My wife's IPod nano (first gen) just decided to call it quits. The battery said "NO MORE" and decided it would not hold a charge. I sent in a price quote to the folks at Apple and they had stated that it would cost $90.00 and three weeks without the IPod to replace it. I personally had a IPod classic (second gen) and the two of us determined to just buy me a new Zune and to transfer my IPod over to my wife.

So far I have very little complaints about the Zune. For instance, I had to write a script to convert my WMA Professional encoded music over to the IPod's (AAC). It was awesome that Apple had an SDK and API to use with C# to do the conversion. Although, this process took at least 20 hours to run through my 145 albums worth of music. The nice fact that the Zune supports WMA Professional is one plus.

The major complaint that I have now is interoperability. The Zune does not function well with other devices. Right now it supports bluetooth, but only in the instance where you use it with headphones. It also supports WiFi, but only to the point where it can communicate with other Zunes or your PC. It does not have any support in any radios that I know of where you can plug the connector on the bottom and have the radio operate it. I own a Scion TC and on my TC it came with a radio that had full support for the IPod (even came with the cable for it). I understand that this is only the second generation for Zune, but I really think the reasoning behind Microsoft's lack of supporting these features is because they want you to buy into Ford Sync. While I do consider Ford a decent automobile company, I am not going to turn around and sell my Scion TC (which I love) just to get a car that supports my mp3 player.

I guess that means I am stuck using an Aux cable and will have to resort to the wishful thinking that Microsoft or someone else will produce a method to make this work.

If anyone was curious on what Gout feels like, this image explains it all.

Picture provided by Wikipedia

I have changed my default theme for BlogEngine. I am using a variation of the "Bright Side of Life" theme. I plan on creating a few extensions too like my RandomHeader (look at the header image) control.

One major thing that has caught my eye (and thoughts) in the past 10 years on the internet is the direction it appears to be going. It used to be the way to keep people informed about news and events was through BBS boards that you would dial into and read a list of posted items (much like a web forum). Then the next big thing to communicate online with other people was IRC channels. You could log into a server, type in /join <channel> and chat away in real time with friends and family (and anyone pretty much who cared to join the chat room). AOL and Yahoo then stepped in and created a web based / software based Chat Rooms which enabled non tech savy individuals to share the fun.

Then the internet exploded with new methods on communicating with people. Mind you now, the internet was developed originally to share data and information between colleges and military bases. Around this period the internet took people by storm, there was no restriction on who could provide content and there was no restriction on what method they used. News groups, Web Forums, Web Blogs, LiveJournal (DeadJournal and other variants), Email, and other methods of communication. There was only one problem to these methods, it took time to write content. It took time to make sure that it was what you wanted to post to the internet. In many cases it also costed money. If you wished to put a blog out there, you would have to pay out a monthly fee to some service who would do it for you.

Then the service provides found ways to make it easier to communicate with these methods. Found ways of posting to the service through your cell phone and ways to post without having to have a complicated login process. The posts then moved away from being well thought out posts that provided information to posts that were short and simple. Posts that stated things like "I went running today". As if it was a major accomplishment that everyone in the whole internet needed to know.

Now you can see another progression away from forums, blogs and service providers to microblogs. Systems such as Twitter, Pwnce and the like. So now they move from a more information post to a less informational more chaotic little blurp about what someone did during their day. Chat being too complex, E-mail doesn't reach everyone on the internet only those who you know, Facebook only reaches people in your "friends list", LiveJournal is pretty much a dead horse after the sale. That leaves only two options, those of us who stick to blogging and those of us who chatter about our daily lives. So I pose the question to people which system do you prefer?

Do you enjoy daily updates (hourly, minute by minute playback) of everyone's activities? or do you prefer blog posts which delve into a deeper part of thought?

I think it's quiet obvious which system I prefer, but I was just wonder what people thought was more important to them.

I am providing a "pre-release" version of my photo gallery control for BlogEngine. There were a few things I considered when making this control (and not going with other solutions that exist).

1. No third party assemblies (that means everything written from scratch).
2. Keep business logic and control logic inside one contained .DLL file.
3. The interface with BlogEngine will be through an extension.
4. Follow the BlogEngine method of abstracting data types and resource files.
5. Make the gallery control easy to setup and use.

With these goals in mind, I hope that my assembly + extension will be considered as part of the core of BlogEngine. If I do not accomplish this goal, well then I have a pretty kick arse photo gallery for my personal use. More...

Many of the online comics that I read every morning decided to take a moment to dedicate one strip to Gary. I think this just shows how important of an influence he was for many imaginations out there.

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp03042008.shtml

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0536.html

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/03/04

http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/archive.asp?nextform=viewcomic&id=1347

http://xkcd.com/393/ 

I am sure there are more out there, but these are the ones I tend to frequent.

Today while looking for information about Dungeons and Dragons 4.0 I found some sad news that I feel is very news worthy. Gary Gygax passed away today. May his inspiration and talent shine through on all of us each day, and may he find solace in his new place of rest.

The XBox 360 Widget that I use on this site was fairly straight forward to build thanks to mads and the team for making such an awesome framework for widgets. This post will run you through how to create such a widget.

It is fairly easy to create a widget as all you need to have is an edit.ascx to handle the edit fields and a widget.ascx to handle the display of the actual widget.

More...

The latest build of BlogEngine now supports multiple scalar extension settings. This is great news as now you can build a much more robust extension without creating a custom administration screen! I love the work that mads and rtur does with BlogEngine.

You can read more about it at http://rtur.net/blog/post/2008/02/25/Using-multiple-settings-in-Extension-Manager.aspx