Electronic Arts, Harmonix, and Energizer have all teamed up to give me one hell of a headache. The past month my girlfriend gave me Rock Band 2 Special Edition (you know the one with a bunch of fake instruments) as a present and since then I have drained the batteries that were included with my guitar controller and the drum pads. Being the thrifty gamer I am I decided it was time to invest in some rechargeable batteries. Not familiar with the inherent pitfalls of different battery types I went ahead and purchased some relatively cheap NiMH batteries which I discovered after charging them that they did not fit the inside the guitar controller. Like any man should do in the first place when faced with an unknown I went to the instruction manual that came with the controller and found this: "Use only fresh AA standard alkaline batteries." OK fine that's great, I'm sure there is some sort of design advantage to using 3 standard alkaline batteries. Then I remembered seeing this offer in the store when I was looking at rechargeable AAs. A four pack of Energizer AA batteries with a special offer for a free Rock Band 2 downloadable track. There was only one problem, the batteries were not alkaline but lithium and anything but alkaline are FORBIDDEN making the promotion pointless because the batteries would void my warranty if I used them in the controllers. I'm no battery expert and I'm definitely not familiar with the inner workings of Harmonix or Energizer but you'd think someone at one of those companies would read their own freaking instruction manuals. After a long search through both Harmonix's Rock Band forums and support and EA's support search engine I came up with a single thread with a voice of reason and he is known as Thorr69. So what's the deal you three? I'm not saying you guys need to own up to your mistakes, Thorr69 has taught me better, but why are the forums my last hope to obtain information about your products? Also why do I have to register with your website to email you a question? I guess that's another rant for another time.

I've been asked to add blogs, forums, and comments for a while now and I've always waited on the right software to come along to do this. I did a quick blog to appease some of the folks but it wasn't what I really wanted. Sure, it was a great way to test out some new programming practices and tricks but it wasn't a real strong blog software with the features that I wanted to have. Now, I think with BlogEngine, we've got a strong base to work with. I've added some minor improvements and extensions to help the guys here do some really cool stuff.

 Comments and forums were also on hold until Yet Another Forum made their latest version. While it is an alpha, I haven't had any glaring issues and so far it's worked out pretty well. Again, I made a few changes here and there thanks to access to the source code so I'm happy how it turned out.

 It just so happens that both software came out with their latest versions at the same time and I set out to see how long it would take me to get them running. Integrating the main site to access the forums to do comments wasn't too bad and changing the styles temporarily also wasn't bad as well. So after I setup a few test environments I went at it. In a span of a few days I got everything working as you see here. It's great to be able to leverage open source software for your needs and to see everything fall into place. It took me a little less than a week from start to finish to get it all working and I've made some small tweaks here and there to both the blog software and forum software since launch. 

I guess I wanted to go out of 2007 with a bang on my to do list for the site so I hope you guys enjoy the new features.