A few days ago I ordered a Viewsonic VG2230 22" widescreen LCD for about $300 from www.newegg.com It replaces an ancient 19" Viewsonic G790 CRT display. I also have a little 15" Gateway LCD as a secondary monitor.

So far I'm loving this new monitor. I have a lot more room to do stuff, and games look awesome on it. It is plugged into a DVI port on my Radeon x1950 Pro. I briefly ran Quake 4 and Half Life 2. I ran F.E.A.R. Combat but it insisted on running on the secondary display. I hope I can resolve this later. I still need to try Bioshock on this thing.

This monitor can swivel on its base, and it has a height adjustment that can go pretty high. It has some speakers I will never use. This monitor will improve the many, many hours I spend on my computer. Now I just need to upgrade my secondary monitor.

I have purchased a few new video games over the last month or so. Here is a little info on each of them.

I bought Bioshock for PC on it's release date, right after I got off work. Bioshock is set in 1960 in an underwater city called Rapture. Something has gone horribly wrong there, it appears to have something to do with the rampant genitic modifications performed there. The environment is really well done, it really seems to fit with the time peroid.

Bioshock plays like a first person shooter, but you can use powers from plasmids in addition to the standard weapons. You find plasmids enabling you to throw fire, ice, use telekinesis, electrocute, and many other things. There are endless ways to dispatch the mutant freaks known as slicers.

I may write more about Bioshock later, it is one of my favorite games at the moment.

I also bought Metroid Prime Corruption for the Nintendo Wii. The game makes very good use of the motion controls. I like the puzzles and the varied worlds of the the Metroid universe.

I picked up Brain Age 2 for the Nintendo DS along with Metroid. Brain Age is intended to be played daily, and it claims to train your brain. This idea seems to make sense. Each of the mini games makes you think in ways you normally don't. It tracks your progress in each game, and you can view a calendar of your results. Every day when you train your brain, you get a stamp for that day. Earning stamps unlocks more of the games. The creator of the game, Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, gives you brain tips in between games. I hope my neurons are making more synaptic connections as a result of playing Brain Age 2.

Last Saturday I bought Castlevania, Portrait of Ruin for DS. It was on sale at Walmart for $25 so I just had to get it. I have played a few of the Castlevania games, including the original, Super Castlevania, and one on the PS2. It is a great series. Portrait of Ruin stars 18 year old Jonathan Morris and his 16 year companion Charlotte Aulin. They are on a mission to vanquish the vampire Brauner from Dracula's castle, where he is up to no good. I've played through a few worlds, which you enter from magical paintings. There is a large variety of enemies and weapons. You can upgrade your characters through earning experience points and collecting items. I enjoy this game, it has the feel of a classic platformer with lots of modern additions.

John Carmack demoed Id tech 5 at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. Id tech 5 is his latest game engine that features technology that allows artists to use unlimited textures. This sounds like a major development in computer graphics, which would simulate environments much more realistically. More and more the video game industry is contributing to the advancement of mankind by pushing the limits of real-time graphics and physics. The singularity is approaching.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvuTtrkVtns

One of the presents I got for Christmas is a Microsoft Standard Wireless Mouse. Before receiving this mouse, the only experience I've had with a wireless mouse is my Wireless Intellimouse Explorer, which is a few years old. My Intellimouse didn't seem to be very accurate, and it would lag a bit if you stopped moving it for a few seconds. Because of these issues, I had been using my basic Logitech optical mouse.

The Standard Wireless Optical Mouse comes with a receiver which plugs into a USB port, and 2 AA batteries. It's supposed to get about 6 months of battery life. That would be nice. It also can operate on only 1 battery. It comes in black or white, mine is black.

When I got home on Christmas day, one of the first things I did was plug in my new mouse. I was suprised that it moved so much more smoothly than my Intellimouse. I guess a few years of technological advancement will do that. It also doesn't lag at all after it has gone into power saving mode. Overall I like my new mouse, it works well.

Konfabulator, a cool program that runs widgets, has just been bought by Yahoo. The program is now free, so I have reinstalled version 2.1. Widgets are small programs you run on your desktop, sort of like desktop accessories were on the old Mac systems. A widget is written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and it can access the web.

I am wondering what Yahoo will do with their newly aquired widget technology. My guess is that we'll start seeing widgets that link to Yahoo technologies, such as search, instant messenger, photo albums, stock listings, and more.

http://www.konfabulator.com

A few days ago, Google released Google Earth beta for Windows. This is an incredible program, if you're using a Windows PC, you should download it and give it a try.

http://earth.google.com

Google Earth allows you to browse 3D earth, generated from satellite images taken of the entire planet. You can zoom in on any location (though some areas have higher resolution images than others). Mountains are rendered with their natural curves, and some buildings are drawn in simple 3D shapes. There are overlays you can toogle, which tell you where various types of locations are. It has locations of restaurants, banks/ATMS, bars/clubs, coffee houses, malls, retail stores, movie rentals, grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, golf courses, stadiums, parks, hospitals, schools, churches, and a few other things.

An interesting feature is the ability to display information posted in the Keyhole community BBS. This allows Keyhole users to post their own icons on the globe, which are linked to a message board. There are seemingly endless amounts of locations marked with trivia related to locations in the world. You can also make your own placemarks.

There are many other features to explore. Get Google Earth and find familar landmarks. If you've got a Mac, Google is still working on the Mac version.

The other day when I was looking at my site's stats, I noticed that I had a lot more bandwidth used than normal. Looking at the hosts section, I saw that 8 IPs in the same subnet had downloaded about 1.3G each, for a total of over 10G. It didn't look like they were going to stop downloading, so I banned those addresses. I looked up the addresses, and they belonged to Hurricane Electric.

I looked in my raw log file, and found out that these computers from Hurricane Electric were using gigabot 3.0 to download all this data from my site. I had never heard of gigabot before, so I googled it, and found Gigablast. Gigablast is a search engine written by Matt Wells. It was written from the ground up in C++ to be fast and scaleable. It has indexed billions of pages with only 8 computers. I guess those are the 8 computers I found in my logs. Mystery solved.

A little while ago I stumbled across problogger.net and became hooked. Problogger, as evident by it's name, is about professional blogging. Darren Rowse, the creator of problogger, lives in Australia and makes a good living from blogging. He doesn't say exactly how much he makes, but he wrote an article about "The house that Google bought".

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/03/06/look-what-blogging-bought-me/

Problogger is stuffed full of useful articles about blogging. It covers marketing, advertising, making money, writing skills, and anything else related to making a sucessful blog. The articles are well writen, and the site keeps me coming back for more. These articles give me good ideas that help keep the gears spinning in my head.

There is a section on advertising, which I am starting to experiment with. I am intrigued by the possibility of making money by maintaining my website and writing about things that are interesting to me.

Blogs are pretty easy to set up nowadays, so anyone with something to say can publish one. If you'd like more information about the business of blogging, please visit problogger.

http://www.problogger.net

I have been participating in a few traffic exhanges recently. Traffic exhanges are a resource for web site owners who wish to drive traffic to their site. Within, you will find pages that market to marketers. There is a dizzying array of web sites containing all in one online stores, automated marketing programs, downline programs, email responders, and more. It has been interesting learning about this world.

I have produced a modest list of these promotional tools. If you want to get more visitors to your website or blog, give some of these tools a try.

Promotional Tools

I just installed this program called Mmm, which I discovered recently. It makes the Windows contextual menu a lot simpler, and it loads faster. Windows seems to cache my contextual menu onto disk, and it takes a lot more time than it should to load the menu again. Hopefully this program will make the menu load faster, or always keep a copy of the menu in RAM.