NewPosted by james on September 24th, 2008

My friend Chris challenged me to do a blog based on one word, the word being “New”.

So here we go.

  • New season for television is finally here, so far all the shows I’m digging are Fringe, and the Mentalist.  Haven’t had any time for any comedies, although my aunt tells me that worst week ever is pretty “effing funny”.  Might have to catch up on that online or something.  My faves that have returned seem to be in good form as well, Heroes,The Shield, House, Prison Break, and Terminator.

  • New mixtape from The Hamiltization processhas dropped a few days ago.  Basically a newer MC named Charles Hamilton is coming out, guns a blazed you could say. I think this is really interesting in the fact that he is dropping all these mix-tapes for free just to get his name out, so far ive been pretty impressed, make sure you check it out.
  • New issues on the linq/MVC front, mainly coming from needing to use a checkbox list using a many-to-many table, luckily found a nice article on how to alleviate this issue, here (this work was based off another blog, however i find this one a bit easier on the eyes, as well a little easier to comprehend)
  • New crisis! Apparently gas is short, at least according to the people in Atlanta, where gas is almost impossible to find due to the hurricanes in the gulf.  Kind of weird that Atlanta is the ONLY city i think this is happening. (they’re also a red state, so who knows. yes that’s a diss)
  • New nike zoom tremodeled after Marty McFly’s sneaks in Back to the Future II (do want, new ones not old) 

 

During lunch today we talked briefly on a topic that I found quite interesting, what is the best way to obtain information from a user without making it seem like they are divulging just information over and over?  Obviously this becomes a battle of two sides, the client (for us) and the user (the public). 

The client ideally gets as much information as possible with as little investment as possible.  The user, on the other hand, doesn’t want to just go through page after page of forms with little to no reward.

So wheres the middle ground? 

The client has to provide a site that has  to reward the user, all while doing it in a manner that will retrieve information from the user, with zero to little awareness of the knowledge transfer.

For me, one of the more basic examples of this is the achievement system for the xbox 360.  While it may or may not gather information that could enhance society, it does however show you how far a user is willing to go to get recognition for doing a simple or sometimes not so simple task (little rocket man anyone?).  Im wondering if game devs or at the least MS has the ability to sort all users by achievement, it’d be interesting to see which achievements are the hardest/easiest to get, in order to perhaps balance the next game coming out for a wide base of users.

This same achievement idea has been pushed onto http://stackoverflow.com where users get “badges” for interacting with other users, and the site as well.

I mentioned that users have to have little to no awareness of the transfer of knowledge but I do know that there are obvious contradictions to that (wikipedia, any open source project, etc etc)  but in my opinion the number of people who don’t contribute freely vastly out weighs the other. 

 

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, been real busy with work, life, and vader’s birthday (turned 4!).

I’m thinking about writing my own CheckboxList HtmlHelper because apparently we don’t really need one for MVC .net. So ill make sure to chronicle that adventure!

Stay tuned.

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