BrainBeat Productions Multimedia blog

Today I rang up EB games to see if I could get one of the two copies of the Burning Crusades from the standard version to the collectors edition. I was told that it is unlikely that at this stage it is unlikely that I will be able to do so as Blizzard seems to be releasing a very limited number of copies into Australia and the each EB store is only getting 35 copies at this stage. He went on the say that they will be ringing up the people with preorders in order of the order and and offer them an upgrade to the collectors edition. I am not sure if this is going to mean the I am going to miss out or not as the release date in not until January and even then it may not be ready.

The reason I was after a was I want the special pet as I felt really annoyed that only Americans who went to Blizcon could get the Murloc pet. I also want the DVD to install it as if it is half a big as World of Warcraft itself then that will still be 2 or 3 CD where if you have a DVD you can installing it much faster as you don’t have to change the disks all of the time. For a full list of the items contained in the collectors edition check it out on the World of Warcraft website.

This week I would like to highlight an open source distributive computing project call BOINC. BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing and is a wrapper program that allows various scientific project to use computing power from every day people to further their research. The first project created to use BOINC was SETI which was an independent project who are looking for radio signals from extra terrestrial sources. There are now 10 full projects and and over 10 in alpha and beta releases. Some of the projects include Climate prediction (where they are trying to model what would happen to the earths climate if different factors are altered ), Einstein@home (is a project looking for gravity waves), Rosetta@home ( protein folding for medical research) and many more. There is a comprehensive website that keeps all of the stats for all of the participants which can be great encouragement for you to continue to contribute. I have been running BOINC on computers since it started as I always have some computers on and they are not always doing anything so I thought that it could be both beneficial to me and to the community at large. I am apart of the group BOINC@Australia  which is the 31th ranked group in the world and the top Australian group by a long way. If you have computers that are regularly idle and want to contribute to the advancement of science and help find a cure for cancer or other diseases and others I urge you to download a copy of BOINC, and if you are an Aussie then why not join us in BOINC@Australia.

Last week I did not post anything to my blog as I was busy with business stuff, preparing for a LAN party I ran on Friday night and I was also feeling the effects of another head cold. I will try to post at least 5 this week to make up for last week.

I have a normal Xbox and my controllers have stopped working so I decided to go and buy some new ones as I am going to a LAN Party next. While looking through this weeks Target catalogue I noticed there was some genuine S controllers being sold for $19.95. looking closer I realised that there were the games that were behind the xbox controller seemed to with it as there was a note saying normally $98.50. I decided that it seemed to to be a very good deal and went into the city Target store to see if I could purchase it. It turned out that they had not received their shipment of games yet. I got them to contact the Tea Tree Plaza store as It is my next easiest to get to, I was told that they had many of the packs there so I went to the Tea Tree Plaza store. I then purchased 2 of the packs as I needed 2 of the controllers and for me to purchase a controller on its own would have cost $49.95.In the games pack I received I got copies of Crimson Skies (a dogfighting flight simulator), Voodoo Vince ( a 3^rd person RPG), and Kung Fu chaos ( a 3^rd person fighting party game). The games are not the the newest or the best games but are all very fun to play with over 50 hours of play between them. It turned out that the games that came in the pack were not the same as what was advertised but I am very happy anyway as I did not have any of the ones I received. If you have an xbox and do need a new controller and or don’t have these games this is the best value pack I have ever seen and recommend you get it.

Yesterday I noticed that after having my website live for 9 months I have finally gained a Google PR rating. The way I found out it had changed was not through the use of the Google tool bar but through the use of the iwebtool’s pagerank checker. It would appear that the page rankings shown by the Google tool bar is not always accurate. My main website now has a PR of 1 out of 10 which is not very good but is at least a start. My blog on the other hand has a PR of 3 which while still not grate it is better than a lot of websites. This shows that having a blog attached to your website can help you gain better standing with Google and other search engins.

Today I thought I would write a review of my experiences with using the new Yahoo Mail Beta. Fist of all it has been designed to look and feel like a stand alone email client. All actions are now dynamic where you now see your emails appear strait away in the email window as apposed to what you had to do before of having to open an email in to a full window. You are now able to move emails between folders a lot easier than before as you can now simply click and drag 1 or many files to their new folder. They have also added an RSS feed reader but I have not been able to add any feeds other than the ones that are built in. It is also possible for you to open many emails at once as they have added tabbed browsing, I think this could be very useful feature in the future. I have found that the overall performance of the new design far slower that what it was with the old design or a stand alone email client. I have also found that not all features may be been included yet. I have tried sending an where I wanted to include a Hyperlink and was unable to see any buttons to do so or any automatic conversion to complete my task so I had to go without.

As Yahoo Mail Beta is still a Beta version there are obviously some features that may yet be changed and added and overall I think it will be an improvement over the previous version.