Demo stand Picture 2

This is the latest pic i have of my demo station. Ok, so i know this is just the monitor, but one thing at a time. The side panel i have created are pretty much what i want, only they are currently just printed paper. I tried to print them properly and my printer refused to work right. It kept printing the main body of black text as grey. this is real annoying, as otherwise i think i would have them created onto the mounting board etc.

Next up is to do the base board for the bottom of the monitor and then start assembling the rest of the actual stand, and locking pieces into place etc. But more of that later...

I did get my joystick pulling code done today for A Shooter, but that was it. I haven't even had chance to test it properly yet. More to do as usual. I may need help or something. Maybe just less Apathy.

G'night

Apathy

It is sunday. A fine day of the week. One of the 7 i look forward to. But today i am being pretty apathetic about everything. Not sure why. I am sure though it has to do with a number of things.

Today is my Dads birthday. He is in England and i am out here in the US. I am missing him today. Not being able to just dawdle round to the house he lives in and stay longer than he wants me too is a bit of a downer. He is the type of dad who tries so hard to please everyone. That is not possible of course, but he tries so hard. When it doesn't work out he gets a bit down about it. Wish he were here with me today, in super sunny california. Though i hear the weather ain't so bad in England. He recently changed his phone number and i cannot find it, argh! So no phone call to him today, maybe i will have better luck tomorrow when i call me mum, at least i have her phone number. Happy birthday Dad, love ya lots.

I did not have a good nights sleep last night. Suffered a bit more with my shoulder, but i suspect that i am also suffering from fatigue. Having a full time job and also working on my Indie stuff is tiring. I just have so many balls in the air at once. All demanding some level of attention most days. Today i feel very weary of all this.

This weekend i really want to finish the the monitor surrounds and also get the box built that it will all sit on top of. This is now a tall order with only 1 more day left of my extended weekend.

Still i had a nap this afternoon and am feeling a little better, but not really excited about much of anything. Doing the technical stuff for A Shooter right now is at the low end of my enthusiasm scale. Maybe i can work through sme of my wish list.

Hope you are all having a better day than i feel i am (cos it isn't really a bad day of course!)

laters

Need a picture of me stand

I know this is weak sauce, but i cannot take a picture yet of my stand. Well actually i can take a picture.. Only i cannot get the photos off the camera atm.

I am gonna see what i can do abuot this, as i haven't gotten very far, but i have gotten somewhere.

I was a good day today, watching my tenni team win the division and celebrating with them. Even though i cannot play at the moment it was a good time. Then we go to Taco Bell for some grub then back home. A good day, then my kids went off to a friends house wher they played with the two boys there  (mostly castle crashers). Then we went over later and the kids were in the pool for several hours. On the way home much later there was a sobriety checkpoint in Wood Ranch. I have never seen one of these before. Quite interesting. As i had not been drinking at all i wasn't worried.

So now i am back home abnd back to working on the stand flanges. (hmm, great word flanges). Yeah, i did work on them in the afternoon. But i was an idiot... Yeah, ya heard it here first. Don't try and do text layout and design in paintshop packages. Like i spent way too long doing. Instead use a package like word. Well i hope that is gonna work, and i am about to find out.

When i get a picture or two, ill post them up.

G'night.

Well i found a nice SD card reader i had forgotten about, so below are my first pictures of my developing Demo station.

This is the whole demo station. With my bed behind it andscissors and velcro and all that great stuff one needs to have to make anything cool.

This is a Closer view of the Top deck, though you can clearly see in this picture the bottom deck, and that is where the Xbox will reside soon.

This final closeup has the actual maounting board company logo and the XBLIG logo on it. That one is velcro'd on and ready to go. The left side one is the new test printout from the new Word Docx that i made. And yeah, I was dumb and word is so much easier to do this in. Good knowledge. now i have to print the lect one properly and then start work on the right side. Then it is back to more preparing of the stand i guess.

with that... Good Night.

Where does all the time go?

Tonight I managed to copy some discs of my sons Black Belt promotion/exhibition from last November (yeah a wee while ago eh!). I also managed to fix some more bugs in A Shooter. Had dinner and erm.... yeah

So what happened to all that time. It is amazing that time can seem so inconsistent with how long it takes to pass. Sometimes hours can go flying by and minutes can take forever.

Take a few days ago, i went to the Doctors office to get my shoulder MRI results. I got there 10 minutes early, but i had to wait in the waiting room for a whole hour. This was slow but people were coming and going so not too bad. Then it went into super slow mode when i was taken to one of the jail cells, erm.. i mean't treatment rooms. There i was bored to tears nearly for 40 more minutes... This was a very long time, or it seemed like it. The Doctor saw me for only like 10 minutes and they went super fast. Go figure!

On an opposite type thread, i visited Dave High today. This guy has a printers shop very near me and i was after quotes from him to make me some t-shirts and hats etc for contest prizes. I have visited Dave befroe and he is such a nice chap. Roxy in the front office is also very charming and i have to say that the hours we spent there last time and this were like rocketship time. It passed so quickly it is amazing. I have to say i love visiting their shop. They are both very cool people. I hope i can get some money together to buy some of what they offer.

Tomorrow i am sure the time will go fast and slow at the same time. This is because my tennis team, the Moorpark Raiders is in their final match of regular season. If we win all 5 courts we will be in the divisional playoffs. If we lose a court the currently second place team might be able to overtake us. It is very exciting and I will be there to cheer my team on, as i am too injured to play (bummer!!). So i am sure while i watch us winning will be fast time, i reckon that any close court will take forever to get done. Either way, it is going to be interesting.

g'night and stay healthy!

Xblig, the land of the Avatars!

Hear them ROAR!

The land of the Avatar games is on your Xbox. If you haven't found this fabled land. Then you need to get yourself over to the Games Download section and choose Indie games. In there you will find all manner of Avatar games. Created by talented and not so talented people. Games that will make you laugh, or wince or cry out loud.

Xbox Live arcade (XBLA) is the big brother of Xbox Live Indie Games(XBLIG). It has a lot of quality games on it. Games that have been vetted by microsoft and then put through some pretty rigorous testing and work. These games are professionally created and usually show that in all aspects. The Indie games are not so heavily tested. Or vetted in any way.

What does this mean? What are ya waffling on about?
The land of the Avatars is popular. Most Avatar games seem to be garnering a considerable amount of downloads (even if some have not got a good sell thru). so what we know is that Xbox owners really love to play games with their Avatars in them. Not really a surprise. The surprise is the lack of choice in the XBLA area. The reason is pretty simple. It takes a lot of time to create an XBLA title, whereas an XBLIG title can be created from the examples in a week or so. So XBLA cannot hope to bring out a large number of games featuring the lovely little Avatars. But XBLIG can (also MS has several restrictions for XBLA titles pertaining to lots of stuff like leaderboards and presence etc). For XBLIG once again, there are no real restrictions. I am sure if there were we would have a lot less Avatar, or any other games to peruse on the service .

Why do I care?
All developers on the Xblig service are seeing the large download numbers, on some really crap games. It makes it hard not to jump on that bandwagon and create something. I myself am considering this as a form of advertising or marketing. It would get my company name out there to maybe 40K potential buyers. That is an impressive number. If i can then lead them to my other games of better gameplay and quality, then is this virtual advertising? Would it work?

At the moment i am looking for funds to finish my current game in a way that will make me more proud. I will be pondering my options as i go along this next couple of months though for sure.

Good Night and Avatar well.

Note: Of course some people think that MS are already being over restrictive on it's rules for Avatars. This however is MS decision, and i guess they have good reasons for controlling them. Though it does make reveiwing games with Avatars more difficult.

Blizzard Hacked my Wow account?

How can i say such a thing as the title to this post?

Simple!!!

My account was hacked a few days ago. As were my friends accounts of the last several months. Ok tos this isn't new news really. But what is new news, is that i believe it is not the Hackees fault. There are no key loggers on my machine. There were no key loggers on several of my friends machines.

Blizzard tells us that it is our fault. OUR machines have been compromised etc. That is BS i tell ya. There is nothing on on any of mine or my friends machines. (ok, so one of them had a key logger ok!). The rest of us feel secure with our solid virus checkers and scanners and firewalls etc.

Ahh, it's that Curse gaming and it's addons mate! No it freakin isn't. I can tell ya that cos i don't use addons. I am a Neanderthal when it comes to such enhancements.

So please someone tell me how Blizzard can possibly believe that an account that has been dormant for over 6 months could possibly have been key logged? Just how is that done now?

Her is another oddity about the recent 'Hacks'. the accounts had their passwords changed, and some had authenticaors put on them. Now mine was just a password change... But.... where was the email telling me that my password had been changed? I got one when i went on and changed it myself to get back my account. How can this possibly be? This is also the same thing that happened to my friends accounts. This is BS i tell ya. Somehow someone changed my account password and i wasn't notified by Blizzard... Let me think about that.... does that mean that in reality Blizzard is the one being Key logged? Then they use those admin paswords to suppress password account change emails?

Something is wrong, and someone needs to do something about it. Class action for all those 2 week periods that everyone is losing. I have to say that emotional trauma is another point. My son cried when i told him we had been hacked and all our characters were now naked and poor. This is complete and utter BS.

I am really annoyed about this and i have noone to shout at. I HATE that. I need to vent to someone and i wish it could be Blizzard, but all ya do there is hold the line till ya get a poor sap to shout at, and that isn't satisfactory!

ARGH!

Anyone got any ideas on this? I BLAME Blizzard, they lost my details at the very least. do they have an emplyee that is stealing these things?

Good Freakin Night!

Time to Blog

I have taken me meds tonight. The ones that will hopefully get me at least 5 hours of solid sleep. so now it must be time to blog as usual i did not make it earlier. So what do i waffle one about? should it be a directionless diatribe or something more directed?

Well i am going for the first option, as i love that idea a lot more at the moment...

Ilerion, Welcome to the whacky world of Xblig and Xna programming and playtesting. I see ya got your first one in there on Old School Racer. For anyone that wants to know, Ilerion is a cool dude that i do have the pleasure of knowing. Though darn him for finding several bugs in my game tonight haha! ;)  No really, great job. I am sure everyone in the community will appreciate you as they get to know you.

A Shooter is about ready for the Playtest section once more, however Ilerion found a bug i just cannot seem to find. Sooo, i might just put it up there anyway. Not sure. So it will have to wait till tomorrow now. so much to do, so little time.

Talking bout Meds, it is also a game that some web site i read said was worth a look. How wrong they were. I hate it when i get cheated (or feel cheated) out of living or succeeding in a game. This breakout game (i love breakout games, as you could tell from my Pong/breakout mix Aceball) sucks badly. I just felt cheated from the first moments. Not the way to start a game, no wonder it only has 2 stars. Pity as it looks like the programmer can program too!

Onto PS3.. Once again i have gotten The Midway sent off to Sony. I cannot disclose why it has not gone live yet on PS3 Home, but it should now be slated for Mid June. I know you folks are gonna love it. Well certainly gonna love it more than a lot of home. When i get more info i will post something up. Our secret agent is still on the loose in the Midway.

Tonight i don ear plugs and Vicodin.. Hmm, can i don Vicodin? Maybe i will consume Vicodin and consume ear plugs.. Hmm, nope.. that doesn't really work either. Just how would the ear plugs know where to go ?

With that random Thought i am Outta here!

G'night.