2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 15,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Security Breach at Valve Releases Steam Subscriber Information for 35 Million People

There was a security breach at one of the internet’s premiere video game retailers, Valve Corporation, also known as Steam,  which disclosed subscriber information for up to 35 million customers. This is about on the level with Sony’s security breach earlier this year: http://www.databreaches.net/?p=21478

This comes on the heels of 2 of the biggest video game releases in 2011, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Both released and distributed by Steam shortly before this announcement, the potential impact could be even greater than just their advertised 35 million subscribers.

An INTENSE moment of TRUTH with MAINSTREAM Media

This has to be the most important thing that has been said on TV in the last 20 years. Everyone needs to watch this if you live in the United States. EVERYONE.

Please, please, please share this video with everyone you know. This is one of the most important speeches of our time. Unless we do something now and wake the people of this country up, we are all doomed. This country is so far from what our founders intended at this point, and it’s shameful to see how we’ve let these people ruin everything for us over the last 30 years. Take this country back now. Spread these words and make a difference, because if you don’t we’re all doomed.

Banks, fraudulent foreclosures and the law…

So, supposedly all the banks are in trouble for the fraudulent foreclosure practices of the last few years. They’re trying to negotiate a way out right now with the Justice Department, et al, and there’s a real opportunity to fix the whole housing mess in one foul swoop. Will they do it? Probably not, they will most likely just make it so the banks get off easy, and pay a pittance in some sort of settlement.

If the government was actually smart and serious, they could fix it all, and let the banks get out of prosecutions.

DriverCleaner – the best $10 you can spend

So I decided to update my drivers for a Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS, and got the latest that were available from Creative Lab’s website…what a mistake…After a shoddy install, all my audio stopped working. During installation of the latest drivers I started getting all kinds of error messages while it was writing stuff to the registry from what I could gather. I was not a happy camper when those started popping up. After the installation was done, everything audio related stopped working.

I tried to uninstall the whole mess and reinstall from the CDs but nothing worked. I tried uninstalling everything Creative related multiple times. Started disabling all the other sound devices windows had listed, thinking perhaps windows was trying to use them and ignore the Creative stuff after reinstalling from CD, but none of it worked. I ended up with a bunch of error messages about bad commands to the mixer etc when trying to play audio and none of the Creative apps worked either. None of the sound control panel stuff was recognizing the card and drivers correctly. It was showing the device as D400, which is one of their dealies, but it wasn’t listing it as it normally would. I probably spent a good 3 or 4 hours trying to clean up the mess Creative Labs made of my computer.

I found 3 of Jared Loughner’s friends on MySpace and his MySpace Page

If you search MySpace for Jared Loughner you will find this: (I removed the real name of one of the girls and blurred the faces, one of them has set her page to private)

There are 2 people that used to have him on their friend’s list very recently. This girl and Sara™. Both of which had comments from Jared that disapeared when they disabled his profile on MySpace. But with the help of Google’s cache, I bring to you what he had posted on one of their profiles: (I decided to remove the girl’s real name, her profile on MySpace is now private)

Blizzard loses company data and user subscription data…

Yep, you heard it, there was a leak that disclosed Blizzard’s subscriber information and internal company documents.

Blizzard GM leaves company after game roadmap and user data leak

They didn’t say what kind of subscriber data was leaked, but to be on the safeside I would be getting new credit card numbers if you have ever subscribed to World of Warcraft.

Activision has killed Call of Duty Franchise

So, this is going to be short for now, but Activision effectively has killed Call of Duty with the substandard Black Ops release.

My biggest beefs with Black Ops mostly center around the quality of the sound and gameplay from the campaign. I’ve only done the campaign so far, will probably end up doing multiplayer this weekend.

Modern Warfare 2 Hacks, beware of Resurgance Pack

So I’m happily trying out the new Resurgance map pack for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and I ended up joining a game already in progress. The host of the match had some hack running that set everyone at 70 and unlocked everything. I had just started prestige round 2 and was enjoying leveling up and unlocking everything.

So all of you people that might be concerned about getting your Modern Warfare 2 installation messed up, your unlocks etc, you may end up randomly getting in a match where someone’s mod messes everything up for you.

Real Names Displayed on World of Warcraft Forums

That’s right kids, all of you who play WoW, and post on the forums, will soon be displaying your actual names.

 http://www.wow.com/2010/07/06/official-forum-changes-real-life-names-to-be-displayed/

I don’t think Blizzard has completely thought this through, due to the amount of asshattery on the internet, this will only invite people to harass others in real life. The children of today are much, much different than when I was growing up (and I’m not all that old at the time of this post). Children now a days (anyone under 27 years old) have become by in large a group of sociopaths. Due to the lack of parenting that seems to have invaded our society over the last 10 or 15 years, most children are growing up not knowing any sense of decency. Just look at all the cases where actual parents are harassing their child’s classmates…some woman photoshopped some girl’s head on some bestiality porn not too long ago and circulated it in their community and online…what the hell is wrong with people?