Biggs' Zone

A Geek's Cogitations, Conjectures and other Cortical Experiences

Friendship Exists Without Borders

An interesting concept occurred to me the other day. In our world today, with various social mechanisms and online activities and games, the process of making friends and maintaining relationships has changed. The way our parents are use to it is old fashioned and out dated. Friendships can be forged without the need to meet face-to-face. We live in a world without borders and, as a result, its a little naive to think that a friendship can only exist if you have met physically. After all you are friends with someone for their personality, not their body.

In fact I would even go so far as to say that making friends outside your town, state, time zone or even country is a great way to experience different cultures. There is a significant percentage of people that never go to college which is a great place to meet people from different parts of the country and/or world. Therefore instruments like Facebook, Google+ and MMOs allows everyone the opportunity to meet other people. You never know what you might have in common with someone from California or New York. You don’t need to be able to invite them out for coffee or lunch just to be friends.

I’m also not suggesting you throw yourself out there haphazardly. There are a lot of creepy people out there that give social media a bad connotation. Please be careful when you are handing out even your full name and email. The threat of identity theft is scary but use a little common sense and discretion and just be yourself. I have more friends then I can count on two hands that I have never met physically that I know I can trust and thinking that those people are not actually “friends” is just obtuse.

Cheers!

The MMO Times: E3 2012

Issue 35

Welcome to E3 week, Gamers!! Since E3 is this week we are going to hear a plethora of gaming news coming out from the LA Convention Center. I hope to have captured only the pertinent and interesting stories as there were details coming out about non-MMO and console games as well.

Also, I’m not going to only have E3 stories because there are goodies that are still under development that will be announced in parallel with all the news flowing out of LA. In fact there are patches that went live this week for a couple of well known MMOs.

Snippets: [jQuery] Highlight Rows with Checkbox

It has been a while since I have posted a new jQuery snippet, mostly because I only get to play with jQuery once in a while (though I wish I could use it more). Recently I had to create an administration page for deleting multiple rows of data. I presented the data in a gridview using checkboxes as the control for selecting which items will be deleted. I wanted to make it clear which items were going to be deleted so, using jQuery, I wrote the following snippet to accomplish what I wanted.

Obviously you will need to define a CSS class called “highlight”. I think the best thing about this snippet of code is that it will work if you are using a standard HTML table to organize your data or you are using a GridView object in ASP .NET. This snippet will also ignore the row that contains the “Select All” checkbox; for my purposes the select all checkbox was in the header of the table/grid.


$('#SurveyGrid input:not(#selectAll)').click(function () {
if ($(this).attr("checked") == true) {
$(this).parent().parent().addClass('highlight');
} else {
$(this).parent().parent().removeClass('highlight');
}
});

I have posted this code on snipplr.com (as usual).

Biggs On: Why Microsoft Is Dying

Despite the fact that I make my living providing Microsoft solutions using .NET, many know that I have never been a big fan of Microsoft. I stated that because I want to be upfront about my past feelings and that I am going to try not to let those feelings influence this topic. I am going to discuss this based on my interpretation of the evidence I see in the industry today. I think that Microsoft is no longer a leader but frantically playing catch-up instead.

Windows OS – It took Microsoft 7 versions to finally get Windows right (with Windows 7) and now they are going to screw it all up with Windows 8. While I have heard that the latest beta build of Windows 8 is much more stable, people are still struggling with its interface. It’s not very intuitive on a desktop which is what I had been saying since the beginning. It’s the Microsoft curse that every “even” version of Windows is garbage. Unfortunately for Microsoft the OS is the only thing they have left in the PC market that may be generating revenue, though unfortunately for us Windows is the only OS we can buy for a PC. Although, more and more people are switching to Apple.

The MMO Times: The Power of The Force Compels You!

Issue 34

Hello Again, Gamers! As the excitement of Diablo III finally quells, the MMO world suffered some disturbing news this past week. All of the employees at 38 Studios have officially been laid off as more drama continues to emerge from Curt Schillings disastrous foray into MMO development. Bioware also announced that they had to layoff several developers and will be performing server merges, however this does not spell doom for SWTOR. There are still 1.3 million active players and obviously layoffs are just part of the business (Blizzard did the same thing a few months ago).

Despite these unfortunate events, there is still something to be excited about for World of Warcraft and SWTOR players. More interesting changes are coming out from the recent beta build for MoP and the SWTOR devs (that are still employed) have more details of what to expect in the 1.3 update. There is also some more exciting news for RIFT fans and anyone excited about the upcoming Marvel Heroes MMO.

Also, next week is E3 (June 5 – 7) so hopefully we will get some more exciting news about our favorite games (current and future)! Enjoy!

Diablo III Revisited

A couple weeks ago I posted my initial impressions of Diablo III and I prefaced by saying that I potentially could be writing a retraction, however that will not be the case. I feel now that I have actually spent sufficient time playing Diablo III through a couple of the Acts and I am going to stick with my original assessment.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think Diablo III is a fun game. I have played a Monk into Act III now and I have played a Demon Hunter through a couple of levels. I have caught myself trying to click-to-move when switching to another game after playing Diablo III, it was quite humorous. I haven’t experienced any of the server issues others have complained about and I have had minimal lag issues. I am also coming to D3 after playing WoW for over six years and I have never played any of the previous iterations of Diablo nor any other click-to-move MMO/game. Perhaps my perceptions are skewed as a result.

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