December 2007
Monthly Archive
Nintendo and video games December 27th, 2007 by HMTKSteve
Everyone is playing Wii Sports!
In March of this year I posted a series of article featuring tips and tricks for use with the games in the Wii Sports package on the Wii. Over the course of the past year these articles have consistently drawn traffic at the rate of 50 views each per day. Over the last few days the traffic to these four articles has increased at a maddening rate!
Prior to Christmas my article on how to find a Wii saw a similar increase in traffic. The only thing I can make from this is that everyone was looking for a Wii for the holiday and now that they have one they want to know how to get the high score on the wii Sports games!
These articles are a good example of of evergreen content.
video games December 26th, 2007 by HMTKSteve
Having A Nintendo Christmas
All right. I got a few new Nintendo items for Christmas this year.
1) Zelda DS Lite - Unlike the other colors of DS Lite this one is not a base color with a clear plastic covering over it. The covering is molded gold plastic. This is good because my daughter has a Pink DS Lite with the clear plastic and the edge cracks (between the covering and the pink) are filled with black cheese. This one has those same cracks but you will not see the cheese build-up.
As for the game... It is too easy. The hardest part for me so far has been when where you have to close the clam shell to transfer the map symbol. That was only hard because my mind equates closing the DS Lite with putting it in standby mode. I had the same problem with that one Wario Ware game that required you to drop the Wiimote. The game was telling me to do something that has been warned against in the instructions.
2) Wii Zapper and Link's Crossbow Training - The Zapper is high-quality plastic. Not sure about being worth $25 but I still picked it up.
The game requires you to unlock each stage in single player score mode before making those levels available in multi-player mode. The stages do get more difficult though I somehow managed to have most of my trouble with the mid level stages and totally blew through the last few stages on the first pass. It's a good "mini-game" style game for when you have friends over.
3) Super Mario Galaxy - OK, I did not play the other 3D one on the N64 but... WTF? Is there a difficulty setting somewhere in an options menu? This game is stupidly easy. I think I died once by getting squished by an elevator floor by accident.
The graphics are sweet but I have not encountered anything real difficult in the game.
General and Internet December 21st, 2007 by HMTKSteve
Where have all my blogging friends gone?
I have been using this site as a blog for a little over a year now. In that time I have met many interesting people. Some of them are still blogging while others have moved onto bigger and better things. I'd like to take a moment and list some of the bloggers I have met over the last year.
1. Ohad from the Plugg - I think I met Ohad through the social bookmarking site Digg about a year ago. We had some similar interests and chatted for a while. We still send emails back and forth every few weeks but that is about it.
2. Ryan J. Parker - I met Ryan via John Chow's blog in the comment area. At the time he had some gaming blog with him eating Lucky Charms in the header. Ryan helped me out a few times with some coding problems (damn my old feeble eyes for missing obvious things) and he's a cool guy. I think he won one of my contests too. His blogs have been dead for a while now.
3. Baron - I don't remember if I found him or his blog first. Baron was fairly active on Digg until he got banned and brought back. His blog was a very good read and he even got linked to by Wired at one point. Sadly his blog has turned into a twitter link fest.
4. Jez from Site Logic - I'm not sure where I met up with Jez, it might have been the same place I met up with Ryan. Jez is a sharp cookie and he runs quite a few sites, many of which I am not familiar with. Jex has always been good with some information on SEO and linking strategies.
5. Ben Cook from Blogging Experiment - Ben contacted me a while back when I was looking for guest authors. He sent me a good article and I published it. Since then his own site has really taken off. He had some trouble a short while back dealing with selling a theme (that should have remained private and not posted on site) and his site is always worth a read. right now he is making the rounds on digg with his Lessons on Blogging series.
6. Ms. Q from Q Musings - Another person that I can not remember how I met but I do enjoy her blog. I tried to help her out earlier in the year with traffic and building an audience and I can only think it must have worked because her posts always have a ton of comments attached to them.
7. RT from Untwisted Vortex - I have no idea how I met up with R.T. but it was around the time I was checking out Plime. I reviewed his blog and kept going back. Like me R.T. is a former military man.
If I left you off don't worry, I'm planning to do a few more of these in the coming days.
Family December 21st, 2007 by HMTKSteve
Christmas is coming
I know that it is not exactly news to most people but Christmas is almost upon us. It is a religious holiday that has been converted into the holiest of days to those who belong to the world of retail shopping. It is the holiest of days to those who belong to the religion of consumerism.
I also enjoy a bit of consumerism now and then (I bought my Wii last year) but I find that shopping at this time of year is the worst. There is never any place to park and the things you want are often in short supply (unless you go to eBay) if they exist on store shelves at all.
Do you know that this is going to be the first year (since we started the tradition) where we will not have a picture of my daughter sitting on a mall Santa's lap? I just realized that. I will also be working Christmas Eve (1PM - 9PM) so my daughter and I will have to do our annual "Sugar Cookies for Santa" Scream and Fight Fest in the morning. Then I get to go to work while my wife deals with an over-excited 8 year old who can't wait ten minutes (let alone 10 hours) for Christmas.
Another funny thing about Christmas in my house is that my daughter is a late sleeper. What I mean is that after she wanders into our bed around 3AM she likes to sleep in. In the past she has done her sleepy-walk routine right past a room full of presents, bleary eyed and unaware. I don't know if we will be so lucky this year. I know that I do not want to get up at 3AM to open presents!
I know that later on, on Christmas Day, we will leave our nice warm home and travel down the road to Grandma's house where we will have to endure several hours of relatives. Some relatives we enjoy, some we do not. I'm not going to go into too much detail here because some of them may be reading this. Suffice to say, when it comes to the Christmas get together I would prefer to stay home and enjoy time with my immediate family.
As good as the foods smell when we go out I know that 90% of the dishes being served are not compatible with my body. I end up picking at the snacks and getting an upset stomach for the rest of the day because everything else contains something that I am allergic to. Yeah, it is just so much fun for me.
Enough about me and my holiday plans, what are you going to be doing?
Movies December 17th, 2007 by HMTKSteve
Movie Review: Enchanted
This weekend my family and I went to the movies. I wanted to see I am Legend but I was out voted. Instead we saw the new Disney movie Enchanted.
Enchanted is a new spin on the fairy tale story of the evil queen not wanting to lose her throne. Her stepson Edward, the prince (James Marsden), has been kept away from girls his whole life by the Queen's (Susan Sarandon) special henchman Nathaniel (Timothy Spall).
The movie opens with the prince wrangling a troll while Giselle (Amy Adams) sings in her home. Hearing the catchy tune the prince rides his horse to find her. At the same time Nathanial lets the troll loose to thwart him. After a quick action scene Prince Edward and Giselle meet up and complete their duet. finding that they are a perfect match they plan to be wed the very same day.
On her way to the wedding Giselle is taken aside by the queen and sent into the "real" world, where she spends a very rough first day before meeting up with Robert (Patrick Dempsey) and his daughter (Rachel Covey). She spends the night on his couch and awakens the next morning to perform a "working song" that attracts the local city wildlife to help her clean the apartment.
When Robert's long-time girlfriend Nancy Tremaine (Idina Menzel) shows up she just happens to walk in on Giselle, fresh from the shower, falling onto Robert in the hallway. A small fight ensues and Nancy leaves.
Robert takes Giselle with him to work (in an attempt to find a way to send her on her way) where she interferes in his job, as a divorce attorney.
Around this time Prince Edward and a talking chipmunk named (not Alvin, Simon or Theodore) Pip make the journey to the real world in an attempt to rescue Giselle. Nathaniel soon follows at the bequest of the queen.
Robert and Giselle make their way through the city park where, wonder of wonders, Giselle's singing turns into a song and dance routine that goes from one end of the park to the other. Prince Edward hears her singing but gets run down by a group of cyclists and misses her. Nathaniel catches up with him and helps him go somewhere to recover.
Eventually Prince Edward does find Giselle, in Robert's apartment no less. Unlike the Prince, who is still an empty headed fairy tale character, Giselle has grown and requests that they go on a "date" before returning to their homes and getting married. The date culminates at the royal ball being held in our world. Robert and Nancy are also at the ball and Nancy is obviously perturbed when Giselle and Prince Edward show up.
Due to Nathaniel's continued failings the queen herself shows up to take care of matters in her own special way. Let's just say that the movie ends with two weddings, two book deals and a funeral.
My Thoughts
The movie was entertaining enough and fit for family viewing but I do find it very interesting that the character of Robert was so instrumental in removing the innocence of Giselle. When you step back and look at the movie you begin to realize that the only adult in the fantasy world is the queen while Prince Edward and Giselle are nothing more than innocent children. I put the ending of the movie on the same "disturbance level" as having Madonna play the part of the love interest for a ten year old boy as was done in the movie Arthur and the Invisibles. On the surface it looks sweet and innocent but when you pull back the curtain you are left with something that would result in a lengthy prison term if it happened in real life.
Games and Ramblings December 15th, 2007 by HMTKSteve
Knit your own d20
OMG!
I could not believe this even when I saw it.
I have to wonder if this is it what old lady gamers use when they play D&D :D
Hey Val, do you play with these things? I know you're not an old lady but then again, you do put up with Grim so...
Programming December 13th, 2007 by HMTKSteve
Notepad is not a viable PHP editor
Last night I needed to edit a few lines in a php file on one of my sites. I loaded up my ftp client and grabbed a copy of the file onto my local machine.
Not paying attention I just double-clicked on the file and it opened up for editing. After changing a few lines I saved it and put it back on the server, overwriting the previous copy. That is when all hell broke loose!
My site started acting wonky and blank pages were showing up in some areas but not in others. That is when I looked a little closer at the file on my desktop and noticed the notepad icon.
I quickly opened the file in one of my code editors and fixed the problem.
The key point here is that unless you are using a Microsoft IDE product DO NOT use a Microsoft text editing program (Word, Wordpad, Notepad) to edit a php file. when those programs save a file they throw a bunch of non-standard characters in there that cause problems.
Internet December 12th, 2007 by HMTKSteve
How much spam do you get?
Barracuda Networks just released their yearly report on spam. How much spam do you get?
Here on hmtk.com I get well over 1,000 spam comments every day. Yes, I said every day. I also receive in excess of 250 spam emails every day. Yeah, that's a lot of spam!
It is not all bad though as I have been able to turn those junk stock pick emails into a business by posting them on one of my other sites with a little bit of commentary added in.
So, tell me, how much spam do you get and how do you deal with it?
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