* Players no longer need to scroll down through the EUALA when logging into the game. The window now defaults to the bottom, and players need only check the Agreement box and click accept.
* The war against the gold sellers continues! We have made improvements to the Appeal system to allow players to report spam messages from gold sellers more quickly.
* TAB-targeting should now more consistently select the nearest enemy in the player’s field of view.
* Corrected an issue that was preventing players from adding new friends to their friend list even while the number of existing friends was below the list’s size limit.
* Fixed the issue that was causing players to sometimes get stuck in a particular animation state.
* Monsters which change velocity while moving in combat should no longer return “Target is Out of Range” sometimes when attacked by players.
* The /ignore command will now work more consistently.
* In response to player feedback, we have made improvements to player pet movement and behaviors.
* The Pet window should no longer disappear when its master is zoning or entering the game.
* We made many UI fixes including a new “autoloot” feature requested by many players.
* Guild cloaks will now display their heraldry properly.
* We have made several improvements to the chat window, and it should now be more intuitive to use and set up. A number of chat window issues were resolved in the process. We are continuing to work on your requests about chat, with more improvements to come in the future.
Not bad at all. Seems like they’re working on the hottest issues, to me.
Amazon has a listing for the upcoming Playstation 3 Bluetooth Headset. Price is $49.99! Yikes. That price includes a charging cradle and it should work with your cell phone, etc. According to PS3 Fanboy:
A new High-Quality (HQ) mode will use “advanced wireless technologies and the Headset’s dual-microphone design to enable clear and wide-band wireless voice communication with the PS3 system.”
(They don’t attribute the quote in that, um, quote.)
Of course, for $10 more you can buy SOCOM: Confrontation and get the headset and a game, which is what pretty much everyone will do, and that’s probably exactly what Sony wants you to do. $59.99 for a bluetooth headset and a game seems like a decent deal.
Recap. I got into a debate over one aspect of someone’s comment on another site. The debate was going nowhere, so I gave my last word over there. I came here, to my personal blog, and wrote a post about whether or not discussion in comments have value, not realizing that Wordpress was set to automatically send trackbacks to the other blog since I linked to it. Because the trackback appeared in the comments over there, the person I was debating with came here and continued the debate. In all honesty, this was warranted because I had mentioned some of his data on the other blog was flawed. We went back and forth, pointlessly, for a while, then I asked that we put an end to the debate. He posted again, continuing the debate. So I deleted the whole exchange, and edited the original post to remove references to his arguments.
Over on his blog, he continued the discussion I’d started, and made sport of the fact that I’d deleted the thread here.
[NOTE: Contents of this post have been edited heavily to focus more on the topic at hand, and less on the topic that spawned my consideration of the issues. Also derailing comments have been deleted.]
So this morning I was reading at post over a Pumping Irony where Scott was talking about LOTRO Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel’s interview of a couple days ago. I thought Scott made some good points (which I won’t re-iterate here, but I encourage you to go read the post) so I left a kind of an ‘atta boy!’ comment.
But being a dumbass, I couldn’t stop there, and questioned some of what another commenter had posted. Which began a back and forth of us each spinning our wheels and getting nowhere. Now don’t get me wrong, it was a civil discussion, but ultimately pointless and a waste of both our times. He wasn’t convincing me and I wasn’t convincing him.
It’s not worth regurgitating the whole debate, which spilled over to this blog and devolved even further. There’s no structure in blog comments, no ‘rules of engagement’ and meanings of common terms are often not clearly defined. To take the time to define them is cumbersome when you don’t even know for sure the other party is coming back.
It was a frustrating discussion for me; it was like the other party was from a totally different culture and we had no common ground to base the discussion on. Some of his points made as much sense to me as someone saying “We have corn flakes when moon dust wallows green penguins irately. ” First he would say one thing then he’d say completely the opposite, or so it seemed to me. It got to the point where I could only surmise he was debating for the sake of debating, not worrying about reasoning or consistency, but just trying to be an irritant. Perhaps he felt the same way about me.
Anyway, my point about this, beyond just needing to vent my frustration, is to ask this question:
Are comments on blogs really of any value, or are they just a place to fritter away time talking to each other, but not listening to each other? I don’t mean to vilify this dude, because the fact is I was certain of myself too, and he wasn’t going to budge my opinion either.
So what’s the point? Have you ever been swayed by a discussion in blog comments? Or are they all just a waste of bandwidth? Should we all turn them off and save ourselves the hassle of combating the spammers?
Woot! This week’s Rock Band DLC is a 3-song pack, for $3, that includes:
* “Skullcrusher Mountain” - Jonathan Coulton
* “Livin’ on the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe” - MC Frontalot
* “Shhh .” - Darkest of the Hillside Thickets
All are masters, and all proceeds go to Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play Charity.
I’m playing the hell out of LOTRO these days, but there isn’t a lot for me to say about the game that hasn’t been said a hundred times before. It I was high enough level to be enjoying the latest new content it’d be one thing, but I’m still hunting the Lone Lands looking for Wargs. Don’t read that wrong, I’m having an absolute blast, but I’m not doing anything ‘newsworthy.’
In the absence of real Warhammer News, blogs are turning towards navel gazing and in some cases sniping at each other. I myself spent some time arguing with Sara Pickell in the comments of her blog, which was ultimately not a good use of my time or hers, since the topic at hand seems to be an emotional one. Sorry, Sara.
Spore will be here soon, I guess next week. Not convinced it’ll be great, but that didnt’ stop me from pre-ordering. I think it’ll at least be interesting from a ’student of games’ point of view. And then a week or so later, Headstart for Warhammer Online starts. So lots of excitement coming in.
And thanks to Grimjakk, I just ordered an “Omnibus” edition of some Warhammer novels to get me in the mood for the game. I so blindly followed his suggestion that I’ve already forgot the title. Heh.
I dunno, I’m a little sick of the hyperbole of the blogosphere. So many bloggers declaring absolutes that aren’t, citing facts that only exist in their own mind, and so on. We all get swept up in these things, I guess. But it’d be nice if we could all try to remember that just because we feel certain things are or are not important, it doesn’t mean everyone else feels the same way.
Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose “last lecture” about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.
Seymour Papert is tinkering with a robotic,
computer-controlled turtle in The Learning Barn, the rustic,
light-filled laboratory where he developed and refined many of his
ideas…
Nineteen months ago he was struck by a motorbike in Hanoi and suffered
a brain injury so severe he was comatose for a month and couldn’t walk,
talk, or read. The man widely considered to be the most important
living thinker about the way children learn is struggling with an
unreliable memory and an uncertain grip on words.
So my project for the day was to re-do my ‘home theater’ setup. I put that in quotes because we’re talking, y’know, the living room, not a dedicated home theater in a separate room. My goal was just to get components plugged in so that I could turn them all completely off, rather than have everything in ’standby mode.’ Good for the environment, and good for the electric bill, right? But of course I didn’t want the DVRs turning off, nor the hubs.
Once I started pulling stuff apart…I was pretty amazed. I ended up with a huge pile of gear I really no longer need to have hooked up. First, my ancient Laser Disk player. I haven’t turned that on since I moved into this apartment a few years ago. Next, VCR. Can’t remember the last time I used that. DVD player? Just collecting dust, since the PS3 upscales DVDs so nicely. I found out I had a wireless bridge running that was supplying ethernet to the XBox. Not the XBox360, mind you…the old XBox. And speaking of the old XBox, tear it out and stick it into storage. I don’t have time to play all the new games I want to play; I’m never going to get around to playing those old XBox 1 games.
Now I was really getting into the spirit of things: I pulled out the #2 Comcast Box, and the Tivo that was hanging off it. I never watch Tivo anymore because I can no longer tolerate SD content delivered through an s-video cable (the best my Tivo Series 2 offers). I’ll either put the 2nd Comcast box in the office, or turn it in and save the $10 or $12 that Comcast charges me every month. I did end up re-connecting the Tivo just to see if it gets its podcasts (like Cranky Geeks) via ethernet, or if it somehow is pulling them now through the cable. I can’t imagine how it would be… anyway that still might end up going. I had an Airport Express out there to stream music from my computers to the stereo, which I last did about 18 months ago. And I never print to the printer hanging off of it. So out that went.
Suddenly, a brace of switch boxes and y-cables were no longer needed, so I got rid of those, several of which were powered. Which mean fewer plugs and so fewer power strips.
That whole side of the room looks so much neater and uncluttered now. I’m using 3 power strips. One will be ‘always on’ and has the Tivo, the Comcast DVR and the single remaining ethernet hub on it. One controls the receiver and the XBox 360. And one (plugged into a different circuit) controls the TV, PS3 and Sub-Woofer. So when I’m turning out the lights at night, I can just toggle off those power strips and all that energy going into keeping all this gear on standby no longer gets wasted.
Now my big challenge is… where to store all these gear I tore out!!?
She’s holed up in her cabin while a storm is smacking her around. She’s got a satellite ‘net connection/phone, and solar panels to charge stuff. Leo Laporte hooked her up with an iPod full of audiobooks. Normally she rows 15-16 hours/day.
No support vessel. Just a woman in a 16′ rowboat out in the Pacific. Fascinating stuff.
Divers trained in archaeology discovered a marble bust of an aging Caesar in the Rhone River that France’s Culture Ministry said Tuesday could be the oldest known.
The life-sized bust showing the Roman ruler with wrinkles and hollows in his face is tentatively dated to 46 B.C. Divers uncovered the Caesar bust and a collection of other finds in the Rhone near the town of Arles - founded by Caesar.
. Price is $49.99! Yikes. That price includes a charging cradle and it should work with your cell phone, etc. According to 
and get the headset and a game, which is what pretty much everyone will do, and that’s probably exactly what Sony wants you to do. $59.99 for a bluetooth headset and a game seems like a decent deal. 
Normally she rows 15-16 hours/day. 
