trying to believe

The introduction of Castlevania to the Virtual Console is certainly going to delight many a gamer.

• Castlevania® (NES®, 1 player, 500 Wii Points)
  Step into the shadows of the deadliest dwelling on Earth. You’ve arrived at Castlevania, and you’re here on business: to destroy the curse of the Evil Count, once and for all. Make your way through six monstrous floors filled with bats, ghosts, zombies and every kind of ghoulish creature you can imagine. Use the legendary whip Vampire Killer and a host of deadly weapons to battle your way to Dracula’s chamber and the ultimate duel of good vs. evil.
• The Legend of the Mystical Ninjaâ„¢ (Super NES®, 1-2 players, 800 Wii Points)
  In The Legend of The Mystical Ninja, take control of Kid Ying and Dr. Yang in an action adventure through feudal Japan. A curse has stricken the village of Horo-Horo, and its beloved princess has vanished. Together Kid Ying, a daring young mystical ninja, and Dr. Yang, master of the invincible spirit transformation, must overcome 10 levels of the Dragonbeast to save Princess Yuki. Each stage contains intense 3-D and 2-D zones where the duo must perform dozens of attack moves and solve magical problems and puzzles before advancing. Battle humorous enemies like the Carp Meister, who stuns victims with poisonous fighting fish, Tanaka-U-Out, a knockout artist who wallops opponents with a bone-crushing hammer, and the Sumo Tag Team, kings of the unbeatable belly-buster crunch. Collect coins to buy new equipment and to receive clues, spend some time playing minigames in the arcade or try your luck and increase your fortune at the Quiz House and Horse Races.
• Shockman (TurboGrafx16, 1-2 players, 600 Wii Points)
  It’s been two years since Arnold and Sonya were made into Shockmen. A message from the professor to return to their bodies has them head to his laboratory, but they are ambushed by a mysterious enemy along the way. After narrowly defeating the enemy, they catch a TV news flash announcing the Ryo Empire invasion. They find that the professor has been abducted and set out to rescue him. Shockman is a side-view action shooter that has eight stages, including Action Stages, where you jump and use special techniques, and side-scrolling Shooting Stages. This game expands on the well-paced story from the previous version and contains cooperative elements like shared life and a powerful Team Shockbeam that can be used during two-player simultaneous play.

Last week, the ESV Bible Blog posted about reading the ESV on your iPod, so I gave it a try. Only the New Testament is available at the moment. This is a great resource if you’re wanting to do some light reading or need to look up a verse while you’re on the go. There’s two versions available… one for the iPod nano and one for the iPod video. I’d highly recommend checking it out!

Another movie night has come and gone. The idea of watching 5 movies in a row probably seems silly to most, but it’s an idea that’s probably going to become a monthly event for Patrick, Scott and I. Joining us for the first time were Josh and his wife Audrey, and Scott’s wife, Jessica.

The Adam Sandler Spectacular was a success. We watched Billy Madison, Click, 50 First Dates, Anger Management and Happy Gilmore. It was really tough to narrow down our choices this time, but I’m happy with the movies we went with.

So how does this thing work? What’s movie night all about? Well, the way we’ve decided to have things is each month Patrick, Scott and I will decide on a theme, actor, genre, etc. Our first actor choice was Pauly Shore. This month we went with Adam Sandler. Next month… is yet to be determined. But we’re already toying around with the idea of either a video game movie night, with flicks such as “Super Mario Bros.”, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter as some of our features. Once we’ve decided on the the direction we’re planning for the next movie night we’ll put together a list of a dozen or so movies for folks to vote on. Everyone gets to pick their top five… and we narrow it down. It sounds overly complicated, and it probably is, but it’s working for us.

Obviously… this sort of thing isn’t going to appeal to everyone… but that’s half of the fun of it. In some cases we’re watching movies for the first time or maybe we’re watching movies we haven’t seen in ages…  Regardless, we’re all having fun… and that’s all that matters.

Now it’s time for bed.

It’s 12:30am, and I’m giving up on trying to install CS3 for the night. I’m tired and frustrated. Updating software shouldn’t be this difficult, nor should it take as long as it does. Just installing the smallest app, Contribute CS3, takes over an hour because of all of the “Components” that need to be installed. This is complete and utter nonsense.

When I upgraded from Photoshop 7 to Creative Suite I didn’t experience any problems. When I upgraded from CS to CS2, I experience no problems. Now, because I - like so many other people - decided I’d like to try out a Beta application from Adobe, I’m getting screwed out of hours upon hours of my time - because their software simply doesn’t work like it should.

I expect more from Adobe, and frankly this situation is making me seriously reconsider upgrading the rest of the designers in our office.

Tomorrow morning I’ll need to spend some time trying to make sure CS2 works like it should. I have a feeling it’s going to be a while before I waste any more time trying to install CS3.

UPDATE: Additional information on installing CS3 is now available (Thanks to Barry Hills at Adobe!). Please read through the article “Additional Information on Installing CS3″ for help installing CS3 on your computer.

I’ve added a post to the site with info on using Selective Startup Mode under Windows XP to get Creative Suite 3 Web Premium to install. Hopefully it will help some of you that are struggling with getting it on your system. Article: Installing CS3 Premium

Never before have I had this much trouble installing an application that should just work. I’ve done everything from uninstalling the Photoshop CS3 Beta, running the CleanScript for Windows XP and each and every time I try to install Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium I get “component fail” errors.This is COMPLETELY unacceptable.

I’ve wasted way too much time trying to install applications that shouldn’t have had ANY problems at all installing.

I’ve learned a valuable lesson from this: never beta test software from Adobe again. Photoshop CS3 Beta was their first widespread beta test of an application, and it has completely screwed things up for me.

Ugh… I am so disgusted right now.

I’ve been pretty busy as of late, so I didn’t get around to writing this review because I didn’t fully make the switch from Extensis Suitcase 9.2 to Extensis Suitcase for Windows 11 until this morning. I’ve been delaying the switch for a couple of reasons:

1. Upgrading to the new version didn’t replace Extensis Suitcase 9.2. This is bad, because it didn’t copy over all of the font sets I had created in 9.2. Recreating my font sets took time, and that’s something I haven’t had a lot of lately.
2. A number of fonts I had loaded into 9.2 were being referenced in my C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\ directory. When I loaded the new application and copied fonts in for the first time, a number of the fonts wouldn’t activate because they were already in my system folder. I am not sure if Suitcase 9.2 did this… but it was a nuisance to go in and clean those fonts out of the system font folder.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way… Suitcase 11 seems to be working pretty well. Auto-font activation works well with both Illustrator CS2 and Photoshop CS2. (I haven’t had a need to try out InDesign CS2…) I’ve got about 600 fonts activated currently and it appears to perform pretty well given it’s current load.

I haven’t seen much in terms of difference between Suitcase 11 and Suitcase 9… other than the addition of the “Font Vault”. I’m not sure if that’s a compelling enough reason to get most people to upgrade.

Pushed a few minor updates live this morning:

• Created a Links page that uses Wordpress’ blogroll/links list functionality to handle the content. Now displays Friends, Other Stuff and Social Networks. You can view my last 10 Ma.gnolia bookmarks here as well.
• Updated Archives page for better display.

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

Read More and Take the Survey!

We’ve been using Quickbooks Timer to keep track of time spent on projects for ages. It’s not bad, but it’s pretty unstable at times. We use Basecamp for project management. We’ve been using it for nearly two years now… The Time Tracking functionality is one aspect of Basecamp we haven’t ever taken advantage of… But that may change with the release of Chronopipe.

Here are some of the features it promises:

• Import Time from any Basecamp Project to any Customer and Job in QuickBooks
• Match Users in Basecamp to Employees and Contractors in QuickBooks
• Match To Do Item names in Basecamp to Service Items in QuickBooks
• Specify a “catch all” Item for Time that doesn’t have a match.
• Import with the same set of parameters more than once, without duplicating entries.

I am definitely going to need to try it out. It could be a great addition to our team…

It’s Graphic Novel day once again! Chapter 30: String Theory was posted to the official Heroes website today. The graphic novel comes in two flavors: interactive or printable [PDF].

If you’re not familiar with the graphic novel, you should be! (You can read all of the past graphic novels here.) In most cases they pick up right where the television show leaves you and fill in additional back story between episodes.

A brief introduction to this week’s graphic novel after the jump.

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