Just bought a game on amazon from my cell while at work. <3 overtime
Mix Turtle is everything I want in a music site: Music. You can search for a song, artist or album and it will bring up a list and let you listen to them without any need to download. It also supports playlists. Oh, and it has a big turtle smoking an undefined substance with green smoke coming off it. Need I say more?
I <3 Mix Turtle
While working on some of the syncing stuff I’ve got going I came across a HUGE list of sites of RSS feed readers. One of which is RSSHugger. At first glance, it has a nice, ad-free layout that is easy to navigate so it’s friendly to look at. Because of this, I have no hesitation to sign up.
The catch here is though that they are holding a gun to my head to write a review about it before they’ll throw my blog into the list of sites they search. This logic seems a little bit backwards to me. That’s like asking me to review a movie based on how cool the poster looks. Until They actually put me in and let me get a feel for it, I’m not going to lie and say they’re SUPER AWESOME. I’ll write good (hopefully) info once they actually let me try it.
I’ve decided today would be the day where I take everything that I have online and merge it into one huge mega…thing. In short, what I want is that when I updated one site it will update all of them. That note lead me to claiming all of my misc blogs/socal networks that I may have signed up to on Technorati and finally getting around to signing up and syncing everything on FriendFeed.
Now FriendFeed did a great job and has a pretty big page with a lot of places that I went to, but there are still a few I can think of that aren’t there. However my next step in this process is this: How do I get all the FriendFeed info to display on my site? I’m sure there’s an easy way (or with my luck, a really complicated way) but I just haven’t checked yet. So this is a fair warning to anybody reading/subscribed to me: There may or may not be a lot of spam on it’s way, sorry.
*feel free to ignore this*
I’ve had irblogging for a few months now, figure it’s about time I go around the net and update some of the trackers. First on the list: Technorati.
Technorati Profile
The other day I decided to play around with Google’s new play thing Lively and to be brutally honest with you it was pathetic. This comes as something really hard for me to say, given that I have a history of spouting off at every given opportunity about how great google is but Lively is just unbearably bad. For those of you just tuning into what Lively is (or at least trying to be) it’s an avatar based 3D char room. Players are able to ‘create’ and ‘customize’ a series of avatars and chat it locations similar to the real world. This is hardly a new concept, but given that it’s being backed by one of the most powerful forces online the expectations are fairly high.
The first issue I have with this is the idea of it being browser based but requiring a download. A download for something is normal these days, especially for virtual worlds/mmo; Having browser based with no download are no problem either. However, the expected quality between the two is going to variry a great deal. If a user is required to download something it should be far superior to something thrown together in java or shockwave. This isn’t the case with Lively which is a big turn off right from the get-go.
Next lets tackle what is actually in this world and how it’s presented. Avatar selection is very slim. Users have a choice of 8 (I belive it was 8, might be 6 come to think of it) different avatars ranging from an anime styled character to a cat-like creature. For each of these avatars, you have a very limited appearal options which includes mostly different colored hats. There is no skin tone option or clothing layering option which most other servies offer making uniqueness very limited among users.
As we’ve now established that all the avatars will be clones, lets look at the functionality of this system. In an attempt to ‘create a room’ (which is common in many virtual world to allow to to customize a small space to call their own) I managed to put down a sofa, a table and a poster to float in the middle of my room. This would have been easier if the viewing screen is not cropped so small and the camera angles were not horrid.
The last things I can possibly think of at this time which irritate me about this poorly designed website is that the characters use chat bubbles (which is ok if the whole environment is viewable, but quite obviously is not due to poor camera controls) but does not support a chat log feature that I was aware of in my time using it. On top of the chat bubbles, character movement is completely done with the mouse by clicking and dragging a character to place which becomes very annoying, very fast when the cameras try to keep up with the mouse location.
Final summation: If Google wants to make it completely browser based they have to remove the inital download and install of the modules and make control a bit easier. They did a fantastic job with Google Docs and not having to require any downloads so there is no reason why they can’t do it with this. If they choose to go with the download route make it a true virtual world download and up the quality of the product (which honesly has to be done even if you stick with a browser based envirtonment) to allow more customizable feature and some sort of user interface would be a huge help. Until then, I’d stick with Second Life.
First off, I’m not sure why I like Avatar: The last Airbender. I guess it just hit me as “that could be cool” so I watched all of them. Don’t judge me.
Now to continue on, I just got watched the last 4 episodes of Book 3 yesterday and thought when he went into avatar form again he was totally badass. The whole dragon-turtle thing was kind of weird though. That’s not why I’m writing this though. I just saw a post talking about an MMO for Avatar titled Avatar: Legends of the Arena coming out in September and my mind just went into ‘yay’ mode.
Unfortunately, however, I then start thinking about the previous Avatar games they released and my hopes are dashed. I’ll be trying this out since it sounds to be mostly PVP which can prove for a bit of fun, but if they start charging for it my chips are off the table. Guess we’ll see in two months when it’s released.
I found a video of it (below) which could be interesting. Skip to about 2m30s to see some actual action.
After reading through all of the Day of Blogs participants posts (well, at least the last 5 of each) there was a total of 4 people who ended the last post with the words “It’s over. Thank Fuck”. I’m not even kidding. Now I’m not sure who exactly Fuck is, but he didn’t donate to me so I’m not going to thank him.
However, we did get another donation from JL which brings us up to a total of $32! Thanks JL.
EDIT: OMG, I missed a donation that Jen made. Sorry Jen, the notification went to my spam for some reason. That brings us to $42, woot and thanks!
Back to Current news!
Some of you may just be waking up but we’ve still got some amazing ladies truckin’ away. Let’s give them all some encouragement, they’re doing great!
Hilary for Amnesty International : Powering through prompts
Miss Raye for Wild Horse Rescue : Showing off her excellent writing talents with some fic
Linda for Christian Children’s Fund : Talking about the great outdoors
Twyla for Not for Sale : Teaching us about Zimbabwa
With one more post left, Day of Blogs is almost over. That means I have one more chance to show you how great of a blogger I may (or may not) be but also only one more chance to convince you that you should donate to the Tim Horton Children’s Foundation. They’re a great group of people who take kids camping and let them be kids in a world where they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Link is on the side ->
Almost done. 2 posts left after this one. I don’t have any juice left in me, kinda glad it’s coming to an end. My animal-loving monitories did a fantastic job this year. I’m proud of all of you so here’s a shoutout.