Madison Monroes

Duh.

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If you’ve ever heard of the game World of Warcraft, you know that it is an MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). It’s one of those games that can consume your life if you’re not careful, which is just one excellent reason I’ve avoided it (others would be the cost, and limited free time now that I work 40+ hours per week).

Recently something pretty cool happened in the world of the game. Blizzard, the game maker, introduced a new area with a new boss. When players got there, a spell called Corrupted Blood was cast upon them. Here’s where things get interesting: when players returned to towns in the game, they brought the disease back with them. The result was a virtual plague that quickly spread throughout the game. It was strong enough to kill low level characters and must have been a serious pain even to those at higher levels.

The fact that the whole thing was never supposed to happen doesn’t really matter. The plague spread in a very “natural” way, imitating a real life scenario. I’d say that’s both really cool and pretty scary at the same time.

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Sound drivers about half the size of a coffee cup attach to solid surfaces, turning the entire surface or object into a large speaker. Imagine sitting in your living room, being truly engulfed by surround sound emanating directly from your walls!

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So apparently I decided to start posting again. Who would have thought. The thing is, now I’m itching to change things up (in more ways than one). The site needs a new layout and a major overhaul in general and possibly a change in hosting. There’s files all over the place on the server, a lot of which aren’t mine and I don’t care about. Jimmy left long ago, and now Dylan has got his own website he’s been working on as well. So now it’s just me. I don’t even know if I want to keep this domain name, but until I come up with something better I’m hanging around here.

The first thing I decided to do was to switch back to Blogger for comments. I dropped Haloscan for several reasons. One, it was Dylan’s account so it doesn’t seem right to keep using it now. Two, I realized a few months ago that Haloscan doesn’t actually keep all of your old comments (at least not when you have a free account). It’s limited by either number of comments or a given amount of time, I’m not sure which. Three, Blogger has made a lot of improvements to the way they handle comments and I like it much better than I did when they first introduced the feature. So yeah, some comments have disappeared, but I can’t imagine there was anything that interesting there anyway.

I’m probably going to stick with Blogger for now, just because it makes things so easy, but I’m considering something else down the line. I’d really like to build my own system, but I doubt I could ever make something as effective as WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad.

One thing I know will change is the layout. We took the easy way out before and used a slightly modified, pre-existing Blogger template, but this time I think I’ll go for my own design. Stay tuned to see how that goes.

Currently Playing: Trapt – Stand Up

Family Guy silently gets a new 22-episode order, all but finalizing a fifth season. After sitting through class all afternoon, this just made my day!

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This is pretty sweet.

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Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s director of technology strategy for Windows Digital Media breaks down the reasons Microsoft decided to back HD-DVD over Blu-Ray as the next generation of optical media. According to Microsoft, Blu-Ray failed the test in six critical areas.

“Our decision is based mainly on where the formats are today,” Ribas said, referring to Microsoft. “A year and a half ago, both format organizations had very similar goals, and to some extent, the story of Blu-ray was actually very powerful. It had higher capacity, it had what we would consider benefits at the time. But then as time went on, and we’d seen what’s the reality of both formats today, and what were promises versus what’s proven and what’s real, that’s when we decided to make the decision.”

I’ll have to say I haven’t really been following this whole thing very closely and there’s one main reason. Usually competition is a good thing for consumers because it will drive down costs, but this time around that’s probably not the case. You have studios and software companies splitting over which technology to support which means in order to continue to buy a wide spectrum of movies and games, you’ll need to have players capable of reading both formats. Sure, multi-format players won’t take long to hit the market, but how much extra will we have to pay? I’d hate to see this turn into a Beta vs. VHS battle where the superior technology ends up losing out in the end. Then again, after reading this article it isn’t clear that one trumps the other (There’s an interesting comment about capacity in the article). In my mind, it doesn’t really matter which is better; I’ll most likely end up needing both which means I better start saving now.

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But more interesting are some of the other comments:

They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn’t emailing a blackhole.

Some other good stuff as well.

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I think this guy has an excellent point.

No one was suggesting they wanted a flash-based player over a hard drive one, and no one was complaining about the iPod mini being too wide or too heavy. In comparison to the iPod mini, the iPod nano made the battery even harder to get at, lowered its battery life, removed the “remote connector,” ditched FireWire support, weakened the device making it much more fragile, and features a scrollwheel inconsistent with that rest of the iPod lineup.

The nano is cool and all but I don’t really understand why they chose to completely replace the mini instead of just adding to the line or why someone who owned a mini would run out and replace it with a nano. I also like the mention of Motorola CEO Ed Zander’s supposed joke about his feelings for the nano.

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Google is joining the ranks of the Knights Templar, the Masons, the Illuminati, and Skull and Bones, effectively setting up secret invitation-only meetings with 400 elite attendees, including major media figures, who are all sworn to secrecy about next month’s Google Zeitgeist 05. Passwords will be used in lieu of secret handshakes.

Google, what are you up to?

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