So it has been ages since I wrote my last post. Nobody reads the site anyways so I guess it isn’t too much of a loss. As I am counting my “blog” as a journal of sorts so I guess I should do an update of some sort.
Let me start with Video Games Live. A group of us went to Video Games Live at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City. It was an amazing show show that nearly brought me to tears. Once because of the music and the memories it brought back and another time when Tommy Tallerico decided he needed to be a rock star during the Halo 3 segment.
I am also beta testing FireFox 3 and Internet Explorer 8. So far I can’t see anything exciting in Firefox but IE8 has a couple cool new features called Activites and Webslices. They are lightweight (you don’t install executables) components that let you do common features. As an example you can select an address and then right click on it and choose the Live Maps feature which will take you directly to that address in the Live Maps site. It might seem like a small thing but when you think about all the toolbars people install and all the spyware that follows it is nice to see a lightweight component that will do this.
Next on the docket is a new (to me) web game that I have been absolutely addicted to called Travian. It is a simple war/sim city real time strategy game similiar to Civilization or Baron Realms Elite (BRE). The big difference between Civ and Travian is scale. Where as a game of Civilization will run a couple hours Travian will last close to a year. Have I mentioned it is addictive. I was lucky to align myself with the most powerful alliance on the server. We are about to enter the “end game” portion of the round. Hopefully we will do well.
Lastly I wanted to talk about a touchy subject. Microsoft and the Open Source community. It seems like Microsoft is still getting beat up for being a proprietary software company (Oracle is close source why don’t they get beat up?). So I was reading Port25 Microsoft’s open ource site on TechNet and I came across two open source projects I thought was worth mentioning. WIX (Windows Installer XML) and IronRuby.
