A Personal Blog
Archive for September, 2004
Selling City of Heroes Account
Sep 2nd
With several games coming out soon, I thought it might be time to sell my City of Heroes account. Here is the Ebay auction.
Even at 100$ this is a great price. Selling influence alone makes the account worthwhile, but the upcoming abitlity to refactor your player makes this even better.
Hopefully someone picks this up for a good price and has as much fun with it as I did :)
Edit: My CoH account has now been sold. This chapter of my life closes. Sad, really. But, with Fable, Half Life 2 and Halo2 coming out before the end of the year I’ll have “too much” (according to my wife) gaming to do ;-)
Review: MSN Music Site
Sep 2nd
Microsoft recently “launched” (official launch later today, apparently) it’s MSN Music Store.
The obvious comparison is between this and the iTunes Application. Joe Wilcox already has a great take on this.
Primarily, I prefer MSN’s store for a couple of reasons. First, it’s web based. That means I can browse songs from anywhere, add them to my collection from anywhere and redownload songs as I need to from anywhere. That’s a good thing. A very good thing. Also, the store does not lock you into using Internet Explorer to use the more advanced features (music previews). You will need to have ActiveX installed (take that as you will) and running in Windows Media Player’s Zone (you may need to create it if you’re trying to lock ActiveX out from regular surfing). But, you can happily use Mozilla, FireFox or Opera if you so desire, as long as you install the ActiveX extensions for each of these.
The music selection seems fairly good. I looked for some “non mainstream” (in their genres) stuff in a variety of sections (jazz, christian music and world mainly) and found instances of everything I was looking for, even if I didn’t find the exact song.
The website is well designed, staying away from top-loading the page (like Apple’s sites do…).
The ads are non intrusive and, really, helped me out. While searching for songs I found several things that caught my eye in the ads. They’re even more “out of the way” than Google’s. Some people will complain that they are paying for the music so shouldn’t see ads. Whatever. They aren’t in the way and it’s not like you’re paying for the bandwidth you’re using while previewing songs. If all you have to do is ignore a few ads in order to listen to some songs, so be it.
Also, the Radio, TV and Movies sections are welcome additions. Being from Canada I’m not sure I can buy from the store yet (I still can’t from iTunes). Overall I’m glad this is here. If I ever get a Digital Music Player it probably won’t be an iPod (unless I get my free one). In which case my best option really is WMA format, so the MSN store could easily be the place to go.
I’m happy with this. If you prefer Apple, iTunes and your iPod this obviously isn’t the best option for you. If you’re looking for a new WMA store, give the new MSN one a shot. I know a couple of guys on the team and they are very happy with what they’ve put together and they should be. Well done to all.
CERT Okays XP SP2
Sep 2nd
Waaaay back in July I had a “runin” of sorts with the auditor over a CERT advisory.
Well, CERT has issued a new advisory. Upgrade to SP2 as soon as possible. Do not wait 30 days. Do not wait for the CD to be delivered. Upgrade now.
Fun. I’ve been saying the same thing in hundreds of debates for weeks now. The time where you can simply sit back and wait to see if critical patches are going to be reneg’d on is past. Test everything first. But when you are done with your testing, install. Fast. Because the mean time to a virus being deployed after an exploit is found is down to less than a week.
That scares me.
Sadly, this advisory will not get nearly the publicity that the anti-IE advisory got. Which is, I guess, typical. However thankfully I’ll have this advisory archived here at Ensight so I can pull it up should the auditor come’a runnin’ again.
