Connecting Band

Here is a name that needs help. I am opening up discussion to anyone that is out there listening. A new website that I am a part of is being created to connect bands across the country. The connection is geared toward planning tours and filling venues with bands that want the gigs. We will also allow people to browse the website to check out the band's profile and listen to any music they might have uploaded. Fans of the bands will also be able to view upcoming shows that the band may have.

The biggest problem we have run into so far is a catchy name. Also, the name should be available as a Domain name and should not already be taken as a copyright, but that should be a given, right?

Popularity of a Videogame in Relation to its Abbreviation

I have been wondering lately about this topic and have put enough thought into it to make it worthy of a blog post. Games that come to mind are WOW, CSS, DODS, AOE, DOTA, L4D, GTA, NFS and many many more. We know what these are because of their popularity and common usage. What we don't hear about are games with names like TimeShift and Railroad Tycoon. And these are good games, but without a simple easy to say name, how can they be expected to catch on. I know there are many exceptions to this, such as Guitar Hero and Starcraft, but there has to be some correlation between an easy to say acronym and hard to say game name without an acronym. Marketing is all key when naming your next hit title, so spend the extra time to do so. Any other ideas on the topic, make a comment.

It is also worth mentioning that the rule applies to most things across the board, not just games, but that is where my interest is, so there.

GTA IV

So I have been anticipating Grand Theft Auto the fourth. I stood in line for about 50 minutes at Walmart starting at midnight (Tues) for the release and managed to buy their last Special Edition copy. I did not play it however until later that day because I had an 8am final exam. With some Will Power and motivation I limited my game play to almost none until my final project was turned in on Wed. afternoon. Thus begins a Summer filled with GTA. Well, until yesterday (Sat). My game would not load after the initial loading screen. After much troubleshooting, I was able to occasionally get my game to load. Even, so, the loading of my save data was not working. I had tested my save data on a friend's PS3 to make sure it wasn't corrupt and I was correct. I have read online that there is a bug with the online service and that I should unhook the Ethernet until further updates are sent out to patch. I will attempt and update my Post with my findings.

-->"Only in America do they let blind people drive" -Niko

Kirk Fox video clip

Clip courtesy of Comedy Central.

Copper Beech FTW!

My apartment complex never ceases to amaze me. They are so poorly managed that truly any management would be an improvement. They recently handed out a newsletter along with a bill and a letter. This is the most correspondence we have gotten from them in the almost two years we have lived here. The newsletter was about their new property manager (the third since we've been here) and other new people they had hired. Apparently, (according to an article in the newsletter) since they did not have a property manager, they had not been keeping very good records of transactions; so very little if any. Examples will follow. The actual letter was about inventorying our furniture (we have a furnished apartment) because they did not know who had a furnished apartment and who didn't. Another article in the newsletter was about how corporate came down to audit and fix records that they had not taken. The article went on to mention that some people were behind on rent, but they didn't know who or how much. They also decided to inform us that our water bill has finally been tallied and totals 9 months worth of tally. The amount, $495, yeah not to bad considering we have 10 days to pay it. Now, granted we should have known this was coming and put money away each month, but we're college students, who puts money away for a water/sewage bills. If my math is correct it is only $13.xx per person per month, but it is still over $100 per person right now. Well, someday they will figure out what they are doing wrong and hire competent people and maybe that day we will get our floor in the kitchen fixed (lol that'll be the day).

YAY! My own URL

So you heard it, I now have my own URL. I am pretty excited about this and it shows the nerd in me a little bit, but oh well. IU is changing their web servers over the summer and all websites will be dumped. They are giving us a significant increase in space from 10Mb to 10Gb. Yeah I know, wow. But since I only have a year of school left anyway, I won't need to utilize the weird, possibly different url that they give us. I have my own piece of the internet to myself that I can post many things or not. So, the url, well you'll need to look to the left of my blog page for 'Website' and click the link and admire the nice clean url, although probably not as much as I do.

Rubik's Cube

I have solved the Rubik's Cube. It took me all week and the directions, but I can finally solve it in a decent amount of time without help. Of course I am talking about the standard 3x3 cube, nothing too fancy. I also have to say that I just wanted to make a post on Leap Day; so Happy Leap Day people!

Interesting Music Video

I am in a music video class this semester at IU. It's called Tel-T195 Music Video and Visual Music. We watched an older video today that has a good meaning. It also has some ridiculous parts in it that make it quite funny at moments. The video uses stop animation and is in color. It was created by Norman McLaren in 1952. Watch it on Youtube here.

The Video Game Cabinet

The video game cabinet is almost complete. I am only one console shy on the installation of them. I also need to put the LEDs in when I receive them all. I ordered some cheap ones from Asia, so it may take awhile. Once they are installed I may install a fan in the bottom part, although probably not. I have not made up my mind, yet, obviously. It is looking pretty cool so far, but I will take pictures once it is complete to my stringent expectations. This has to be one cool cabinet (according to its cost). VGC Rules!

What's in a number?

Try this little game to have it guess your number. Here. The faster I did it the more accurate it got which I guess is because I fall into it's math formula better rather than when I think about it and try to out smart it. (run-on sentence alert!)

Can you make XP look like Vista or like OS X?

The answer is yes, for the most part. I challenged someone to make their desktop look like the two completely different OSs and it seems they have succeeded. Here is their website to view their newly renovated desktop. This is the reason I have a picture of my desktop in a previous post. I also feel like a desktop is an expression of self and shows a unique creative side of people.

Veesta OR V(i) 'h' sta

How do you pronounce it? Just thought it was interesting that people pronounce many words many ways. I heard someone pronounce it both once and could not tell you how to try and repeat it.
On a second note, I got my computer working fully again. It has had issues recently that are hard to explain. Things such as not having access to all of my programs and it turned itself into power save mode (turns off after 60 minutes). I was able to reverse these newly changed settings, but why did they happen? Who turned them on? I also did not have sound. I have speakers and two sound devices with drivers installed and "working properly", but at the same time "No Devices Found". I ended up just reformatting my hard drive and reinstalling. It works fine now, so it was either a weird virus or a bug in Vista. I assume it was a bug. First time I have had a problem with Vista Ultimate! Recommend except for the occasional bug (wait for SP1).

Movies!!!????!!!!

What movies did I have?? I am having trouble remembering what movies I owned, but maybe you remember watching one at some point. If you can think of something that I might be missing then just leave me a comment. Thanks for the help and feel free to just look at a collection that was. You can view this said list here.

Rock Band

I love this game, but I have a couple of problems with it, so here is what I like and don't like about it. I really love the download able content available and coming soon which you can see here. I do not like the fact that the guitars and drums are junk. They break easily, come with a sleazy 60 day warranty and are priced far from measly. Junk = Here. So there is my 2 cents. I think that the black wired GH3 controller is the best. Best Buy has it for its display model and I love it; unfortunately you can't buy it yet for the 360 - only Sony consoles.

New Website I Found

So I find many websites while at my job, but this one peaks my interest. I like it because it is all about videogames and is not sponsored by any videogame company (treats all games equal). You can make a profile and then add games that you own to your profile. I like it because you can see how random people get and also who likes similar titles. It is essentially a networking site for gamers, but if I had to give a more detailed description: Gamers of Nintendo and older generations and/or mostly console gamers and I believe the website is based in the U.K. With that said, I am a PC gamer mostly and can tell that most people on this site are not. Check it out here: VGChartz

Burlged! (Burglarized)

Yeah so my Apt got burgled (much better form of the word) over Thanksgiving break here at IU. My roommate called us all Saturday to tell us. We all came down later and took inventory of what was missing. They broke my bedroom window and then unlocked the front door. Only two of the four of us had stuff missing and we reported it to our insurance companies on Monday. On Tuesday they caught them. They pawned a guitar they stole from our neighbors and one of our neighbors found it and called the police. When they pawned it, the guitar shop copied their drivers license (their real one). Turns out they had already gotten rid of a lot of things and won't fess up as to where. They burglarized three Apts that night all in the same complex they live (Copper Beech Town homes) . I am still missing some stuff and my room mate's computer and classical guitar are still MIA. It has been and continues to be an interesting 'Life Event' as the sims would put it.

My Desktop

Notice the sidebar and that is a moving background movie (not picture); oh and the overlay for switching windows

Security

Here are some cartoons about security: Security Cartoons I am currently reading them for extra credit, but they are actually pretty good.

Gaming or More Gaming?

I am debating a couple of future purchases in my life. The first is this desire for twin graphics cards running SLI - maybe 8800 GTXs, I dont know. The other is this desire to get a Wii and some games such as Guitar Hero 3. While on one hand I want to play Crysis and Fear 2. The other says Mario and Zelda and of course the fast growing library that goes with a Wii. My computer does run newer games ok now, but I feel it will only be a couple of months and new games will struggle. I'm glad we had this discussion. I will sleep on it and let me know later.

Website

I just updated my website tonite on my graveyard shift in the Library Information Commons. I feel like I really made the most of my online space allotment. The load times may have also improved because I rebuilt it in Dreamweaver CS3; Before I had orginally started with Frontpage, then moved it to Dreamweaver (before Adobe bought it) and then to CS3; There was a lot of unused garbage in the HTML code. Looks cleaner and it is. Hope you enjoy. Let me know if you find misspellings or typos, it is 6am.