dW

And They Say, “Shit Happens”

Responses Closed

It was only yesterday I got myself a Yamaha HTR-6060BL Audio/Video Receiver and a set of 6.1 speakers to go with it. I am more than happy with them to say the least. I almost cried when I heard the audio coming out of the speakers. The YPAO microphone that came with it was a joy to use as it automatically set the speaker system for where I sit typically. After I plugged everything up it took no time to be sitting there listening to music and movies with awe.

Looking at that picture will show you that this post isn’t about my joy over the receiver and speaker system. It’s about my 5 year old 20″ Apple Cinema Display. I woke up this morning, woke the computer up from sleep, and saw that the backlight died on my 2nd monitor. Lately it’s been showing signs of dying, but I thought I could keep it going for a few months until I got the spare funds together to buy a replacement. The power LED would blink in a short, short, long pattern. Apple’s website categorizes it as a “backlight error”. It would blink like that, and nothing would be different on the screen, no part of the screen would be without light. When the backlight went out completely the LED would continue to blink the same way. Apparently the first generation Apple Cinema Displays (and any similar display by anyone made at that point in time) were notorious for the backlights going out. I guess it’s what I get for buying something that’s cutting edge. I got five good years out of it anyway. I worked it to death (literally… ha!). Naturally right after I spend a ton of money to replace my speaker system (if you could have called it that) it dies and forces myself to dip into my emergency money (called a credit card).

The funny thing about it is that Ed Palumbo was trying to coerse me into buying Pokémon Diamond yesterday saying it would be an “Emergency Pokémon”. Well, Ed… I’ve had to use my emergency money but not for a DS game.

A few months down the road when I was going to order the replacement for my monitor I was going to buy another 23″. I didn’t really want to spend the money for another 23″ (even though they are cheaper than they were when I bought the other one), but couldn’t decide whether to get just a 20″ to replace what I had or to get the 23″ that I wanted. I flipped a coin — Heads for 23″, Tails for 20″. The quarter came out Heads, so I ordered the 23 incher. Interesting way to decide, hmm? Maybe fate wants me broke…

Re: Buy a Wii Instead

five Responses (now closed)

This has been a nice rollercoaster ride the past few days. I’ve been called a fraud, a fanboy, and an idiot. I’ll agree with the last one, but I’m neither a fraud nor a fanboy. The picture up top of Shigeru Miyamoto was done as a gift to the fine people at N+. I plan on buying a PlayStation 3 (and will enjoy it immensely), so if I really was a fanboy I would not be saying that. Since it isn’t exactly affordable I do have to do some planning to buy one. I will have one before the end of the year if everything works out right.

I’m not a fraud. I know it’s easy to assume something is fraudulent on the internet because there’s so much of that kind of stuff going on. This was a prank and not an act of vandalism. This was a planned act with a friend of mine that worked at the store. I will not be giving information about what store it was and what location it was at since I don’t want my friends in any trouble over this. Here is what I wrote:

[…] I planned this one for an entire week, and knew there’d be no one in there except the girl behind the counter. Sure enough there wasn’t anyone in there but her when I walked in. When I went to pick up my copy of Super Paper Mario today I fed this story to the girl behind the counter that a friend of mine took my PS2 game and turned it in there to trade in for his copy of God of War II. I said that I wanted it back, and wanted to know which one did it. The girl bought the story and I had no time to vandalize the Xbox 360 boxes lining the front display. While she was gone I did this with a white paint marker I hid in my coat. After it was done and I had my photo a friend of mine who worked there walked in and told her what was up. She had no clue it even happened. We cleaned up the boxes with damp washtowels I brought from home, laughed a lot while doing it, and I went home with this picture. […]

The inability of people to be able to read this part of my post is amazing to me. Are most of the world illiterate? All you see are a bunch of boxes vandalized with what you see and assume the worst. READ THE DAMN POST!

This was a planned PRANK designed to get myself an entry into the N+ EvWiiwhere Challenge. One of the employees knew about it, the other didn’t. We cleaned the acrylic paint off the boxes, and I left. This was a prank designed to get myself a picture for the challenge, nothing less or more.

Some assholes have posted “news” on their shitty news sites (shitty because they don’t respond to emails). They publish biased news with half the information; of course after that all of the retards from around the world comment on it. They can act like rabid monkeys after the last banana for all I care. I’m sick and damn tired of this bullshit. Have fun being retards and leave me the hell alone.

Buy a Wii Instead!

twelve Responses (now closed)

Edit: To anyone coming here from DrLaunch’s dreadful digg I did this through a contest entry, and you can go through the link provided at the bottom of this post and see. Some might think it is Photoshopped. While I am capable of doing such a thing I assure you it is not a Photoshop job, but if you want to believe it is so then please be my guest. If you spread the word about its being a hoax then maybe things will quiet down from what started out as a simple contest entry. Thanks.

This is making me laugh just typing this in. This is my 2^nd entry into the N+ EvWiiwhere Challenge. I planned this one for an entire week, and knew there’d be no one in there except the girl behind the counter. Sure enough there wasn’t anyone in there but her when I walked in. When I went to pick up my copy of Super Paper Mario today I fed this story to the girl behind the counter that a friend of mine took my PS2 game and turned it in there to trade in for his copy of God of War II. I said that I wanted it back, and wanted to know which one did it. The girl bought the story and I had no time to vandalize the Xbox 360 boxes lining the front display. While she was gone I did this with a white paint marker I hid in my coat. After it was done and I had my photo a friend of mine who worked there walked in and told her what was up. She had no clue it even happened. We cleaned up the boxes with damp washtowels I brought from home, laughed a lot while doing it, and I went home with this picture. Now everyone will know what to buy instead of an Xbox 360. Have fun and don’t die of laughter because I’m afraid I’m about to.

It’s EvWiiwhere!

five Responses (now closed)

This was quite fun to do and funny to boot. This is the front of Gene Cox’s Grocery in West Monroe, LA, and this is Greg Cox the owner. I went in today and conspired with one of the employees to replace a sign advertising ribs on the front door with my own homemade quickly-scribbled Wii sign. Greg walked out to carry out the garbage, came back, and noticed an odd sign on the door. I walked out “innocently” to see what was the problem and just had to get my camera out to take this picture. He never caught on even when I went to my truck to get my 10 megapixel digital SLR camera (big camera). It’s really odd unless you’re known as a photographer to happen to have one of those around. We eventually let him in on the joke, though. Sadly the Wii sign has been replaced with the old barbequed ribs sign.

Interesting Predicament

five Responses (now closed)

This all starts with a story like all things. I’ve been having to resort to downloading TV shows off of the internet because of the horrendous quality Comcast offers here. It’s so bad that the local paper wrote an article urging locals to find alternatives to Comcast because of their horrible service. At the moment the only way to cancel or get any troubleshooting on your service is to drive to their local office as the phone lines are full of customers complaining about how horrible it is or attempting to cancel their service. The BBB have been brought in to investigate their actions.

Their service is so bad that on channels provided on regular cable it is better to watch them on regular cable than it is to watch them through digital cable. Comcast rips the customers here off by receiving analog feeds from the low tier channels, converting them to digital, and sending them back in the form of “digital channels”. This goes for about 80 channels that are provided through regular cable.

I received a letter in the mail from Comcast’s “Legal Response Center” on my downloading of Rome Season 2, Episode 9 off of BitTorrent. They say I am in violation of the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” and that it is a violation of their acceptible use policy; it may result in a suspension or termination of my service account. I say go right ahead. It’ll give me an excuse to try alternative or perhaps better methods of receiving the internet.

As a result I have sent an e-mail back to their “Legal Response Center” stating my differences with the company and my reasons for downloading “illegal content”. In my opinion it’s not illegal when I am unable to watch the show on TV when I pay for it. Here’s what I replied with:

Thanks for mailing me this letter regarding my downloading of Rome Season 2, Episode 9. I have had nothing but rotten service from Comcast ever since our local Time Warner Cable provider was bought out by you. I have in the process lost about 12 channels on my TV, saw an incredible loss in quality on my TV, and a higher monthly bill on both digital cable and internet. I subscribe to HBO and if you look at my records you will see that I subscribe to it, but the problem is that the quality of the picture is so horrendous that I am forced to download the episodes off the internet to even watch the show or many of my favorite shows for that matter. The problem with my downloading this episode off the internet comes down to YOU. If the quality of my service wasn’t so deplorable I wouldn’t have the need nor the desire to download any television programming off the internet. I see this as a fair trade. I can’t get it through digital nor HDTV cable in quality good enough for human viewing, so I download it. Plain and simple. Fix your cable service and I’ll stop downloading episodes off of the internet.

If you would be so kind please contact my local Comcast Cable service provider in West Monroe, Louisiana and tell them that I’ve been trying to call them for the past few weeks trying to resolve my TV quality issues with them, but I am unable to get to talk to someone as the waiting time is around an hour at the moment. To tell you the truth it’s because so many people from this area are calling to complain. Even the local paper wrote about how atrocious the quality of service Comcast has here. People are unable to cancel their service with Comcast because they are unable to get ahold of a service representative to cancel their service or to even troubleshoot it. We are not used to this kind of irresponsible service, and we are not about to put up with it.

I cannot watch this show on demand because that service stopped working after Time Warner left and I guess the local Comcast service provider doesn’t have a comparable service to Time Warner’s On Demand service. I can’t watch the episodes at my leisure anymore, but then again I don’t want to because the quality of my cable service has taken a huge dip. Don’t even get me on DVR service because if I record the show off of the TV using the DVR it is in a lower quality than it was on the TV, so I would be watching it in even lower quality than I would normally. No thanks.

You can feed this information to HBO/BBC. I own the first season on DVD and bought it through Amazon.com. So if they want to use this violation of our civil rights to go see that I purchased it through Amazon be my guess. The second season isn’t offered on DVD yet. I don’t know if I’ll be purchasing it or watching anything on HBO again or anything owned by the BBC as I feel I am being violated. Why don’t you spend your time going after people who actively download episodes off of the internet to create themselves a collection of episodes to use instead of purchasing DVDs? I have shown to you that I am not an active pirate and that I will purchase the shows that I like when they are offered for purchase. As this is not offered for purchase at this time I would gladly send you a proof of purchase when it does come up for purchase. Would you or HBO care to see that? I doubt HBO would care because they cancelled it, certainly the best show since Band of Brothers in 2001 (I own that on DVD, too).

This all comes down to Comcast’s inability to provide proper service to its customers. I pay over $100 a month for garbage. Provide quality comparable to the amount being paid out by customers and perhaps most of this activity will stop. It won’t stop completely, but you will know that your customers downloading TV shows off of the internet at that point in time are active violators of copyright law and not people like me who find it necessary to get their TV shows using this method to watch them once and delete afterwards.

Get off my back and have a good day.

I wonder what their reply will be. It’ll probably be a cancellation of my services. Oh well. Big loss I say. Oddly enough as a complete opposite to this I got my free gift from Nintendo Power in the mail of Twilight Princess’ soundtrack and its strategy guide. At least that’s a plus.