Twitterfox

This complaint is going to be in regards to Twitterfox, a Twitter integration tool that is a Firefox extension – but it can apply to any of the number of Twitter tools out there.

I installed the tool yesterday and immediately fell in love. My biggest problem with keeping up with Twitter conversations is that I hated visiting the actual site. Once I could integrate it into my Flock browser, all was right with the world. Until this morning. I opened up Flock and the Twitterfox tool did its thing, updating all of the content I missed overnight.

And then, it imploded.

To be fair, the tool itself didn’t necessarily crash or anything. It just stopped allowing me to access it. The icon turned red and there was a little warning message:

twitterfox.jpg

No more than 70 updates an hour, huh? I check the Twitterfox development page and see that this limitation is on the Twitter API side, no doubt to lessen the strain on their servers. Completely understandable, from a developers point of view. But from a user’s point of view, it’s disappointing. Not because I generally receive or send 70 updates every hour – far from it. It’s because this essentially means that every morning, Twitterfox will become completely unusable for the first hour I’m online.

How do other tools such as Twitteriffic and Snitter get around this limitation? Or do they? I assume they can’t since the limitation is based on the API itself. But do they force you to “shut down” for an hour every time you start up the software and they receive more than 70 updates from the time you were last online? I can’t imagine that being the case.

If anyone knows what I’m doing wrong, or if there’s something else I should be using, please feel free to let me know.

Is Brawl awesome?

I can most assuredly report to you that it is every bit as awesome as everyone has been making it out to be.

How awesome? Well, it’s sold 1.4 million copies in the past week. Just in North America. 874,000 copies were sold just on the first day.

How awesome? The entire game–from menus to actual brawling–feels polished to absolute gleaming perfection.

How awesome? I’ve been playing for a handful of hours almost every night. A tiny, infinitessimal fraction of those games have I actually won. But I have enjoyed every single moment of every single game.

How awesome? My nephew played for a couple hours this weekend. He’s already asked for the game for his birthday next week.

How awesome? So awesome.

The painful reality of Nintendo’s pathetic online system

You know what’s an absolute pain? Adding roughly 30 people to your Brawl roster. And then, coordinating and poking and nudging until they finally add you back. Also, attempting to reason with those that are hurt when you don’t feel like adding them because they are relatively new EvAv members and you haven’t participated in any discussions with them.

It’s in moments like these that I envy Xbox 360 gamers. Play with someone, add them as a friend. It’s just that easy. No inputting of random strings of numbers. No collateral reciprocation required.

It should not be this way. And yet, here we are, allowing it to occur, and doing so happily.

Still playing Urban Dead, death merely a speed bump

I had a friend email me and ask if I was done playing Urban Dead now that I had died. Au contraire, mon ami. The game has only begun. That would insinuate that I’m now roaming around as a zombie, terrorizing survivors and nibbling tasty brain remnants. This is actually not the case. I got revived by a teammate, and now I’m back in action healing up my squad members as they need it.

I’ve actually got three characters in action at the moment.

DrSetebos
Type: Scientist [Doctor]
Level: 4
City: Malton
This is my main character, and the one I have included in an Evil Avatar squad.

Sgt Setebos
Type: Military [Scout]
Level: 1
City: Malton
This is an alt I created to play with a friend. It’s operating a few suburbs away from DrSetebos (there’s a strict rule against playing alts near each other – it’s called “zerging” and it is highly frowned upon by the community at large).

Capt Setebos
Type: Military [Medic]
Level: 1
City: Monroeville
This is a character I created to play in the UD second city, Monroeville, that was created to celebrate Romero’s Diary of the Dead. The city is supposedly “temporary”, and one cool feature is that if you are turned into a zombie in Monroeville, there is no way to become human again. You are permanently zombified. It’s an interesting concept, but so far there’s very few zeds to whack on.

And yes, it’s still a fun game.