Well it’s not normally the best time to launch site (late at night, 12 hours before leaving for France) but I’ve just put my latest little project up and on to the internet, www.rotornot.co.uk.
ROT or NOT is a sister site for Crawl of the Dead. It works by showing random zombies who are registered on Crawl of the Dead, and letting internet users rate them. It’s just a bit of fun but hopefully a nice way of attracting new zombies to sign up on to CrawlOfTheDead.com.
Now I just wait for the spammers to hack my code to shreds, they tend to enjoy sites like this.
Just got back home after a rather boozy night in the pub, third night running, ahem. Just as Caroline and I were entering our house we glanced up the road to see a guy being set upon by two ‘emo’ kids. They were viscious, with punching, forcing him to the ground, and then kicking - even stamping on his head. I ran over, along with another chap (who as a bit bigger than me, rather reassuringly), the guy was rolling around on the floor in pain with a fair amount of blood pouring from his face. The two emo kids (actually about 19 years old), were not hanging around, one stayed and mumbled something before heading off. I was on the phone to the ambulance immediately, the poor guy, by now was standing up and very emotional about the situation, at one point I thought he had it in for me but he slowly calmed down. The ambulance was pretty quick and the police turned up a moment later. I was impressed with the number of members of the public who stopped to help - 3 or 4 people were witnesses and a genuine assistance.
I was a big annoyed at my initial reaction though, for a split second I saw emo kids and thought they’re “passive”, assuming the fighting to be playing around. But they weren’t, they were just a couple of aggresive young boys who attacked a (to the best of my knowledge) perfectly innocent Australian guy who’d only been in England for a week.
Stereotypes rather obviously never do anyone any favours. Emo bastards.
I've just finished work on my second version of Crawl of the Dead!
Ever since the site launched I have not been pleased with it, so after a few months of hard spare-time graft, I've finished version 2. Or "2.0" if you like. It's got some general improvements to the design plus some new features.
CrawlOfTheDead.com is a social networking site for Zombies. "Because zombies need friends too..."
If you're a zombie, get yourself over there!
After some serious SingStar loving, and then later some slightly more serious SingStar hating, I’ve now returned to the SingStar loving camp.
I’ve been given a mention on the Official SingStar newsletter!
I like to think I’ve dug a little hole for myself in the SingStar online Community, so I’m pleased to see that my videos have been recognised by the official SingStar team.
Still - I’m looking forward to improvements. The SingStore is still lacking in updates, the ratings system doesn’t work most the time and I have not been able to post a comment successfully since before Christmas… But thanks guys ;)
This is just to let the world know that I went out and got an iPhone last week.
Despite saying I wouldn’t get one, and despite lots of voices in my head shouting “Don’t do it! Your current phone does all those things anyway!”. I still went and got one. Sorry Orange, you did nothing wrong.
I love it though.
If you read my nonsensical blog, you might have seen my post, entitled “The Joy of SingStar”. I’d just got the game then and I was pretty excited about it, despite some of the network problems they were obviously having when the game first launched. I decided to give Sony and the developers of the game the benefit of the doubt, and bear with them on those problems.
Well I did, and now I’m not so forgiving.
SingStar launched in the UK and across other major European countries on 7th December. The game is a triumph of SingStar gameplay with new-school web 2.0 style YouTube/MySpace community features. Plus, having purchased every single PlayStation 2 iteration of SingStar, in addition to this new PlayStation 3 version, I consider myself a loyal customer.
But that loyalty has not been rewarded in any honourable way, and I find myself in a rather frustrating position of having a great new game, but one that doesn’t really do what it says on the tin.
So, here are the 3 main problems:
Network outages
The games launch week online service was a shambles. The online mode simply just didn’t work - presumably due to the volumes of users accessing the service. A call to Sonys customer service department would get you a rather patronising lesson in the basics of home networking, with no information of any real use. It was a full week before the service was useable, with a community rep on the playstation.co.uk forums finally offering some information on the network problems.
Even now though, over a month after release - the network mode of SingStar is never 100% reliable. It’ll occasionally log you out and won’t let you back in until your second or third attempt. The rating functionality of the online media now seems to work only when it wants to, and every so often it’ll lock up when you’re trying to quit a video, only freeing itself if you quit back to the main menu. It’s frustrating and it needs patching.
The SingStore isn’t getting updated
In 2007 we were promised the back catalogue of songs to download from the SingStore. Nearer to the games release date, a press release went back on that and said that the back catalogue would be build up over time. But this has not been well communicated and most people are wondering why the SingStore does not contain those 300+ songs to download. The official product page on playstation.co.uk states “Download the entire PlayStation 2 back catalogue of more than 300 songs - as well as new songs available online”. Well that’s simply not true. And frankly - it’s false advertising. Even within the game itself, some rather sloppy placeholder text may appear when online, stating “Hundreds of more songs to download”. It’s really quite shoddy.
Total lack of communication with customers
If you buy something with a fault, you normally take it back. But it’s different with SingStar. On the one hand, it works beautifully when you’re actually playing the game. On the other hand, there are the frequent online problems and the constant disappointment of not being able to download the songs which you were promised. It works, but just not perfectly. And you want it to work perfectly!
Communication could really help here. A blog post on ThreeSpeech, a press release announcing what songs are out and when, even an in-game message wouldn’t exactly be taxing - It’s really not hard to communicate these days and a simple reassurance for customers would be much appreciated. It’s poor.
Right now there are thousands of SingStar PS3 owners who want to download songs and spend money. And they get nothing in return for even asking.
I was kind of at breaking point today so I decided to make an online petition. I made an in-game video message, which read:
Unhappy with SingStar?
SingStore not available in your country?
In need of some SingStore updates?
Register your disappointment at:
www.petitiononline.com/ssps3/petition.html
...hardly rude, eh? It got one 5-star vote was removed within 15 minutes… Which kind of sums up the whole ‘communication’ issue.
I’m not the only one though. Upload your own video with a personal msg to Sony in - and it wont be there for long.
So if you’re reading this and you’re an unhappy SingStar PS3 customer, then sign the petition and maybe someone will hear it.
Let’s hope someone somewhere is actually listening…
*UPDATE*
The petition has picked up a fair amount of steam in it’s first 48 hours. With over 270 signatures it’s clear this issue is very important for SingStar customers. A few sites have started to report about the petition too, which might help see that number rise further. The rather fine PlayThree.net has just posted an item about it, and PS3 Fanboy also picked up on it earlier today.
*UPDATE*
Well a full week after the petition and I managed to get a mention on PlayThree, PS3 Fanboy, Kotaku, The Guardian and Eurogamer.
After the snowball rolled for 5 days, Sony came out on Thursday to announce that there will be improvements over coming weeks. Eurogamer covered the article and mentioned the petition as a possible cause for their announcement.
It’s good that they responded, but it shouldn’t have come to this - a petition to get news to customers. And the update to the store of a small handful of mediocre songs isn’t exactly amazing, but at least it’s something.
Let’s hope the service sees further improvements sooner rather than later.
With just a few hours to go until 2008 arrives, here are some happy photos of Guillaume and Martin, taken in Amiens over Christmas (they're Carolines' nephews).
The handlebars stand still just for a second whilst I take the photo...
Oh and this is what happens when Mabel gets hold of a 'cheap' tennis ball. It literally lasted 3 minutes. Then she was bored.
I meant to post these photos sooner, but didn't have time.
The annual Christmas-Card-making session that I go through each year is somewhat of a tradition. For me, it was my Dad with his almost religious devotion to hand made Christmas Cards, who has made this become a task which under no circumstances should be neglected over the festive season. So, every year I set about making my Christmas cards.
There are 2 basic requirements:
- It has to be festive. Normally I like to focus equally on Christmas and New Year, without any religious connotations. Yes, I realise its Christmas but Christmas has long been a concoction of various traditions. Besides, I send my cards to many people, not all of whom celebrate Christmas (!). However, I believe we could all do with some good-will and peace on this tiny rock we live on.
- It has to be simple. The practicalities of making rather a lot of cards in one go should be considered. Some years I've had more complicated designs that are harder to mass-produce and with little time, the quality can suffer as a result.
Of course, if you're on my Christmas-card list then you already know all this. Anyway. This year I went with a Christmas Tree theme. The thick stripes of 'tinsel' on the tree came to mind after remembering some 80's album cover designs.
Excuse the bad language but the utter, utter a***holes over at “they’re not even worthy of being linked to” 123-reg have done it for the final time.
Them and their lame arse excuse of a website for managing domains and DNS records seemed fine a few years ago when I started using them. But since then, frequent email forwarding issues were just about forgivable but this year has seen some major balls ups in their web services. Premium rate helpline numbers?! DNS changes that just get saved but not implemented, just so they can spam your domain with their own holding page for 24 hours when they do?!
A few searches on the internet reveal many, many similar ‘customers’ from 123-reg who’ve experienced the 123-rage.
Actually, at this point I might blame James Cridland. I am sure it was him who recommended them to me about 6 years ago (I’m sure he wouldn’t now though, he’s quite sensible really).
Anyway, if you got domains from 123-reg then get them out of there! 123-reg will come crashing down on you one day. Start dancing with your domains over to the lovely, helpful, polite and downright decent people at: www.domainmonsters.com.
Oh, and one last thing whilst on this rant - also avoid 1and1.com. Any website service provider who has over *8 pages* of advertising in Computer Arts magazine alone is obviously spending far too much money on advertising and not enough on things like customer service, or “knowing what the f*ck you’re talking about” (bad phone conversation).
They are truly useless and should be avoided at all costs.
There is a really annoying problem with Quicktime H.264 encoded movie playback on some Windows PC's and the latest Quicktime player.
Whilst enjoying the latest trailer for Batman: The Dark Knight, it finally did my head in and I had to find a fix. So, follow the steps below and you'll have those crisp blacks with deep colours, instead of that horrible washed out grey.
- Go to Edit/Preferences/Quicktime preferences
- Advanced tab
- Uncheck both:
- Enable DirectDraw acceleration
- Enable Direct3D video acceleration
- Restart and enjoy
You could just buy a Mac. Or not use Quicktime.