Trying to move from Medium to Hard on Guitar Hero 3 was a frustrating experience. I consider myself to be a good Medium player, but I can only get through, so far, two songs on hard. I’ll just keep practicing, I guess.
I also played Halo 3 for the first time in months last night. In my first game, the other five people kept yelling at me… for trying to kill them (in Rumble Pit), and then gave me negative feedback for being ‘Aggressive’. Sounds about right.
Okay, so I finished Call of Duty 4 last night (after returning from Moes & Joes). There was a whole Saving Private Ryan thing with the ending that I thought was really cool, along with the short epilogue after the credits. Now I’m trying to get the achievement where you have to finish the CQB training in under 20 seconds, and it’s proving somewhat difficult. I did go back through and complete the sniper level without alerting anyone, and got a few other achievements though.
Almost finished with the campaign in Call of Duty 4, which is awesome. Then I’m probably going to replay some parts of it (maybe grabbing some achievements on the way), and then try out the multiplayer. Maybe the feature patch will be out by then.
I’ve been going through a rather extended site-ugrade campaign for the last couple of weeks, but now I’m starting to get into the real meat of it. I’ve already upgraded to Wordpress version 2.0.4 from 1.5, and added some plugins like Post Restrictions and Role Manager, and now I’m getting into re-writing themes (which had some bad carry-over from 1.5) and trying out some newer plugins as well. The moral of the story is that I’m adding more functionality to the site, so if you happen to stop by, and
there’s some weird looking stuff going on, it’s totally my fault.
On a related note, I’ve also been adding some posts that are either subscriber-only, or approved subscriber-only, and have opened user registration as well. You get the drift.
One of the great features of the XBOX 360 is that it will allow you to network it with a PC running Windows XP or Media Center, and use it as a Media Center Extender for streaming images and songs from your PC. The single best use of this is for listening to your entire music library as a soundtrack while playing games. Why listen to a bad game soundtrack when you’ve already spent hours organizing music and making playlists of your own?
If you’re an iTunes user like I am, getting your music library (and playlists!) shared across your network can be a little bit tricky, as I’ve discovered. Sure, you could plug your iPod right into the console itself and do it that way, but that’s not any fun. So, I’ve written up a little guide to help people work through some of the more common issues.
It’s always nice to hear when someone appreciates your work. It’s also nice when they show you respect by doing the correct thing and asking permission to use it. Otherwise, I’d probably never have known.
My name is Mark, and I’m the editor for the monthly newsletter of a USA Swimming club located in the Dallas area. I was doing a Google image search to see if there may be something useful out there on the internet for one of the columns of the newsletter. I came across “Kick” at http://kick.hopto.org/about. He’s adorable and fits the bill beautifully! I noticed the pointer at the bottom of the page to the original artist, hollismb.
We plan to use him in a column called “Did you know?” where we list various facts of interest to the club and swimming related trivia. To make his image more along the lines of the theme of the newsletter and this particular column, I’ve added a few elements to the original image and have attached the resulting GIF. We may make a few additional changes (color, etc), but this is the basic theme.
If it’s okay with you, we’d really like to use Kick in our newsletter. Our organization is non-profit and the newsletter is available only to club members, so has a very limited distribution.
Would you be willing to allow us to do this?
Of course, I told Mark to go ahead and use Kick however he saw fit, and also gave him access to the original PNG file used to create this comic in both black-and-white and color formats to help him out, since editing a compressed GIF file isn’t quite as easy. In return, I simply asked that I be given credit for the original work in the same manner as Kick the Donkey’s ‘About’ page if he posts it on the internet.
I probably should’ve also advised Mark to keep him in the shallow end. He’s not a very strong swimmer.
Another day. Another meeting. Another hour of sitting locked in a room, listening to a conversation that has absolutely nothing to do with me. If only I had a blank sheet of paper and a pencil to draw with, that would keep me entertained. Even some fingernail clippers would do. Whoever said I needed to be in this meeting is going to pay. That’s one.
Another is the fact that conference calls and speakerphones have a peculiar ability to draw people towards my desk like flies. I’m not sure whether there’s some sort of imperceptible electrical frequency that spreads out throughout the office, but it clicks something within surrounding co-workers, turning on their ‘annoy’ mode, and driving them like zombies to my area to hover around my desk and ask me what I’m doing or who I’m talking to. That’s two.
Another is being asked what’s the status of a problem or project by someone who’s been monopolizing my time all day, and preventing me from doing the very thing they’re asking about. Do they think an extra hour randomly spawned somewhere in between one of the five minute intervals when they were asking me to help them with something else? Perhaps so. That’s three.
Three of the things that annoy me most during a regular workday, all of which amount to one my pet peeves of not liking to be interrupted while in the middle of something. But, every once in a while, it’s all worth it, when the offending person comes to my desk to check the status of something, and I get to reply with, ‘No, I haven’t gotten a chance to look at it because you keep dragging me into meetings that have absolutely nothing to do with me.’
Meanwhile, the person who’s having the actual problem is listening on speakerphone.
It’s bad enough I haven’t updated in over a month, but it seems I keep getting hacked too. Cleary it’s due to a vunerability in phpbb that’s been known about for quite some time, which allows a malicious person to inject code into the database and re-write a file, in this case, my index.php. Sure, I probably should have patched the problem by now, or maybe simply removed the forums altogether (which never get used anyway), but the truth is, it’s not even that annoying, and only takes about five seconds to fix. I will say that these hackers have a mild case of the potty-mouth, but then again, I guess they’re not too concerned with manners.
