Despite the fact that I work for a games publication I play them surprisingly little. However, I have played a lot of Guitar Hero over the past few months. It's hands down the most fun I've had with a video game ever. After seeing some of the coverage we have been doing on Tony Hawk's Project 8 I thought to myself, "Why don't I dig out Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 and give that game another go?" You see, I was so bad at THPS4 when I first got it back in 2002 that I quit playing it without really giving it a chance. However, playing Guitar Hero and finally getting through Bark at the Moon on Hard difficulty gave me inspiration. I thought, "Well, maybe if I practice enough I'll get good enough to really enjoy THPS4 and see what everyone else sees in it." So, it may be an old game to everyone else but it's kind of new to me.

Movies are getting to be too long. I wish I had a large amount of actual data to prove my point but I remember back in the early nineties most movies were somewhere between 1:40 and 1:50. Now it's hard to find movies shorter than two hours. Very few movies deserve to be longer than two hours. Movies in the Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix series certainly deserve every minute of their running time but does Legend of Zorro really need to be 2 hours and 10 minutes? Can't that story be told in under two hours?

Does anybody know why Yahoo's new fancy video player crashes Safari when YouTube, Google Video, this site, and every other Flash-based video player on the internet work perfectly fine in Safari? Seriously, has anyone been able to use Safari and Yahoo Video together without bad results?

Now this is kind of interesting. Check out this demonstration video on Dashboard on Apple's Leopard Sneak Preview site. The Web Clip stuff is in the first part of the video. How does this work behind the scenes? I have no idea but my educated guess is that each webclip only stores the URL of the page you're interested in and the viewport coordinates along with the height and width of the widget and border style. Whenever you activate Dashboard each webclip does a full page load for it's respective URL but you only see the portion of the page defined by the widget. Bear in mind this is pure conjecture but that's the only way I can think that something like Web Clip can work. Since each web clip triggers a full page-load any ads on those pages will still be generating impressions but the ads themselves won't be seen because they're being hidden by the "browser". Cool for users but bad for publishers. It's already hard enough to count true page views and ad impressions for reasons beyond the scope of this little post. Analytic tools are going to have to become much more granular if the concept of Web Clip catches on and becomes a part of Vista or other Dashboard-like tools. It would be really nice if the user-agent for Web Clip generated requests contained a unique string to identify it as such but what are the chances of that happening? Maybe someone with a preview copy of Leopard knows?

I wanted to see how the video upload tool works so I dug up this little gem from dusty corners of my hard drive.

[video=I30wxDKv5bsOuD_Z]

Who knew? This makes me want to run out an buy a bunch of Diet Coke and Mentos and start filimg.

Anything by Iron Maiden. Run To the Hills would be nice. Maybe The Trooper or anything from Piece of Mind. Man, I love Iron Maiden's music!

Something by Avenged Sevenfold would be great. It certainly would be one of the more difficult songs but I'd love to see Bat Country.

It pains me to say this but when it comes to PHP development on OSX over a Samba connection then Zend Studio is the way to go. The main problem with TextMate is that when editing files over a Samba connection the application will pause for a few seconds when it received focus. As a web developer I'm constantly switching from browser and editor so those few seconds add up over the course of a day.

The TextMate guy (I forget his name right now) has promised a fix at some point in the future. I hope it comes sooner rather than later because I would love to be able to use TextMate for all of my everyday work.

Still Zend Studio is a great PHP editor and should fill-in quite nicely for TextMate in the meantime. Gotta love that "Go To Declaration" command.

This seems to explain global warming quite nicely.