So some others and I have launched www.gaming-wiki.com which is intended to become a most excellent source of gaming info. Wikipedia has a pretty darn good selection of Wiki entries on games, from reviews, to walk throughs to background info. However nothing like this exists for JUST gaming. My goal, to make just that. Someone attempted this with gamingwiki.com and failed, hell that site hasnt been updated in well over a year if not longer. Ergo my new project. There are so many review and preview sites out there, but they only cover what their staff writers bother to cover. The goal of gaming-wiki.com is to cover EVERYTHING the readers want to know, by simply cliking edit, and adding in their info, after all, that is what a wiki is for!

The problem, is content. Its a wiki, open to the world to edit… the trick it, finding people willing to edit it. So far everyone who has seen it is all “Awesome!! cant wait for there to be content for me to look at”

Errr…. so put some in ? *sigh* so yeah, its needs content.. baaaaadly… help?

So dan and I are headed to Subway for lunch…. mere FEET from the parking lot entrace a big white SUV decides that mine lane looks better than his, and proceeds to merge into it, and me. I hop to the right barely avoiding him as his realizes and moves back, but its too late… WHAM.

With the sound of a full on collision, so loud the guy actualy STOPPED in his lane… and then sped off…. I had hit the curb. My front passenger wheel rim is bent on the edges, a large gouge is taken out of my tire, and the front bumper is all kinds of effed up. A cop was just far enough behind to pull up behind me, but not see the guy who ran me off the road, or to chase him down. Seeing that there was no actual accident, she doesnt have much reason to write a report, so helps block traffic while I move the car up into the parking lot, and heads off.

Im pissed, naturaly, but my only solution at this point is to take out my spare, put it on, and just worry about this later when I have a clear head. I pop open the trunk, lift out the spare… and guess what? Looks like when i had a tire replaced about a year and a half ago back home, the goodyear place didnt put my jack and iron back into the trunk… so all I have is a tire with a big open storage hole under… WTF!?!?!

Yeah… great. Did I mention i let my triple A lapse when I moved? Dan tries calling his cingukar road sisde assistance, but they say because it was classified as an ‘accident’ because I was run off the road, they wont help for free. So, I go ahead and take the plunge for the long ardruous phone call that I must make to my insurance company, Progressive. I give em a call, she takes my info, pulls up my account, logs the claim, and tells me she is about to forward me on to the local claims office. After 15-20 minutes on hold with her checking back now and again, she says she cannot get though to them, and that they will be calling me back in the next 2 hours. I go ahead and hang up, and call jesper to pick Dan and I up so we can go get his car and get back to the office, not 1 mile from the restaurant lot we are in.

I get back to the office and shortly after progressive calls me back… here is where it gets good. Apparently they are telling me that about a month ago when I changed checking accounts, when i entered my new info in the system online, it didn’t take right. They can confirm for me without a doubt they have yet to send me any notice of this. This past Friday dad got in the mail my june, 6 month renewal paperwork, and new proof of insurance cards. He mailed them to me yesterday. However according to their systems, on the same day my renewal notification paperwork was mailed off, they canceled my policy for lack of payment, without ever notifying me. They understand they never notified me that they were unable to charge my account, and they don’t give a damn, My account is closed, my only option is to open a new one, but that wont cover this, since it happened during the one week my coverage was lapsed.

I have no recourse with them, at all. I resign to my fate of paying out of pocket, so I have arranged for a local place to tow my car home, where it is going to sit in the driveway untill I can figure out how to pay 500 dollars for a new tire and rim after parts and labor. Fuck the bumper, it will have to do.

Being the responsible person I am I immediately tried to get new insurance, so I went right to Geico, my old providers. They quoted me 528 for 6 months, or 103 a month. being 30 cheaper a month than progressive was, I was happy. I signed up, went though all the hoops. On the last page, they said they had to “update” my rate, due to information gleaned from a history check. Back in November in my neighborhood I was turning right at a 3 way stop in my subdivision. I did not come to a 100% complete stop, more like about just under slow walking speed as I turned right. A cop was in a driveway, and followed me quietly all the way to my house and threw on her lights after I pulled into the drive way and got out of my car. She wrote me a ticket for running a stop sign (and not to mention was so rude that I both filed a complaint on her, AND had another cop at a random road block a few weeks later even joke with me that shes a known ‘issue’). Because of this new information geico wanted to change my quoted rate from 528 per 6 months at 103 a month to 1190 for 6 months at 218 per month, WHAT the HELL??

Fuck that…

I’m now sitting here waiting for American Towing to call, so I can meet them at my car.. and just get it back to the house, and get this all over with… *sigh* I’m miserable… and pissy… and in a bad mood….

So I have come to learn if I really wish to spend the time and money tracking down all the paperwork of my ancestry, and then have all of it authenticated, and then have it all filed for review by the UK governing body that oversees this shit, I can earn the right to the title of “The Honnorable James Wellington” as a Peerage title. Course, thats serves me no use since its a title only with no extra benefits due to my lack of citizen ship, the fact im not the eldest in the family by any means, and there are far likely to be plenty of living, closer direct decendants in the UK to use up the more privlaged slots… but still, the whole situation is pretty damn cool.

Well, not really… but still its kinda cool. I guess technicaly I can claim some small form of Peerage, err, maybe. I was doing some searching online today and digging into some info and found out something interesting…

My ancestor, Francis Xavier Eckert is about as far back as I have tracked my geneology, back when I did a project when i was in middleschool. He was the one who picked up his family of 7 kids and wife and moved them all from Pfaffenweiler Germany, and moved them to Jasper Indiana. Well today I poked back a bit further. You see, we have stories in the family that when Francis X came overe here, a decent ammount of “old money” came along.. supposedly english in nature. The question is, where did it come from?

Well here is what I found out.. Francis’s mother, wasnt from Pfaffenweiller, like the rest of the family going back generations, hell she wasnt even German. Her name was Maria Agatha Wellesly. Daughter of George Wellesly, Earl of Duo, who was the brother of Arthur Wellesly, First Duke of Wellington… as in the “I kicked Napoleons ass all over waterloo”-duke of wellington.

Well now isn’t that interesting… huh?

Holly sent me the pics her and her boyfriend, Sir Ty, took at the party, so I finaly got around to uploading them tonight.

http://www.sargonas.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=897

Of special note, watch the video of stale ‘holding court’ as my dad called it, while retelling the Zombie Possum story. Good times indeed.

…to recover.

My party was a blast as planned. The only downside being that saturday was a string of bad news phone calls regarding the plumbing situation from friday. The party kicked off perfectly, but about 12-15 of the 40 some people didnt show up, no call, nuttin. I mean stuff happens and people get busy, I understand, but it impacted the planned Epicness of the event and I feel bad I wasnt able to deliver on the calibre of party my friends have grown used to me having.

Late in the night things got real interesting though when stale crossed into rarely traversed territory when he became visibly intoxicated. Some key moments being when he began to get into a tug-o-war fight with Z using his cane.. haha. He held court for a while in the kitchen as well, retelling some famous stories of time gone by, for those who never heard them, and equally entertaining for those of us whom had, because his method of telling a story would make shakespear, dickens and the rest of them cower before him in an surrendor of unworthyness.

Sadly it all came crashing down when kaz looked down at him on the deck and goes “are you drunk” and Stale just nodded solemly, and rested his head on his cane. Kaz, in a display of kinda, gay-love, kissed him on the forehead… and within seconds dan was leaning over the railing sharing the contents of his stomach with the bushes below.

People began to drift out, and Kaz and Sir Ty managed to maneuver Stale onto the living room couch, where we left him with a bowl, and called it a night.

Sunday was less pleasant though, when Stale realized his alchoholic exploits, combined with an empty stomach, had lead him into what he said is called DKA… basicaly his checmicals are all fuxored to holy heaven and for the next 6 days will suffer through mad pain as it feels like acid is pumping though his veins.  Because of this we opted not to drive back sunday, and instead returned early monday morning. I dropped him off at our house, riddled with holes in the walls from the ongoing plumbing work, and headed to the office. Yeah about the house… turns out things are worse than originaly thought. The plumber came back monday and did waht he could to fix more leaks.. but all told, its temporary. The whole plumbing system will have to be redone from the ground up sometime in the next 6-8 months. Oi…

So thursday before heading to work, a spot of our living room floor had a tiny wet spot I stepped in. I wrote it off as one of my house mates spilling something and headed to work. When Dan and I came home for lunch however, we were treated to a much larger wet spot, nearly a foot in diamater. I put some pressure on the carpet around it and felt the tell tale spongyness of a water-logged carpet padding. I put in a call then and there to my landlords, who’s first though was that our ac unit up in the attic was leaking. This kind of made sense, since it sits above the wall next to this spot, and if it was not draining right, it would leak condensation down the inside of that wall, and right out this point. They put in a call to their regular hvac people for the next morning and we let it go, and headed back to work.

When I got home later that afternoon though we were greeted with a soaked area 4 times the size and growing. This was obviously NOT a AC condensation leak. I pulled back the carpeting (this spot was a foot or so from a corner that is the entrance to the room) and was greeted with all out standing water under the padding. It was plain to see that in a 3 inch gap out from under the wall the water was coming from, right where the kichen sing fixtures were on the other side of that wall. Aparently there was a leak in our plumbing. To try to isolate where, while doing some trial and error stuff we located our water meter, which took about 30 minutes and 3 phone calls to the landlord, (who was in a car on their way to chicago from the home in birmingham, heh) to finaly find it, in a hole in the ground, OUTSIDE the fence in our back yard, about 10 feet from the fence along side the sidewalk that lines the boulevard that runs behind our house…. riiiight. So we look and according to the water meeter were dumping out 1 gallon of water every 2 minutes. I go back in side and cut off the water where it goes into the hot water heater, and it keeps spinning. This means its in the main line before it branches around the house. Normaly not a big deal, except our house is on a concrete slab, with the pipes inside the slab…

The leak was geting worse by the moment and we didnt have the special tool needed to turn off the main valve in the pit, so I ended up having to call a 24 hour emergency plumber to come shut it off for like 150 bucks. Once that was done we finaly called it a night and waited for our landlords usual plumber to arrive in the morning.

Longer story short, first it took them an hour and a half and about 11 holes in the back yard to find out where the lines come into the house, then through trial and error, and cutting 5 various 2 foot by 2 foot holes in various walls of the house,  they found the junction just before the leak. He ran a line from there bypassing the junction under the house up the wall into the attic, and back down the other side, splicing it back into the main branch, skipping around the leaky pipes under the kitchen floor. After starting around 8am, he was done shortly after stale and I hit the road for louisville around 2pm.. needless to say it was a long crappy morning to kick off my 3 day weekend for the party I am throwing up in Louisville. The whole ordeal sucked, and now, as I understand it, there are 4 walls in our house that need patching, and a carpet to be replaced when we return. Thank god I rent the place and dont have to pay for any of this…. oi… suckage indeed.

This is what happens when you live in the bermuda triangle of Karma cause by Stale and I living in a house together creating one great big vortex of “fuck you”.

Err… well its on its way… slowly. Today anyone who owned a specialty marked copy of Crackdown for the 360 was treated to access to download the Halo 3 beta and play though mid June. The launch time was set for 5am PST, and so well hyped Bungie had a counter running for the last few weeks on their website counting down to the very moment… and when that moment arrived….. Xbox Live dropped the ball. The little button wouldnt light up and let you DL the beta. I dont blame Bungie in the least, for starters, cause I know some people there and Im biased, but mostly because lets face it.. Bungie gives the Ops engineers at XBL code and say “here you go” and its up to them to deploy it right.

What was really annoying though was that it took them around 7 hours to find out what was wrong, and durring that time not a single update was given. Bungie made efforts to show they were trying to keep tabs on the situation for us all, but when they had nothign to share, it really didnt help. Finaly around 7pm they announced the problem was tracked down and that it would be fixed in about 3-56hours.

Naturally at the 2 hour point, I was logging back in once an hour looking to see if it was enabled. Finaly around 11 (right at the 6 hour mark) I logged in and WHAM I can download the 900 and some odd meg update… WEEE i was happy.. and now im sad…. 20 mintues later im at 2%.  Makes sense really….. 50 thousand some odd people are trying to download this rigth now, and knowing MS they dont have the server capacity to handle it.

Thats ok, tomorrow I can rock it and alls well. I cant wait though, I might have to go into the office a wee bit late, hehe. Soon I will be ajoy in haoley goodness… planning keggers and going to frat parties… studying for my finals with the guys and shopping for a jeep…

(for those that totaly dont get the reference, click the link, if your still lost as to why this 27 year old is making those references… well… I give up..)

We did it!! PlayLinc 2.0 web has gone LIVE in beta. Months of work since the holidays have paid off. Its still lacking a lot of features that are still in development, but they are coming. We have a long way to go, but we just passed our biggest milestone of them all, and its awesome.

If you want in on the invite to the beta, its easy, just let me know and I will send you an invite key. Im running the program, so its pretty easy for me to come up with them when needed, I just make new ones hehe. Seriously though, let me know and I’ll hook you up. This new 2.0 version is fully web based, and a working model of what will soon be embedded into live sites. For example, say we partner up with Lanwar.com and I log into there using my [lw]Sargonas[GumiBear] user name. At the same time, I will automaticaly be logged into playlinc in the background under the name ‘[LW]Sargonas[Gummibear]@lanwar.com’. If this aim name does not exist, it will automaticaly be created the first time on the fly for me. Then a skinned version of what the web 2.0 is will be meshed into the site, or in a seperate popup window, or in one of a plethora of other possible ways, its all up to the desires of the site owner and our design team. A way to bring all of the gaming communities together into one, it will be glorious… lol

Eat your heart out xfire. Everything you do we can do now, and we have 3 times that number of things on the boards to add… and some are already in place (like free dedicated servers to run some of the top 15 games).

The future of online gaming and online social networking is about to collide like never before, and I am a key architect in it…. its overwhelmingly awesome, truly.

On a side note, I hooked up the admin for mygamercard.net with a beta key… and lo and behold, I’m now listed on their “celebrity” leader board of 260 or so gaming industry celebs… hehe, rawk on. Phear my xbox live gamercard!!!

So we have been working away feverishly towards a launch of the beta version of our 2.0 software. The goal was to launch an invite only beta of it today at Noon. However, all has not gone according to plan.

We have really focused on some key stuff for the last two weeks, getting things in line and  putting together a functional, although feature lacking, beta. Then again, its a beta, and not meant to be complete anyways. If we were going for complete, it would be a release, now wouldn’t it?

Thing were on track once we cut a few un-necessary features and realigned some planning. On saturday night we had a fully ready version, all that needed to be added was support for the beta access control systems I designed for us to help control the number of beta users. Once that was put in on sunday, there were 4 more features we decided to be put in, and here is where things took a turn. Somewhere between there and this morning something went it that went kaput, and now its 3:30 and our noon launch window is passed. However we are on the right track to make amends and looking well, I don’t think it will carry on past the end of today, or noon to morrow at the latest. Our devs are some seriously talented people.

Outside of that, things are good… I’m planning as I can on the side to get ready for the super-party on Saturday that I am throwing back up in Louisville at my parents house. If your part of my local social circle up there and haven’t gotten an invite, let me know ASAP and I’ll get you the details, its going to be HUGE. For everyone else, watch for pictures to be up in the gallery after the weekend.

On a final note… I think I’m missing Nikki… which has put everything in a off-kilt perspective that doesn’t make like easier in the least for me…. *sigh*

So get this… Today after work, as we pull in the driveway im geting the mail, and as I walk back towards the house past the cars, Stale is geting out of his car. He looks at me and goes “wana see some shit?” and procedes to get up out of his car, turn around, close the door and walk to the back door, then open it.

All without using his sticks…. at all… they were still in the car.

It obviously hurt like hell and was a strain for him, but it was one of the most impressive things I have witnessed in a long time. I’m somewhat amazed he didnt throw the sticks to the ground, do a double backflip and and stand up and say “God bless us… everyone”

For those who dont know, dan has slowly degraded from using a cane to a pair of walking sticks over the past few years, even so bad at times that for events like MML and Lanwar where hes moving around alot, he instead uses his wheelchair. But since moving down here to work for me here in Atlanta he has begun to move around a shitfuckton more than ever before, especially since he has to go up and down a flight of stairs every time he goes in and out of the office. I think all that excercise is paying off. It was actually really rewarding to see this… I feel really good for him. No matter how you look at it, his health is going down hill, there is no way around it, but Im glad to see him gaining back the strength to at least make a bit better of the situation while he can.

Course this means I cant rely on the safty of the fact that if hes out of arms reach I can make fun of him, now I run the risk of him launching out of his chair and coming after me for a few steps…

Stale linked me to this youtube video… it was…. thought provoking. Rarely do i come across a video on youtube that isnt something crazy and off the wall, or funny…. or ridiculous. This one is different though, this one has a pretty deep meaning, is rather thought provoking, and really makes you look back on the web the last 20 years, and the impact it has had on our society as a whole, as well as our future.

To even try to imagine where we would be today without the web is unfathomable, and to see how we could ever accomplish the things on the horizon that are so close, without it… impossible.

YouTube : The machine is Us/ing us

So jesper (my CEO) came over today and said “hey come over to my house tonight and drink!” (he lives two houses down from me) and Dan (Stale) and I did… and I am drunk. Jesper, his GF Nadine, Stale and I downed a 50 dollar bottle of Patrone, half a bottle of Vodka and some Spiced Rum. I am traaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaashed right now. Oh god so trashed. ANd having the time of my life, hehehehehehehhehee. I needed tonight. Today sucked, one red alert after another at the office with things, I was on the phone for a cumulative 3 hours with the datacenter today for various things. Yeah.. today was hard…. and drinking tonight was a good release.

 Here is to Dan, Jesper, and Patrone…. fuuuuuuuuck yeaaaaaaaaah

I went ahead and deleted my archive site. I zipped it up and saved it for posterity, but I found a fuckton of places where the gallery folders had been compromised to upload fake bank sites for phishing. Going though my web logs was a real eye opener. So just to be safe I wiped the whole thing clean… sad but necessary for the fresh start i wanted for the site anyways… and fuck those asshole phishers too!

Yup, pretty much what that topic says covers it.. allow me to demonstrate my supreme awesomeness..

YouTube :  Paralel Parking

So using a few combined tricks, I have learned how to take my RSS feed from www.360voice.com where my 360 writes its own blogs about my gaming, daily, and now syndicated it into my blog here, to look as though its posting itself on my blog.. god im a geek.. and i LOVE it!

Now that we have a nice big widescreen HDTV at the house (52 inches of such, to be exact) I’ve gone hard core back into the 360 gaming, and loving it. The PC can wait for now, I have achievements to unlock

Most of my time this past week was spent on Guitar Hero II. I have completed the game with 5 stars on Easy and Medium, working on Hard now… and some day… maybe just some day… I’ll be good enough to say I’ve done the same on Expert.

Outside of that a lot of time has been spent on Oblivion, another realm im working in. I played a decent chunk of the game on PC a year ago, but really wanted to get back into it and decided if I was going to replay the whole thing, I may as well earn achievement points for it!! Ive done a 300 point gain since around 2 weeks ago, sounds good to me eh?

On a side note related to the 360…. watch out for Timeshift and Frontlines: Fuel of War. I know the Producer of the first and the Netadmin / Head of QA for the second very well, and have gotten to really know the games and I think they are really gona rock things hardcore… check em out.