It has now been a week since mobile Facebook broke comments on Notes and there seems to be no fix in sight. I check every day and every day I see December 31st 1969 and blank spaces where comments once were. Today standard Facebook imported my blog post below but I noticed that it did not appear in mobile. I am hoping this is just an overlooked glitch and not a trend towards discontinuing the mobile sites. I have been posting bug reports semi daily to Facebook with no response and today I complained on their blog that was going on about how much their Mobile sites rock.
Why do I care?
A couple reasons, number one is that mobile Facebook gets you all the same info regular Facebook does while the mobile app on my blackberry just gives status updates, comments and messages so when I need something specific like an event location, read note comments or access to groups mobile Facebook is the better choice on the go.
Secondly, I have a plugin Facebook CommentsTNG which takes comments from imported Facebook blog posts and puts them back into their home Wordpress blog. Myself and about 1000 other people use this plugin to keep our social worlds connected and since this breakage it does not function.
To conclude, you can see if you have this problem as well (some don’t it seems but most do) by logging into mobile Facebook and clicking notes at the bottom, pick any notes with comments and see if they are blank with the wrong dates. If they are I have provided some links for you to help the cause below.
Think back to 1995 and the birth of one of the greatest real time strategies of all time, Command & Conquer. Back in those days the game was DOS based and the units were larger than life with a dual disc story to tell the tales of both factions. This game along with Command and Conquer Red alert are still my favorite games of the RTS genre to this date but time has not been kind to their multiplayer aspects. When Windows XP came along all of a sudden both games became un runable due to their dependance on kernel level IPX support. This left the game unrunnable until a patch that disables multiplayer was released isolating the game forever except on Westwoods system which was limited to 1v1.
But wait there’s more.
EA since it has announced the new C&C has been slowly releasing all the old classics as freeware. Currently that list includes C&C, C&C red alert and C&C: Tiberian Sun. For me this doesn’t matter because I bought the first decade special edition with C&C 3 two years go but this does mean that any fan patches and bundles made are now legit for distrobution which is the point I am slowly getting to.
Player made Patch 1.06
This patch improves the games resolution from 640×480 to 1024×768 which everything still looks pretty good in but the better part is that the IPX networking has been converted to UDP. That’s right, LAN play is back with a vengeance and with the CnCnet tool you can play up to 6 player matches over the internet. The people responsible for this patch have also been kind enough to provide a 99meg game package with their patch that is fully playable minus videos so join me in reliving a classic.
Evil: Ovechkin (I have nothing against the rest of Russia)
Last night was Canada’s Triumph, no, Hockey’s triumph over a cocky bastard of a hockey player and our revenge as a nation for what happened 4 years ago in the same match up. Go Canada!
Right now I am watching a high def stream of the USA China Womens hockey game and I have it streaming onto my 40 inch TV. I could watch it on cable of course but I don’t have an HD cable box yet and that isn’t the point I am getting at. These are the most online integrated Olympics to date, on the CTV site there is a Facebook connect link, I can share this feed to Facebook, twitter, google, etc. It’s quite exciting to be able to follow hockey on the one computer, skating on another and follow another sport on the TV. I feel a back in my day coming on so I’ll wrap up here.
I am pretty certain I am going to blow my Cogeco bandwidth cap this month with all this streaming as it is running at 500 kilobytes a second right now oh well, worth it.
Do we really need another social media outlet? Probably not but before you make your decision give Buzz a look see like I did over the last 24 hours.
The rundown
If you tweet you will be used to the very basic method of getting your social point across but wait, there’s more! Buzz also allows you to comment and like the tweet ripoffs so it’s more like Facebook status and Tweets had a baby.
The little bit extra
What sets it apart from being utterly pointless like Twitter is that you can link your photo galleries, blogs, and pretty much any other RSS content you wish to share through these posts with relative ease. At the moment I have set up a profile at http://www.google.com/profiles/crazyspence and as you can see it has the usual profile picture, a comment associated with it and some location data, nothing too fancy but below it is a Photo strip. This photo strip is an RSS feed from my Gallery2 photo website which Buzz had no issue communicating with as it supports RSS. This impressed me because I don’t use Flickr or Picassa (the default options for photos) and Google was kind enough to add support for any photo service using RSS.
If you browse through my buzzes you’ll notice one is linked from this blog, heck you’ll probably see this post in there too because it picked up my website through my Webmaster Central settings with Google.
Downside
Ok great there is Twitter integration but no Facebook. I have beaten the system by adding my Facebook Feed to the links on my profile and also by adding it to Google reader but at the moment there is no Facebook Connect and hopefully if Google is serious about this that will change.
Summary
I prefer Facebook and hate Twitter but this is a good Twitter replacement if that’s your thing. If they add Facebook support that doesn’t require my cheats I will use this as a catchall for my Facebook, photo and blog posts. People who follow me will then only have to look one place to see what I’m up to but until then it will not be my primary tool for interaction.
Look at that little red number in the bottom right
Get excited “Oh joy! I’ve been included!!”
Open it up and….
BAM!
Add your relatives!
There are polls for you to answer!!
People claim that <insert random friend> is funnier than you! Take the quiz!!!
Or some other bullshit. We already get ads on the side of Facebook and surrounding the games we play inside Facebook are these phony notifications really necessary?
It’s a disappointment if anything because you are thinking “oh joy!” then you look at it and the reality sets it “aww shit, nobody likes me” and the downward spiral begins! That’s right, Facebook is why you’re depressed!
As a part of life, we all have to pump gas at some point to get somewhere. At least in today’s world we have gas terminals that take debit and they are great because you don’t have to face the angry person in the gas booth who is pissed you had the nerve to make them ring something in. However, there is one place that totally sucks for this in every way possible and that is Esso. Esso has the slowest and most annoying terminals of any gas station out there and to top it off some locations even make you suffer through some terrible commercials as you pump the gas
The pumps are too slow
I don’t know why they felt it was neccesary to make them so slow but have you ever noticed that it’ll be going along fine and then a dollar before the amount you pre entered it slows to a crawl and those last 100 cents take a minute! With it now being winter this is exceptionally annoying! New Sunoco and Petro Canada stations stop almost right on the amount or only 20 cents from the final tally which is way more acceptable!
The pump asks you 20 questions before you get to pump your gas
Do you have esso points? no
Do you want a carwash? no
Do you want a reciept? no
Do you want to fill up to $100? no
Then we get to the point finally….
Enter the amount you would like: 20
Account?
Pin?
Select grade
Lift nozzle
Then! 10 minutes later when it went from $19 to $20 it prints a receipt anyways even though you said no and beeps until you take it!
The commercials are awful
Ok so they have commercials playing to make money yet still charge the same amount as everyone else for gas while having crappier gas pumps then everyone else….AND THE COMMERIALS ARE TERRIBLE. You never see these super shit bottom of the budget commercials on real tv but when you use ESSO and be their customer here you go! Right where you can’t get away from them!
As we all know the FPS genre is pretty much everywhere you look these days and why not, it’s fun to blow the crap out of your friends with a shotgun right? Well I find most FPS’s of today are a bit too serious and are a little bit “function heavy” for my tastes where either half your keyboard is mapped to 100 things you need to do or on a console you have absolutely ridiculous button combos to get around.
Remember a simpler time?
My favourite shooter of all time had always been Quake/QuakeWorld it was simple and ridiculously fast paced. Quakeworld pretty much created online play we know today and the mods introduced the sub genres of class based (team fortress) , Clan Arena and Capture the flag to the world and you can find these in every FPS you look at today. Thanks id!
However getting a bunch of friends together to play an old game like this proves problematic and the people online still playing it are nuts.
There is another way and it is free…
id Software last year started a beta for a new quake game called QuakeLive. This is a totally in your browser skill match based quake game. It is based of the Quake 3 engine and is run by a plugin for your browser. It takes minutes to setup, few minutes to download the game data and bam, good to go! I started with this game a year ago in the closed beta. Back then they only supported Firefox and IE on windows so I had to play inside a virtual machine but man I was hooked. It is the same fast paced fragging I love except it doesn’t look like shit and people of today actually play it! Anyways the beta now is open and anyone can sign up AND as an added bonus it now supports linux and Mac OS X natively.
What kicks ass:
Supports all 3 major platforms, Wintendo, Linux and Mac
All the old goodies like Rocket jump and jump running are present
Skill matching so you arent totally pwned all the time (still most of the time though)
Offline mode for practice
Kick ass game modes like Clan Arena and CTF are present
Free! Just sign up and go!
All of your stats are recorded for you and trophies are awarded
So I’m sorry to say Quakeworld but I may finally have to retire you as QuakeLive offers everything you did plus more and it looks great!
Anyone catch idol last night? Well usually I do not as I don’t care for it but it happened to be on and the most hilarious thing occured when 62 year old General Larry Platt broke out into his original tune about people who wear their pants on the ground.
This song has been stuck in my head since last night and it is now all over youtube, there are a few videos of last nights broadcast that top the 50k view mark and 1 that is 100k+.
Anyways, this morning I try to share this amusing piece of now internet and tv history with my classmates at work and they all break out into labeling me a pansy for watching idol! Bastards! As punishment for their noncooperation I un muted my laptop and played it a few times in class and they now also cannot get it out of their heads.
It has now been a week since mobile Facebook broke comments on Notes and there seems to be no fix in sight. I check every day and every day I see December 31st 1969 and blank spaces where comments once were. Today standard Facebook imported my blog post below but I noticed that it did not appear in mobile. I am hoping this is just an overlooked glitch and not a trend towards discontinuing the mobile sites. I have been posting bug reports semi daily to Facebook with no response and today I complained on their blog that was going on about how much their Mobile sites rock.
oh well, worth it.
