A bit of fun on a Thursday night…
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What Was I Thinking Rants | The Rants of Alexander Rehm
How Fable 2 killed 3 Xbox 360’s
You may recall a story where my 360 decided to die after playing Fable 2, which was a very sad day for me. I spoke to Microsoft to see if they could repair my console, and Lionhead has so far managed to not acknowledge the problem. So I bought a new Xbox 360. And guess what:
Yup, I had 3 (THREE!!!) XBox 360’s die on me! This is what happened…
The day my Xbox 360 died
So there is me planning a nice evening with friends to watch a film – I get pizza, some drinks, clean up a little, look at my watch. “Plenty of time still, how about I play a round of Gears of War 2 or do a quick mission on Fable 2? Or I could open the (still sealed) copy of Saints Row 2 I bought this week and have a look at that!”
I decide to put Fable 2 on, I know there is a quick quest I wanted to do, so I put in the disc and begin to play. Interesting quest, finding out what lies in a cave near the graveyard. Well, just a few minutes into the game and this happens:
Just kidding, it did not explode, but it froze mid-game, the sound was still playing, but the screen froze and had tearing, gamepad did not work, it would not eject the disc; nothing else I could do but to restart the console forcefully…
On “pricing” pages on design studio websites – a rant
Over the last couple of months (or maybe already since the beginning of 2008) more on more upcoming design studios are having a “pricing” page of sorts on their website explaining their pricing structure, what they charge for, sometimes already with a PayPal button.
I can but wonder what went through the mind of a design studio at that time…maybe it was like this:
Designer A: “Hey you know what, let’s make loads of money by adding the prices right there on the site! They will come in flocks!”
Designer B: “You sure?”
Designer A: “Of course I am, everyone does it these days!”
As a matter of fact I am trying to find anyone in the top 100 or top 200 web design studios in Europe which showed a price for their work. And here is why you shouldn’t…
On Cuil, the new relevancy search engine (a rant)
Cuil, the new search engine looking for relevancy rather than popularity has seen the light of day today. Developed by former Google employees,it claims to be able to crawl through 120 billion pages (that is 3x more than Google and 10x more than Microsoft’s Live search). But what does it actually do and how does it perform?
Well I had had the chance to play around with it today, and I must say I am not overly impressed. Aside from the high server load and time-outs I managed to find either one of the two things:
- Nothing, or
- Anything but what I was after
Please read on to read more about my thoughts and usability concerns about Cuil…
On usability and accessibility – please display PDF links properly!
Over the last couple of months I have been working on a great number of design, usability and accessibility reports for clients of mine. Some of the sites I worked on are pretty good, and all you can recommend is maybe tightening up their call-to-actions or look at a couple of points of Section 508 to validate properly. Then there are some that need a bit more help than that. That is natural, some of the sites have been up for years and could do with a new design or will need some more development work.
But what gets me going of late is the inability of some websites to display their PDFs properly…
Why I hate Neon Genesis Evangelion
* please note that this post does contain harsh language and may – WILL – offend fans of the series *
Right, so I guess most of you know Neon Genesis Evangelion (if not, read the Wiki page). Basically, a very good friend of mine from the good old uni days warmly recommended me that anime. And in fairness, when it started I did quite enjoy it. The drawing style was very well executed, the overall feel of being in future Japan fighting against ‘Angels’ looked very well and the soundtrack was this nice mix of classic and electro-pop as many animes have it.
So why did you not like it, Alex?