The graphics were also quick to impress me, though there seems to be more aliasing than I thought there would be. Or maybe I'm just used to playing PC games where there is virtually none. But the city in GTA IV is very well detailed, which is what's to be expected in this game.

Meet Niko Bellic - your character in the game

The physics in the game have greatly changed since the previous version. Some of it I like, others I don't. The rag doll physics that your character and every other pedestrian in the game have are fantastic. Though I learned this the hard way when I first tried to cross the street and was hit by a passing car that sent me flying through the air, landing head first into a curb. It got a good laugh out of me as well as raise my impressions of the game.

On the down side, the car physics have been redone and are now harder to control than ever. I guess you can say the vehicles in the game handle more realistically. They definitely feel heavier, so don't expect to stop on a dime or easily drift around corners like you could in the previous GTA games. I don't like it, but maybe I'll get used to it later on.

Again, GTA IV is impressing me a lot. I was a little worried because the developers said a bunch of things would be missing in this game that were in the previous games (winged aircrafts, bicycles, parachutes), but now that I started playing this game and have gotten a feel for the atmosphere, any of those missing items would feel out of place. So I'm kind of glad they're not here.

The game definitely feels more real, life-like, gritty, and less cartoony and over the top like the previous games. I have a feeling GTA IV is going to be the best in the series by far and I can't wait to start playing again. So, bye!

P.S. I probably post a full review of this game once I complete it.

Here is our backyard before the rock - just dirt and some weeds

Here is was 14 tons of rock looks like - a little intimidating

Finally, here's our backyard after the rock - a lot better

Five people helped me with this daunting task. Mostly family and a neighbor, and I thank them for the help. It took about 3-4 hours and three wheelbarrows going from the front yard to the backyard.

This is, of course just the first step in our backyard project. In the above picture you might have noticed bare spots in the corners. We are eventually going to built some planters there with some plants - bushes, palm trees, etc. I also want to eventually add some pavers to create a nice sitting area somewhere back there, but that's a little further into the future (lack of $$).

But we finally took the first step to landscaping our backyard and I'm glad it's done. Now maybe Jenny and I can actually sit in and enjoy our backyard a little more.

Quick background on 9rules

9rules is a community site that links to the best web content out there. I'm mainly talking about blogs here. It's a great place to share your blog's articles and read others.

Going back to their roots

I hate to say it, but I didn't like where 9rules was going with its previous updates. Prior to this release, 9rules also includes Notes (comments), Cliques (mini communities), and Clips (Diggs). For me it was all too much, and I felt that much of what 9rules was about, got lost.

Luckily, I wasn't the only one that felt this way - so did the team behind 9rules. And now we're back to the community that I love. All their other stuff (Note, Clips, etc.) got moved to another site called Chawlk.

So, I'd like to thank the folks behind 9rules (Mike, Scrivs, and Tyme) for going back to the 9rules that I enjoy. In some way I feel the motivation to start writing more now. Let's hope that motivation stays put.

I decided to get the game through Steam to avoid some of the DRM issues, including the game not working with certain DVD drives, and the constant "phoning-home" to Ubisoft. The latter has also caused the game to crash for lots of people. Due to that, and my laziness, I just decided to get the game through Steam, which I've done for multiple games in the past and have never regretted.

Control and Stability Issues

Moving on, the controls seem to be a big issue for most. I was a little thrown back by them at first as well. But like most new games, you get used to them and soon they become like second nature. Assassin's Creed was exactly like this. The game does start you out with a tutorial that shows and explains all the controls, but when you enter your first fight or flee, sometimes you can't remember what you need to do. But I soon got used to them and had no further issues with the controls at all.

A lot of other people are also complaining about constant game crashes. For the record, I did not experience one single issue with the game. Though, I'm running a top of the line PC with Vista.

Performance, Graphics, and Sound

On a related note, the game's performace was remarkable. I was able to run the game at full resolution with all the settings set to High. The game ran smooth and looked phemonimal. Definitely one of the best looking games I've played on my PC so far. Everything is very well detailed and includes very high-res textures. Each city is very dynamic and very believable with lots of people walking around, standing in merchant lines, begging for money, etc.

The game's sounds were also very well done. There are a lot of distinct sound queues that let you know exactly what's going on. The musical score is also nice, though a bit overpowering at times. I had to turn down the music volume in the settings so I could more easily hear dialog and other sound effects.

The Story

For me, this was definitely the best part of Assassin's Creed. There's another completely different "realm" to the story that I never even knew existed. Without this additional "realm" this game would not have been very in-depth and I might have not finished the game if it wasn't for this "realm".

Spoiler Paragraph. Of course with additional "realm" I'm talking about the present day story with Desmond Miles and his imprisonment with Abstergo Industries. About half-way through this game I stopped caring about Altair's story and was more interested in Desmond's situation (What's going to happen to him? How or will he ever escape?). But of course in order to figure out his situation you have to relive Altair's life. I love how the developers took what would have been a standard game-type story of an assassin in the past, and turned it into a much more in-depth story that spans centuries and multiple groups of people. End Spoilers.

Unfortunately, the story/game ends kind of abrubtly as Assassin's Creed is just the first game in the trilogy. So, that kind of sucked. But I'm definitely hooked and can't wait for the next game to come out.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game. It also has some re-playability where you can travel back to certain cities and complete additional tasks. At times the game play felt tedious and repetitive but the story is what kept driving me forward and I can't wait for the next game. Let's hope it doesn't take as long to port over to the PC as this one did.

An additional note: it takes about five minutes to exit out of the game through the navigation menus. It's easier to just make sure the game is saved (checkpoint system only / no quick saves) and then hit Alt+F4 to exit the game.

One of my most anticipated games for the PC was finally released a couple days ago. Assassin's Creed has been a game I've known about since it was first announced to the world. But I was never that interested in the game until about nine months ago when lots of gameplay footage and screen shots were released. The game looked amazing and I couldn't wait to play it.

Well I finally picked it up last night. Unfortunately, I only got a few minutes of game play in before I had to stop. But those few minutes, including the opening sequence and tutorial were surpassing my expectations. The game looks like it's going to be a hell of a good time.

One thing that threw me off were the controls. Again, I've only played it for a few minutes so I may have not gotten used to the controls yet, but some of the key mapping seems off. I'm sure I'll get used to it soon, but if not, I might have to remap some of the keys.

And that's one thing that worries me about this game - the fact that, despite what the developers say, this game is a console port. And one of the biggest issues with console ports are their controls. But I'm sure more game play will prove to me that there's nothing to worry about.

So I'm off to play some more. Expect my full opinion of the game once I complete it.

The music video was created for the first song on the album titled We Will Fall Together, and in my opinion, is the best song on the CD. I believe it best illustrates the type of ska band Streetlight is - technical and melodic. Anyone who knows them will agree. With most all their songs you will hear lots of horns and backup vocals, which I believe are missing from lots of ska bands today.

For me, Somewhere is their best album so far. Streetlight seemed to get a little more aggressive with this album, which I love, and we hear a lot more faster tempos and distorted guitar riffs. But Streetlight is still very melodic with their choruses and produce lots of great sing-a-long moments that they're best known for.

Somewhere in the Between is definitely a required album for any ska fan. I'm sorry I waited this long to pick it up. So whether you're a Streetlight fan or just a ska fan in general, then get this album. And don't forget to check out their first official music video below - it rocks!

One of the biggest hurdles when I upgraded from XP to Vista was getting my Audigy 2 sound card working. At the time Creative only had shoddy beta drivers for Vista. While they did work, I lost a lot of features that their sound card was supposed to provide, included 5.1 surround sound.

The Problem

Last year I built a new PC with a new sound card - X-Fi XtremeGamer. Surprisingly the latest drivers for this card did work for Vista and all was good. But last week I decided to update to Vista SP1 and guess what? I lost my 5.1 surround sound again. Checking all my settings and connections, everything was properly setup and set to a 5.1 speaker configuration. But running any speaker test resulted in just my front two speakers doing all the work.

So I went online and found out that Creative released newer drivers that I had currently installed. So I downloaded them and tried to install them. I said 'tried' because no matter how many times I tried, I always ended up with a blue screen of death (BSOD), followed by a system restart. Granted Vista and Creative may not have been playing nice, but I'll bet money that it's mostly Creative's fault.

Moving on, I did get the new drivers installed. Turns out that after the BSOD and system reboot, the drivers were properly installed. Doing several checks on versions, I did have the latest drivers installed, but still no 5.1 surround sound - this includes listening to music and playing video games.

The Fix

I was about to give up until I decided to install Creative's Console Launcher, which was on the same web page as the driver download. Once that was installed, I suddenly had 5.1 surround sound throughout the OS and all my other applications. I didn't even have to go into the Launcher and tell it to use 5.1. It was already setup. Why this solved my issue I have no idea. But I'll just do my part and blame it on Creative's sub-par software.

Why I won't use Creative Again

Funny enough, shortly after my ordeal I read about some new hot water that Creative put themselves into. Obviously I'm not the only one have problems with Creative's drivers on Vista. Turns out there was another guy out there that created his own drivers, or improved upon Creative's drivers, getting their sound cards to work perfectly on Vista. His name was Daniel_K and he publicly released them online, which gained a lot of attention and love.

So Creative did what was in the best interest for their company and not the consumer. They pretty much told Daniel_K to stop and that he was in copyright trouble. Not wanting any legal action taken against him, Daniel_K complied. This just sent shockwaves through the tech community and people are pissed. Check out the following articles:

• Creative goes after driver modder
• Creative's fall from glory - Consumers fight back
• Site launched in protest of Creative's egregious actions
• Creative sound card customers revolt and NewEgg (?) response

I hope that this is a wake up call for Creative. I've always used their sound cards in my PCs, but unless they get their shit together, I won't be buying another Creative product.

But it's not just me. A lot of other sites I frequent have also had a drop in activity. My site has even dropped in the amount of spam comments. I used to get about 10 per day, but now I'm (un)lucky if I get 1 a day.

But for those wondering what's going on with this site, don't fret, I'm still around. I've been doing a lot of coding on my CMS and should have some more screenshots for you in the near future. I still want to do a screencast, but finding the time to make one is tough. But to wet your whistle here's a small screenshot of the newly designed Dashboard for my CMS:

So, along with the main article feed and main comment feed, there is now a unique comment feed for every single article. These new feeds will simply allow you to watch comments for a specific article. To access these feeds you can click on the Comment Feed link that's below the article and its summary. Or you can just add "/feed" to the end of any article URL so it looks like this: http://webnv.net/articles/article-comment-feeds-now-available/feed.

This is just one of several new features I'll be adding to the comments system. You may of also noticed that I added an "author type" to each comment that shows people who the comment came from (guest, site member, or the article's author). It also applies a custom CSS class to the comment so you can uniquely design each comment based on its author type.

Next, I want to add a trackback link to each article to allow for...well, trackbacks. But since I've never used trackbacks before in my life, it's a little weird trying to write a script for them. I'm also going to be adding a subscribe option that will send you an email when a new comment is posted in an article.

These are just common things that most CMSs contain today, and while I'll probably never use them, I know there are some people out there who will.

Well, hopefully not. One thing I changed was my Archives URL. I basically just pluralized it to have it match its sub-pages (topics and tags). I also wanted to carry this same naming scheme across to the Articles page, and changed the URL from article to articles. Neither of these were a big deal. My CMS (NiBuM) easily allows you to change the URLs of your pages. I also created some simple rewrite rules in my .htaccess file to redirect anyone (search bot) to the new, correct URL.

Next I needed to change my individual article URLs or permalinks. In the past my permalinks were separated by underscores (_). So they looked like this: http://webnv.net/articles/url_friendly_article_title

I don't know why I originally designed the system like that. Maybe because I believe underscores are a better visualization for spaces than any other character (not including actual spaces of course). But I've always noticed other URL friendly sites would use hyphens (-) instead of underscores or plus signs (+). And after reading several articles about which character is the best, it turns out hyphens are the best, and are recommended over underscores.

Why hyphens over underscores?

The reason is because a lot of programming languages use underscores in their syntax. I know PHP uses tons of them - mysql_num_rows - being an example. With certain search engines the underscore represents a literal character and not something that can represent a space. So when a search engine indexes your site, they may have trouble breaking up the URL into separate words. The hyphen is the recommended alternative for representing spaces.

I'm sure search engines have since come a long way and probably don't have a hard time with underscores like they used to. But to be safe and keep in line or standard, I've updated all my article permalinks to use hyphens instead. This of course would break virtually every search index, bookmark, favorite, etc. that was pointing towards the old, underscored, URL. Using the .htaccess file again, I created some rewrite rules to fix this.

So if anyone out there has any bookmarks or favorites, you might want to update them accordingly. While the rewrite rule will get you to the correct page, I don't want to keep these rewrite rules in my .htaccess file forever. So, when they're gone, expect mass breakage.