Mercwear.com – Curtis Morris

The Nintendo Wii was released at 12am this morning, mine was on reserve at EB Games and they opened up at midnight for us to get our systems – thanks EB. Aaron and I went to get the system and hopefully pickup a few extra controllers so we could play some multiplayer games (Madden 2007 and Wii Sports) however EB did not have any extra controllers. We went to a few Wal-Marts before accepting the fact that anyone open at 12am was already sold out of just about everything that had to do with the new system. We spent the rest of the morning (1am – 4am) playing The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess and Wii sports, we gave Madden a try however it’s just not the same with only 1 controller =/.

I woke up at 8am and headed to 3 different Targets in search of additional controllers however it was the same story at every location – sold out. I did manage to get 2 extra remotes (each controller consists of a remote and what Nintendo is calling a numchuck) and 1 “classic controller� however they were out of numchucks. Before calling it quits I headed over to Best Buy and they just happed to open early to let the people waiting for the Wii get their systems, by this time it was almost 9am and I was already considering ordering the additional controllers online.

There was a massive line of people waiting on getting their system so I asked a manager if I could just grab a few extra controllers expecting for him to tell me that the people buying systems were going to get first choice on them – boy was I wrong! The manager told me I did not need to wait in line and to take as many controllers as I want, I remembered later that the controllers are where Best Buy makes their money (I use to work there) so he did not care who bought them just as long as they were bought!

I ended up getting 3 numchucks and 1 more remote, I also grabbed the last classic controller they had too! This left me with 4 complete controllers (the most the system will accommodate) and 2 classic controllers (which are used for playing older games that are downloadable from the Nintendo Wi-Fi service) all in all I am very happy. The only thing I need now is the component video cable so I can play Zelda 480p and that is on the way from Nintendo’s online store.

Click here to see more pictures of the Wii in my gallery

I came across this clip today – it’s basically Mario and Luigi in the GTA world.. Good for a laugh.

Click here to view

I am sure that most of you reading this blog know about the recent release of Sony’s Playstation 3 game console, if not just click this link. Due to the high demand and low supply of the units there were 1000’s of money hungry sleaze bags lined up all around the country with plans to buy the units only to turn around and sell them on E-bay for huge profits. I have to admit, I was even thinking of doing this until I realized that the launch had turned into an all out dash for cash instead of a bunch of eager fans waiting for their favorite new console.

There were reports of people getting robbed at gunpoint and shot and kids getting mugged only minutes after buying their systems. I firmly believe that this launch has driven the final nail into the coffin for midnight releases and camping out to get the first few systems. My prediction is that the next console release (other than the Wii!) will be done exclusively online, which is sad however with the increasing amount of greed in our society I think it’s the only way to go.

I don’t put all of the blame on society – some of it belongs to Sony for being too slow on getting the systems out. There is a bright side of this whole thing – the people selling them on E-bay are not smart enough to realize that by over saturating the market they are going to make nowhere near the profits they are hoping for. I have even seen a few systems selling for only a few hundred dollars more than what was paid.

I have been thinking about getting a hand held gaming system for a while now (ever since the PSP came out) however I could never justify buying one, after all I do most of my gaming on the PC. I have a feeling that is about to change with the Wii only hours away from my living room so I decided to pickup a Nintendo DS lite last weekend along with the game “Club House Games�. The Wii is going to have games that tie in with the DS so this helped me make a decision between the DS and PSP.

Club House Games consists of 42 traditional board and card games that you can play online or with a friend using the WI-FI built into the DS.. Thus far I am seriously addicted to the darts game – fun stuff.

Ok.. Probably not THE BEST but damn funny to say the least.
What the hell is he saying? Chacarron?

Let me start this post off with a statement: Flash programming is hard and so is creating good flash animations.

With that said I would like to share something with you all: The Ultimate Showdown

This is the best flash animation that I have seen in a long time, mainly because it presents figures from both my childhood and present day killing each other but the animation and song are good too!

Click here to visit the site

Although I am super busy today I just HAD to post this article from Gamespot:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6143114.html

It’s basically this asinine rancher that would like to take political office in Texas, one of his first actions if he did would be to abolish property tax and make up for the last funds by doing the following things:

* $10,000 tax on all abortions
* 100% tax on violent video games
* 50% tax on almost all sodas

You would think that something like this was a joke, but it’s real! Don’t get me wrong, there is no way this guy will ever take any sort of office but it is a good reminder that we (Texas) still have our fair share of idiots.

So I go to check my web stats yesterday with Urchin and find a weird anomaly in my traffic, it has more than tripled for the month of December. My average traffic use is around 15GB a month, for December it’s going to be about 50GB, this of course worried me. Having worked in the web hosting industry for the past 3 years I know what a traffic spike usually means: You are hacked.

Luckily this was not the case in my situation, after about 3 hours of sleuthing I found the culprit that was causing my traffic spike: A single image that I posted over 1 year ago. An image of Jason Alexander (George on Seinfeld) wishing everyone a happy Festivus. The traffic came from a both Google image search and myspace.com, I am guessing that someone at Myspace went to Google and did an image search for the word “Fesivus” and hot linked the image from Mercwear, sucking down my bandwidth at an average rate of 600k/sec.

It is amazing how fast the image spread at Myspace.com, I did some traffic sniffing on the server and noticed over 30 hits in 25 seconds from different profiles on the site. The evil part of me wanted to replace the image with something vulgar however the cheapskate in me did not want to pay for even more bandwidth.

Below are some of the Urchin pages that show the traffic:

Total hits for the image file:

Total hits from Google and Myspace:

Total transfer over the last 5 days for the image:

404 error count since I enabled the hotlink protection:

I found that the best way to stop this was to simply disallow hotlinking to Mercwear, I did this by utilizing a tool called Hotlink Blocker from www.helicontech.com, if you use IIS for your webserver I highly recommend checking it out.

I also use my Robots.txt file to exclude all of my images from being indexed by Google, this will cut down on the possibility of this happening again, adding the following code to your robots.txt will stop the Google image crawler from indexing your images:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

Is this site worth a million bucks? I don’t think so but you be the judge.

www.milliondollarhomepage.com

News covrage of the site

This clip has been radiating throughout the internet since last Sunday, it aired on Saturday Night Live on 12/17/2005. I really can’t decide on a favorite part, but if I had to pick one it would probably be when they use Yahoo maps to find the “dopest route”.

This film has Starwars Kid potential in my opinion, the masterminds behind the short are The Lonely Island group (http://www.thelonelyisland.com/) who joined SNL this year.

Lazy Sunday (Requires Flash to watch)

For the really big fans of the skit (like me!) here is a link to the MP3 (not sure on the quality as I have not tested it yet):

Download “Lazy Sunday Mp3�

Thanks to Andrea for showing it to me, it’s definitely one of the best SNL skits in a long time.

I came across this link today on Slashdot, the list includes the following:

Atomic Bomb Mod (My personal favorite)
Toilet Mod
Microwave Mod

Full List

It’s that time of year again – Google has posted it’s annual Zeitgeist. For those of you that don’t quite know what this is, allow me to explain:

In it’s basic form Zeigeist is just a list of the top searches on Google for the past year, however if you are interested there is MUCH more to delve into! The site will show you strange trends, cultural changes and other “strange� data.

Take a look:

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005.html

As an avid player, I have to admit that it’s hard to believe a year has gone by since the game was released. If you add all of the hours I have sat at my PC playing the game it would equal days, possibly months – so I consider myself a big fan.

To celebrate the 1 year anniversary the official WoW site has posted a time line of significant events involving the game at the link below, I have also included a link the screen shots I took while playing the beta version of the game.

WoW Timeline

My Beta screen shots

Well it looks like the “360″ was a bit rushed, my friend Aaron sent me the link below that shows it crashing with what looks like some video problems:

Pictures and a Video of the crash

I am still trying to get my hands on a few to sell on Ebay, they are going for $700+ there!

Yep, you read that correctly – I am engaged, I asked Andrea to marry me on September 16, 2005. We have been together for over 7 years now and for the last 2 or 3 months I have really been thinking of how to ask her etc, what I came up with is below.

I took her to a brand new PF Chang’s (opening night) at a new open air shopping mall near our apartment for dinner. I knew she had a big test coming up so I made up a story about winning a free meal in order to make sure she would go. Our reservations were at 9:30 and I had gone to the restaurant earlier in the afternoon to plan things with the staff and pickup a few fortune cookies.

The way I planned to ask her was to create my own message and stuff it inside a fortune cookie, this worked out quite well (I did it without breaking a single cookie!). After picking Andrea up from school at around 7:00pm we headed to our apartment (I had the ring and cookie in my pocket), we took about 45 minutes to get ready and headed out.

Andrea had received a few discount offers in the mail from a store she likes so the first thing we did upon arrival was visit Express. Andrea was totally unaware of my plans so she was as cool as can be, I on the other had was worried that someone was going to bump into me and crush my cookie.

After leaving Express we checked out the rest of the shopping center (The shops at La Cantera) which was very nice (I am sure we will be spending a lot of time there with Andreas shopping habits). Of course all this time I am still trying not to bump into anyone or anything for fear of damaging my cookie.

At last 9:15 rolls around and we head to PF Chang’s, after being seated I headed to the restroom to make sure the cookie survived (it did!). When I got back to the table we both ordered our drinks and food, then Andrea headed to the restroom – now was my chance to hand the cookie to our waitress. I asked her to place it on a plate and bring it to Andrea telling her that in celebration of opening the new restaurant they were giving away prizes and that the cookie was the game piece. Andrea took the cookie, opened it and read my message. I put the ring in front of her while she was reading the note and the rest is history.

We won’t even begin to plan our wedding until after she is done with law school, but rest assured that the engagement party is right around the corner!

I will post pictures of the ring here soon.

Our flight was canceled due to some sort of hole in the tail of the aircraft. At this point I am not sure what to think, I am glad that I did not get put into the air on a faulty plane but I really want to get home.

America West (our airline) gave us a flight in the morning at 6:22am on American airlines, a hotel voucher and two $5.00 meal vouchers. The only problem is it’s 2:15am now so by the time we made it to the hotel we would need to leave in about 2 hours. So at the moment I am typing this while laying on the floor of the airport, oh joy!

It looks like we are about to leave!! Once the maintenance team takes a look at a “small problem� on the plane.. Sounds comforting huh? I should be home in about 3 hours – I’ll post pictures of the trip tomorrow.

Total wait time at the Las Vegas airport: 5 hours 30 minutes

I can’t remember the last time I was this excited to get back to San Antonio.

Well it is 1:19 CST (11:19 in Vegas) and I am stuck at Las Vegas airport because our flight has been delayed for 2 hours. I don’t think this is a coincidence, it seems that this place has a lot of delayed flights (mine is not the only one) and I am sure they don’t mind the extra revenue that they get from the people sticking more and more money into the slot machines that adorn the terminal.

At least the internet here is free… But good luck finding a plug for your laptop.

Well.. I told a few of you that I would be doing blog updates the whole time I was in Vegas. If you have yet to notice – I lied. The hotel we were at wanted 12.00 each day for internet access, I said “screw that” and just waited until I got to the Las Vegas airport for internet access – it’s free here!

I am in the terminal now waiting for my flight back – once in town I will post pics and stuff.

Mercwear had a hard drive failure today – luckily I did a full backup of all content on the 15th of April so the only things I lost were the comments and posts from that day moving forward. I was able to salvage the post about my new bike from cache however I wont be putting it back up until tomorrow.

For the time being the database is back up and I am in the process of putting all of my content back online (Images / Video / Etc) so bear with me.

What is comical about this whole situation is that I was just thinking about how I have not used the “Being Dominated� category just yesterday.. This certainly fits the bill.