you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

15 cents per message. That’s how much Cingular charges me to send or receive a text message. Or “The New AT&T”. Whatever they want to call themselves these days. They spent millions of dollars spinning off Cingular into its own company and now have spent millions re-educating/rebranding themselves.

15 cents! WTF?! That’s insanely expensive. It used to be 10 cents when it was still Cingular. In Japan, it’s 1 cent. How many text msgs do I send a month in the US? ZERO.

Cingular could’ve spent some of that money wasted on their branding and rebranding back to AT&T on providing better service at lower cost.

Talking about shoddy workmanship and bad customer service! My “repaired” XBOX lasted a whole 2 weeks before giving up the ghost, so now I have to send it back to Microsoft a second time. Well, at least it didn’t die before the Sox vs the Rockies game.

I invited a few friends over to watch the game and was worried I’d be Boxless that evening. Only one of us really cared about baseball. The rest of us just wanted to hang out, drink some beer, and have some pizza. Just a few days earlier, I booted the thing up and got a scary black screen with an E67 error. In typical unhelpful Microsoft fashion, no other information is displayed about what caused it. After some cursing and looking on Microsoft’s site to see what E67 was (hard drive failure), I reset it and the error never came back. Strangely, the BOX was running completely fine the night of the game, and we got in a few rounds of Halo 3 after we decided not to watch the rest of the game. Boston was winning.

The next morning, I powered on the XBOX and got all kinds of badness. The spinning X orb animation froze, the sliding panels of the dashboard froze, putting in a game froze. Every time I reset it, the system froze within a minute of powering up. The console refused to acknowledge the controllers, and I got the 3 red rings intermittently. So, I got fed up with it, cursed Microsoft some more, and waited until Monday morning for customer service to open.

My prepaid box came 5 days later, and now it’s on its way back to TX for repairs. The tech support guy said he flagged my ticket high priority, whatever that means. Hopefully, that means “stop screwing this guy over with dead XBOXes and give him one of the re-engineered units with better heat sinks.” My brother got a new one from Microsoft, with a manufacture date of September 2007, so I’m crossing my fingers.

Today, I had quite a bit of a scare (and quite a bit of cursing). My PC had been on for a couple of days and I got a “Virtual Memory Low” warning. My Celeron is normally a piece of crap performance-wise anyway but it got especially bad today. The hard drive was clacking like crazy just doing the simplest things like switching between windows.

So I went ahead and told my PC to restart. It went through the normal BIOS checks and everything, After a couple of seconds I got a scary “NTLDR missing. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to continue” error. And of course, pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing to fix this problem, so what help is this message?

I scrambled around looking for my Windows CD but didn’t get very far. At this point, I had been working for 6 hours straight on some illustrations on my Mac and was in no mood for this Windows idiocy. My head was starting to throb from lack of sleep.

After some unsuccessful wrangling with trying to make a bootable USB flash drive, I powered up an old Compaq I had in storage in a desperate attempt to make a 3.5″ floppy disk. My laptops don’t have floppy drives. WHO THE HELL USES 3.5″?!!! This is 2007!! That didn’t work either. The PC didn’t recognize the floppy. Probably had to do with my boot sequence? I got an I/O Error when I tried to boot from the floppy, so I didn’t mess with it, and decided to track down the CD.

I made a copy of the CD that came with my Compaq and lost the original ages ago. I was worried that it would be manufacturer-locked, or scratched, or any number of things that could go wrong. But I finally found it and initially, the system didn’t recognize the CD. I had to change the boot order to CD first for the PC to recognize the existence of a boot CD.

After waiting a couple of minutes for it to load, I hit “R” for repair. And in typical Microsoft unfriendly fashion, it throws you into DOS with no explanation on what to do next, nor does it repair anything. Luckily I have other PCs to look stuff up on the net. To make things even more fun, I had to guess what drive letter my CD/DVD was. I knew it wasn’t A: or B: or C:, so my first choice was D:, since that’s the letter Windows assigns the drive.

Nope.
E:
Nope.
F:
Nope.
G:
Nope.
H:
Nope.

WTF?! At this point I was starting to curse profusely, but I wasn’t surprised at how stupid this process was. And of course, the loveliest part is that it’ll let you change to that drive letter. But you won’t know if it’s an actual drive until you do a “dir” to list the files. So, after each letter, I had to type “dir” for the directory listing, only to be told that nothing exists.

So I tried starting from the last letters of the alphabet.

Z:
dir
Nope.
X:
dir
Nope

More cursing and some more random letters. Then finally
I:
dir

YES!!! The CD listing. I went to I:\386\ and copied over ntldr and ntdetect.com back into C:\

I guess sometime during the night, I had been a little too zealous with the spring cleaning and thought those were temp files or some other garbage. Why would you put such critical files in C:\ and give them such crap names? Especially ntldr, which looks like any one of the hundreds of temp files other programs make. There’s no extension on it to signify that it’s important. Worse, Windows doesn’t lock it. It just lets you go ahead and put it in the trash. ntdetect.com too.

I have “show hidden files” turned on, but regardless, Windows should lock down these files. One hour of wasted time. AGGRAVATION!!!

I’ve avoided having to deal with IE7 pretty well up until now. Our QA manager looked at the site I’m building for Paltalk Groups in IE7 and found some CSS overlap problems on 2 pages. I’m surprised he didn’t find more (either a tribute to my good coding standards, or that Microsoft has finally gotten their shit together somewhat with web standards compliance). IE6 was a Mongolian clusterfuck. You were pretty much guaranteed that if it looked OK on Firefox, it’d be totally screwed up on IE6. Styles that you intuitively and logically understood to be done right would render out completely fuct in IE.

Why do I not have IE7 installed on my workstation despite the fact that it’s been out since Nov 8, 2006 and that I’m a professional web developer? Quite simple: I couldn’t be fucked to install it. Microsoft does not let you run IE6 and IE7 concurrently, meaning there’s no way to test compatibility on one machine. 7 replaces whatever previous version you have, so that means you’re pretty much screwed unless you have multiple workstations. I have two PC’s, but didn’t give a rat’s ass about 7 until today. If it works good in Firefox, it works good everywhere. End of story!*

Today, I took the old creative director’s PC for my zombie 7 tester. (He left to form a game company with his friend, Paltalk’s lead developer.) He was the designated driver, b/c no one else on the team wanted to deal with Microsoft’s jackassery.

Today was my first time using 7 and sweet zombie Jesus! This thing is more of a piece of shit than I thought. Microsoft decided to rearrange the placement of all the menu items and then LOCK them all in place so you can’t move them. First, they broke their own rule and put the File menu UNDER the URL bar, in direct contradiction to EVERY program on the operating system. Notice how in every program you use that File Edit View, etc is the first row of menu items and any buttons are underneath. I tried to move it but “Unlock Tool Bar” does nothing! I expected the Customize Toolbar to work like Office, where you can drag items off of the bar, move the bar, etc. But you can’t. Instead the first 2 buttons are Back and Forward, then a very long URL box, then Reload and Stop. In Firefox and Safari, all these buttons are grouped together in close proximity to each other so you don’t have to move your mouse very far.

I really hope I’m talking about the beta, b/c Jon said he downloaded the beta. If this is the real version of 7, I will go insane.

* a reference to Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” speeches where he uses a Simpson’s mock-PSA to make fun of people in denial about confronting the problem of global warming. I was in denial about having to deal with IE7.

I’m in the process of purging my house of old clothes, computer equipment, and electronics in anticipation of the New Year. I’ve got several huge boxes stuffed with things I don’t need anymore: toys, video game systems, boomboxes, printers, VCR’s, TV’s, DVD players, 2 PowerMac computers with monitors, and various computer peripherals. I also have a dozen bags of clothes my parents purged.
Today, I called Salvation Army to schedule a pickup. Here’s what they told me: They don’t do pickups unless it’s furniture. What?!! Apparently, they want you to do all the work of donating. I have several hundreds of dollars worth of good, usable electronics here. All quite heavy. Now I have to take time out of my day and ask someone to haul me and the stuff down to the Salvation Army (I don’t have a car).

Making donating this full of hassle is one sure way to discourage people from donating. Sorry if I’m not feeling the gratitude here.

I’ve been an American Express cardholder since freshman year of college, so that makes it a little over a decade now. In that span of time, I must’ve spent over $50,000, figuring that averaged out between the time I was a student with very little disposable income to after college when I got a job and started spending more money. What do I have to show for it? 16,798 measly reward points!

The Reward Points are supposed to be based on 1 point for every every dollar spent, but there’s no way in hell I’ve only spent $16,798 in 11 or 12 years. My end of year summary for 2005 alone was $4000, and I even spent half that year not even being in the country (was in Japan, where American Express wasn’t at all useful).

It’d be fine with having 16,798 points if the point value system amounted to something meaningful, like 1 point = $1, but it’s like fricking Kool-Aid Points, where you are like some dumb kid who’s collecting a hundred UPC’s from drink boxes just to get enough for a lame $0.10 Made in China watch. What can I get for my 16,798 points and 12 years of customer loyalty? 16 fricking tickets to watch a movie at AMC Theaters! So basically, that means each ticket is worth $1000.

Sorry, American Express, but that is uber Scroogey. A $70 Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB is 14,000 points! How about a reward system that is actually rewarding? I’ve completely stopped using my AmEx card. Many years ago (college), I signed up for the Discover Card, but dumped that when my end-of-year reward statement amounted to something like $5. I got pissed off and cancelled my account… plus the fact that I always felt dirty trying to pay for stuff with Discover at the few places that would even take this card.
Now I use my Amazon and Buy.com credit cards exclusively (both administered by Chase) and actually get real rewards. The point system is straightforward and honest. No bullshit like some purchases not counting. Everything I buy from their site is 3% bonus and 1% if I buy from anywhere else. Coupled with Buy.com’s YUB club, you can get even more reward points back. I signed up for Yub this summer and made about $800 worth of purchases. I forgot about it for a while and checked a few days ago. To my surprise, I had over 2,000 points (Yub seems to accrue points for Buy.com purchases automatically without having to explicitly sign into Yub). In Yub-land, points actually make sense: 100 points = $1, unlike AmEx’s table scraps.

This has got to be the stupidest and most miserly shopping offer I have ever seen from a web store: free UPS shipping after rebate. With many major retailers offering free shipping outright, MacMall has the nerve to pretend that they’re giving you a good deal. Most people are used to sending in rebates for products, but a MIR for shipping? Sorry MacMall, free shipping after rebate is NOT an incentive for me to buy from you. I’ll stick with companies that offer genuine free shipping like Buy.com and Amazon.

They offer free shipping if you spend over $25, and most items qualify for the offer. They make me feel good being their customer and reward me with discounts and points. I like shopping with them because they don’t make me do any work. MacMall’s tactics, on the other hand, just makes them look dishonest and shady.
Free shipping for “most orders over $99… other restrictions apply.” Oh, do they ever! Limit 1 rebate per 90 day period, with a maximum of $40 rebated. Please allow 6-8 weeks to process. They do this so they can hold onto your money as long as they can. For what reason? To pad their books? To aggregate that money from thousands of customers and collect the interest on it? Possibly. The other answer is that many people forget to send in the rebate or want to deal with the hassles.
Screw you, MacMall. I’ll take my business elsewhere.

Every few days, I am reminded of exactly why it is I hate riding the subway. The trains are full of scumbags and sometimes I feel like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, waiting for a rain to come and wash away the scum, the dogs, the c*nts..

Today, I was annoyed by two loud trash-mouthed girls. They got on at Ninth Avenue in Brooklyn and dressed really trashily. One girl had on jeans that clearly were not meant to be on her. Her fat was bulging out over the side. She had a Playboy cellphone holder clipped to her pants. They looked to be college age or younger and demonstrated a complete lack of refinement and disregard for others that shocks even me. I am not known for being modest with my words, but these two girls took it to another level of vulgarity that would probably have Dennis Leary feeling embarrassed. The entire 30 minutes that they were on the train, they talked loudly about bullshit like getting drunk. Every other word seemed to be a variation of the word fuck or fucking. I tried to tune them out by meditating, but it didn’t help. They were like school in summertime — no class!

I kept thinking to myself this is the exact reason I wear headphones to work. I won’t forget them tomorrow.

I’m convinced there’s a special place in hell reserved for spammers. These bastards have gotten a lot more sophisticated and creative with their spamming strategies, making it nearly impossible to filter. Thwarting techniques include intentional misspelling words (’morttgage’), using numbers to represent letters (’v1agra’), spacing letters apart (’sof tware’) and  including random phrases lifted from other sources in the body of the email.

Besides the usual viagra and sex ads, I’ve been getting a lot of spam for software recently. I was a little surprised when I began receiving GIF text attachments in recent months. This is a significant technological leap forward for the scumbag spammers. Some ads are even skewed diagonally to further trick filters that might be able to interpret graphics!

My ISP charges me a monthly fee for something called Spamalizer. They really ought to be providing this as a free service to their customers, and I’m not paying for it, so I’m left with the ole standby: maually setting up filters.