by Matt | Nov 24, 2007 | Personal
I hope everyone out here had a great Turkey Day, or at the very least, an early festivus. I had a great time with Lauren’s family this year. We had a great dinner, watched a few movies on her parents flat panel and HD-DVD player. Chris and I even snuck away for a little bit to have a nice Grand Habano and some 12 year old Scotch. It was a nice, relaxing Turkey Day.
Yesterday I had to work but from the other people I’ve talked to it seems like everyone had a good Black Friday as well. My brother is actually quite the BF aficionado. He goes every year and gets all of his Christmas shopping done.
I’m also really excited that quite a few people have gotten 360’s this year, just in time for the holidays. Nagle just got one, as did my brother. I also have it on good authority that one of Lauren’s friends just got one. Her brother has one now as well. My pool of potential XBL playmates just tripled. I had quite a few guys from the TCC on my friends list, but none of them are on very often. Now, with Nagle rockin the 360, my brother getting back on his campus network and our friend across town getting online, this should make for quite the gaming season. Now we just have to find a good game we all would enjoy playing. Halo would probably be a safe bet, most people will get that eventually. Call of Duty is quite good, but that’s more up my alley than anything else. What does everyone else like to play? I’m more than willing to pick up a used copy of Madden or something if that’s where people are leaning. Any suggestions?
Besides Xbox, I’m being taunted around here by what people have gotten me for Christmas. It seems every year everyone knows exactly what to get me and has their shopping done on or before Thanksgiving. Lauren’s mom apparently bought my present months ago. I have no idea what it could be, and, like a 12 year old, that bugs the hell out of me. I hate surprises. What if I go out and buy what someone has already gotten me? I can’t stand holiday gift giving because inevitably it’s the one time a year I have a few extra bucks to buy something for myself, but I can’t, because someone might have already. Of course they didn’t, but the threat of duplicate gifting is almost as staggering as finding the “perfect gift” in the first place.
I don’t want to make it sound like I’m all about the presents. Actually, quite the opposite. I’ve never really received a great deal of presents, so my expectations are really quite low. It’s the entire process that frustrates me.
You see, my birthday is 4 days before Christmas. As a kid growing up, that meant that every friend/relative/girlfriend/etc gave me a “combo gift” for both occasions. Even my parents often lumped gifts together. Birthday’s were NEVER a big deal in my family and were rarely celebrated. I’m sure Chris and Chip can tell you all about the rather pathetic “let’s get a pizza” birthday parties I had over the years. What was it, 5-6 years in a row where I celebrated my birthday by doing hardly anything? There was a movie or two, a trip to Denny’s that I can remember with Chip, but hell, I don’t think I’ve had a birthday cake since I was 10. So, having rather lack luster birthdays AND lumping those lack luster birthdays together with Christmas made for some rather forgettable holidays.
So, my expectations were always low, and in turn I didn’t see what all the fuss was about when it came to giving and receiving presents. I always thought that the holidays were more about spending TIME with people. That was always the best part to me. Driving down to Boston and having dinner with my grandparents and the entire family. Pie, turkey, bad jokes, stupid cousins, the cooler full of soda on the back porch in the snow bank to keep it cold, football games in the middle of the street, sledding, hot chocolate, bad holiday movies, falling asleep on the couch after eating too much. That’s the holidays to me. The giving and receiving of presents was just something that happened. I would much rather have someone tell me they bought me something cool, hand me a toy and say Merry Christmas than to go through all the trouble of wrapping it, putting it under the tree, waiting weeks to opening it, only to find out that it is indeed yet another shaving kit. I guess I’m just not much of a surprise kind of person.
Does that make me a scrooge? I hope not. I enjoy the season as much as everyone else. I love the weather, the tree, the baked goods, the whole thing.
I think I’ll just leave the shopping up to Lauren. She’s much better at it than I am. I think that goes without saying.
Matt out.
by Matt | Nov 20, 2007 | Games
I just got a call from the UPS delivery call center, my 360 should be back in my hands by this afternoon. Huzah!
I had left some, umm, “unique” identifiers on my console so that I would know that it was mine when it came back, so I’m curious to see exactly what they’ve replaced/repaired. Little tiny micro dots aside, I really hope they didn’t try a switch and just sent me out some crappy refurb. Like I had told the CSR, I wanted a repair or a brand new replacement. Refurbs that I’ll have to send back in after a week were not going to be acceptable. Lets cross our collective fingers.
by Matt | Nov 17, 2007 | Aggravation
For the second time in less than four posts, I’ve had trackback spam with a portion of my article stolen. Now I’m getting pissed. Not only is everything I write on this journals technically copyrighted, but these turds of the internet are trying to increase both their trackback links and their search engine results off of my stuff. What’s worse is when google/yahoo/ms finds out about a spamming site, they often penalise the TEXT. So, not only does the spammers google rank get dropped, so does mine, because it has the same text in it.
I’ve reported the last two to their ISPs and deleted the links. I don’t know what else to do. I could try and issue a DMCA take down notice, but I doubt it would get me anyway. There is a special ring of hell reserved for spamming assholes.
by Matt | Nov 17, 2007 | Aggravation
Just try and figure out how to get back onto the freeway, I effing dare you.
by Matt | Nov 16, 2007 | Personal
Is that not the most epic title of all time. I can’t take credit though, I stole it from Something Awful. Still, epic. Which is my word of the day. Mostly because my vocabulary, while extensive, trends towards the obnoxious. “Epic” fits that category.
Trendy words are not why I’m posting. I felt that a general life update was in order.
First off, Mircosoft assures me that my console is in the repair process and I’ll have it by next week. I’m not holding my breath. I just realized that I didn’t explain the issue with the box when I last mentioned this. You see, last week they issued me a repair/RMA ticket and said they were sending a special box to pack my system in to send to them. Inside said box, according to their own instructions, was to be a pre-printed UPS shipping label. I got the box, I opened the box, I found no such label. Maybe I misheard them. Nope, according to the instruction sheet IN THE BOX, there should have been a label. I called them up, thinking surely they could just send me a PDF of the label, or a link to print the label from. Nope. Not only is the LARGEST TECHNOLOGY COMPANY ON THE PLANET not capable of sending me a fucking label, they can’t figure out how to let me print the label myself. No, they have to send me a whole new BOX! I wait another 3-5 business days. receive me second box and luckily this one has all it’s pieces. I pack up my xbox, send it to Mexico, well, close enough. Apparently the only Xbox repair center in the US is located dead center on the Texas / Mexico boarder. I’ve been down to the area and lets just say that restaurant menus aren’t exactly in English. Anyway, that was a week ago. Calling them yesterday to see if the system was going to be repaired or replaced, just out of curiosity, they inform me it’s been marked for repair and should be on it’s way to me soon. This should also be a good time to point out that the original rep I talked to indicated it would be a good 3-5 weeks, and most likely after Thanksgiving, before I got my system back. Either they’re over estimating and over achieving to look good for the consumer, or someone is lying to me.
This time without my system might turn out to be a good thing. I’ve actually had a chance to let these games come out, be played and reviewed, and add all these factors into my purchase decisions. I might end up waiting on Guitar Hero and Assasins Creed until post-holidays, and picking up CoD4 and Mass Effect, which I think will give me more actual playing time.
Enough games. I always talk about games.
Life itself is going well. Work is keeping me busy, which is always a good thing. My case is coming along nicely. I have to repair the lower front panel because I’m retarded and took off the painters tape with paint covered fingers, leaving big finger prints on the freshly painted stripes.
My folks were thinking about coming down for the holidays but it looks like that won’t be happening, which is sad because I was really looking forward to seeing them. My brother will be starting school back up in January. He had taken a long double semester internship at Standards & Poor’s (aka, what you hear on the news all the time as the S&P 500), the investment firm. Apparently he’s doing quite well there, enough so to buy a 360 in a whim. He called me at about 2am one night to tell me how right I was and how much it kicked ass.
Other than that, not a lot going on. I’m being constantly reminded about how much Comcast sucks all, especially now that they took over Houston from RoadRunner. RoadRunner, despite being morons, actually worked quite well. I never had any problems with them service/speed wise. The instant Comcast took over, I had 3 modem outages that week. No joke. My speed has also been cut in half, and I’m not talking about my bittorrent traffic either, I mean surfing and checking email. They advertise something like 4mbps down/512 kbps up. I think I’m getting 1/4 of that. It’s basically DSL now. Hell, I might as well switch to DSL. For the same shitty connection I could be spending $20 a month instead of $60. Actually, now that they “apartment monopoly” law was passed, I’m not forced to use Comcast anymore. I could technically get OpLink, which for $44 a month, I could be getting 6 Mbps up / 768 Kbps down. Either that or that AT&T UVerse thing looks kinda interesting.
Oh, and one last thing. The new Streetlight Manifesto CD is the most brilliant piece of music I’ve heard in a very very long time. It’s ridiculously good. I’ve got a bud here who isn’t a big ska fan, who thinks it’s unbelievable. Even Lauren doesn’t mind it, lol. Jason, back me up on this one bud.
Matt out.
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