Blog Changes
So - new system here, slightly new look, although I’ll modify that more soon.
Besides the new look, the most obvious change might be the lack of hockey posts here right now. That’s because I’ve converted The Ice Block back into a hockey blog. While that’ll be beefier than the normal blog, I’ll leave that discussion there. However - if you’ve linked to vodkafish.com simply for the hockey posts, you may want to change your links to The Ice Block. One other note - the hockey posts will be back here soon. You’ll get a dose of all my stuff here on vodkafish.com, including any other future blogs I may start…
Some other notes:
Don’t bookmark any inside pages here right now. I’m not a fan of the urls that ExpressionEngine produces. I will be modifying it.
I’m trying to seamlessly move the feed. If anyone notices any interruption in the rss feed, please let me know.
Hey look, finally have a contact form - it’s up in the right corner currently.
There’s a real registration system here, with profiles and such. Feel free to sign up, helps you avoid my spam filter as I make it more aggressive.
I will be re-adding links soon. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you.
More to come soon, this transition obviously isn’t “complete”, but I couldn’t help but get this started now. Perhaps we’ll consider this vodkafish.com ver 2 beta.
Oh Those Search Results
Here’s one of the fun ones for the day: go to Yahoo!, search the web for “idiot”.
Scan results, what I’m laughing at comes in at #7 right now.
This message brought to you by the party that’s not aligning with a party, just laughing at the search engines. Thank you.
A Potato a Day Keeps the Hepatitis Away
Scientific American has a fun article: Potatoes Deliver Hepatitis Vaccine in Human Trials
The concept alone can wind up leading to a much different grocery store than the ones we’re used to today: have an illness, grab the right food. Imagine the flu could be cured with a carrot, and maybe a Mac & Cheese version for kids.
Of course, the idea behind this is to help poorer countries have easier ways to treat disease, but that doesn’t mean it won’t turn into some odd form of capitalization and marketing over here.
ForecastFox Weather Extension
From ForecastFox: ForecastFox is an extension that brings international weather from The Weather Chanel® to your Firefox web browser.
I just found it today, and I have to say it’s a nice little add-on for your browser. It is indeed “lightweight” and it’s very customizable. Knowing it’s spyware-free helps a good amount too.
Future of The Ice Block
As some of you know (at least half of both of my readers), I do plan on “knocking down” The Ice Block and blog-ifying it. Basically, taking my hockey posts from here to there and writing much more. In the end, it’d let me have a place to write about general hockey topics freely, and I was never interested in promoting another site with a forum.
The only thing that has been asked repeatedly of me is: What about Newslinks? Newslinks is the most visited page on the site, understandably. Well, I haven’t quite decided yet. I’m either going to shut it down for a few weeks and try and re-build it quickly for whatever system I choose to run on TIB (right now I’m leaning towards pMachine’s ExpressionEngine), or I’m going to simply move it over to hockeyfights.com. Having it on hockeyfights.com would be easier, obviously. I would have many people willing to submit stories (yes, they do love hockey in general), and it could be very active in that regard. I will be adding commenting to Newslinks, making it a bit more interactive. However, to reach the general hockey-loving audience, it would probably be better to have Newslinks on TIB and just have it be slower for a bit. So a few things are definites: they’re not going anywhere, there will be commenting, and there will be an rss feed for them. So you’ll be able to read them easily in any feedreader, or even put them on your own site as well.
I do wish I would have made up my mind about all of this already as I’d love to have TIB up today to post lockout updates on. I’ll obviously make an announcement about the re-launch of it here, and until then I’ll keep posting hockey here as well.
ESPN Broadband Remade Into ESPN 360
ESPN Broadband has been renamed ESPN 360 (non-download version here).
PJ at Sharkspage informs us we can watch last night’s SEL Farjestad vs Modo matchup.
This is another free preview weekend from ESPN’s broadband “channel”. ESPN 360 hasn’t changed from ESPN Broadband’s model of having the ISP be the one that needs to subscribe to the service, not the user. They’re hoping the free previews push enough users to contact their ISPs I’m guessing, but it doesn’t seem like they’re pushing the preview enough for that, so perhaps it’s only for some testing and feedback at this time.
Video Search Semi-wanted
Google’s made some news lately, this time by introducing Google Video, a tv search engine. Google searches TV shows, mostly broadcast shows with closed-captioning text. Neat idea, useful to some I’m sure.
There are other video searches on the net though: here’s one from Yahoo and one from AOL’s Singing Fish.
Yahoo links to the page with the video. Singing Fish links to the main website, and then directly to the video.
While these two may be nice for the average user, I can’t see many webmasters being thrilled about this - especially about Singing Fish, who are basically helping suck the bandwidth (currently, still a huge cost) from websites. This may not matter to some corporate types, or people who are just hosting on free accounts; but the common webmaster running a small to medium-size website with just one popular video clip may eventually suffer if Singing Fish ever became popular.
There are methods to prevent hotlinking, but nothing’s currently foolproof. Luckily, these services are currently all from big corporations and all are properly recognizing robots.txt files. Yahoo, Singing Fish. Believe it or not, not all webmasters are aware of how to properly write a robots.txt file, so some may not discover this solution until after they receive a large bill from their host. I’m sure whenever Google moves away from just TV and starts including web video searches they’ll do the same in regards to a robots.txt file. The problem will come when another not-so-respectable engine emerges, and it’d be foolish to think it won’t happen.
Escape from the Universe
If you can get past the gloominess of the end of the universe, Prospect magazine has a very interesting article about how a possible future advanced civilization could Escape from the Universe before it ends. It relies on the theory that other universes, or parallel universes, exist, and that current physics and scientific theories allow for some sort of travel between here and there, wherever that is. Bon voyage.
EA Signs Deal With ESPN
Darren Rovell on espn.com is reporting that EA, ESPN announce 15-year gaming partnership. This comes a little over a month after EA signed an exclusive rights deal with the NFL and NFLPA (CNN Money’s Game Over article about the deal).
The EA-ESPN deal starts in 2006 (there is one year left on the deal between ESPN and Sega) and is for all of EA’s sports titles.
While ESPN branding certainly isn’t as powerful as exclusive rights, it certainly can’t hurt EA and is leaving Sega in a very tough spot for future games. Visual Concepts, Sega’s sports studio, did not return calls to Rovell.
Sports gamers are now left waiting to see if any real competition will exist in the sports gaming marketplace in two years. The future looks bleak for football games (which outsell baseball and basketball games combined) and with now having to re-brand its games Sega could be in a very rough spot.
Let’s look at the video games from the other three major team sports, with the criteria being it’s licensed from the league and union (real teams and players), is available on at least one major console (PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube):
Baseball:
MVP Baseball (EA)
ESPN Major League Baseball 2K5 (Sega, soon to be sans ESPN)
MLB 2006 (Sony’s 989 Studios, only available on the PS2)
MLB SlugFest: Loaded (Midway; no announcement of new game for this season, Slugfest came out mid-season last year)
All-Star Baseball from Acclaim is dead (Acclaim went bankrupt)
Basketball:
NBA Live 2005 (EA)
NBA Street V3 (EA)
ESPN NBA 2K5 (Sega…)
NCAA March Madness 2005 (EA)
ESPN College Hoops 2K5 (Sega…)
NBA Ballers (Midway; and this was released towards the end of last season, there doesn’t appear to be a new title for this season)
Hockey:
NHL 2005 (EA)
ESPN NHL 2K5 (Sega…)
Gretzky NHL 2005 (989 Studios, PS2-only)
My guess is this list may thin out over the next couple of years. Sure, there are PC simulators, and handheld and mobile games coming out, but the consoles are where the market is.
Update (Jan 19th): From gamesindustry.biz - Publisher Take Two, whose plans for its sports game franchise have been hard hit by a string of exclusive license deals announced by rival Electronic Arts, may be in talks to sign a similar exclusive with Major League Baseball.
Vaporware Awards
Wired has published the annual Vaporware awards - a countdown of the top products that never came to be over the course of the past year.