KyleBits

Last nights pool winners …
1Q – Mike
2Q – Lois
3Q – Annette
Final – Bob G

Congrats, ya lucky bastards.

We were talking yesterday about how we’ve never documented who has won the Super Bowl Bocce Trophy over the years… so, here’s an attempt. Unfortunately, there’s usually a great deal of beer involved, so our memories are, shall we say, imperfect.

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I’ve had kylebits.com as my personal domain for a long time now, but prior to having it, I had prion.com pretty much forever. Well, no longer. I’ve just agreed to sell prion.com to the owners of prion.de. So, if you are still using my prion.com email address, now’s the time to switch to kylebits.com!

I’ve gotten used to subtle ad placements in games… things like real products being advertised on billboards in a racing game. Things you notice but they’re not distracting. I thought it was a little bit money-grubbing (hey, I *paid* you for this game), but I didn’t mind so much.

Today, I fired up EA’s Fight Night 4 on the XBox and saw something that hadn’t been there previously. During one of the transition screens (while a ring/fighter was being loaded) there was a blatant ad. Right there above the spot where they give you gameplay tips, there was an box ad for a movie.

Come on. I paid $60 for this game. Do I really need to see ads too? I paid for the privilege of seeing you be more money hungry? WTF? Ads are for supporting free stuff. That’s why they’re aired on local television stations (which is free), but not HBO (which I pay for).

I put ads on some of my websites (where the content is free) and potentially in the free programs I write for the iPhone, but wouldn’t dream of putting them in the paid programs. If you paid me for a program, you shouldn’t have to see ads. Period.

If this is a trend they plan to continue, this will be my last EA game. There are plenty of other game developers out there happy just to get the $60 for the game, and I’m happy to give it to them.

Incidentally, I’ll be interested to see how the NetNewsWire (NNW) team deals with this problem. They recently released 3.2 beta, for free, and it displays ads. The thing is, they used to have a paid “premium” version that had no ads. Somehow, they’ll need to make sure those paid users aren’t put off by the ads they’re now going to be seeing…

UPDATE: Jesus. I finally got around to fighting that fight (I was so put off by the original ad, I decided to write the blog post first), and now I see they also have ads in between rounds. Fuckers.

For the record, I don’t mind when they put stuff on the mat or the corner padding, etc. Unobtrusive. Fight Night 3 had sponsorhips (”This fight brought to you by Burger King”) and I didn’t mind that. But when you pop up 2 square ads in my face when I’m trying to read something important on the screen (such as how I did in the last round), you’re crossing a line. I did a quick Google search and I’m not the only one. EA are you listening?

Just got back from a Western Caribbean cruise on Carnival. We visited Grand Cayman, Jamaica, and Cozumel.  The cruise was good and we all had a good time (Beckie, Katie, Kate’s friend Brittany, and me), but we’re glad to be home. Seven days captive on a ship with limited options for entertaining yourself (and all of them expensive) is quite enough.  I’ll have pictures posted soon on the family site.

There were a hell of a lot of kids on the ship … most of them well behaved, several of them not so much.  I found myself wondering if it was legal to punch a 13 year old while in international waters. Some kids just need that. Sadly, it seems more and more kids need that… maybe it’s me getting older, but I think it’s also that parenting skills just disappeared somewhere along the way.  I try not to be a “you kids get off my lawn!” kind of guy, but damn.

Note to self:  While using capsaicin-based pain creme (similar to Icy-Hot, but using the compound that makes hot peppers spicy) for current back problems, wash hands twice before urinating. Yikes.

Is it just me, or was “Little Miss Sunshine” basically a remake of “Napoleon Dynamite”?  I sat through both movies wondering why I was investing so much time in it, only to have a dance scene at the end redeem the whole thing.

Who knows how many versions there have been, but here’s yet another.  I’m no longer using MovableType for publishing, or Pair.com for hosting.  Now I’m hosting on Dreamhost, and they have WordPress as a publishing option.  I’ve got a few things I want to get posted up here, but I’m getting the blog configured first.

After wasting about a week troubleshooting various problems related to my Visual Studio installations, I thought I’d share the solution to 3 problems I ran across. Several people have asked questions related to these on the various forums, but the answers are hard to find …

PROBLEM #1 – If you’re installing VS 2008 Professional on Windows Vista, and it tells you to install Windows XP Service Pack 2 before you can proceed: Copy the contents of your VS 2008 DVD into a folder on your C: drive called “Disk 1″ and install from there. Who knows why this works, but it does. (Incidentally, I didn’t have this problem installing Standard, only Professional.)

PROBLEM #2 – Microsoft says you need to “repair” your Windows Mobile 6 SDK installation after installing VS 2008. You’ll have much better luck if you uninstall the SDK before you install VS 2008, then re-install it using the “Windows Mobile 6 SDK Refresh” packages.

PROBLEM #3 – visual Studio setup fails installing various components. Until you’re done installing everything you need to install, disable the UAC, disable your antivirus, and stop the Windows Update service. And, as in Problem #1 above, things seem to be more stable if you install from a C: drive folder than from a DVD or ISO.

I hope this saves someone some time. I wish it was all consolidated into one place last week while I was going nuts …

When Beckie and I got engaged, we said our plan was to sneak off and get married w/o telling anyone until we got back. That’s pretty much what we did…

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