This is me speaking as someone who played the Battlefield 3 alpha and beta trials, in addition to owning all of the previous Call of Duty games on the PC. This may read as a bit of a rant but I’ll try to stick to laying down the facts. I could go on for paragraphs, but let’s keep this brief.

• Price. I was able to get BF3 for $42 USD on Amazon (you can still get it for ~$50 USD), compared to $60 USD for MW3.
• Content. Battlefield will ship with more maps than MW3. Not tiny maps, mind you… MASSIVE, SPRAWLING landscapes.
• Destruction. Dynamic cover is something you come to appreciate, and the Call of Duty series is ignorant of this.
• Redundancy. Modern Warfare 3 is essentially the same game its predecessors have been. Watching gameplay shows a blatant disregard for innovation.
• Armour. Helicopters, jets, tanks, quads, humvees, light armour, and other vehicles add so much more fun to gameplay in Battlefield 3!
• Scale. Battlefield 3 runs up to 64 players while the “other” game is only balanced for 18.
• DLC. I was really irked that Activision continued to charge $15 for map DLC. If you decided to buy Black Ops plus all of its DLC, you would have spent $120. Not a great investment.
• Prestiging. I’ve never prestiged in Call of Duty and never considered it to be worthwhile action. Not only do the costs vastly outweigh the gains, but it’s an obvious attempt at player retention. They try to push you to keep playing (one more prestige, one more prestige, etc.).
• Community. From what I’ve experienced in both games, Battlefield has a much more… “mature” community. Guys that can actually make rational decisions regarding objectives… not to mention intelligent conversation. I’ve never met an unpleasant person in Bad Company 2 — can’t say the same for Modern Warfare 2. That game is saturated with mic-spamming tweens.
• Evolution. Correct me if I’m wrong, but MW3 is still using an older version of the IW engine that dates back a few years? Yeah, Frostbite 2 is leaps ahead.
• Team-play. Even though you can play as a lone wolf in BF3, you’re drastically stifled in your success. However, if you play in a squad and move as a team… you’ll get those “Battlefield moments”, where you become lucid to the fact that you and your friends are moving as one in synchrony. It’s hard to explain, but it definitely kills any monotony and gives you a bit of  a rush. Sounds silly but trust me.

To close, here are just two Battlefield 3 videos you should watch if you’re on the fence. This game is far superior to Modern Warfare 3. If you do happen to get BF3, let me know and we’ll drop in as a squad!

Launch Trailer

Mostly singleplayer stuff.

On the flipside, here’s the Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer trailer. To me, it just looks like they added new maps and a few of new perks/guns.

Harley “Ability44″ Dishon seemed like a decent fellow human. He was introduced to me via a mutual friend quite a while ago and was in the market for some web development work. While he didn’t quite have a clear cut goal yet, he was willing to pay, and truthfully that was all that mattered since we could hammer out the details as we went on. Web development is my gig after all. It’s what pays the bills.

I tend to run an informal operation. Minimal contracts, work by the hour, and just that sort of jive. In addition I try to be as fair and personable as possible. Hosting client sites for free, offering access to select source files, etc. The nice guy.

Well, shame on me for assuming people wouldn’t take advantage of that. Let me explain.

The Project

Harley was looking to create [yet another] RuneScape fansite, this one entitled MyRuneLog. “One that would be different,” he explained. It would have such things as voice chats, Jagex-sponsored contests, and a boatload of other crazy things. Some of these things, I responded, were damn near impossible and incredibly impracticable.  So some of the ideas were shelved, but many remained on the to-do list. We had no choice but to oblige.

We went with it though. By “we”, I mean Josh Welham and I. It should be about time to introduce him into the story, I suppose. Josh specializes in back-end code, and was brought in once the project began to creep beyond my scope of expertise. He’s pretty brilliant at PHP, putting most of my stuff to shame. Anyway, he would handle that stuff while I would work on the front-end and design aspects of the MyRuneLog project. We had a pretty good gig going.

A lot of work had to be done. Databases needed to be constructed, core scaffolding laid out, and other fairly intensive stuff. This wasn’t your typical blog or personal website. This would be best described as a mega-site  with large amounts of data being added/moved around constantly by multiple parties. Josh’s brainchild really — he built it pretty much from the group up. It ended up being pretty impressive from a developer’s POV. If you’d like an idea of what I’m talking about, take a look at Zybez, who would have been the competition.

The Downturn

Up until March, 2011, nothing seemed askew. Harley was paying his invoices on time and work was continuing as expected. Then he began to lag behind. He cited job/moving problems, which I believe[d], and would have a hard time making payments. To “work with him”, I set up a monthly payment plan: $75/mo (and later bi-montly) and our services would continue as usual. Damn cheap if you ask me — most cable/phone plans are that price. Honestly, any other firm would just drop the client outright at that point. We wanted to work with him though since we knew no one else would be able to carry out “his dream” besides us. And yes, he did say that MyRuneLog was his dream — more than once.

This would have been his final invoice (his total debt was more)

The monthly payment plan worked… for about a month. Then he began lagging even further behind, until it was finally four months later and he was ~$3,000 in the hole. We were done. He continued to cite problems with jobs but it was time to call him out on the utter B.S.

Confrontation

Josh and I spoke to each other and agreed that he was never going to pay at this rate. What we decided to do was offer him a reprieve. A chance to wipe his debts clean.

We offered to take ownership of the site (which we had forged ourselves), taking in 100% of the ad revenue, while he remained on as a full administrator and taking in 75% of other revenue streams. Donations, shirts, and other merch would be his money makers really.

This was a great deal for him. His several thousand dollar debt to us would be gone for good and he would still be able to be a major part of his “dream”. Not to mention the money he would be making from other avenues. And this would be a good deal for us as our hard work would not go unrequited and we would be able to continue working on something that we had an actual, palpable investment in.

It was a good solution. Everyone would walk away happy, we imagined. There was some negotiating that went on as he considered it, but that ended up being pointless. Harley chose to go against us without our knowledge and essentially stab us in the back. No payment, no deal, no respect.

Today

Harley, with his pal “l2rushnub”, believes he can run off with our out-of-date source code and resume work on the site. The source code in question is many months out of date and pretty much worthless considering how much improvement the current revisions have made. But it’s still our source code that he didn’t pay for. Theft.

But good luck to them. I think Harley will get his “dream”, although likely sub-par and with much more backstabbing to go. I just hope “l2rushnub” isn’t being offered payment, because he damn well won’t be getting it.

Harley is a selfish cheat. From the beginning he was always concerned with having his name, Ability44, attached to the site (despite everyone else in his community doing the work, might I add). He wanted people to know that he was the great creator. That he was the wise entrepreneur. That he was the site. In reality he’s a self-absorbed, self-entitled kid that believes he can get everything by cheating his way through life. My interpretation of the human condition has deteriorated because of him. For fuck’s sake, this narcissist has “Ability44” tattooed on himself.

I truly hope his friends and family see what he is and respond as such — don’t let him take advantage of you. We bent over backwards to help him and were stabbed in the back.

He screwed over Josh and I — not to mention several others (for example, Robert, if you knew him).

Why I Wrote This

I’d like for this to serve as a warning. Always have a damn contract. Never go beyond project scope. And for the love of god, never let the project get any further if the client isn’t paying.

Don’t let people take advantage of you, even if you do end up looking like the bad guy as a result. People like this deserve to be shut out. He ended up wasting 9 months of our time.

More specifically, I want this to be a warning for people researching Harley Dishon. When people Google his name (friends, prospective employers), they should be aware of his extreme lack of respect and morals. At the time of writing he lives in Virginia, although I won’t share his specific address publicly. More detailed information is a few keystrokes away, is all I’ll say.

Records

I’m just going to include some text conversations between myself and Harley. Some of our correspondence was via Skype calls, so I don’t have records of those. These are un-edited, although you’ll just have to take my word on that — sorry.

They’re in chronological order and have some interesting tidbits of information.

Chat logs.

The Rebuttal

Harley has created a topic on his forum in response to this blog post. You can read it here in case he removes it. Anyway I’ll be going line by line and dissecting each of his points since there’s just so much logical ineptitude to go at it all at once. Plus I’m not really in the mood for writing. Here goes:

In the last few days I have found out that what I have paid for hours of work on is not even coming back to me in full blast… Not many of yall know but I have put out $1.2k so far for this site to be developed, and was being asked for 3,000(USD) more,

No, you paid ~1.3k of a ~3k TOTAL debt (combined between Josh and I). We never asked for 3k more. You only owe[d] ~1.7k.

on a project that I was told would only take 60 hours (Which is reasonable for that amount of work) but turned into 210 hours total…

I’m not sure where you got that 60 hour figure. I know I initially quoted you for ~100 (but let’s not let turn this into he said, he said), which I also added was a rough estimate since you weren’t exactly sure what you were after with the whole project to begin with. In fact it wasn’t a bad guess considering the initial project scope. Your constant requests for additions and lack of foresight was the reason why that number increased. You could have halted the project at any time. In fact, I urged you to multiple times (see it in this screenshot) when I noticed that you were lagging behind in payments. You replied by saying you’d have our payment ready soon, every single time, and asked us to continue working. Being the nice guys we are, we obliged. And it’s not like you had no idea how much work was being done — you had easy access to all of our timesheets (detailing work being done, times, and total invoice amounts) on Freshbooks. Stop trying to shift the blame on us.

I have just recently cut ties with the web developers which I have been paying to work on this site, for 9 months now.

Haha, no. You haven’t been paying for nine months. Your last payment was in early June and it’s now late August. The project officially began in December of 2010. Even in May you were straggling behind in payments. See this screenshot.

And have also been informed that the full site cost for development is around $600 tops. (This has been assessed by 2 web developing companies already) So put simply I was took for a scam.

I’d really like to ask these “developing companies” what exactly they’d be charging $600 for. A Joomla set up with a slightly customized Theme Forest design? I don’t want to list everything, but here are condensed examples of what Josh and I ended up doing for Harley, which truthfully is worth much more than $3k considering how much he would have made from the site over time:

1. Forum skins that were custom-made (IP.B 3.1.x and another for 3.2.x)
2. Unique design and codebase created (with revisions) custom for MyRuneLog
3. Custom-made, RuneScape tailored CMS
4. Kind implementation of your [sometimes awry] ideas
5. Everlasting support and continued development, even after your payment hiatuses
6. Deep forum integration beyond just user basic profiles

As all of you might of noticed In recent days… MyRuneLog has came back online, today an attack from a fake anonymous member was executed (no ones passwords were compromised). We would just like to say we have nothing against government or any sort we are minding our own business and would please advise the hackers to stop. We are a rs fan site and that is all we plan to be.

Well that’s just kind of funny — sorry. Nothing more to add from me.

A very unprofessional post was made by one of the developers you can find that here.

There’s so much wrong with that statement but I’ll just mention two things:

1. This is my personal blog. Not a professional site. I post musings and rants here, not love sonnets or creative writing projects. Chris Coyier has the same approach to his personal site. If something irks me, I’ll share it.
2. We stopped being professional when you stopped taking us seriously. Although not directly related, you are one of the most unprofessional people I’ve ever worked with. Your grammar is terrible and you lack any sort of serious finesse (read the chat logs for a sample). You don’t get to call other people unprofessional.

Thanks for the traffic though!

It goes into his full side of things but mostly slanderous things to me of course.…

Well I’m definitely not going to praise your magnificence, am I? And do you even understand what slander is? I didn’t misrepresent you beyond reasonable interpretation nor make up facts. None of what I said is misleading and is apparent to anyone willing to investigate your character.

Don’t even got a good pic of my Tat.. I mean.. Wtf? lol Here’s a good picture of it though ;p

I apologize about that tattoo — finding an embellishing picture of something so sad wasn’t exactly important to me. I don’t even know why it is to you.

Also on the blog entry he decides to put out personal conversations (Which is invasion of privacy, considering he did not alert me that chats would be publicly shared) between the both of us, mostly they are one sided of course.

Hardly invasion of privacy. If you’re referring to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — that only applies when messages are in transit. After they’ve been received it’s unrestricted. We don’t have a confidentiality agreement preventing me from posting logs. I didn’t hack into your computer and take the chat logs either. Those were between us and did not need to remain mutually exclusive. I would be okay with you sharing your chat logs between us, as well.

In addition, posting the chat logs is just one of the many forms of proof I have to support my/our claims. You, if I recall correctly, have nothing but your word.

With all of that being said and out of the way we are under new development by a combined power of l2rushnub and myself and the site should be up within the next couple weeks (yea… 9 months compaired to a couple weeks, hope yall are happy about that!) I mean… In 2 days me and l2rushnub were able to get these new forums with the skin up and running… So we will take much less time on a better outcome.

So let me get this straight…

1. Install IP.B -> 10 minutes
2. Install forum skin and change the logo -> 5 minutes
3. Create crappy splash screen in Photoshop -> 20 minutes
4. Creating an expansive, responsive, integrated, custom CMS for a specific niche website -> two weeks? give or take a few months maybe.
5. ??? -> PROFIT

I don’t even know how setting up the forum took two full days. At that rate it’s going to be a year until you have any sort of palpable website.

Thank you everyone who has read this topic and I hope you understand what is going on.
– Harley

Best of luck to you.

Closing Thoughts

In my conversations with Harley I had to use a lot of analogies to explain things to him since he often did not understand. One of those was saying we’re kind of like a phone company — “you continue to pay us or we’ll terminate your services”. He likes picking apart my analogies, and this particular one (which remember, was made up on the spot) he LOVES to destroy. He explains that a telephone bill is “prorated”, which to him is a magic bullet — effectively making all of my previous statements invalid. Prorated essentially means means adjusted proportionately — which we admittedly do not do. However that’s hardly detrimental - I’m sure he understood what I meant. Picking apart my analogies doesn’t immediately nullify our facts nor make everything here invalid — you screwed us over. Plain and simple.

Also, regarding our hourly payment plan. I overheard another person calling that a “bad business practice”. Not at all if you consider some things specific to this project:

• Harley was very unsure as to what he wanted for the site to begin with (he had no proposal/plan in place at all)
• He wanted to start ASAP
• By charging hourly, we would be able to add things as we went along. If we had a fixed amount (50% up front, 50% after for example), then we would need to re-draw that contract and agree on a new fixed price every time he wanted something else
• No other firms he consulted would take his project for a price he liked

By charging hourly we not only were able to sustain continued development, but also build the site just as Harley wished with minimal issue. I’ve done fixed price work before and honestly it just puts everyone in sub-optimal situation, unless the site is something simple and straightforward like a blog. For something as expansive as MRL though — hourly was the way to go.

About not getting what he paid for. Absolutely false. Josh sent over all of the modules, databases, and core files that he paid for (28 hours worth, to be exact). As for me — he already has everything. He admitted to having the source code from when the site was hosted on the GoDaddy server (see chat logs), which includes more up-to-date source material than what he would receive from me. Those files are roughly dated to June, while I stopped receiving payment in May. Truthfully I had completed most of the work by then anyway (I do front-end and design work, so that stuff came first).

Regarding legal action: we did have a verbal agreement, which is still legally binding (but admittedly not as solid as a contract). All we would need to do is prove that he was going along with our agreement, which would be incredibly easy with our backlog of invoices and other records. I’ll be consulting some professionals in the coming days, but at this time seek no litigation unless provoked. More specific records (invoices for example) are being withheld as a precaution.

I can be a vindictive ass, I know, but we don’t want to ruin this guy’s life. Let’s let sleeping dogs lie now, eh?

This has been something I’ve been passively working on for a long time and it’s great to finally have it ready to show off. Technically this is version 2, but I went though about 5 design comps before I was happy. I wanted to keep it clean and professional basically. The back-end is my own, and while it’s not the next WordPress, it should be much easier for me to do things like update projects.

It’s quite heavy in HTML5 and CSS3 stuff, so I may need to still hammer out some kinks in inferior browsers. You know the ones.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think!

Edit: Turns out the site works fabulously in IE7, 8, and 9! I love it when that happens!

Things I hate

• Memory usage is high compared to Steam. As soon as I started Origin, it shot up to over 120,000K (in iTunes/Dreamweaver territory) while Steam remained at a modest 50,000K despite being running for several days already.
• EXTREME lack of customization. You can’t even hide the friends pane on the right — which is absolutely useless since none of my friends would ever in their right minds install Origin. They’re already on Steam, where you can do all you’d like to customize the app via skins and whatnot.
• I can’t upload avatars. I don’t know if this is a technical limitation or just censorship. Not a fan either way.
• Terrible interaction in the store. There are no hover or focus events on things like links and images that NEED to give the user feedback when they do said actions. There’s also no loading indicator, so you need to wait for the page you clicked on to load before you have any sort of indication your click did indeed do something.
• Referring to games as “products”. Yes, they are indeed products, but it kind of makes you wonder if EA believes each game they release is a wonderful masterpiece or just another row in a spreadsheet. I don’t think the word product is even uttered at Valve.
• Mediocre selection. It will never be able to compete with Steam on this front. As far as I can tell, Origin only carries EA titles. None of those lovable indie gems like Audiosurf or DEFCON are to be seen. Origin is inferior to Steam for just this alone.

Things I don’t hate

• The interface is in one window. That’s kind of nice. But then again, there isn’t much to interface with. The store, games panel, and friends list. That’s it. Except they don’t let you hide the friends list. Dammit.
• The default [unchangeable] design is okay, albeit clunky in some places.

I basically see Origin as a bastardization of everything Valve has accomplished with Steam. It looks like they spent a lot of time looking at Steam and Games for Windows Live and just put a lot of effort into wrapping up those experiences in a different package without spending the time to polish out the details or innovate.

Origin doesn’t even need to exist. Steam is fulfilling the market’s needs quite well. All competition will do is make Steam look even better to gamers. Oh, and yes, I am quite aware Steam was just as bad when it was in its infancy, so I’m willing to give Origin another go in the future. But I doubt it will get better in the next year or two though… if it’s still around.

Here are ten songs that WINNERS listen to. Enjoy!

Tiësto & Mark Knight - Beautiful World

When you want to KICK THE WORLD’S ASS.

DJ Fresh - Hypercaine

FREAK OUT and SCARE EVERYONE ELSE AROUND YOU.

Elvis Presley - A Little Less Conversation (JXL Remix)

Get in on SOME ACTION.

Wolfgang Gartner - Illmerica

Don’t like something? DOMINATE IT AND CHANGE IT.

Fatboy Slim - Wonderful Night

Enjoy the world for what it is AND THEN MAKE IT YOURS.

DJ Deekline & Ed Solo - Handz Up (Stanton Warriors Remix)

REPRESENT NO ONE BUT YOURSELF.

Parov Stelar — Catgroove

CLASS it UP and MAKE EVERYONE ELSE KNOW YOU MEAN BUSINESS.

Flanders - Behind (Callea Radio Mix)

LEAVE EVERYONE ELSE that drags you down BEHIND.

The One AM Radio - Everything Falls Apart

HOLD ON and SUCCEED in EVERYTHING YOU START.

Unlike the last design, the colour scheme here is dominantly white and cyan. This time around I really wanted to show that I wasn’t all dark and suicidal. That scares people away. What the lighter colours do here is invite people to come in and read (hence the dark text on white background). If you’re complaining that it makes your eyes bleed, then that’s your fault. Turn on some [more] lights and sit farther away from the monitor — you’re mutilating your eyes (glasses/contact user, here) by not doing so.

To expound a bit, this theme was derived, code-wise, from the stock TwentyTen WordPress theme. It’s a great base to build upon, despite the somewhat messy CSS. Regardless, the code is simple and it’s easy to implement your own uniqueness. As far as design, I can say it was partially based on my previous Cloudy design. I ended up spending a lot more time on this than I really thought I would.

In the end, the result is passable and I can be proud of it. Just recently I added the recent work slider and tweaked some inconsistencies in the sidebar. I still have a long list of things to either add or change, and I look forward to checking off items as the year goes on (time permitting).

As a tradition, I like to share the song that was the driving force of my inspiration and motivation to work on this, because music really is powerful! This is a great track!

To close: I’d just like to point out that every time I re-design something, it is a sign that my design or development skills and tastes are evolving. By re-working something, I am able to take what I had learned previously making the theme and apply it alongside my new found skills and tastes.

“Prairie Sky” by Jesse Therrien (source)

Here are the Cliffnotes. Minecraft is…

• A sandbox game which allows players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world
• Set in an infinitely large world
• A world that allows you to build the most intricate structures you can imagine out of simple blocks
• Updated almost every week by its creator Notch (Markus Persson)
• Both singleplayer and multiplayer
• Profoundly addictive

That’s all nice and dandy, but I think the best way to let you get a taste of a game is through a short gameplay video…

Before I cut this off, I feel it’s important to mention that this game is still in the alpha stage. There are bugs, glitches, and crashes. However, the don’t detract from the fun experience of playing the game at all, and buying the game is still a good investment. Notch will continue to develop the game, and early projections place the game’s completion sometime in the fall of 2011. You can play it now though!

Also worth noting is the player base. From my experience, players are actually in the 18–30 range, which is surprising considering how childish the game looks. Please don’t judge Minecraft until you have had a chance to play it. Here, try the classic version for free.

You can buy Minecraft Alpha for around $13 right now. Exchange rates may change in the future.

Gaming Heavens also runs a vanilla Minecraft survival server. If you’re interested in that, the connection IP is gamingheavens.com.

There are a few ways of doing this, but this way is by far my favourite because it’s so easy to modify the effect later on if needed.

First, a short history lesson.

To make you a bit more savvy on the subject, let me fill you in on the origins of the letterpress effect. You most likely own a book, container, or even business card that you’re able to rub your fingers along and feel the letters raised in or out. You guessed it, that’s the letterpress effect. Origins go back to as far as 750AD and has almost been used exclusively in physical printing until around a decade ago. Graphic and web designers then adopted it as part of their design toolkit. Current design trends were beginning to age, so designers needed something to spice up their work.

If you’re interested in seeing some examples of letterpress in web design, take a look at Line25’s fantastic gallery article.

Alright, let’s do it!

Pop open Photoshop and proceed to create a new canvas. In this tutorial, I’ll be using a canvas with the size of 400x400 and background colour of #555555. After doing that, go ahead and type your text out and make it’s colour #999999. You can replicate this if you’d like, it shouldn’t really matter but this colour and size should yeild the best results.

Alright, now let’s actually get into doing the effect. In this method, we can be pretty non-destructible by only using layer styles. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.

Select your text layer in the layers panel. Now, head over to the bottom of the layers panel and choose Layer Styles → Drop Shadow. Now, make sure to replicate the options in the next image below. I’ll explain what these do in a moment.

Replicated everything yet? Good. Now let me explain a few things. The first thing you should have done is set the blend mode to normal. This ensures that the drop shadow will stand out. Next up is the colour change — make sure it’s #333333. It’s dark enough to stand out against the background without being too disruptive. You should have set the opacity to 100%, which will ensure that the drop shadow is nice and crisp. Next is important, make sure you set the shadow angle to 90°. Last part is easy, just make sure the both distance of the shadow and the size of it is 1px. You can change these later if you want to change the look of the letterpress, but we’ll keep it like this for a more classic letterpress look.

Alright, now we’ll be doing doing the second part of the effect — the inner shadow. Since you already have the effect panel open, just go over to the list of effects on the left and select Inner Shadow.

You’ll immediately see the inner shadow applied, but we’ll change that in a moment. Just take a look at the image below and copy the settings.

Alright, a lot of familiar stuff here. You really just need to duplicate the settings that you used on the drop shadow, but with one major difference. Make sure to set the inner shadow colour to #cfcfcf. This is lighter than the colour we set the text to (#cccccc), and adds a bit of polish.

And that, my friends, is the letterpress effect in Photoshop. I prefer this method because it’s really easy to change the colours of the shadows and text, and believe me, that happens a lot! In this example, the text is pressed outward, but if you were to reverse the colours of the shadow and tweak the text colour as well, you could easily achieve an inset letterpress. I’ll leave it to you to experiment with that, though.

If you want to get fancy, you can also add some gradients and such. I won’t go into the details of doing this, but the above image is an example of what a little bit of creative tweaking can do.

So, in closing, let me outline a few things that you need to remember when doing the effect with this technique:

• There are always two shadows.
• If you want an inset, the inner shadow is should be a colour darker than the background, the drop shadow should have a lighter colour than the background, and the text colour should be the same as the background.
• If you want an outset, the inner shadow is should be a colour lighter than the background, the drop shadow should have a darker colour than the background, and the text colour needs to be a colour that is light, but not as light as the inner shadow.

Today, I’ll be sharing some of those shows that had great potential, but a bad time slot. With all the garbage on TV these days, it might be good to shed some light on some shows that were unique, well produced, or ahead of their time.

I just need to preface this by saying that these shows didn’t necessarily end due to lack of interest. Some may have just expended the storyline.

1. Kings (NBC)

This is number one for a reason. Rarely do I find a drama that I can actually recommend to people, and with Kings it’s no exception. Sure, the environment in which the story takes place is derived from the Bible, but that doesn’t bug me at all. The compelling acting and ever-evolving story always kept me counting the days until I could catch the next episode online. Unlike a lot of other shows that have a new scenario for each episode, Kings makes sure to play things out like one very long movie that’s been diced up into 43 minute pieces. You can typically expect what’s going to happen, but never how it’s done or what happens along the way.

It’s too bad this show was up against American football as it had great potential. Also, this was a more recently canceled show, so there’s a lot of outrage from the community to bring the show back. If not on NBC, hopefully we can see Kings on some other cable network. Make sure to share your thoughts, if you like the show, with NBC’s executives.

2. Bionic Woman (NBC)

Based upon the 1976 series, the modern day revival of Bionic Woman did a very good job at introducing another generation to the story that they would have missed out on otherwise. I thought it did, anyway. Alas, it only ran for one season in 2007 with a concurrent six million viewers and only consisted of eight episodes.

There was a mess of speculation as to whether the show was canceled. You may or may not remember the 2007 writer’s strike, which occurred during the production of the first season. Of course, without writers, production halted and no more episodes were released. After the strike had ended, it appears that everyone had seemingly forgotten the series as it’s content was slowly pulled off of the NBC sites and hulu. Two years later, and I still hold out a bit of hope for a revival, but it looks bleak.

3. LAX (NBC)

It’s probably the aviation nerd in me, but I loved being able to see some (although scripted) behind the scenes action in one of the larger airports in the United States. Like Bionic Woman, LAX averaged about six and a half million viewers across it’s thirteen episodes and only lasted one season.

I can understand why this show was canceled. It only seems mildly interesting to a small subset of people, and to everyone else it just seems like a drama encoded in the mundane operations of an airport. I do admit that I cared little about the actual story of the show and more about the United 744s in the background, but at least they tried. Still, it was very enjoyable to watch as it was a very unique setting for a drama to take place. I commend NBC for giving the show a shot.

4. Last Comic Standing (NBC)

Last Comic Standing lasted through six hilarious seasons and is essentially the American Idol of comedians. A panel of judges listen to comics at various casting calls throughout the United States, determines if they have the stuff, and forwards them onto proceeding rounds (in front of live audiences) if they do. However, in the later rounds, teams are developed and rivalries form as the two teams compete against each other and ultimately only one comic is left standing, hence the name.

As I mentioned, six seasons of this show were produced, ending in 2008. The show itself was genuinely funny, and I loved the idea of listening to concurrent acts and jokes while the comedians telling them were rated. Near the end everyone tended to step up their game in attempts to win, and the result was hysterical.

5. My Name is Earl (NBC)

This show had a very unique setting that I enjoyed very much, and a plot centered around a society in which “hillbillys” rule is certainly fresh. My Name is Earl is one of those shows where each episode drops the characters into a different situation, advancing the storyline very little. Something that always irked me was whenever the show made progress to further develop the characters, it would always be reset to how you knew them back in the very first episode eventually. That’s something I’ve always hated about that type of story, but I still found the 22 minutes of it each week very enjoyable.

Four seasons were eventually produced, raking in around eight million viewers for each episode. The show was canceled in 2009 during the production hiatus.

6. Airline (A&E)

Again, the aviation nerd in me loved this show. There’s just something about pissed off, incoherent passengers that makes me all giddy. Also, the seemingly genuine look into the operations of a CSA (customer service agent) for Southwest Airlines always was interesting to me. I’ve always been interested, for some reason, in careers that most people take for granted.

The United States series with Southwest as the focal airline was actually based off a United Kingdom program of the same name, only featuring Easy Jet as the airline in the show. Unlike the UK series, however, Airline in the US was canceled after three seasons in 2005. Production of the UK version still continues.

7. Thank God You’re Here (NBC)

Derived from Australia, Thank God You’re Here is one of the few improv shows that seems to strike my funny receptors consistently. Actors are essentially dropped into skits with no idea what they’re doing, and they must play along to find out what the skit is about from the actors who are in on the story of the skit. The only clue the actors had before hand as to what the skit was about was the costume they were told to wear. This show was on caliber in terms of funny with Who’s Line is it Anyway (another show I deeply miss).

Lasting one season over seven episodes, Thank God You’re Here was a very unique way of presenting improvisational comedy. It’s short life was during the year of 2007.

8. This American Life (SHO)

I’m a fan of the This American Life radio show, and when it was announced that they would be producing a short, thirty minute show, I was estate. Basically, interesting stories from typical people are delivered as usual, but with visuals and interesting cinematography. A few of the stories were even taken from the radio show and retold (or maybe it was the other way around).

I wasn’t able to catch the reason of the series ending. I’m assuming that it was just too much work to keep going, as poor Ira (the host) also needs to work on the radio show. Regardless, it was very provocative and interesting while it lasted and I hope it returns. The last episode aired in early 2008.

9. Malcolm in the Middle (FOX)

Most people from my generation remember watching the antics of the dysfunctional family in which Malcolm is in the middle of. I did. Malcolm in the Middle was a unique spin on a [generally] family friendly show. Each character had his own quirks that made him diverse from the rest of the family, keeping each episode a treat to watch. The show lasted six years, and it was great to see how the characters matured over that time.

Sadly, the show ended in 2006 with seven seasons. Perhaps it was due to a growing lack of interest among the viewership. Malcolm int he Middle had a good run overall, but didn’t quite end with anything significant as I had hoped. Alas, the show was very fun to watch and will remain one of my favourite programs.

10. King of the Hill (FOX)

Like Kings, King of the Hill has been canceled recently. Most episodes featured a form of satire in one way or another, and generally wasn’t a dumbed down animated comedy show like Family Guy. Although entertaining, the comedy in this show was not in the form of jokes, but rather in how the characters lived their lives. The look of horror on Hank Hill’s face when he sees someone grilling on charcoal instead of propane is just hilarious.

The reason for the cancellation is due to lack of interest. FOX is trying to cater to the kind of person that finds Family Guy funny, and a show like King of the Hill doesn’t really follow suit of that atrocious program. More insulting, King of the Hill was replaced by a program entitled The Cleveland Show, a derivative of Family Guy. Thirteen seasons can’t lie — this show was popular.

Recently I had a problem when I moved my blog from blog.fantikerz.com to fantikerz.com. I had far too many links on other sites that still looked like http://blog.fantikerz.com/?p=261, and wouldn’t redirect to the new blog’s location. I wouldn’t even know where to start if I had to change all of those.

Instead, I threw together a simple redirection script that I thought I’d just share in case anyone needed it. It’s nothing fancy at all, and stupid easy to set up. There are many ways of doing this, and in my opinion, this is the easiest.

This is explained in a way that even common folk who just want to move their blog will understand. Sorry if I insult your intelligence.

1. Create a file called index.php

Pop open notepad, go to File > Save As…, set the filename as index.php, and then go directly below that and make sure to set Save As Type to All Files.

2. Copy the script into the text editor

<?php
	$post = $_GET["p"];
	$new = "http://newbloglocation.com";
	$string = $new . "?p=" . $post;

	echo "Redirecting to " . $string;
	header("Location: $string");
?>

3. Plug in your information

This is easy. Just plug in your blog’s new address where http://newbloglocation.com is. Make sure to include the http://. If your blog was located in another directory, you’re also able to include it like so: http://newbloglocation.com/blog/. Otherwise, omit anything after the domain name.

4. Presto, now save it and upload it to your server

Do a quick CTRL+S to save and upload it via FTP to the root of where your old blog used to reside.

Now you’re done. That was easy!

Before I start, I just want to share the songs that fueled me while doing the bulk of the work on the rework last night. You know, for fun. I was kind of in the mood for some energetic, synth-poppy music.

In v13 I removed everything that reminded me of the terrible colour scheme in v12, opting for a cleaner look with some cyan and gray mixed about. You’ll see a few subtle instances of radial gradients still, but it’s not really notable. As of now the header section is a bit too bloated for my taste so I may end up chopping that down eventually.

The content pages (Portfolio, Media) haven’t changed much. Yes, they’re still empty, and will probably remain that way for a while until I can find the patience to put them together. The contact page, however, has been tweaked a bit from the last version to make for a better experience with the AJAX interface. I also finished up the About page for now, but plan to add a few more things to it once everything else is done.

A lot has been added to the footer to de-clutter the sidebar. There are the typical social icons like before, but now my tweets and Flicker pictures are also being snagged from the respective services and are now living in the footer as well.

Also worth noting is the addition of the Labs. This was up for a while but I only showed it to a few people. Hopefully it’ll serve as a nice hub for my spontaneous projects. It’s not done yet, like most things on this site, though.

As always I welcome any feedback, and knowing me you can expect another major revision by the end of the year… Here’s to OCD!

If you’re not aware of what EvilChicken is, you should go ahead and skip this entry. Things are going to get in-depth and it’ll be hard to understand at points if you weren’t there from the beginning.

Before I go on, I’d just like to preface this by saying that I’m not trying to shift any blame around, but instead outline the shortcomings and faults that led to the site’s demise. This should also serve as good reference material for anyone that wishes to start a large, community oriented site.

Alright, so I’m just going to dive in and outline what went wrong, what went right, and what needs to be done before the site comes back up again.

What Went Wrong

• Traffic
  • On the first day the site was online, Max and Cam both uploaded advertisement videos to their YouTube accounts. Combined, they have over 150,000 subscribers. Less than 1/15th of that was all that was needed to take out the single server.
• Back End Systems
  • While it wasn’t evident to the end users, the system that ran most of the site was crippling out ability to administer it. We took a shortcut and ran Joomla on a site that needed a much more specialized codebase. We initially planned on coding our own content management system — but this was scrapped due to impatience. Once the site was up, we learned that you can’t run a large, comprehensive site on Joomla without hitting some big walls. We had a strenuous time expanding the site (games room, item database, etc.) because we didn’t know how the code for Joomla was setup (since we didn’t write it ourselves).
• Staff
  • While some may take offense to this, I must be honest and say that the staff was, overall, poorly managed. Some of those who were active (and a lot weren’t), didn’t know what their job was because it wasn’t clearly outlined. Yes, it is common knowledge that the job of the moderator is to mediate conversation — but there still were some inconsistencies between staff members. A bit higher up in the chain, you have the staff rank entitled “Owner”. This should be eliminated and be combined with administrators. It should be recognized that those people do indeed own the site, but they should not be placed at the top of the hierarchy for doing little in [forum] moderation/administration. Sure, they manage expenses and the like — but that’s not something that Mint can’t do. Some members of the staff seemed dwarfed by ranks such as owner — resulting in little motivation and spite against those above them. It’s hard enough to put in volunteer hours, but it’s even harder when those above you are getting the spotlight and even accept credit for the work you did, leaving you with little compensation.
• Design
  • Yes, the design did look pretty — for Firefox users. A higher percentile of users still use Internet Explorer, and when your site looks like a bomb went off when they visit, they aren’t going to change their browser over to Firefox just to use it. In terms of expanding upon the design, it would be very much a pain. Each little rounded box was encased inside a dozen other divisions, making for very confusing and messy code. I’m sure even the original designer of the theme has a hard time wallowing through the code. An in house, site-specific design would have taken a lot more time to make, but would payoff in the end due to the understandability of the code (since we wrote it ourselves!). Like the back end systems point earlier, this was scrapped due to impatience.

What Went Right

• Advertisement
  
  • Most sites struggle for weeks attempting to establish a user base. EvilChicken, however, was reached by thousands within hours of launching the site. This was because of the use of viral/social media. If one influential and popular user uploads a video and asks the viewers to help advertise it too — they will. Dozens of videos were made by community members as a result.
• Content
  • When a visitor comes to a site, it’s usually because of either hype, or specific content. If said content is non-existent, non-unique, or is simply not up to par — they will leave within seconds. In the case of EvilChicken, content on the site was submitted by the community. To be more accurate, the content came from the RuneGamer community — EvilChicken’s [main] predecessor. The large amount of guides, tips, and the like were moved over from RuneGamer to EvilChicken — giving the site a bit of a head start.

What Needs to be Done

• Rebranding
  • The EvilChicken name has some what been tarnished with embarrassment. The site was down the first day, then down again during the server upgrade, and then down once again during the domain transfer. When it was up it displayed improperly for half of its users.
• Closer Look into Staff
  • Clear roles need to be laid out for staff members to follow. While it may sound restrictive, it will dramatically save time and make a much smoother system for both the users and the staff. Inactive staff members should be pruned and the portion of the staff that put in the most dedication should be recognized and rewarded, either in the form finances or in proper attribution.
• A Complete Rework
  • A new name won’t be enough to restore reputation. As was initially planned with EvilChicken, the new site must have it’s own content management system and design that actually suits the needs of both the administrators and the users. Look around at some of the most popular sites and you’ll see that they don’t run Joomla or Drupal (ok, fine, a lot run WordPress though).
• Gradual Rollout
  • When the site is totally complete, it needs to be rolled out slowly to users. Preferably by word of mouth. This way, the server hardware can easily be scaled to suit the needs of the site. It should also be noted that the “biggest” or most “powerful” server doesn’t need to be used. If a content data network (like S3) is used then bandwidth overages can be averted and HDD space can be conserved.
• Collaboration
  • The staff needs to all join one conference and lay things out. What content will be on the site, who’s doing what, the current progress on milestones, and what’s ahead for the future all need to be discussed… periodically. In addition, the implementation of collaboration software such as activeCollab or DimDim would be very helpful.

Many people invested many hours into this site and to see it go is a shame. When it does return we will have learned from our mistakes and further, embarrassing mistakes may be averted.

I’m going to close this by reiterating that I am not trying to shift blame. I do indeed have a lot to do with most of these points, for better or worse. I’m sure I’ve left many other things out, but those should be saved for another post.

Thankfully, there’s a whole genre of software comprised of free solutions to the otherwise costly mainstream alternatives. This magical genre is called Open Source.

After the break are a few programs that you may find useful, with often just as many features as the costly alternative.

Microsoft Office » OpenOffice

The free and open productivity suite.

Autodesk 3ds Max » Blender

The open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation.

Adobe Photoshop » GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, for X Windows systems.

Adobe Illustrator » Inkscape

The vector graphics editor.

Techsmith Camtasia/HyperCam 2 » Camstudio

The free alternative for recording on-screen video.

Sony Vegas/Adobe Premiere » Jahshaka

The world’s first OpenSource Realtime Media Playback and Visual Effects System.

Trillian Pro » Pidgin

The multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once.

Halo 2 » Sauerbraten

The singleplayer (2 game modes, savegames) and multiplayer (12 game modes) first person shooter.

Guitar Hero » Frets on Fire

The open source Guitar Hero alternative.

vBulletin » phpBB3

The most widely used Open Source forum solution.

Microsoft Windows » Ubuntu

The free, Debian derived, Linux-based operating system, available with both community and professional support.

By far, the best resource for Open Source applications is SourceForge.net.

I personally hung out with Regicidal1 for a while, and we went over to Clan Wars and lost multiple times. I pwned with my Mith stuff… But hey, who cares about me?

Videos and pictures after the break.

Runescape 2008 Gathering

Video by TheUnforgiving

Here are some pictures I took in the short while I was there.

Ice Mountain

Clan Wars