Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Hrm, new Blogger site


Wow, I really need to come by more often. Major changes around here and I am caught completely by surprise.

I really only wanted to say a couple of things.

Please visit www.podcasturbia.com

and
KNOCK KNOCK MUTHERFUCKER!

Heheh
heheheheheh...


It makes me laugh.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Ok, it has been a long time coming, but the podcast is now online! You can find my Pod-Partner and I at www.podcasturbia.com Please listen in and provide feedback.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Dollar coins are goooood!

I got an chain-email today talking about refusing the new dollar coins. I am not going to ask you to reprint this if you agree, but If you receive said email, think about the following before you act.
The dollar coin is a great thing we could do to help our economy; the more people refuse them the more damage is done to the recovery of the economy.
Simple facts:
1. A strong economy is built by churn (or transactions). The more transactions the more churn, the stronger the economy.
2. People are far more likely to spend a coin than a bill. Coins go into machines and used ...for coffee... bills stagnate and are collected and traded in to get larger bills which are often just put into the bank.
3. Coins have a longer lifespan and the total cost of life is less. E.g. say it costs 3 cents to make a dollar coin but 1 cent to make a paper dollar. However, the coin will last 3.5 times as long while the dollar is removed from circulation, destroyed, reprinted etc, which actually brings a 1 dollar bill up to 3 cents for the lifespan. Take that into consideration of the dollar bill's 8 year lifespan and the coins 30 year lifespan. These particular numbers are not perfect, but they are a decent parallel.
4. Counterfeit coins, while they do exist, are not profitable for the criminals.
5. If a coin isn't spent, it is often stored away in a jar somehow. Most people, when they collect those jars of coins and trade them in, immediately spend the money they condensed. They have effectively removed currency from the system for a short while, and then caused a transaction.

The EU has proven this with the 1 and 2 Euro coins. The Euro is kicking the crap out of the dollar and this is actually one of the reasons. Yes there are a lot of reasons, but the ability of the currency to force itself to flow and create transactions is good for the economy and the currency.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Brew Review

I am going to start trying to put down my Beer reviews on here...as much as I can anyway...

This week: Avalanche Ale
http://www.breckbrew.com/beer/avalanche.html

This is my second beer from breckenridge and I am still not convinced. It is not bad, just not really my preference. It is much sweeter than I like, and very light in other flavour.
The aroma is also very generic... I do not really get anyting distinctive.
The colour is very nice, exactly what I expect from an amber.

I will not avoid this beer int he future, but I will not seek it out either. I am hoping the other beers in the sampler I have are better.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

MMOs for Dummies: Part one

Introduction
What is an MMORPG? MMORPG stands for massively multiplayer online role playing game, a type of MMO (massively multiplayer online game). As the name implies MMOS have a massive amount of players on one “world” or server at a time. Some games handle 1500 simultaneous connections, while others such as Eve Online recently set a record of over 64,000 players online on the same persistent world.

A persistent world is just that, a world that is always there. A player can log off and go to sleep but the interactions on the world continue.

Genres, Intellectual Property, and Licensing
MMO genres come in many flavours, the most common being Fantasy (World of WarCraft) and Sci-Fi (Eve Online). They all require Intellectual Property, or IP, as the background. There are strong and weak IPs. Strong simply means that they are more widely known and less of a niche fan base (as in the case of a weak IP).
Strong IPs include Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek,
Weak IPs include WarHammer, DC Comics, Champions, Conan

Billing models
Subscription The player must pay per month, usually about $15. In the western markets there is no limit on time a player can spend online. The Asian markets have “fatigue laws” that only allow a player to spend a certain amount of time online during a given day.
Multiple month subscriptions are often offered with a small discount.

Micro Transaction (MTX). Most often found in the Asian markets, but are gaining ground in the west. Players can play for free, but would need to pay small fees for additional content. This can be access to new races, items, vehicles, or other customizations. Western games are adopting a mixed model Subscription with MTX, with mostly cosmetic options offered through MTX.

Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) introduced the Station Pass in 200x. With this model the subscriber paid a monthly fee of approximately 1.8 times the cost of one game sub ($27). However this pass gave the subscriber access to all of SOEs titles.

Endless Trial. The first tier of levels (usually about 25-30% of the level cap) are free to play indefinitely, but if you want to play the upper tiers, you will need to pay for a full monthly subscription.