monkey!

March 27, 2008

seriously the best music I’ve ever listened to

I’m a big fan of GodSpeed You! Black Emperor. I’ve listened to all their albums many, many times over. When I found out that they were pretty much done with, I became so, so sad.

Then I discovered A Silver Mt. Zion, or now known as Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-la-la band. The bandis headed by 3 members of Godspeed, plus some other talent and the chemistry of all these talents combined is … like liquid sex.

Since discovering them abuot 2 weeks ago, I have not been able to stop listening to them. I’ve already bought tickets for their Toronto show in JUNE (A bit ways away!) and I simply cannot wait. They have 5 albums out, some really depressing, some powerful, but all very beautiful.

Also if you are contemplating suicide, do not listen to the first album (He has left us alone, but shafts of light sometmies grace the corner of our rooms). It is fucking depressing.

On silver mount zion
All buried in ruins
We was dancing the hora
Until we vomited blood
Spinning like crazy
Shoshana was jonesing
The towers had fallen
And the wind called out
My grandfather’s name

Oh, don’t be afraid, though the parade
Will not pass our way
It’s nobler to never get paid
Than to bank on shit and dismay

March 22, 2008

The ultimate internet TV box

I’ve been playing around with various online tv providers lately. It’s a huge growing market, with Hulu being a huge player (But U.S only!) and Miro, a free, open source, available everywhere player that focuses on RSS feeds to fetch episodes across the net.

Despite all these advances in trying to push major and freelance broadcasting online, the mass market simply isn’t going for it. Sure, us geeks and early adopters can enjoy these services, but most people like good old fashioned T.V.

However, with all these services we have all the shows we usually watch, but whenever we want, with pause, rewind, forwarding, no commercials, social features, and much more. Why hasn’t there been a huge adoption of these services?

Simply put, people like to be able to sit down and channel surf. People do not want to watch their favourite shows on a 20″ LCD 3 feet away from them. They want a comfy couch, a remote, and a lot of variety. So how can we get this?

Bring something like Miro, to a set-top box

Miro is in my opinion the best idea so far when it comes to internet T.V. You subscribe to channels (Like you would in any regular cable package). It automatically downloads new episodes of the shows to your library and you can watch them whenever you want. To make it easy for you, it also by default deletes old episodes you’ve watched after 5 days (You have the option to keep them).

Now that you know a bit more about Miro, why not bring this to a set-top box? A small computer running, simply downloading and displaying the content. Miro is very good at doing this for all the various free video casts out there, but how do we get the major networks on it?

A monthly subscription service, like we pay now would work perfectly.

I would be more then happy to pay a set fee each month to get my favourite T.V shows. If Hulu.com can be free, why not do almost the same idea but on the T.V with a monthly fee? Let me create a package of T.V Shows, Series, or Channels. Let’s say I’m a big fan of House, Family Guy, The Simpsons, and Lost. Toss this together for me in a package, throwing in any extras and charge me a small monthly fee of say $5 for just those shows. Let’s say I want episodes from the Space Channel, History, and Discovery. Charge me $10 /month to have a good stream of episodes from these networks and I’d be more then happy to pay that.

All the shows would arrive onto my box, via a subscription like service. Create a model that makes it very easy for me to subscribe to more T.V Shows or channels.

Of course, the problem here lies that we have hundreds of channels, all from different corporations and a bunch of legal issues come in hand. This is why I am loving free internet T.V. (Mostly) quality content produced by people who simply love what they are doing. No legal issues, no fees, just entertainment.

We won’t get this in the near future.

Unfortunately, knowing all the restrictions and legal hassles involved in getting the major t.v broadcasting to other locales, I do not see something like this coming any time soon. In the mean time, I am building a small $200 P.C that will incorporate services like Miro to get free internet T.V on my television so I can watch shows on the comfort of my couch.

March 18, 2008

I was all hacked up!

A few days ago the server that this blog runs on got hacked. It was from a vulnerbility in a file uploader we run on GamingW.net. The hacker decided to delete a few things but backups saved most things.

For some reason though, my blog did not live! The database was fine but I have lost my template. I will have to modify to something but for now I’m stuck with this ugly default one.

Anyways will be writing something most likely on small business soon. Also, starting a herb garden

March 3, 2008

How to get your customer excited, Or: Why WoW is better then LOTRO

Before I begin this post: This is not about the gaming experience from either World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings online, this is about what happens before all the gaming. Getting the thing installed!

I had some free time in the mornings this weekend to just relax. I decided I would do so by installing Lord of the Rings online and play my free trial. I had the CD’s that I had purchased about 5 months ago in my desk and plopped those into my CD drive.

The installation got going, kind of a cheesy interface but whatever, it was working. While installing, I downloaded a full patch from 1.0 to the current Book 11 patch so I could be ready for that. The installer finished with no quirks and I opened up the patcher. After about 20 minutes of patching it was nearing the end when all of a sudden…

“Cannot purge data files!” at 99% of patching this showed up. What? Ok, shit happens, I look up the error and most suggest to re-install Lord of the Rings online and re-patch. I do that again, wasting another good hour or so.

Cannot purge data files! .. Yup, it happened again, at 99% again. Ok, now this is annoying. I do more research and find out that some people who bought the game early had issues and had to download the huge 5gb client from the web to be able to play. Great customer experience so far. The CD’s I bought don’t even fucking work.

So I download the client, surprisingly it’s going fast (550kb/sec average) .. wow! That made me slightly happy. The client downloads and once again, I run the patching tool.

Patching is taking awhile, you’d think they would offer a some-what patched client from their official site but I guess not. I’m nearing 100% in patching .. it’s getting close, when all of a sudden

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME. Yup, my patcher went PAST 100% and kept going. You know where it finished? 360% It also took very long, probably another hour to finish.

Finally .. LOTRO was installed. I loaded the game up, moved around for a bit, and fucking deleted this piece of shit game and threw my CD’s away.  I invested about 5 hours to get this shit running and I was too angry at it to even want to play after that.

A day passed, and I was hanging out with my brother helping my girlfriend move in. Off and on we got talking about WoW and I decided I’d give WoW a shot and play on his character to help him build up gear and ratings (I am not too informed on all the WoW terms yet)

I sat down at my computer at about 11pm and decided to install WoW before bed as I wasn’t too tired. I popped in the first CD and got going. The original WoW is 6 CD’s of data, but it went by fast and in about 20 minutes I was already installing the expansion (Burning Crusade)

The expansion took another 10 minutes. After that, I began downloading a large patch for the game. Estimated time said it would be about 2 hours as I had a lot of patch data to download. No biggie I though, I will go to sleep and finish it tomorrow morning.

I woke up today to find not only had my download finished fine, it had patched it all up once the download finished and after clicking Ok, I was ready to play WoW.

No hassle, fast, a nice friendly install UI made me excited to play. I logged on to make sure it all went through fine and it had.

So the lesson here? LOTRO and Turbine fucking blow. Blizzard does, and always has known how to please customers and this is no different. I see so many people complaining on the WoW forums about the game and such but after the experience I had with LOTRO I see how spoiled they all are.