Philanthropic Endeavors

By Jeff | Published: 3 May 2010

Proof that I am a contributing member of society.

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Last Friday I went down to the board to see if I could find my brink now that renovations have been completed. I don’t recall what the bricks cost, but they weren’t giving them away.

Here is a close of photo of my specific brick, let my name live on in infamy.

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Good Bye Halo 2

By Jeff | Published: 14 April 2010
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vanlandw and I play our final rounds of Halo 2 together

Today, I played my final few rounds of Halo 2 online. I seriously cannot believe they are canning XBL support for all Xbox games. It looks like Bungie knew some people would be coming back for a last round so they flooded the “Did You Know?” tips with amusing little snippets.

On the flip side, I honestly don’t think that I’ll miss it. We played several matches, only won two. And, I played just abysmally. I sealed the night by receiving an ass kicking in Big Team Battle. Yup, that pretty much sums up my entire Halo 2 experience.

Check out the miserable abomination that was my Halo 2 career

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Obliterated

By Jeff | Published: 10 April 2010

Last week it was pouring, so I was attempting to run out to my car in the Meijer parking lot. Everything was going fine until one of my shoes started to come off, I attempted to slide my foot back in middle stride and ended up tripping over my feet and slide across the pavement. Do not try this at home.

Left knee, don't do this at home.

Left arm, I ended up taking off several layers of skin. This thing is taking forever to heal.

My right pinky after one day of healing.

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I Love Amazon

By Jeff | Published: 5 April 2010

The e-book wars are coming to a head, and the consumer is the victim.

The new Dresden book Changes comes out tomorrow. I was originally planning on getting it for the kindle, just like all the books I read. Unfortunately, it was pulled a couple of days ago because the publish is being a dick. This all stems from the publishers preference to the “agency” sales model for digital media. They prefer this because while they get fewer profits they have more pricing control. Why does this matter? Well, Amazon has been purchasing licenses for books at their whole sale prices (around $13 for new releases), and then turning around and selling them for $9.99 in the kindle store. What does this mean? Well, having cheap books helps bolster the sales of Amazon’s ebook reader, the kindle. Publishers don’t like this because they think it “destroys the value of digital books.”

While other ebook publishers, have given in to the agency model (Sony, B&N) others, such as Apple demand the agency model. Sadly Amazon is the last hold out. As a reaction to penguin refusing to release new books to the kindle unless Amazon agrees to the agency model, Amazon has begun canceling preorders and reduced the price of hardcovers to $9.99.

Please help Amazon “destroy the value of hardcovers” by choosing to purchase their loss leader $9.99 hardcovers rather than paying full price elsewhere.

Changes (Dresden Files, Book 12)

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Portraying Us

By Jeff | Published: 2 April 2010

Over the past few days I have noticed that I am wracking up a lot of character logs and they’re filling up my folder. So rather than just discarding them I wanted to get a system setup to record session notes. Enter portraying.us. I setup this site years ago to host my photos, however flickr ultimately took that role so I have been holding on to the domain trying to come up for a use for it.

So, this afternoon I quickly whipped together a drupal install with a couple of custom content types to get the ball rolling. I have left registration open, so if anyone has a D&D character they would like to post (the non crunky bits), and track their sessions feel free.

http://portraying.us

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