Everpizza - The MMORPG

This one was just too good to pass up. Ordering pizza integrated into a MMORPG? Well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. What's next, the /booze command will have your local liquor store deliver a 24 of Corona to your place? Props to Boing Boing on this one, this was a stellar find. Too good not to make the blog. Wonder how much this is costing Pizza Hut? Excerpt below...

- Riker -

Link back to Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow: Everquest has added a simple in-game command to order pizzas while playing. I'm surprised that they don't pre-populate the pizza-ordering form with the info from your Everquest account -- usually games have such crazy, one-sided terms of service that the privacy implications of such a thing would shred like wet kleenex.

You're in luck - pizza is just a few key strokes away! While playing EverQuest II just type /pizza and a web browser will launch the online ordering section of pizzahut.com. Fill in your info and just kick back until fresh pizza is delivered straight to your door.

RSS Tip

Hey folks, I just ran into somewhat of an interesting problem. You may remember a while back when I mentioned that Abilon was my favorite RSS news aggregator. I've been struggling to find a way that I can keep my RSS feed list synchronized between my various computers. I tend to read about 60-70 feeds per day and often don't have quite enough time to read them all in one sitting or at the same computer. I tried first exporting and copying an exported OPML file (Outline Processor Markup Language) to my various computers and then re-importing and then manually keeping track of what I had read/not read. Not very fun folks...

So, I found NewsGator. Now, I had tried NewsGator Outlook Edition, not too bad but I really much preferred Abilon. Turns out that the great folks at NewsGator have a version of NewsGator for the online crowd - aptly dubbed NewsGator Online. Long story short, I created an account, logged in to import my feeds and then hit a wall. When I went to import my OPML feed file into NewsGator all I got was an error message saying that there was an error in my OPML file at such and such a line, position ##, etc. Now, being the geek that I am, I immediately opened the OPML file in my favorite text editor (Ultra-Edit), looked up the offending location and, drumroll please, found nothing out of the ordinary. What to do, what to do??? I decided to try importing the OPML file into a different news aggregator and got exactly the same result. Now I was faced with a serious dilemma, do I manually cut/paste all of my feeds (XML entries) into NewsGator Online one by one, or do I find some other way to try and fix my, apparently damaged, OPML file.

A quick Google(TM) turned up some rather useless links for OPML. However, I did find one interesting thing. A potential OPML converter tool. I was hoping I could download this, re-convert my OPML to OPML and then import into NewsGator Online. Well, that didn't turn out so well. Back to the search game and I found a great little tool at RSSCache.com

They have this OPML converter tool online that you cut and paste your existing OPML contents into and then it spits out a nicely formatted OPML file. Not really certain what they are doing in this conversion because the text in the file is the same but it looks like it checks syntax and cleans up the layout of the file considerably. You can find their tool here.

So now I returned to NewsGator Online, pointed the import tool to my newly re-formatted OPML file and hit the import button and voila, all of the feeds imported perfectly, including my categories that I have my feeds sorted into. Very, very nice stuff. I'll have to get back to you on the actual NewsGator Online functionality as I haven't had much time to use it yet but so far it looks promising. I know one thing that I like already, I can read my feeds online with my PocketPC... It's not a big display but it works pretty well.

- Riker -

Diversions

Hello folks,

For the 4 people that actually checkin periodically to read my blog, this is for you. I can't believe how easily time slips away from you. My intentions were to take some serious time to redesign this blog site (you know, give it the custom treatment) and post more often. Instead, I haven't updated the design and haven't been posting. That's just unacceptable! :)

Seriously though, it has been a busy month and change for me. Work has been extremely busy and whatever time is left just seems to be gone before it starts. Gotta figure out why that is???

So, just so this post isn't a complete waste for you, I wanted to talk a bit about diversions. I can't believe how many things can grab my attention, even for a short period of time. For example, I spent 20 minutes watching a movie that I've seen almost 10 times in the past year. Ok, ok, I'll tell you which one - Tears of the Sun. A fantastic movie, but I certainly didn't need to see it again. Oh well, that's marketing for you I guess. As for my latest diversion, and I can't even believe that I'm going to admit this, but, I signed up for XBOX Live.

I've been an XBOX enthusiast for quite some time. Alright, so I'm nuts about gaming but that's a topic for another time. Anyhow, I jumped through the hoops, and there are some big hoops to get signed up and online. Let's just say that so far it's absolutely worth the time, effort and cost. Thanks to my sister I have a year subscription to burn through which is really nice...

Within 20 minutes of signing up I found myself buying 2 other games from the XBOX Live Arcade to play around with. The first being the amazingly basic time waster Bejeweled, the 2nd being Ricochet Lost Worlds. A warning to all you XBOX Live potential users: having a credit card assigned to your account (which is required BTW) makes it WAYYYY too easy to buy add-ons, games, etc. Just keep track and you'll be fine! :)

I did play some other titles on-line as well. I had to try Halo 2 of course and I played some Colin Mcrae Rally 2004. Got my ass handed to me in Halo 2, no surprise to me but my fellow gamers were far, far too good for my liking. I wish I had that kind of time.... Now that I mention that, I need to go find another diversion.

Just so we're clear, if you own and XBOX and you like to game at all, you owe it to yourself to try XBOX Live out. You won't be sorry.

- Riker -