Firstly, I should state the obvious. My plans to navigate dotKenneth.com to a real hosting service are not going as quickly as planned. I’m going to work on it this weekend. Seriously. Progress on my WordPress theme has also been stalled after I realized that it sucked. Might have to use one that isn’t my own until I finish a good one. This doesn’t really bug me, the theme community is one of the appeals of WordPress.

A thought occurs to me at this point. I don’t really know where this blog is headed. I suppose I could go into details on my sudden obsession with Facebook. While I’ve been a member for a little while now, I’ve only become truly active within the past few weeks. Popularity of the site at my school is growing quickly, since the beginning of April we must have gained at least fifty members. Maybe? I don’t really know, but it seems like a lot. Anyways, I’ve sort of gone through the same initial interest process I did with Twitter. Speaking of Twitter, I have yet to find a useful way of sending my Facebook status over to Twitter. While there is a mash-up of the two service directly linked to by Facebook which instantly sends over my stats and converts it from “Kenneth is writing a blog entry.” to “writing a blog entry.,” it doesn’t capitalize the first letter of the status, which is something I can’t deal with. Not a joke, by the way. Twitterbook is the clear choice, then, but the problem is I don’t have a spot to host it right now. I’ve signed up for a bunch of free hosting (read: free spam) sites that claim to support PHP to find out they don’t support PHP 5 or just don’t work at all. Unfortunately I don’t know PHP well enough to re-write the script for PHP 4, learning the language is a project I set aside for the coming summer. There is an upside to all this, though, because my lack of hosting options should encourage me to sign up for the previously mentioned host I’m going to be using for the new version of my blog. This story, if you can call it that, could easily lead to Joost (Bill, if you read this, I wouldn’t mind an invite…) or Digg’s social networking news award or even claimID. Seeing as Facebook is collecting my RSS feed for this blog on my profile page, though, I’d kinda like to draw some visitors from there and chances are they’d stop reading if I kept going. That said, they probably left after I started talking about Twitter or PHP. Ah, well.

As it has proven for me to be impossible for me to write a blog without the mention of video games, I guess this is as good a time as any to do my update on the subject. The Xbox 360 dashboard update launched yesterday and I don’t really like any of it. My Windows Live ID was set up as a child account, and there is no way of changing this. Basically, Microsoft has set up WLM on the 360 to only work with an adult account, alienating a huge portion of their user base. It’s particularly stupid since you can use the IM service on the computer as long as you’re over 12 and since if you are over 18 there is still no way to eliminate the child status of the account. I suspect I might be able to do this by removing and re-adding my Gmail address as a Live passport, but it’s at the risk of erasing anything related to WLM I have. (Interestingly enough, further details on the subject and the future of under-18 WLM users has been recognized by an Xbox.com article before I even finished writing the rest of this blog.) Other features on the update include a Marketplace blade, which is completely useless for anyone outside of the U.S. since there is not enough content to justify it. With no videos and no movies, I have no desire for a blade only for gamer pics and themes and there is already a better way to access XBLA game through the Games blade. There’s also updated video features, but, again, doesn’t apply to non-Americans and the codecs don’t do anything for regular videos, just Marketplace ones.

The Xbox front isn’t all bad right now by any means, though. The Forza Motorsport 2 demo launched today, which, while limited, is fun and should tide fans over until the game’s release later this month. Many details were also released on one of my favourite 360 games, Crackdown, regarding the free and paid downloadable content to come. There’s far to much for me to cover, so go to the source. I can’t wait for all that! I feel I should note that I haven’t forgotten my Nintendo Wii, but right now things are a little dry. I had a lot of fun trying out some Wario Ware multiplayer with my friends, but that’s about it as of late. For the past few weeks I hadn’t even played my 360 until the other day, my Nintendo DS has been getting way more attention than both of them.

So, I guess that’s it for the time being. Believe it or not, I just remembered what I was going to write this blog about in the first place: Heroes. I guess I’ll save that for after a new episode on Monday or on the new blog. Thanks for reading.

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