I was just browsing the GamerDNA forums, and one thread caught my eye, not the title really, but the contents. This guy must be the current day MacGuyver
There you have it his very own hand build lancer – i wonder if he could make that shotgun foot my buddy Ymiris wanted to have attached when he broke his leg.
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I have been Avatar…ized!
That’s right I made it in on the second wave of NXE previews. I actually didn’t even notice the email but got a prompt for a system update when I was booting GoW2. After it completed I noticed the email in my box saying it would be coming. I have to admit, I originally signed up to just give it a shot, and see what it was all about – but I wasn’t super excited to get my hands on it or anything. I think I have said in the past that console updates don’t get me hot under the collar for the most part – but I have to bite my tongue. The new features and sexy look make me happy I got my hands on it early. I am actually considering going back to netflix, just for the online streaming (changed to blockbuster online a while back), and the interface just seems to function a ton smoother, but who am I kidding if you really care about the update, you all ready read all about it on 10 news sites – you dont need me to drone on on my blog about it. |
| Gears of Goodness War 2
Secondly I went out and got Gears of War 2 at the midnight release in my area. It was pretty quiet – the biggest news from the night was the kid behind me won a free Halo 3 Legendary edition for wearing a Gears of War shirt to the event. So apparently it does in fact pay to be “that guy”, you know the one that wears the band t-shirt to the concert of said band. My hat goes off to everyone involved with Gears 2 though – seriously. I haven’t completed the campaign as of yet, but I have been completely blown away by it every moment so far – and the multiplayer experience has been amazing as well. The horde mode gets intense, again I haven’t gotten high enough to really gauge this – but it turns into complete mayhem quick – and I love every minute of it. |
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Well that’s it for now, those two things made such an impact I felt like taking a moment to pimp them out – I expected both to be good, but they surpassed my expectations on so many levels. I have been tooling around with XNA here and there when I have some free time – so depending on what comes of that I might post up some samples or something. It will probably be quite some time before I even consider having something thats worthy of the Community Games on Xbox Live – but game development was always a childhood dream of mine – and even if nothing comes of it, I enjoy tinkering. Speaking of tinkering – I have been playing around a bit with some new signatures heavily based on 360voice data & avatars – heres a quick sample – what do you think?
I am going to get cranking away on some code my current GamerDNA and 360voice projects again – and with luck some more Gears 2 soon…very soon
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So the emails went out last night, Did you sign up? Did you get in? Ironically I don’t think I know a single person that got in – at least not one that has let me know as of yet. Based on the post by Major Nelson, whoever got an email should be getting the update ‘later this week’, which leaves only a few more days of waiting to those lucky few.
I did in fact fill out the application to get the early preview / upgraded, but no tears shed over not getting the email saying I was selected. Its only a little over 2 weeks before we all get the upgrade, and I think i have been on record in the past that console updates don’t get me all hot and bothered like some. What say you, and lets see those avatars for those of you that did in fact get in (when you actually get the update of course) |
I dont know if its the season, the fact that I am keeping myself busy, the number of games being released recently, or what but I am just sitting here somewhat in awe that it is all ready Thursday, and then even more baffled that its almost November. So I guess its time to just brain dump about what’s doing!
Ymiris, Antediluvia, and I threw together another episode of the friendcast – episode 12, one of our longest episodes to date. Don’t let that fool you that probably means I didn’t cut enough of my babbling out 
I have been kicking around some ideas to leverage the GamerDNA Helix APIs – nothing specific yet, I have a few ideas bouncing around but as usual I am struggling with making something pleasing to the eyes from the data available, but also what would be useful for others to use, etc – let’s see if i ever get something cranked out.
Speaking of GamerDNA things seem pretty busy for everyone there – even I have been keeping my hands pretty full of code for a bit now with various tasks as we push forward. One of the biggest things I have had my hands in thus far for the site is the new Group Signatures – go check them out I am pretty pleased with the product so far and we continue to make it better. Don’t be fooled the graphics are products of Zel – you know pretty and I almost always clash.
Other than that I have been keeping busy gaming – mostly just Rock Band 2 and Warhammer Online. Though it seems my gaming time has been lacking as my Xbox’s mood badge has gone down substantially on 360voice, and my Alt Order character for Warhammer is closely catching my main character in level. Which I have only played 2 nights for a few hours – its kind of a scheduled one night a week character with a couple friends.
Oh I believe I forgot to mention this, for those of you using my 360VoiceAPI plugin you might like to know that there is someone who has taken the project and copied plans to enhance it so keep an eye out for the new features he has promised in future versions.
Picking up your preordered copy of Star Wars Force Unleashed even though you know your Xbox 360 sits at home waiting for a coffin. Squidbox IV you had an ok life – a little over a year since you made your way to my home you will be missed, luckily Squidbox V should not be far away the only question is will he have a cousin named Squidstation I, before he gets here since ironically I have been reviewing and discussing the purchase of one recently – perfect timing. I guess I shouldn’t have busted Ymiris‘ chops when his Elite took the RRoD dive – karma is a bitch.
I am sure my various projects will benefit from the loss of my little friend – I am cranking away at my GamerDNA bug fixes and enhancements faster than ever – and I even spent some time playing around with madden-stats complete with custom signatures.
So after my post yesterday I was headed out the door of the hotel to wait for Trapper and Steve for the BBQ as I said. I would have never guessed how the rest of that night played out though – sure some of it went as I expected – food, rock band, and meeting Trapper’s wife and kids, but so much more happened.
I left the hotel, and there wwas noise and banging going on everywhere, then I noticed a bunch of streets shut down – apparently it was Pride day, and there was a parade going through – so to try and keep the boys from having to deal with closed roads and congestion from the parade, I thought I would be smart and take the subway over towards Steve’s apartment. Well I thought I was a big shot and knew what I was doing, unitl I realized I went 3 subway stops the wrong direction, ending up deeper into Boston – no big deal right? Just hop off and get on the other direction to make up for the mistake. Except when I got on the other train it kept stopping and waiting for trains ahead of us, extending the time it was taking to get there – and of course being underground my cell wasn’t really working so there was no way to warn them of my screw up.
Well Ymiris finally talked me into doing the podcast I always said I wanted to do for 360friendspot. head on over and check it out.
First episode, a pilot if you will, where Ymiris and Squidpunch get together to talk about gaming in general, some of the recent releases and gaming news. This is the first time I was actually running the recorder, doing the editing, etc – so hopefully it came out all right for you guys.
If you want to send us some feedback or be on the show email us at podcast@360friendspot.com
head on over and check out the show: http://www.360friendspot.com/2008/05/12/friendcast-episode-1/
Not 100% sure what is going on – I got an email from the host about high CPU usage and was attempting to look at the things they provided me as troubleshooting steps, but they seemed to have disabled the site for now.
I know the traffic was up more then it has been in quite some time, but it wasn’t high enough that it should have been affecting the CPU usage of the shared server (which is what they mentioned in the email from support).
So I am currently waiting for a response from support about the site, and if the site was going to be this active on a regular basis I definately would have to start looking into upgraded the hosting plan again - all though it really looks like there is some problem with one of the apps I have running on the site which is what is slowing it (and apparently many other sites) down.
I’ll post more if/when I know more to post!
Today was an interesting day to say the least. For starters, I was in charge of a pretty big change at work – the task at hand was to change a single server which currently houses about 5 live websites, as well as the databases for those webistes and about 15 or so windows applications (and even an access 97 database ’application’) to be split into two brand new beefier servers. One for those websites, and the other for the database server. So that involved updating all those sites to run against a remote database and updating all of the applications to point to a new database server – and just for some extra spice we upgraded from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005. Today was the fall out from that change this weekend – which actually had very little issues, so job well done i guess!
Next on the plate was this little site called UnlockTheAchievement.com – it seems to be a bit popular, maybe you have heard of it? I knew it was going to do pretty well, but it has surpassed (at least my) expectations…I am just glad that the code all works – though the server has had its trouble off and on, I don’t think it is code related. The server has been hit with a pretty good amount of traffic from, xbox360fanboy.com, xbox.com, digg.com as well as the 40 some community sites which are hiding the images as well as promoting the site. From that site has been a pretty good amount spillage over to my blog here (I have never had this many visitors!) as well as 360friendspot. Both of them are hosted on my shared hosting plan – which apparently is taking a pretty big performance hit from the new found traffic (oops!).
…If you code it….they will come
So I noticed some problems with my 360voice plugin when playing around with my 3FS blog (yeah thats right anyone can now have your very own blog at 360friendspot, go get one!). I decided I better put together a quick fix (essentially the hyperlinks in your blog were not properly processed, and showing the actual html that creates them), while I was at it I put together a little 100% club type thing as part of the plugin. If you didn’t know the 100% club images I built over at 360voice were done using the public APIs – and I once again used them here.
One word of warning – I used cURL this time (since my PHP knowledge has expanded a bit since the last time I worked on this plugin (almost 1 year ago since the last update actually!)., and because my hosting actually does have cURL - I just didn’t know it. I did not however modify the old functionality to be based on cURL or use my new way of processing the XML – maybe next update!
So if you use my 360voiceAPI plugin for wordpress – please head on over and download the update : http://www.squidpunch.com/supported-services/360voice-plugin/
