Whenever I drive down Santa Monica I can’t help but think of that song. I also look for car washes across from bars to figure out which bar she means.

“We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday
In a bar that faces a giant car wash
The good people of the world are washing their cars
On their lunch break, hosing and scrubbing
As best they can in skirts in suits”

There were a few car washes I saw that maybe could be it, I couldn’t tell since I was driving and had to keep moving.

Regardless, here are a bunch o’ pictures I took when driving to Beverly Hills for a meeting, I decided to go the long way, down Santa Monica all the way through West Hollywood to get there.

Santa Monica Drive

Click the picture, genius.

I will be on TV soon

Yeah, they are finally going to show the episode on TLC I was in, but I’m not going to tell you yet because it’s in three weeks and you’ll forget. I’ll tell you with about a week to go.

Valve announced that starting next week, Steam will begin hosting certain user-created mods of Source engine titles such as Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2.

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f you are not happy that you can
’t get to try a native chrome, arguably the fastest browser out there; give Firefox Minefield a shot. Even though it’s an early Alpha build, under the hood, it has the fastest javascript engine out there.

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I’m really excited to be telling you guys about this one, it’s always great to work with David from Festival of Blood Radio. We’re going to be putting together a Warhammer special review in the coming days, and hopefull have it up by the end of the week. We’ll be covering as much as we can, and hopefully find enough tangents and verbal diarhea to make it entertaining! Keep an eye on both RSS feeds for the show, since we’ll be posting it on both more than likely.

Decided to expand my library of TF2 skins and grabbed a few of these from GameSprays.com.  The downloads are in ZIP format, the sprays themselves are in VTF format.

We at Moonlight Pictures are very relieved that we will be officially re-launching our web page on October 15th, after being offline for almost an entire month. The delay in this re-launch was primarily caused by a security breach in our database due to our servers failing to receive its updates as it should have. Our admins have worked relentlessly to fix this issue which, unfortunately forced us to delete the old database and begin from new - meaning, all of our previous members will have to re-register.

Nevertheless, starting from fresh gave us many new opportunities for growth, including some new features for our members. We want our web page not to be just a gateway into our films, but a fun and safe community where inspiring filmmakers can gather, add and upload their films, and get reviews from established independent directors across the United States. We are in-touch and negotiating with several producers and directors who have experience in the field and have some extra time on their hands to join our site and be active moderators and constructive critics for the new media.

So what are some of the new features being added for new memberships?

• Complete up-to-date profile management system which is intergrated with your forum posts, video uploads, including a brand-new blogging system and a photo gallery!
• The ability to sync your podcasts or music to the site to share with other members!
• Add videos to the site instantly with the click of a button or upload your videos to your favorite videos host without ever leaving the webpage!
• Get feedback on your short films/media from our upcoming podcast, “In front of the mic with Nick & D.L.”
• And so much more!

We want to build a team of individuals to interact with and together, we hope that we can grow into the New Light for Entertainment!

Keep an eye out, Moonlight Pictures returns October 15th, 2008!

Hey suckers! Did you buy DRM music from Wal*Mart instead of downloading MP3s for free from the P2P networks? Well, they’re repaying your honesty by taking away your music.

What is not mentioned in the above “Straight From Digg” news posting is that Wal-Mart is giving their customers fair warning about the DRM server shutdown and telling them the following…

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer. This change does not impact songs or albums purchased after Feb 2008, as those are DRM-free.

Beginning October 9, we will no longer be able to assist with digital rights management issues for protected WMA files purchased from Walmart.com. If you do not back up your files before this date, you will no longer be able to transfer your songs to other computers or access your songs after changing or reinstalling your operating system or in the event of a system crash. Your music and video collections will still play on the originally authorized computer.

Not the best method of keeping your music (as you are turning an MP3 into PCM then back to MP3 if you want a non-DRM’d MP3 on your computer), but it appears to be the only method Wal-Mart has looked into.  iTunes, for example, has their iTunes Plus tracks which are 256Kbps AAC that has no DRM.  If you bought any standard iTunes DRM’d music, check out iTunes Plus to see if any of the songs you already own have been updated to iTunes Plus.  You will have to pay an extra fee to upgrade each song, but in the end it expands the bitrate from 128 to 256 AND removes the DRM.

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We’ve had our first Hotfix Patch for Warhammer, showing that Mythic isn’t about to lay down on the job! Here’s what we have for the short but important list of patch notes:

In a continuing effort to make the game run as smoothly as possible, we have added the following fixes to all servers this morning:

* Several stability fixes have been introduced.

* Resolved several crashes that were related to teleporting and/or respawning.

* We addressed reports from some players who were having issues with their screen going black and locking up.

These fixes are now live. Have a fantastic weekend, everyone, and thanks for your support!

One of the great actor of the past 50 years, Paul Newman, was reported dead late last night, falling to an unfortunate case of cancer. He wasn’t just an actor though, he was a major racing enthusiast as well, and always took time to fit it in around acting and stage jobs. He also is infamous in the natural foods industry after having started Newman’s Own Inc in 1983, which produces some fantastic goods in the areas of baked goods, packaged meals, and other natural goods. He’ll be sorely missed. We can only hope that there’ll be a decent man to take his place, although Paul Newman is one that shoes can never be fully filled by anyone.

Earlier this week, Mark Jacobs sat down with Ten Ton Hammer in an exclusive post-launch interview to talk about how things are going so far as well as to talk about what we should be looking for in the near future. One thing Jacobs mentions right off the bat is how amazingly smooth and strong a start Warhammer Online had;

For six days there were no crashes. No real emergency patches. No downtime. Not only did the entire game not crash, but no servers even crashed. So for the first six days, things were fabulous.

It’s a fantastic interview, and Mark Jacobs covers a lot of ground in a decent amount of time. He goes on to talk about the differences between one man’s Vision, and the vision that the whole team has to make a great game;

That’s when bad things happen in almost every field - and it doesn’t matter if you are making games, making movies, television, or writing books - when you are so caught up in that Vision that you have. When you are the only one who can be right. Sometimes absolute greatness ensues but its easier the less complicated things are. I’ve yet to see an MMO that has that kind of Vision, where you can tell that it is some one man’s, one woman’s Vision, truly succeed. WoW is not that kind of vision. Its the vision of a lot of very talented people at Blizzard who did their job and did it very well. And so if you are looking for the secret sauce that’s where it is. Hard work and a willingness to listen.

There’s a lot of goodness in this interview, you can go ahead and read this at Ten Ton Hammer right now!

Google co-founder Larry Page attended a Capitol Hill hearing today and called upon the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to “free” the white spaces spectrum so it can be used as an affordable, nationwide, high-speed broadband connectivity network. Page’s message: Five years of testing and discussion on the issue is enough.

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