Happy Festivus! By this point, you should have your twelve foot pole, and you should have aired your grievances. It is now time for feats of strength.

Scott Jennings has supplied Festivus celebrants with a dancing bird. I don’t know if that’s somehow part of the festivities, or if it’s just another Festivus miracle.

The Sims is a pretty amazing brand: it came from another, more hard core brand; it rocketed in popularity and became a brand unto itself; it maintained incredible strength in the face of countless product releases and endless milking. Part of that is the more casual audience, but part of it is the relative skill with which EA has handled it. In a company that notoriously tried to kill off its largest non-Madden cash cow before it was even released, The Sims has dodged the day-to-day perils of the “bright idea”. (Well, except the Sims Online.)

The latest “bright idea” to happen to The Sims is Sims-branded generic casual games. Have you ever wanted to know what happens when you combine pinball/Peggle/Tetris/Luxor/whatever with Sims-flavored graphics? No? Then don’t read this.

Since I’ve discussed ApertureScience.com here before, I thought I’d mention that it’s currently displaying a little Christmas video.  Note that it does change in one noticeable way after it loops a bit (and then goes back to normal on the next loop), in case you feel like leaving it running in the background for a bit.

Also, I don’t think I ever mentioned the login that was revealed in-game.  Wikipedia’s already revealed any information from it, but you can have some fun by typing “login” at the prompt, and then logging in as “cjohnson” “tier3″.

I recently bought a computer from Puget Systems, and wanted to let other people know about it.

Puget has inherited Monarch Computer’s mantle, since Monarch closed its doors.  Unlike NewEgg (also an excellent computer parts retailer), Puget has an extensive online custom configuration utility.  You can heavily customize a gaming rig, graphics workstation, laptop, or even a water-cooled system.  Their list of parts for each slot is lengthy, and many of the parts are favorites recommended by the likes of SharkyExtreme.  Puget supplies their own suggested choices, and discussions of many parts’ performance and noise levels.  If you want a fast and silent rig, this is a great place to go.  Play around with their configuration utlity– it’s addictive.

Puget fills the needs of people like me, who are sick (or paranoid) of hand-assembling custom rigs, but still want to be able to pick the best parts.  Their prices are good, and they provide a 1 year warranty on the parts.  They even provide the warranty if you use some of your own hardware (I used my own hard drive and video card).

For a business rig, Puget has a few issues.  I recently ordered a system which worked on arrival, but died after a couple weeks.  I think it was a motherboard failure, and it’s perfectly understandable: sometimes hardware fails, and it’s outside Puget’s control.  I called them up, and they had me re-seat every part, including the CPU and heat sink, to make sure it wasn’t failing to boot just because something got jostled.  Reasonable, but it definitely took me some time.  Once that was verified, they told me they’d pay for return shipping, since the failure was within 30 days.

It actually took a couple of days between when I first called tech support, and when they got me the return shipping authorization.  Then I had to schedule a UPS pickup (which I had to pay extra for, and of course UPS is happy to come any time between 8 am and 6 pm– don’t leave the house!).  Finally, the computer was packed up and on its merry way.

Puget fixed the computer quickly, sent it on back, and now it’s working great.  It’s a super fast system that’s finally giving us good Adobe Illustrator performance (that program is a bear).  Unfortunately, our primary working rig was basically out of commission for two weeks, and I lost quite a bit of my own time messing around with it.  Every step Puget took was totally reasonable, but two weeks is just far too long for a business rig: in a previous experience with Dell, they overnighted a replacement part on the first phone call.  (On the other hand, Dell still forces Vista with their high-end rigs, so they’re out of the question.)

Do I have a reasonable alternative?  Actually, I’d stick with Puget Systems for any non-critical rig, such as a gaming machine.  The chance of failure is low, and Puget’s customization options are the best I’ve seen.  Their prices are reasonable, and well worth it.  I don’t think they have a real competitor, to be honest.  For a critical business rig that absolutely needs to be up, though, you might want to look around for some place with a more business-centric support plan.  You’ll probably have to put up with some hardware you wouldn’t normally choose, and you’ll pay more, but sometimes it’s worth the price.

A client of ours had their site hosted with GoDaddy, so I took the time to dig through it a bit.  First, the good: it seems reasonably peppy, and you can easily switch between Windows and Linux hosting.

Unfortunately, you only get one database user per database– the admin user.  You cannot create additional users.  GoDaddy’s help documentation is pretty sparse, so it took me an email to support to figure this out, but they confirmed it.  (Actually, they told me that it’s not possible to create multiple users in a “shared hosting environment”, by which I suppose they mean theirs, as every other host I’ve dealt with hasn’t had a problem doing so.)

That’s pretty much the start and end of my experience with GoDaddy web hosting.  I suspect their other advanced features are similarly limited, but until they fix the database user issue there’s no sense in finding out.  GoDaddy web hosting seems perfectly fine if you just want to post a few files, but HostGator is dirt cheap and far more functional.

I’ve found that a lot of people want Google AdWords, but they don’t have the time to properly manage them.  It takes a while to understand all the data they throw at you, and hiring someone to manage your campaign is prohibitively expensive for many budgets.  So, whenever I come across a super quick tip to help out with an AdWords campaign, I’ll make sure to post it.

The first one is easy: kill off your content network ads.  If you go into your campaign details in your AdWords management area, you’ll see a check box to enable or disable content network advertising.  Content network ads show up on other sites (not Google search) that have signed up for the program, and which Google thinks are relevant to your ad.  Disable them and save your changes.

Why disable content network ads?  You only pay per click, so even if people are less likely to click on content network ads than normal ads, a click is a click, right?  Not really: in most campaigns I’ve managed, I’ve found that content network clicks are worth considerably less than a search engine ad click.  The visitors spend less time on the site and are less likely to buy.

If you have more time to manage your campaign, you can set separate content network bids that are much lower than your search engine marketing bids, based on your statistics which will show you how valuable a content network visitor is to you.  (Every campaign is different, so your results will vary.)  Keep in mind, though, that Google enables content network advertising by default: meaning that lots of people are unknowingly overpaying for these low-quality ads.  This means that bargains in content network advertising are few and far between.

This made the gaming news rounds, but it’s still bugging me.  From the New York Times:

Correction: December 4, 2007

An article in Business Day on Friday about favorite gadgets of executives referred incorrectly to the video game Gran Turismo 5. It has not yet been released, and thus is not a best-selling game. The article also referred imprecisely to the game Halo 3. It is the first game in the Halo series designed for the Xbox 360; the earlier games, though playable on the Xbox 360, were designed for the original Xbox. The chip in the Xbox 360 also was misidentified. It has a Xenon chip, not a Cell processor. And the article also misstated the price of the Sony PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 3 starts at $399, not $299.

I realize they don’t subject their fluff articles to the same scrutiny as front-page news, but after this much fail in a single article paragraph, are you really going to trust them with something important?

I recently brought my Sega Genesis back from storage at my parents’ house, and it had me getting nostalgic about a few games. It can be fun to go back and check in on those old games… unless the game’s designers have implemented security measures.

The embedded video shows a highly-compressed 35 minutes of weed-picking in an old, neglected Animal Crossing world, set (of course) to the Benny Hill theme song.