My view of the world

Bethesda is going to spend $20 million on advertising for this first person shooter. —-OK, OK, Bethesda insists that this is not a first person shooter… Sure looks a lot like one to me.
This is all well and good, but after talking to someone who keeps track of such things, it appears that this latest Fallout may well be turn based like the last couple. In which case it won’t sell. Turn based games are too slow for the current collection of users.

This also has some sort of Karma based system so I guess setting off a nuke is bad karma. —-But what’s the point of having access to a nuke if you don’t use it?

This is from a link off the Bethesda site:
The combat - which can be tackled FPS style - is more intelligently approached using the pseudo turn-based VATS combat system.
For a good review of the game click on the link above.

This is from the overview on the Bethesda site:
Blast ‘Em Away With V.A.T.S.! – Even the odds in combat with the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System for your Pip-Boy Model 3000! V.A.T.S. allows you to pause time in combat, target specific body parts on your target, queue up attacks, and let Vault-Tec take out your aggression for you. Rain death and destruction in an all-new cinematic presentation.

Pause time? Queue up attacks? ——-Sounds like a first person shooter for sissies.

Halo 3 may smoke your Xbox 360, but if you can get it to run, at least it gets the adrenalin going.

First Page Rank doesn’t mean much since the last Google update. They call it an update, but I believe that it was nothing more than an attempt to rein in the competition.
The competition sells links and Google sells links. —It must be nice to be able to adjust the marketplace to suit yourself.
Adjustments must be made for the reduced ranking most sites got. But I think a new metric needs to be found.

Personally I would recommend using traffic stats. Some blog or other I read recently has a comment to that effect, and they were right.
If I’m going to lease space in a shopping center I want to know how much traffic I can count on.

On the sites I own or manage, I have installed Google analytics. Since I work under the assumption that Google tracks pretty much every thing that gets done on the net, I don’t mind giving them a little more information.

Google analytics will tell you not only how many visitors you get, it will tell you where these visitors are coming from, and how long they stayed.

As an example:
Ashburn Va. visits all my sites. I goggled for Ashburn and found out that they are about 30mi from DC, they are the home of the Washington Redskins, MCI, AOL and a number of other tech firms.
This doesn’t tell me exactly who is visiting, but it does tell me that they are probably more comfortable around computers than most and probably have at least a high school education.

If I were marketing a product this information would be valuable. If you think about it, if you have a blog, or a websitem you are marketing product.
Even if you never sell a product or an ad, and all you’re marketing is your opinion, your beliefs or pictures of your grandkids, you’re still trying to get people to pay attention.

And don’t give up on SEO. Page rank may not be worth what it once was, but search engine placement is still king.

Pioneer Loan has a new blogger. His name is Michael. He’s one of their IT people and has a taken up the challenge and begun writing.

The name of the blog is Hostility, and the tagline is “I hates ‘em I does.” I’m not certain if the tagline is from the Hobbit or left over from talk like a pirate day.

Here is a link to it, Hostility.

Remembering that it is not intended as a joke, and that it is being written by the person who also writes their code, —What can I say? —You simply must read it, or at least attempt to read it.

One laptop per child. –A commendable idea.

This project has become the flavor of the month among tech bloggers and the press, but the so called facts are inevitably skewed.
In an article on a ZD Blog, this weird logic was found:

XO laptops, the flagship model of the OLPC project, can be bought for educational purchases in quantities of 100-999 at $299 each, 1000-9999 at $249 each, and 10,000 and up at $199 each. That scale means that if you buy 10,000 XOs in the Give One, Get One program you can hit the $100 barrier per laptop, the OLPC’s initial price target….. Huh??
You buy two laptops at $199 each and you hit the $100 dollar price point?
$199 per unit looks like $200 bucks each plus shipping to me.
Unless the article failed to mention some other details I must assume that the person who came up with this wonderful logic was a marketing major.

Negroponte was on an interview show and said that the reason kids in third world counties don’t go to school isn’t poverty, it’s because school is boring.
And from what I heard during the interview, being computer literate will miraculously produce abundant clean water and food.

While I applaud the basic concept, I feel that Mr. Negroponte’s logic is entirely unrealistic and self-serving to the point that it has no bearing on the real world.

Question Mr. Negroponte.
If you are in a refugee camp or in a small village miles from the nearest power line where do you charge the battery?
And where do you get the much lauded internet connection?
I know, I know. –”Buy our product and they will come”….

This article is about another attempt to educate children in the use of technology. The Hole-in-the-Wall project.
And as far as I can tell, this guy isn’t trying to make a profit.
Sounds a bit more charitable doesn’t it.

“That’s Hot®!” (Paris Hilton) – Hilton owns the trademark to the phrase “That’s hot,” which was registered on Feb. 13th.

This is a comment I just received:
———————————————————
Hello!
Thanks to rcnevada.com for the real great site!

I wanna invite to a free video chat for 10 persons at once where you can find kurdish friend and to findout kurdish news from Kurdistan?

If so then welcome to kurdish video chat for free!!!

Thanks!!
———————————————————
The reason for my posting what I would normally consider spam is the unusual nature of the site.

Like most of the people I know, I tend to forget that there are an awful lot of other nationalities out there who use the internet as part of their daily lives.

This is the latest venture in Arbil.

Another example is Afghanistan. In spite of our taking it away from the people we helped put in power, most people only know it from watching Rambo 9998.7 or whatever it was.
By watching this sort of movie everybody knows that the peope ride horses, live in huts and play some sort of game with a dead goat. –Which by the way is having a bit of a resurgence.
This is the Kabul Trade Center.
Not bad for people living in huts.

Singapore has banned an Xbox video game because it contains a sex scene between a woman and a female alien.

Players can engage their avatars in a variety of sexual encounters during the game. The human-alien duo are depicted kissing and caressing each other in a sex scene that The Straits Times English-language newspaper in Singapore reported ends with the alien saying, “By the gods, that was incredible, commander.”

M$ had this to say:
“‘Mass Effect’ features realistic content and interactions in the context of the science-fiction story line,” Ian Tan, marketing communications manager for Southeast Asia said. “The game takes a mature approach to various relationships amongst characters throughout the game and the content in question is another dynamic of that.”

I guess they don’t sell many games in primarily Muslim countries.

I’ll wager they don’t show the original Star Trek. Given captain Quirks predilection for green chicks and his refusal to marry any of them.

SYDNEY (AFP) - Santas in Australia’s largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas’s traditional “ho ho ho” greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say “ha ha ha” instead.

One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and was too close to “ho”, a US slang term for prostitute.

These nut jobs are not joking.
Even in a sue happy world, isn’t this just a wee bit too politically correct?

This was going to be a blog about the Miller Lite ad in which a dalmatian appears on a wagon drawn by Clydesdales. The Miller truck then pulls up and the dog jumps aboard and the truck drives off.

However, I ran across this tidbit from 2006 or there abouts:
A man once responded to some sort of email campaign from Miller. He later decided he no longer wanted to participate in any other campaigns, so he gave them a bogus email addy. Cool, problem solved…. Wrong.

Miller Brewing tracked down a bunch of people who had taken this approach and sent these people emails letting them know that they were back on the list.

This is from the Spam Kings blog:
Turns out this spooky little spam was the work of Equifax, the big credit reporting agency that shut down its Boca Raton-based spam operation, Naviant, in 2003, due to the impending passage of CAN-SPAM.

The Miller campaign suggests that Equifax’s spamming, and Naviant itself, are alive and well. Customer-contact.net, the domain referenced in the Miller spam, is associated with former Naviant head and longtime ROKSO spammer Scott Hirsch. The IP address hosting the customer-contact.net domain belongs to Naviant.

As they said on Ad-Verse blog:
How sociopathic is that?!?

There are no secrets; Only things someone forgot to mention.

In Nevada it’s illegal to drive a camel on the highway.

In Alaska it’s an offense to push a live moose out of a moving airplane.
In Anchorage AK it’s illegal to tie your dog to the roof of your car.

In California no vehicle without a driver may exceed 60 miles per hour.
In Blythe Ca it’s illegal to wear cowboy boots unless you already own at least two cows.

In Colorado it’s illegal to ride a horse while under the influence.
In Cripple Creek Co it’s illegal to bring your horse or pack mule above the ground floor of any building.
In Denver Co it’s illegal to lend your vacuum cleaner to your next-door neighbor.

In Maine shotguns are required to be taken to church in the event of an Indian attack.
You may not step out of a plane in flight.
In Augusta strolling down the street while playing a violin is against the law.

In Montana it is illegal to have a sheep in the cab of your truck without a chaperon.
It is illegal for a man and a woman to have sex in any other position other than missionary style.
Seven or more Indians are considered a raiding or war party and it is legal to shoot them.

In New Mexico state officials ordered 400 words of “sexually explicit material” to be cut from Romeo and Juliet.

In New York citizens may not greet each other by “putting one’s thumb to the nose and wiggling the fingers”.
The penalty for jumping off a building is death.
In Carmel NY It is illegal for a man to go outside while wearing a jacket and pants that do not match.

In Washington State it is mandatory for a motorist with criminal intentions to stop at the city limits and telephone the chief of police as he is entering the town.
It’s illegal to pretend that one’s parents are rich.
In Seattle Wa you may not carry a concealed weapon that is over six feet in length.

In Tennessee more than 8 women may not live in the same house because that would constitute a brothel.
It is illegal to gather and consume roadkill.
The definition of “dumb animal” includes every living creature.