Squidpunch.com

The Gamer

• So how about this?  I got myself all worked up over my chatpad not working with the wireless headset.  Probably the next day it was working, and I figured wow I am a schmuck for complaning soooooo much about that, luckily last night it did NOT work, so clearly something is up, and I am not insane.
• I finally passed the end of Act III in Gears of War for Windows - only 2 acts to go
• I finished Pirates of the Caribean: At World’s End, to add to my 100% complete list.  Soul gathering was the most annoying part.  It isn’t hard, just time consuming.  It took about 16 hours total.
• I am up to level 40 in Kingdom Under Fire.  I can see why the game gets some mediocre reviews, it really is alot of the same, and to get all the achievements is without a doubt going to be a complete grind.  I however still enjoy the game and would tell everyone that might be interested to at least give it a rental and see what you think.
• The gamerscore challenge is over, as expected Pat2k9 nabbed the prize with a serious gain over all of us.  I opened my big mouth and trash talked Kanone into beating my butt too - I did finish up with 4th place.  Considering the time I have to game, and the games I have available - it wasn’t a bad placing I guess.  

The Coder

• I continue to dabble with the code for TheLiveEye.com - still nothing obvious, really just trying to test out somethings to make it more stable, or more efficient, so far I am not sure I made any real progress actually.
• DaKing240 sent me some more ideas to expand on his contest site - which I added some of that stuff to the site, but it was mostly basic HTML and throwing some ideas out on the site to expand later.
•   At work I have been essentially rebuilding the entire framework of our existing application - its proved rather fun, frustrating, and rewarding all at the same time - the first phase is almost complete after about 2 weeks.
• I did some coding for the not ready to announce project, which by the way will be officially announced and open for discussion soon. 

The Person

• Another boring week for the non-gamer, non-coding section of this little update.  I just did the normal things, spent time with the family, watched tv, etc.
• My DVR system died, so I missed Prison Break, rather annoyed about that
• Also due to the DVR issue, I once again missed the Sarah Conner Chronicles, I guess I am just not watching this show - if I miss too many episodes in the start of a show, I just never keep up with it - anyone else watching this?
• My wife got me interested in Dexter - so we rented the first season on DVD and watched that, it was interesting, not sure if I will upgrade to include showtime or just watch box sets when they come out yet.

Ok if you haven’t notice I have not really been keeping up with and posting all the E3 news - mostly because I am rather busy with work and I can’t even keep up - let alone repost everything.  I am well aware that all of you will get your news in other ways, if you go to just my blog for news - you really are living in the dark

 But I do have some news, we (and by we I mean 99.9% ZaaM) have been working for a bit now on the latest version of the Live Eye.  There are some enhancements and also a little bit of a redesign on colors and layout.  You might also notice that it now resides on its own domain, that’s right this project has grown enough we considered hosting it as its own beast, don’t worry 360friendspot, the community and other services we provide are still going to exist.  So head on over and check out the new Live eye!

So I have created a few different wordpress plugins

• one that connects to 360voice (shown here)
• one that connects to the live eye (shown here)
• one that pulls the gamertile of the user from xbox.com if they are using their gamertag to comment (just post your feedback to see it in action) 

Does anyone actually use my plugins on your site? 
Do you care? 
Should I make more? 
If so, what would YOU like to see? 
Would you like to use the Live Eye or Xbox tile Comment Plugins?

Just looking for some feedback from those of you that visit my little blog.

Officially the only one that is publically available is the 360voice plugin, but you can see the live eye plugin in action here (and if you want to use it let me know), and finally just put a comment to see the gamertile plugin in action

Episode number 42 of XBLRadio is out, I have a small spot on it interviewed about 3FS.  Everyone go tell ZaaM how good his english is, so he can join the fun of podcast interviews

Check out the show, the guys over at XBLRadio are great community guys that offer a variety of video and audio podcasts.  I personally subscribe to all the podcasts that they offer and listen to them as soon as they are released.

well got another interview lined up, all the important folks must be busy In any event this is a bit different then the rest of them its a live radio interview instead of a podcast. so feel free to listen in as I can almost guarantee to fumble my words or something that is sure to make you laugh. The show is broadcasted by magaman. His show is live from 6 to 8 PM EST on Fridays. I told him that I was going to try and call in for around 7PM tomorrow.

http://www.kgmrradio.com/comment.php?comment.news.67

well I just finished up a chat with one of the boys over at XBLRadio, if you dont listen to their podcast, I would suggest checking it out - they are a nice bunch of community guys with a bunch of different podcasts - a video podcast, an xbox live roundtable (for gamers just like you) and a standard news type deal.

I am not promoting it just because I am interviewed on it, because well I generally think I sound like a tool on these type of things. But I do subscribe to their podcasts, and since I just finished the discussion with them, it made me think to mention them to you guys.

I am not sure when the interview will be up, and lucky for me, it was no where near as long as the one with deacon over at unscripted [:D]

You might know of www.360gl.com, and if you dont definately check them out. Here is the official description of them.

is first and foremost a Gaming League and Tournament Site, but we are building the Gamerbase into a useful tool for combining (and referring to) the great community sites that are out there.

I am happy to say that they have added a little feature to display live eye information on their gamers (that have a live eye profile) using the 360friendspot public APIS.

Swing by and check them out, looks like they a Gears of War tournament coming up - you and all your team members can rack up a smooth 1600 MS Points, to bad I completely suck at Gears of War

Play and Win Shooter / Gears of War

Well I finally got an achievement last night during my Gears of War session last night. It was one of the pretty simple achievements - Mix it Up - where you just need to be on the winning team of the 3 different game types. It was also brought to my attention that even though I thought I was going to get a 100 kills with a [insert weapon here] achievement, that there is not one for shotgun kills - which was what most all my achievements were based on, and the one I assumed was going to rack me another achievement, so that wasn’t very wise of me I would say. Thanks to Antediluvia for bringing this to light. This concludes the dates that you can recieve an entry in the Play & Win Shooter Contest, and I believe I should get an entry for each of the 3 days . . . winning is a long shot - but it doesn’t hurt to try (and those prizes are pretty smooth).

Shadowrun Beta

I recently recieved my beta invitation to Shadowrun, but haven’t dedicated a ton of time to it as of yet. Of course in the invitation the NDA was restated that not much else can be said except “Yes, I am playing the beta”. So until the NDA is lifted dont expect to hear a ton more about that. You can keep track of my play time on the game in my Live Eye Profile as you can see at the moment I have only played about an hour or so. Over at 360friendspot we have about 62 current live eye members in the beta and being tracked by our tool, you can see an overview of those users at the Shadow Run Beta Profile Page

360Friendspot / LiveEye

Speaking of 360friendspot and The Live Eye, last night I spent a good amount of time updating some queries after seeing a bunch of sleeping records in the SQL Activity Monitor. This was a hope that what might be causing the slowness or hanging of the site was related to SQL table locks - since I was definately getting time out errors and transactions were hanging out here sleeping. If that resolves, or at least partially resolves the performance issues - I am going to be extremely pleased, but also upset that I didnt find it sooner. I am sure there are more things to optimize - but maybe I am at least going in the right direction at this point.

Crackdown All Nighter, and Rumors

Finally - Happy St Patricks day, and look for an update from my all nighter activities at a later date. Achievements and random video goodness will most likely come of it. There is A rumor posted in my comments about this all nighter being a time that they release some new content or the final 100 points - no clue what that user based it on - but I am all for it!

Well this blog is hosted on the same site as 360friendspot.com. If you didn’t the site performing a bit slower then usual it is because we got some serious media coverage about our site and tools for a change, which drove a TON of traffic our way.

The unscripted interview was completed and available Here, in addition to that we were Dug which was picked up by xbox360fanboy.

Traffic has seemed to slow down a bit, and all of our sites are back to functioning again. It was exciting to say the least - and we have picked up quite a few more Live Eye Members, and hopefully some more active members for the forums.

PS. If you listen to the interview, dont be to harsh - it was probably the most nervous I have ever been in my life.

Just got done having a chat with Deaconblade 360 about the live eye, and 360friendspot in general. I have to say that if I sound like a fool, well I was very nervous! Had a blast talking with him, and I think I got the word out about the site at least relatively well. As soon as the episode is up and available for download I will obviously provide a link.