As you’ve read before, I’ve had a variety of battles with the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration framework from Microsoft.

Today was another day for battle. And an interesting battle it was.

So here is the situation that I was running into. Within my code in the customer portal, I have a notification that is sent out that has a full back trace of what happened on the system, what was inputted and what was the error message that was returned. I of coarse try to give the user a friendly version of the error message to the screen before sending off this plethora of valuable detail. Out of this pile of data, I find the following error message has been returned:

Ready for some numbers this morning? Some scary, scary numbers for Xbox 360 gamers? Game Informer, current king of the smoldering ruins of the print gaming magazine empire, polled about 5,000 of its readers to get a feel for their gaming experiences, including just how many of them had unlocked the fabled “Red Ring of Death” achievement. We’d heard estimates ranging from 16 to 30 percent, but even the most pessimistic guesses don’t line up with the survey’s findings of a staggeringly high 54.2 percent failure rate. That’s five times higher than the PS3’s 10.6 percent, with the Wii coming in at 6.8 percent. Mind you, the Xbox 360 was the most played console, with over 40 percent of Xbox gamers button mashing for three to five hours a day, compared to 37 percent of PS3 gamers, and less than an hour’s worth of gaming per day for 41.4 percent of Wii owners. However, game consoles should be designed to shrug off marathon sessions and just keep on spewing polygons, something that the first revisions of Microsoft’s baby obviously couldn’t manage.

I’ve written about it before, I enjoy watching number 4 play. But for the Vikings!?!?! Judas!!!!!!!!!!

At least I get an extra special birthday gift this year with the Packers heading to Minnesota on October 5th to give the Vikings the thumping they deserve.

Today, I’m finally able to let the cat out of the bag about a side project that I have been working on. My fellow brother in song, Brent Bierstedt and I have been working over the past several months on a better way of accessing, ranking and organizing iPhone apps. We love the iPhone and think that the store is pretty killer. But there are a few things lacking that with a little bit of technology, we can bring out the best of the store and make it easy to find, search, share and rank applications that you find. So today, we are officially launching iapp100.com