This comes by way of Evan Sims…
The Webware 100 awards for 2008 are taking votes from the community! This awards program is a cool recognition system for a lot of sites and services we use everyday and often take for granted so show your love! Vote here.
As Evan did I’ll share my votes:
Audio iTunes, Last.fm (almost made live365 number three for old times sake but they hadn’t done anything memorable in so long I went against it! Didn’t go with a third…)
Browsing Adobe AIR, Google Reader. Firefox
Commerce & Events Craiglist, Paypal, Woot
Commuications Gmail, Skype, XFire (If I had another vote I wanted to throw one at Meebo)
Productivity Basecamp, Google Cal, Google Docs
Publishing & Productivity Flickr, Twitter, WordPress
Search & Reference Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia
Social Facebook, Delicious, LinkedIn
Utility & Security OpenDNS, BT (I considered giving OpenID my third vote but I’m just not convinced yet… I went with nothing)
Video YouTUBE, Viddler, Vimeo
My quest to find solo friendly games has led me to two places. To cover my MMO needs I’ve followed Jim, Evan and the boys into Lord of the Rings Online. I’ve really come to enjoy the storyline gameplay and playing through the central storyline quests with a static group has been a lot of fun. Our plan is to get together a few days a week and work together on the main storyline quests and do side quests, crafting, etc on the off nights. The game offers a lot as a casual game with many great virtual world elements. One of the coolest things I’ve ever done in an MMO was playing music in front of the prancing pony the other night. LOTRO allows you to play music in the game using various instruments. Its just a really cool example of how Turbine makes LOTRO more then just a game. If anyone is looking to try the game out check us out on the Firefoot server – we’ve got a guild setup and everything…
My other casual-post-baby poison is a facebook game – PackRat. Evan convinced me to install this (as a rule I avoid all things facebook outside of basic communication as a rule) and I’ve been having a blast ever since. The game is really simple – You steal, buy and craft collectible cards and try and come up with full collections.
Outside of gaming I’ve been busy with work and getting atvtrailfind.com ready for release. I’m hoping to have the site done this weekend!
RJOworld and my other sites are now all over on a new web host! Evan and I went ahead and purchased a virtual dedicated server together. From my end I wanted to get some dedicated resources for some new projects I am working on, particularly atvtrailfind.com which is about to launch in 2-4 weeks (depending on a few things) and I’m expecting a pretty decent level of traffic for the site.
Dreamhost has been a great host offering low cost hosting with tonnes of features but you definitely get what you pay for. As one of the largest webhosts on the tubes there are many site slow downs when other people hosted on your shared box spike traffic. Also application performance (in particular PHP and mySQL) can sometimes grind to a halt.
So its a brave new world with a dedicated box!
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to figure out how to continue to be a gamer while spending every moment I can with the baby. Of particular difficulty has been trying to figure out how/if/what to do with the MMO genre with my new reality and the baby. I haven’t played an MMO now in weeks and honestly I find that it isn’t a loss at all. I think I’ve finally burned out on the genre to the point where it might be lasting.
I’ve been addicted to MMOs now for almost 13 years and I’ve spent more hours playing these games then I care to recount. I’ve bought pretty much every game in the genre that has come out (even those I knew I wouldn’t like) and I’ve enjoyed every minute playing the games. I owe MMO’s a lot obviously. I have many friends I’ve met playing these games and of course I met my wife working on the media end of the games.
But here I am unable to bring myself to care about having 0 desire to play the games.
In the last few weeks I’ve played my XBOX 360 constantly, a little bit of the wii and hell yesterday I went tobogganing with my sister (yes we rule). I don’t know, I’m finding life without time consuming MMO games to be vastly improved. I’ve always scoffed at people who’ve said “you are wasting your life playing those games” – well of course that is bullshit, it’s just another avenue of entertainment. However too much of a good thing can be bad and its nice from time to time to be reminded that there are many ways of spending your time, money and energies.
At the insistence of Jim (:P) I picked up Rock Band while I was in the US of A last week and both Tammy and I have been playing it when the baby naps and we’ve been having a blast. We’ve also been playing Scene It. I think I’m really beginning to like the Casual / Wii-Era of gaming where you can really get your family involved.
I guess the importance of family can’t be understated, especially when you have a baby – maybe its just having better things to do that finally puts the MMO itch to bed…
I meant to get these pictures up a month ago but here we are in February.
Over on flickr I’ve uploaded my unboxing picture from my new latop!
