being the first plug-in for Firefox that I’ve ever seen crash:

I guess I should feel thankful that Microsoft even released a Firefox plug-in. 😉

I find myself going through cycles with my Xbox 360: when I got Halo 3, I played it every morning for an hour or two until a few weeks later, I had beaten the game (and I still get trashed in online play – go figure). Then I didn’t touch my Xbox for a while, until firing up Mass Effect not too long ago. But just as I was starting to get into Mass Effect, I downloaded, played, and immediately purchased an incredibly fun Xbox Live arcade game: Arkadian Warriors.

The game is immensely fun to play, reminding me a bit of a cross between a Zelda Game and Diablo. It’s fast to get up and running with, easy to learn, and doesn’t bore you with complexities. The RPG element is very “light”, with three choices for characters, and fixed skills that unlock at certain levels. It’s great for local co-op play, with two players sharing the screen at the same time (we need more games like that), and I imagine it’s equally fun over Xbox Live co-op play. Definitely one of the best 800 point purchases I’ve ever made on Xbox Live! <does the Google> Ah, I see that the developer of this game is the same company (Wanako Games) that created my other favourite Xbox Live Arcade game, Assault Heroes. No wonder I like it so much. 🙂

If there’s anything “good” about being sick, it’s that when your brain isn’t working properly enough for real work, there are usually enough functioning neurons to play a bit of the ol’ Xbox. I was given a copy of Mass Effect when I attended Mobius 2007 back in November, but I never got around to playing it until this weekend. What a fun game! It’s got the perfect mix of role-playing and action, something that attracted me to Bioware’s other RPG/action game, Jade Empire (I sure hope they’re working on a sequel). I’ve barely dipped my toe into the waters of Mass Effect, but I enjoyed the few hours I spent playing it a great deal – especially once I looked at the manual and figured out how to swap weapons. 😉 I also played, and purchased, the Xbox Live arcade game Battlestar Galactica – also insanely fun (but hard!). Pretty much anything that says “Battlestar Galactica” gets my dollars because I’m such a huge fan of the show. Maybe this year I’ll actually break the 2000 point barrier on my Xbox gamerscore!

I know what I’m going to be spending my weekend doing: coughing, blowing my nose, and taking pictures with what is hopefully a fantastic camera!

DNS issues with domains are, frankly, some of the nastiest, ugliest Web-based problems you can have. The reason why is that they involve computers that you can’t control directly (such as the 13 demi-god root servers). I won’t go into the ugly details about what happened with a family member’s personal domain today, but suffice it to say that it was one of this DNS situations where a DNS server wasn’t giving out the right information, and that had the chain reaction of breaking all sorts of things, including email. I spent 45+ minutes trying to convince their tech support people that something was wrong with one or more of their DNS machines (they couldn’t see it because they were connected to a different DNS), but I finally decided to try a long-shot and I added a new record (a CNAME) and voila, within an hour everything was working again. So, when faced with bizarre non-updating DNS records, create a new entry to force the update process to kick off again.