Tag Archives: content

New Year's Resolutions 2010

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Last year I succeeded at 50% of my resolutions. I successfully uploaded all my old photos to flickr, but I wasn’t able to entirely give up soda at my desk. It went great for about six months, and then we had a big deadline, and I started up again. I felt pretty good about lasting six months, though.

This year, I have only one resolution: I signed up for Project 52 over on spaceninja.com. The idea is to post fresh content at least once a week, all year long. I’m aiming to make the content worthwhile, with no fluff. I want to write a lot of good content about web development, to start advancing my ultimate goal of becoming a name in the industry.

The flip side of that resolution is to post more worthwhile stuff over here. I’ve been reading through my archives, and I used to write a lot more. In the last few years, however, I basically only write about Zoe and my work. I miss that “here’s what’s happening with me right now” kinda vibe that blogging used to have. Since I’ve split my professional life into its own blog, there’s no reason to hold back anymore, so I’m going to try to be more personal on here again.

Xbox 360 Repairs – Part Three

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My 360 came home yesterday. Inside the package was the console, a 1-month Xbox Live Gold membership card, and a letter explaining that to accelerate my repair, they had sent me a different console. I forget the exact wording now, but I think it’s refurbished, not new. As an apology, the letter explained they had included the membership card, which I’ll probably end up giving to one of my brothers once Halo 3 comes out. I plugged everything in, and reconnected my hard drive, and it seems to be working fine.

I read online that some people have problems with downloadable content they already purchased not working, and I haven’t really had a chance to test that yet. I did notice that the new tileset I downloaded for Catan wasn’t working. I’m assuming that I’ll have to re-download some stuff, but I won’t have to pay for it again.

Update: I did a little digging based on Urn’s comment, and found the following:

To clarify for people who still don’t seem to understand, when you pay for and download a game for the first time, it’s keyed to the console ID. This means the console can play it in full mode forever, OR it will run in full mode under your ID on other consoles. When you replace your 360 due to upgrade or failure, you’re no longer using the system your download was keyed to, so you get treated as a legitimate user on someone else’s system – but only if you’re signed in to Live so it can verify that.
– from a discussion thread on Kotaku

That’s super lame, but Urn says they’re working on a fix, so hopefully it’ll get better at some point.

The good news is that since it was under warranty, the repair was entirely free, including the shipping. I know people are upset about the fact that 360s are failing in the first place, but I think it’s just unrealistic to expect a new product to work flawlessly. My 360 lasted for nearly a year, and when it broke Microsoft fixed it for free. That’s a better deal than I ever got from Apple when my laptop’s motherboard died – twice.

In Which We Shut Down Everyone's Accounts

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Earlier this week, we set up some new user accounts for people. We did this for a variety of reasons, but the main ones are that people have asked for accounts, and we wanted to try something new. Now, for another variety of reasons, we have shut down some of those accounts.

I was never entirely comfortable with the concept of giving away a bunch of admin accounts on the site, but we had received many requests, and one person in particular accused us of being “elitist,” and suggested that the site would never grow if it remained just the three of us. After talking with Steve about it for awhile, we decided to give accounts to a few people and see how it went.

This is where we got pretty nervous. We were basically giving up editorial control on the site, and we weren’t sure how it would go. To be honest, we didn’t like the way we saw the content level of the site was headed. The more we talked about it, the more I realized how unhappy I was that we had given out so many accounts. We finally came to the conclusion that a smaller number of accounts would be best, and so we left three accounts in place and shut down the rest.

I apologize to any of you who are put off by this decision, but it’s not going to change. This site is not now, nor was it ever intended to be, a large-scale community forum. We feel that retaining these three accounts will provide a nice counter-balance to us, while still maintaining a high level of quality in the posts.

One final thing I would like to point out is that this site is not a democracy. This decision is not open for debate. This is my site. I own the domain. If you don’t like the way I run my site, that’s too bad. I will do what I like with it. The reason I refer to “us” making decisions on the site is that I value Steve and Miles’ opinions, but the final decision on any matter on this site is mine.

I was absolutely stunned that some people felt it was acceptable to criticize the way we run this site, insult us personally and then demand a user account! I don’t owe any of you anything. If you like the way we run this site, that’s great. If you don’t, that’s just too goddamn bad. It’s my site and I’ll run it the way I want to.