The many adventures of bootleg marketing

Ok, so I started a website about a year ago dedicated to outdoors type activities and sharing information. I made it in drupal as a project to help me the ins and outs of that content management system. My thinking was that if I were creating a website I was actually going to use, I would be far more inclined to pay attention to it and learn the system. It worked, I now know how to use Drupal, so that end of the spectrum was accomplished (well kinda, I still pick up more and more about it every time I go to do something in it, as it should be) but the problem was I was left with a site I wanted to make usable, but had no users.

What good, after all, are message boards if no one is there to message on them? And there is no user driven content with out users to drive it. This is where I noticed my first of many mistakes, which is OK because that's how we learn. That mistake was I created an area for user generated content with out the users, the only content generator was me, and the scale was far too big for me to handle on my own. So instead of scalling back the website into a managable means, I instead turned to the time tested advertising. After all, like they say, "if you build it, they will come." Well it was built, but they weren't coming. Perhaps they just lost the memo...

This lead me to mistake number two.

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Death of Kodachrome

As someone who identifies themselves as a Rochestarian, or someone from the area of Rochester, I've grown up being surrounded by people who worked for the once picture Juggernaut of Kodak. The company was so large and powerful that anyone within a 70 mile radius knew someone who worked for Kodak or depended on Kodak for their sustainability. Sense then, Kodak has, well, let's just say it hasn't done so well. The digital revolution hit the film industry hard. As a result, the Rochester area as a whole has suffered.

Recently it was announced that Kodak would be discontinuing it's production of Kodachrome, it's color film that they first developed back in 1935. Of course everyone in the city and it's outlying suburbs and country side, are "mourning" the loss of the great film. After all, if Rhymin' Simon sang about it, you know it had to be big. And it was. But the thing is, the stuff was developed only 7 years after the first TV set. In that time TV has gone to color, to digital, to HD, constantly changing. Kodachrome has, well, it's kinda hard to change Kodachrome.

For me this whole thing is like watching a great, great, great grandmother finally pass on after living through cancer, rickets, loosing an eye, gangrene, necrotizing fasciitis, bunions, and being crushed by a rhino stampede at the zoo. Not only was it her time, it was WELL past her time. Same thing with the old Kodachrome. The stuff should have been discontinued years ago, but for some reason, the uper-ups at Kodak didn't think that the digital revolution would reach the serious photography market. They were wrong.

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Sims 3 announced & a look at simulation gaming

I was surfing the internet today and came across an ad for the Sims 3, I was unaware that this game was even under development, let alone ready to be shipped in 2 months (June 2nd). The game boasts improvements over it's predecessors, by allowing the user to us a color wheel to change colors of object. Sounds small, and really I don't know why they didn't do this before, but it's kinda a big deal.

I was actually playing Sims 2 a few months ago with my Fiancee, who had never played it. She became frustrated when trying to make a Sim Andy that the hair colors provided did not match mine. This new feature would allow the user to perfectly set the skin tone, hair color, eye color, shirt color, chair color, wall color etc etc. The user is also allowed to give the sims personality traits, such as being a flirt, a kleptomaniac, insanity, being evil, the list goes on. What they have basiclly done is bumped up the character creation screen. I love this. They also will allow the sims to move around the town, so you can actually just walk over to the neighbors with out having to reload everything. That's awesome, but I really want to look at the idea of character customization, cus I think this is a big issue that many game companies do not give enough credence to. The Sims is the perfect example as to why.

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something happened... The explination

Ok, so some of you might have noticed that something is different with my site. Mainly that it looks nothing like what it used to, some of the stories are missing and the pictures that went with other stores are now gone. So, what happened? Well, half of it I blame on word press, the other half I blame on me being a retard.

So, about a year ago, my then girlfriend, now finance, got me hooked onto Drupal, which her brother Ted uses at his job with lifetime. So I got interested in it and created www.youroutdoorsonline.com, which I have been spending a good portion of my free time working on.

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Numerous core processors and what they mean to you.I was having a conversation with my co-workers lately about oct core processors, I was the only one who was really excited by it. Yep, in a room with three computer “professionals,” I was the only one excited by the huge processors that will be coming out soon. Here’s the thing, one coworker was at one point a computer science major, the other is just IT. Neither of those degrees require a extremely high processing power.test