I tried to play some Gears of War last night but got an error message saying my exe had been modified and now the game will not run. I never did anything to modify the exe but I figured maybe reinstalling would correct the issue. After uninstalling and reinstalling I still got the same error. I just mentioned it to somebody at work right before I left and somebody overheard me and told me to check out DIGG. Turns out Epic Games hard coded the game to expire after January 28, 2009. Luckily there is a work around of turning your PC clock back to before January 28, 2009 but a fix from Epic/Microsoft would be better. Check out Ars Technica for more information.
There were some layoffs at the House of Mouse yesterday but it looks like my team will be unaffected at this time. If anything, it sounds like we are going to be really busy real soon. Not that I'm not super busy right now with the upcoming Disney XD launch.
Man! The new Disney XD site is beating me down. Today was pretty much non-stop meetings. I was actually able to spend 10 minutes setting up some deep links to show pages but the rest of the time was just sitting around listening to flash guys talking about stuff that was way beyond me. I totally don't want to do any coding of my own when I get home from a day like that but I managed to add code to the movie trailers page to display trailers in the page. It still needs some work as it only works in Firefox at the moment. I even added style code for IE8 but I don't have IE8 at the moment to see if that's working. All I know is it's still not the same cascading stylesheet code every other browser has been using for years.
It sounds like Uniballer's surgery was a success so hopefully he will be gaming again so we have an easy target. Check out Uniballer's site for more info about the surgery.
FileFront has the single player demo for F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. I have been seeing good reviews about this one and how much better it is than the first one. Makes me want to go back and finish the first one. Maybe after I finish Gears of War. You can still download F.E.A.R. Combat, the full free multiplayer part from the original F.E.A.R. at FearCombat.com
Uniballer should hopefully be out of surgery any time now. Hopefully all went well and he will be backing to gaming real soon.
DOH! I must be near the end of Gears of War because Dom and I beat a Corpser and got to the next check point but if I leave the game and come back, we have to fight the Corpser again.
I made some fixes to the code on this page so it doesn't reoprt a bunch of errors in the log files anymore. There's a ton of errors on the DOH! Network movie trailers page. I'll have to come back to that one later.
I just saw that Uniballer has gone to the emergency room. Hopefully it is to get whatever it is that is causing him so much pain resolved and he'll be all good tomorrow. Send him a Johnny Leche Get Well Soon card to let him know you are thinking of him.
Congrats to Shaka Zulu and the rest of the tribe on their latest tribe member. Send him a Johnny Leche Get Well Soon card too because he's not gonna be getting much sleep the next couple of weeks.
Dom and I managed to make it out of the gas station with the station owner. He didn't stick around for too long be for we 'split up'. We managaed to hoook up with Alpha squad again but Control told us to head for the mines. I'm not sure if Control is on our side. How is going underground going to be easier than an above ground route? Anyway, we couldn't get into the building that will get us into the mines and I musta had a brain fart or something because I sent Alpha squad to look for an entrance to the building one way and Dom and I went the other way. I don't know what I was thinking. I just couldn't help myself. So now Dom and I are in the cart room trying to reach the control room but we are pinned down by a bunch of lambent wretches. I'm still trying to figure out the best line ofattack. I'm thinking fall back into the room we just came from and fight from the corner. So far it's not working too well.
Good news on the Uniballer front. Turns out he just has a pinched nerve and is not growing a second head so he can talk twice as much about conspiracies and aliens and stuff. Still, send him a DOH! Network ecard and let him know you are thinking about him and how easy a target he was in Soldier of Fortune 2. Maybe once he has recuperated we can kick his butt on Combat Arms.
I think I may have come up with an idea for a Facebook app. I downloaded the SDK a while ago but couldn't figure out what to do with it but then an idea hit me. Have to mess around with it and see if it's possible to do. Probably not because it would require access to content even if you aren't logged in but it will be good incentive to mess around with the SDK.
I really dig that the software for my Squeezebox lets me stream high def radio stations to my computer. Now I have easy access to all those extra stations like KROQ's HD stream easily accessible in Winamp.
I hate that we have all these tools at work that are supposed to make our job easier but no two teams can use the same version or document how anything works. How is that helpful?
I didn't have to restart Gears of War after all. Turns out what I thought was a Boomer was just a Locust with a grenade. We were able to get out of the tight spot we were in and finally made it to the gas station where we could appropriate a vehicle. The owner of tha station didn't bother to fill it so I had to do that and then he says 'Come in. I have some ammo in the back'. I should have just said no. He had a couple of grenades but the rest of the stuff was useless for the weapons I was carrying. Before we could get out a squad of Locust attacked and now we are pinned down in the station. At least my arm isn't still sore from too much Wii bowling. That slowed our progress for a couple of days this week. And what's up with Nintendo charging 5 bucks for a browser for the Wii? They had it for free when it first came out but now you have to pay for it? I don't need it that bad.
I was just reading on Uniballer's site that he's been in the hospital recently with an as yet to be diagnosed illness. Let him know you are thinking of him by sending a bunch of Johnny Leche Get Well Soon cards and spamming his inbox.
I realized after chasing the dog around for 15 seconds that I am really out of shape. According to the Wii Fitness Test, I am 52 years old. DOH!
Looks like things will be ramping up at work with the launch of Disney XD next month. I have been hit with a bunch of meeting invites over the next couple of weeks to get me up to speed on the new framework. The next meeting is with .GrinderRobot on Monday or Tuesday plus all the daily check in meetings that I have nothing to contribute to. At least the teaser site is pretty much done with only one more game coming. That was a full time job just trying to figure out why the site would not work on our servers. The major updates to Hero Rising are done too. I have one more update on Monday to add the bonus video and then it will sit like that until it is assimilated into Disney XD and then a couple of weeks later, the Jetix site will go the way of Zoog Disney.
NOPAL and I were talking about new website ideas the other day. The Mexicans In Black site may go into the vault for a while until a complete redesign can be built. I was looking through the files on my site and I have a lot of half built or test pages floating around. I need to delete everything and start from scratch making a centralized global javascript that can be used on all my pages.
DOH! It looks like I am going to have to start over on Gears of War. I have 60 rounds in my primary weapon and the Hammer of Dawn that won't work unless a satellite is online which they are not and we're at a spot where it's just me and and Dom and the only way to go is through a door where a bunch of Locust including one with a rocket launcher are waiting.
I was just looking at the logs for the website and man, I have a lot of errors going on. I need to clean up my code some. I figure I get so little real traffic I could problably delete the whole site and start from scratch and nobody would know anyway. Woohoo!
DOH! Just in time for the new year, the server has locked up twice in the last two days requiring a reboot. Both times the error was some 'NMI Watchdog detected lockup on CPU0'. That doesn't sound good. I might need to pull out the backup server tomorrow and get that ready to go if the main server is going to need to be offline for a bit. Luckily it didn't just die and I had time to back up the important files. I've been a little lazy about making backups and it would have really stunk to have to completely rebuild the server and fix all my settings.