Sometimes... stuff happens

I’m just gonna go ahead and say this is awesome

No Love

minimalmac:

Sorry I’m so late to the game on this. The promotion expires at the end of this month. Here’s the deal: Digital copies of any O’Reilly book you own, for only $4.99. Go. Hurry.

Before you watch this clip think about all the times a politician has said that videogames are to blame for cruel acts of violence.  I would be the first one to call bullshit because I feel that there are many other factors that would bring someone to a state where violence is a reality… not a videogame.  With that being said, even after watching this clip I still feel the same way but am still quite appalled.

In the video the player is in some way affiliated with a terrorist group who walks right into an airport and mows down every civilian they see.  Yes you read that correctly!  These people do not disappear, they bleed, they scream, and they have realistic reactions such as running away and trying to pull other civilians out of harms way.

This clip shows off what may be a level of the new triple-A title, Modern Warefare 2.  I say ‘may be’ due to the fact that the game will not be released to the public for about another two weeks.  What is being depicted in the clip may be a user created level of some kind… Infinity Ward has not yet commented.  Although the level design and scripted events make it seem to me that this is an actual level created by the developers.

For Infinity Ward’s sake, I hope this is not in the game and not even a hidden level like the ‘hot coffee’ mode for Grand Theft Auto was.

The first Modern Warfare was a fantastic game ( one of the few games I was able to make it all the way through ) and really set the tone for realism in a game… or at least what we perceive real warfare to be.

So my wife and I have been sitting on our current netflix movie for probably about a month now.  This weekend we finally decided to sit down and enjoy a movie.  Well let me tell you there was not much enjoyment out of this one.  We watched Adventureland, which was recommended to us by several people and had a good trailer (plus I really like Ryan Reynolds and Bill Hader).

Anyway let me make this short.  I did not enjoy this movie all that much and that is a hard thing to do for me because I’ve seen some craptastic movies in my day and came out enjoying them.  Saving grace would be that it is a very good looking movie.  It is set in the summer of 1987 at a theme park.  Watching this on Bluray was really cool because all of the lights and other flashing things of the theme park were in pristine clarity.  That probably says more about Bluray than this film.

To all those out there looking to watch this movie… it’s not unwatchable but just remember that those two hours you spend will never come back.

New Relic icon to use for Fluid or the SSB of your choice!  Finally I can get rid of the ugly looking low res version I was using!

Thanks to cwsaylor

My wife sent me an article this morning about a survey taken that put Chicago as the most stressed city in the US.  Being that things have been tough for me and mine lately… I would like to agree, but what is it about Chicago that makes a difference?  We’re all working harder and a decline of work/life balance is sure to follow.

Now the article goes on to say that there is not one particular thing that makes Chicago worse than any other city, just that it rated the lowest.  Oh and that in a roundabout way people are still obsessed with how they look and would take a free month of personal fitness training over other services that could help attain work/life balance.

On a slightly related note: I can’t really take Fox news articles seriously when every 4 words there is an advertisement that interrupts my reading of said article!

I’m normally not a person to drool over all things 37signals but I must say that their newest ‘feature’, changes, hit me pretty hard.  As a developer currently working on a webapp, I found that this displays a level of transparency and hard work that people/users would normally not get.  Now a user that says ‘Hey, do you guys ever update your app after taking my money each month?’, can actually see that yes some sort of changes that benefit the end user have been made every few days.

So I must say that this is something stupid simple that we all could take advantage of in the pursuit of customer happiness!