Monday, May 08, 2006
Marketplace Server Broke
Looks like the Marketplace servers are broke as they won't let me download anything now. Don't know how Microsoft is going to fair tomorrow, but things don't look good.
Sunscreen / Suncream
I like looking tanned, at the mo my skin is untanned. I want to look as good as I can for as long as I can. I know that the sun will make my skin look older than I am as I get older, so I wear Sunscreen.
And while on the subject of skincare. Soap is the worst thing you can put on your face. Even Dove which claims to have one quarter moisturising oil and a neutral PH will dry your skin. Instead use a daily face wash or just warm water.
And while on the subject of skincare. Soap is the worst thing you can put on your face. Even Dove which claims to have one quarter moisturising oil and a neutral PH will dry your skin. Instead use a daily face wash or just warm water.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Some Second Life Stuff
So I spent a little while in second life today and I took a few photos:
This is a furry club that I went to. They had some great music.
Me relaxing.
Would you believe this guy has been paid to stand in a box and model clothes! Even stranger later on I discovered Money Chairs which give whoever sit in them money. This is designed to get the popularity rating of clubs and bars up to get a higher ranking on Second Life's search engine.
A rock that actuality tells you what the weather is with 100% accuracy.
O' Rly?
If I right click on this image and select buy I can get this tshirt. Witch I didn't.
I was going to take a picture of a cinema I went to, but I didn't want to get sued or anything, because they where showing the first ten minuets of Hostal.
This is a furry club that I went to. They had some great music.
Me relaxing.
Would you believe this guy has been paid to stand in a box and model clothes! Even stranger later on I discovered Money Chairs which give whoever sit in them money. This is designed to get the popularity rating of clubs and bars up to get a higher ranking on Second Life's search engine.
A rock that actuality tells you what the weather is with 100% accuracy.
O' Rly?
If I right click on this image and select buy I can get this tshirt. Witch I didn't.
I was going to take a picture of a cinema I went to, but I didn't want to get sued or anything, because they where showing the first ten minuets of Hostal.
The Numbers they DON'T want YOU to Have
Every been in the situation where you have wanted to speak to a person on the phone who works at Amazon, eBay or PayPal, but been unable to find a telephone number to call?!
Well HardToFind800Numbers.com is just one big list of customer service numbers from big companies who for some reason fail to put their telephone number anywhere on their website.
Viva La Internet!
Well HardToFind800Numbers.com is just one big list of customer service numbers from big companies who for some reason fail to put their telephone number anywhere on their website.
Viva La Internet!
Saturday, May 06, 2006
XBox Live! is like SO Innovative
Next week Microsoft will be singing about how successful Live! has been and will probably start pushing so much content onto Arcade and Marketplace that Sony and Nintendo find it hard to invade into, but the thing is that Nintendo actually did an arcade like service first called Satellaview for the SNES. Players could subscribe to a service, create an Avatar, walk around an Animal Crossing type town and play games that where downloaded through the service.
Random Fact
Super Mario Brothers 2 for the NES was called Doki Doki Panic when it was originally released in Japan and featured slightly different characters.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Network Performance Update
And what is this, what has reduced Microsoft's powerful network to this crawling wreck, a Top Spin 2 demo, that's what!
360 Network Performance
Somehow I don't think Microsoft's network is going to be able to handle E3.
For comparison here is what is should look like:
For comparison here is what is should look like:
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Consolas
Microsoft has a team of typographers that do a lot of work trying to improve the lives of readers all around the world. They do research on eye tracking, what increases reading speeds, decreases reading speeds and they are a very opinionated bunch, but their latest creation is Clear Type which was originally designed to take advantage of sub-pixel rendering of fonts on LCD screens. With a CRT screen a pixel is either red, green, blue or a combination of those colours from black to white, but with LCD displays each pixel is made up of three concentric diodes which from a few feet away look just like one pixel. So by manipulating the individual diodes instead of the whole pixel a better rendered font can be created (the article in the link above has more on this).
So anyway Clear Type will be making it's way into Vista and for that the typography team have invested a lot of time and effort creating some new fonts as the ones we are using today where created with the limitations of pixels.
One of the fonts they have developed is called Consolas which has been specifically designed for programmers, who incidentally spend an awful lot of time looking at text.
Today Consolas can be downloaded for Visual Studio 2005 from Here. I have installed it, it might take a little getting used to, but on a CRT Clear Type just looks like antialiased text anyway, but below is a before and after Clear Type.
So anyway Clear Type will be making it's way into Vista and for that the typography team have invested a lot of time and effort creating some new fonts as the ones we are using today where created with the limitations of pixels.
One of the fonts they have developed is called Consolas which has been specifically designed for programmers, who incidentally spend an awful lot of time looking at text.
Today Consolas can be downloaded for Visual Studio 2005 from Here. I have installed it, it might take a little getting used to, but on a CRT Clear Type just looks like antialiased text anyway, but below is a before and after Clear Type.
Apple's New Ad Campaign
So Apple has a new US ad campaign (hope I doesn't make it to the UK) called Gat A Mac. This is yet another in a growing list of human conversation advertisements that Americans are being subjected to. The US has had these kind of ads since they where being sold cigarettes at the dawn of television. Even the FlintStones once proclaimed the benefits of Winston Cigarettes. Although that was before people realised about the Effect it was having.
Anyway after a long absence this kind of one-on-one conversation ad is back. Phillips is doing it with their ShaveEverywhere.com campaign which is cheesy, but then the average American finds it difficult to talk about male grooming so that's ok. And then there is the Game Killers by Axe (known as Linx in the UK) whitch is also trying to be you're best friend.
My problem with this kind of advert is that they pretend to have a conversation with me, but they don't have an adult conversation with me. The issue is especially present in the Phillips campaign. There are glaring details left-out from the conversations just like in the good-old days of the tobacco advert and I find that frustrating. Talk to me, pitch me a product, even show me some of those Sony Third Place Ads again, but not this silly conversation stuff!
Anyway after a long absence this kind of one-on-one conversation ad is back. Phillips is doing it with their ShaveEverywhere.com campaign which is cheesy, but then the average American finds it difficult to talk about male grooming so that's ok. And then there is the Game Killers by Axe (known as Linx in the UK) whitch is also trying to be you're best friend.
My problem with this kind of advert is that they pretend to have a conversation with me, but they don't have an adult conversation with me. The issue is especially present in the Phillips campaign. There are glaring details left-out from the conversations just like in the good-old days of the tobacco advert and I find that frustrating. Talk to me, pitch me a product, even show me some of those Sony Third Place Ads again, but not this silly conversation stuff!
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
It Has Past
Half an hour later than it should have XBox.com has been updated. MyXbox looks very different and you can now send and receive messages from the web.
No dashboard update and download seepds are back to normal, but I suspect not many people are downloading right now.
No dashboard update and download seepds are back to normal, but I suspect not many people are downloading right now.
XBox360 E3 Content List
Only a few hours until Live! is backup and we can all see what has changed, but until then The Good Major has posted a lit of what will be released on Marketplace over E3:
Now I don't know about you, but i wasn't expecting a Viva Pinata demo so soon.Playable game demos and/or trailers from highly anticipated titles like:
- Crackdown (Microsoft Game Studios)
- Dead or Alive® : Xtreme 2 (Tecmo)
- The Lord of the Rings ™, The Battle for Middle Earth™ II (EA Los Angeles)
- Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (Capcom)
- Moto GP™ ’06 (THQ)
- Sonic the Hedgehog™ (Sega)
- Splinter Cell Double Agent ™ (Ubisoft)
- Test Drive Unlimited (Atari)
- Viva Piñata (Microsoft Game Studios)
- Plus a flood of HD trailers from games that have yet to be announced
- Call of Duty®2 – New Multiplayer Map Packs (Activision)
- The release of UNO on Xbox Live Arcade
- Game with Fame celebrity gaming sessions with stars like Jenny McCarthy, Method Man and Panic Channel (Featuring Dave Navarro, Stephen Perkins, Chris Chaney and Steve Isaacs).
- Play and Win contests with the latest Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Arcade titles
- Exclusive high-definition blockbuster movie trailer downloads
- Limited edition E3 Gamerpics and Themes
- A Backstage Pass to see developers preparing for E3
Name Development Comments On The Wii
This is a company that just makes up names. So I was interested in what they Had To Say.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Something Not Right in the Land of Live!
When I first started downloading stuff from live my little NetMetre program display would all red and I would be getting a constant 250K/s download rate, which is my top download speed. Right now however I don't seem to be getting anything like that at all. This has actually been getting progressively worse, supposedly as more people have been getting 360s and downloading stuff. So I am thinking the maintenance tomorrow might upgrade the network a little and prevent Live from disappearing from the internet come E3.
No Dashboard Update
Tuesday XBoxLive!, XBox.com and the XBox Forums will be down for maintenance, but there won't be a dashboard upgrade.
HA!
A while ago I did a Post about the research Microsoft did at Cambridge with camera effects and stuff to make using a webcam more fun. Call me crazy, but I still think Microsoft will be using this with the 360 cam.
Anyway I don't know wither it just applies to the Logitech Orbit Cam, but you can indeed do all these cool visual effects with that camera, Check This Video.
Anyway I don't know wither it just applies to the Logitech Orbit Cam, but you can indeed do all these cool visual effects with that camera, Check This Video.
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