by Matt | Aug 15, 2002 | Imported Entry
Well, as luck would have it, my family is going away this weekend. Thursday through Sunday. Apparently they haven’t gotten enough baseball yet and are looking more more. There’s some tournament down on the Cape that they’ve been selected to be in. I say “good for them, great for me.” That means I get another three days of peace and quiet. My cold/allergies/sickeness has gotten better so I may actually be able to enjoy the weekend without being drugged up on Nyquil.
As for today, I might wonder over to EB and see what they have for a release date of UT2003. Every website that mentions it has a completely different date. Some say “next week” while some say Jan/Feb 2003. In the latest interview with the head designer he said we should have it “before it gets cold” which I take to mean September-ish.
Oh, and I almost forgot, last night I ordered a GearGrip Pro from Thinkgeek. I made sure I ordered the “large size” which it says will hold a full tower. We’ll see. That should ease my travels back and forth to Saturday’s game night.
by Matt | Aug 14, 2002 | Imported Entry
As my 3 year old cell-phone continues to cough and sputter its last ounces of battery life, I find myself vaguely in the market for a new one. Sure, I could probably make do with it for another year or so, or even buy an expensive battery replacement. But why spend $100+ on a new battery (the actual cost since my phone is discontinued) when I can spend $200 on a completely new phone that not only handles phone calls and voice mail, but email, web surfing, digital pictures, and games. I actually have new distinct directions I can go in. First, and I have PA to thank for this, I could get a HipTop from Danger Inc. It’s slick, it’s cool, it looks like a blackberry with more features AND I could even update my website with it. That would be cool. The service providers have yet to be determined however which makes me a little leary.
My other option is Sprints new service PCS Vision, a service which is almost exactly the same thing as the HipTop. The upside of the sprint deal would be that since I already have a sprint service agreement, I’d only need to upgrade the phone. I think the service charge difference is approx $4.99 and their customer service department is usually good about deals. I called to add minutes to my plan last year and they moved me up to the next service bracket for less than the service should have costed, all to “keep me as a valued customer” since my contract was going to expire.
At any rate, we may finally be getting cell phones as cool as our overseas counterparts. The phone markets in places like the UK and Japan are years ahead of the US and have been since we so geniusly deregulated the whole cellphone/digital infastructure. Sure, it creates competition, but companies are more worried about getting subscribers than giving us the newest technology to play with. Take the UK for example. I think they have 2 (maybe) service providers. So, it’s becomes a question of “which company has the coolest features and phones” instead of “will my service work here” or “whats this companies rate structure.” Then again, I’m probably the only one that want to play pac-man on his phone anyways.
Later.
by Matt | Aug 13, 2002 | Imported Entry
As if we needed any more proof that the DMCA was bull-shit and that the record industry is just out to cement their strangle hold on consumers rights…
“LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Video may have killed the radio star, but Forrester Research has said Internet piracy was not to blame — as record labels have claimed — for the 15 percent drop in music sales in the past two years. ”
Full Story: Internet piracy not guilty for flagging music sales
Just another happy thought to toss around in your head while you’re heading off to sleep. G’night my little digital deviants.
by Matt | Aug 13, 2002 | Imported Entry
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, copyright protection software has given way to anti-copyright software. I’m talking mainly about protected CDs and they’re weak and pitiful anti-piracy techniques. Thanks to hard working people who don’t give a flying fuck about this crap we have programs such as Clony, BetaBlocker, BlindWrite or Insektor, all of which circumvent multitudes of different protection systems. Insektor for example allows you to play backups of SafeDisc and Securom protected CDs. Betablocker allows for proper copying of SafeDisk 2 cds using CloneCD. All of these programs can be found very easily around the web. A quick search on Google turned up all of them for me. I love technology.
Links:
Clony XXL homepage
CloneCD.Net
CloneCD BetaBlocker Page
BetaBlocker site (???) in german.
BlindWrite
CloneCD Insektor Page
Speaking of technology, my favorite place for random tech-ish news is back online. NeoWin is reopen for buisness after a short downtime to figure out some backend stuff. Check’em out.
As for me, I still feel like crap. Durring the day it’s not that bad but at night I feel like my throat is going to explode in some Aliens-ish “theres something growing in my throat” sort of way. I’ve been coughing up very pleasent wads of something green-ish in hopes that the more I cough-up, the less remains for me to cough up later. At least that was the plan. I’ve also been reading my new book: Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. It’s a fantastic book. It basically points the finger at the rich and powerful (aka: republicans) for the sudden downturn in everything from the economy to the music industry. It’s quite an interesting read.
That is all.
by Matt | Aug 11, 2002 | Imported Entry
The only interesting thing I did today was pick up my parents from the airport, which I’m starting to think was a mistake. From the minute they got off the plane all they would talk about was baseball. Even my brother, Capt. Baseball, actually told them to, and I quote: “stop talking about f*ing baseball.” Adding to this is serious jet lag and a 3 hour time difference between the east and west coasts. This results in EVERYONE being in a seriously shitty mood. Especially when something doesn’t go their way. For instance, this evening my father tried to check his email. Adelphia, being the worst cable company in the world (yes, far worst than Comcast) has, at the moment, some very broken email servers. They’ve been trying to fix them for quite some time. Lucky for me it’s only incoming mail. Since I don’t use Adelphia for anything but outgoing I’m ok. Unfortunatly for my father, he relies on his email. Instead of A) trying to fix the problem, B) calling Adelphia to see what the problem might be or C) trying again later he chooses option D. Option D includes throwing a temper-tantrum like an 8 year old girl and throwing, yes throwing, various items from his desk across the room. Then, in a loud pissed off voice, declairing that the cable modem was going back tomorrow and that he “didn’t want to deal with this shit.”
You can see that we’re dealing with things in a mature and adult manner at this point. I almost told him to go sit in the corner for 10 minutes of quite time. As for my actual reaction I said something along the line of “just settle down and try it in the morning.” Apparently this wasn’t a good idea and I was met with a “and its all your damn fault, my computer worked fine before.” At this point, I would like to point out that his “computer” is a whopping 133mhz and is running Windows 95. So “working fine” is a term that shouldn’t even enter into the description of this giant paper weight. I don’t see how its my fault that his computer can’t physically handle a cable modem. Sure, the point to all this is that his email should have been working. Yes, it should have. Did I break it? No. You want to get pissed at someone, call Adelphia. Acting like a spoiled fucking child won’t help either. I know you’ve “had a long day” but fuck you.
So, if his royal highness gets his way, which he will, I’ll be offline for the rest of the summer. I don’t exactly relish that idea so I’ll simply have to steal his modem. Or he can buy me another one, since he happens to be using my old one at the moment. And if he doesn’t like me using “his” modem, too fucking bad, he shouldn’t have returned a modem that was working fine just because he doesn’t know how to use it.
I’ve even offered to fix the problem or at the very least call Adelphia. That apparently wasn’t good enough. No, we’d rather complain about things that we could easily fix. It’s much easier to live with something when you’ve gone out of your way to prove that you’re incorrectly right. He’ll probably simmer down after a nights sleep… but he’ll probably return the modem anyway. I should also mention that while this story paints my father in a bad light, he actually gets pissed off quite rarely and is usually a mild mannered baseball coach type of person. That’s what happens when you spend all day travelling I suppose. Well, if I don’t post for a while, don’t be surprised. Later.
by Matt | Aug 11, 2002 | Imported Entry
Apparently Scott has been having a rough day. He also apparently hates…
Pop Music:
“The music industry easily at the lowest point it has ever been. Each day, the radio waves of America are infested with a combination of terrible pop quintets, rappers who rap about rapping with other rappers while wrapping things, rock groups whose most inspired lyrics could pass for a LiveJournal entry, and that terrible “Hero” jingle from Spider Man which sounds like it begins midway through the damn song.”
Moby:
“Of all the faux underground music that exists today, one person stands out above the rest as the most haughty, irritating, and completely useless of the artists of this type. This one man does all he can to try to seem different, but ends up just looking conceited and whiny. This man is Moby.”
And the movie Signs:
“Movies like this are mainly why I dislike seeing things in the theater from the month of April through the month of September. Everything that comes out in that time period is designed to rake in maximum profit for as little quality as can possibly be afforded. Now that M. Night Whatever has a shitload of money one would hope that he would be making better movies in the future.”
Ouchy. I just thought I’d share since I didn’t do anything interesting today of my own. Enjoy the bitter opinions of Something Awful
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