Worked my booty off this weekend to get Chris’ new design up for Flawd Clothing. I suggest you all check out the site and let me know what you think— from a technical and/or design, etc. point of view. And buy some shirts while you’re at it

I love where chocolate is splashing on him at the end. WTF? Hah. Literally a CHOCOLATE RAIN. I get it!

Verizon once again screws Heather and I over. We went 90 minutes over our “family share” plan, and will have to pay 45 cents for each of those minutes. $40 extra dollars this month.

Verizon can send you free texts to tell you your bill is ready, how many minutes are left, what your current bill is, etc… but they can’t send you an automatic “heads up” warning when your minutes are almost gone? Of course they can’t. It would kill their profits from these sort of scenarios. And do you really think those extra minutes are worth 45 cents a pop to them? No way.

I’d say we’re switching to another company when our plan is up, but they all suck. Some major reform needs to happen in that industry and fast. Bah.

http://inquisitivesensitive.blogspot.com/

You should all check it out, and add her to your feed reader. I know she’s got quite a bit to say…

I’m thankful for my amazing wife, Heather. She supports me in every way, even when I’m being a bit eccentric.

I’m also thankful for Heather’s family, my own family, and our friends, for being so supportive of us and helping us through the engagement, wedding and our marriage.

I thought I’d throw in a cute picture of Joshua (my sister’s son), too. They all live in Arizona now, so I don’t get to see the little guy as much anymore. I certainly miss him. It was only a short while ago he was born premature, but pulled through and look at him now! What a cutie.

What are you thankful for?

Overall I like it, but there’s still some slightly rough edges that will hopefully be addressed via minor updates.

Until I’m able to write further on the subject, I’ll leave you with the swank “Now Playing” screen:

7:52 pm Update: If you’re having album art troubles (where some of the album art doesn’t match properly), check out this workaround from Microsoft. I had a few that were off, but are now fixed.

From http://www.austinpc.com/TF2/ (NCSoft):

(second place: girl in a splicer costume from Bioshock!)

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From http://wire.ggl.com/2007/10/29/team-fortress-2-the-best-halloween-cosplay-ever/:

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From http://kotaku.com/gaming/halloween-hangover/how-nihilistic-celebrated-halloween-318050.php (Nihilistic Software):

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From http://kotaku.com/gaming/halloween-hangover/how-ea-la-celebrated-halloween-318045.php (EA Los Angeles):

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From http://kotaku.com/gaming/halloween-hangover/how-blizzard-celebrated-halloween-318035.php (Blizzard Software):

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From http://www.flickr.com/photos/klutzo/sets/72157602826116221/ (Bioware Games):

I was using my favorite audio player/manager, MediaMonkey, this afternoon and ran into a really annoying bug. All of the songs in a particular album would play except for one. MediaMonkey would just skip the file, no error or anything.

At first I thought the file was “corrupt”, but it couldn’t be. It had only been ripped a few weeks ago, and plays fine in other players, such as Winamp, VLC and Foobar2000. I started to think logically about the problem, and noticed that particular track had parenthesis in it’s filename. I removed the parathesis, and replaced them with another character. Nope, still skipping.

So I thought more, and concluded that the filename was the longest filename on the album. I removed a few characters and tried again. Voila, now it works!

I do some research and find that MediaMonkey (at least the new beta for Vista) uses the Quicktime API to playback AAC files. I decided to try an experiment, and attempted to load the troublesome file (with it’s long filename) into Quicktime via Quicktime’s own “open file” menu. It’s leads me to a wonderfully unhelpful error message of “Error -37: a bad filename or volume name was encountered”. Oh, really?

Doing even further research, it seems that Quicktime can’t handle a file with a name longer than 60 characters. What the crap?

Searching around the web, I find a handful of people who have run into this same problem. Why hasn’t this been fixed yet? Is this why iTunes automatically stores most songs in a “cut off filename” state when “Keep my iTunes Folder Organized” is checked?

Ugh. Will someone at Apple get their head outta their butt, fire the entire Quicktime/iTunes for Windows development staff, and start over? I’m tired of it crashing, having exploits, making my computer slow to a crawl, and not playing back “HD” content on even screaming-fast PCs. All major reasons I switched to MediaMonkey. But alas, since MediaMonkey relies on Quicktime for it’s AAC playback, I’m going to have to truncate all my AAC filenames until a fix comes out.

Michael Jackson - Thriller

BYU Vocal Point - Thriller

"Final Fantasy" Thriller:

"13 Going on 30" Thriller:

And finally, Thriller like they do it in India:

Since there is no way for me to directly link this content, and I also wish to keep it for history’s sake, I reproduce it here without permission of Ramona Sentinel or Keith Hansen. If anyone from the Sentinel (or Keith) reads this and wants it taken down, please contact me. I did not write the following editorial; Keith Hansen did at RamonaSentinel.com — I should say that I wholeheartedly agree with the tone and statements made in this editorial. If the water board members did in fact do something “wrong”, then they will be punished for it after investigations. But until then, let’s cut them some slack, and not try to instantly strangle them. Also, most geniuses in Ramona don’t realize that the Ramona Fire Department is actually a department UNDER the water district. Do we really want to affect our firefighters with this mess, too?

A mob mentality seems to be growing around Ramona since the smoke and fire moved out of town.

It seems that some folks are after the hides of Ramona Municipal Water District board members and the general manager. We’ve been fielding phone calls from irate district customers complaining that the district did not have 20/20 foresight, leaving Ramona without water when the electric lines feeding the pumping station in Poway were burned by the Witch Creek Fire.

One may have noticed signs taped to the backs of portable toilets along Main Street that essentially call for the resignations of all board members and the management of the water district. Well, that’s everyone’s right as a paying customer to demand service. It’s also everyone’s right to sit back and gather facts before throwing gas on a fire!

Critics said that board president Bob Krysak was nowhere to be found during the raging inferno. That’s correct. He along with his elderly mother (who is on oxygen) were forced to evacuate with the rest of us.

Director Kit Kissinger lost his house in the blaze, and director Doug Wilsman, who has asthma, left when wind-driven smoke came over his house and it was obvious the fire was coming. Directors Jim Robinson and Red Hager remained in town.

It is our understanding that board members stayed in constant contact with district management.

I’m not sure, but I do believe that the evacuation order given by law enforcement was mandatory for all citizens. Members of the water board were among those of us who where told to get out when the reverse 911 order came.

Now, for those among us so eager to point the finger at these folks and demand their resignation, I’d ask all of you to stop and think for just one moment before you throw the rope over that low-hanging branch to lynch these five citizen board members. First, consider that the fire roared through Ramona like a locomotive bent on killing everyone and everything in its path. No amount of water or flame retardant was going to quench that fire’s lust for fuel.

Second, the board, even if they would have had an emergency meeting in the middle of Main Street while the embers were flying around their heads, it is doubtful they could have forced the fire to stop.

Third, the problem was in Poway. The electrical feed that powers the huge pumps to bring water up the hill was cut off when this demonically driven fire moved down the hill. Even if the board and the general manager had been there 10 seconds prior to or after the fire hit the pumping station, there was nothing that could have been done to pump water up the hill.

Fourth, even if there was fault, however great, is there no more room in our town for giving each other a bit of slack? The board is made up of citizens — just like you and me. I don’t know about you, but I’ve made a mistake or two in my lifetime, and I’d venture to guess so have you.

Finally, if the mob does prevail and the board does resign under pressure and the general manager is forced out of his position, who is going to take their place? Will it be a group of village idiots who have no idea of how a water district is operated or maybe we’ll be lucky and get five people with Ph.D.s who have IQs over 200, but don’t know the first thing about running the water district.

Some have said there was no contingency plan. No alternative source for water. Yup, that’s right. The old back-up source for water was the Barger operation, which was too costly to run and, as I understand it, just plain worn out. The board decided it was too expensive to operate and did not want to saddle district customers with the cost of running an obsolete system. So, they voted not to include the Barger system in this year’s budget.

“Yeah, well they should have known!” has been the outcry from the mob. Well, they like everyone else had not predicted the Santa Ana winds to blow into town last week and spark an inferno that would wipe out the lives of folks from our town.

Let’s focus on those folks who need our support. There’ll be plenty of time for a good lynching after the entire matter has been investigated. If they are negligent, I’m certain we can get a good deal on hanging rope!

Keith Hansen

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness.

Mark Twain

Okay, I messed up. This past month, especially during the honeymoon, I was using my cell phone’s internet client to check my e-mail, etc… I didn’t think it’d be that big of a deal. Maybe $10–$15 worth of charges, right? I get my latest Verizon cell phone bill and it’s almost $100 more than usual. Apparently I used 6 megabytes of data, and Verizon wants $97 for it. What.. the.. f—k?

To rub salt in the wound, Verizon offers a pre-paid “data block” of 10 megabytes for $25. Or unlimited data usage for $40. But of course, they can’t retroactively add these plans to your phone if the bill has been generated, according to them. Which is total baloney. According to the woman I spoke to, if I had changed my plan last week (to have the data block), I wouldn’t have had to pay this charge. Glorious!

I know the error is clearly on my side, but don’t you think they could have a little compassion for someone? The $95 for 6 megabytes is clearly raping the customer for no good reason, when compared to their other plans— that’s $15 per megabyte, compared to the pre-paid 10 megabyte block coming out to $4 a megabyte. Blah.

Also, looking at my phone bill, I noticed minutes deducted for calling voicemail. I was under the impression that calling your voicemail was always free with Verizon. Bzzzt. Wrong. According to Wikipedia (and other sources):

Verizon Wireless charges customers peak minutes if a user dials his/her voicemail during peak hours which is in contrast to its competitors. A customer may have mobile to mobile but will still be charged peak minutes for dialing his/her voicemail. Many customers are used to having free minutes when checking voicemail and are unaware that Verizon Wireless is deducting peak minutes.

Awesome!

Anyways, when our contract is up, Heather and I will most likely be finding another wireless provider.

Heather and I had to evacuate Ramona due to the recent Southern California wild fires. We’re safe, and our house is okay. Pray for everyone in this town, and in California, who might have suffered losses.

Heather and I joined together in Holy matrimony on October 13th, 2007. Amazing!

The honeymoon’s been a long week, and we’re still decompressing from it all. Expect a full update soon.

Until then, check out some of the wedding photos via my flickr account.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon unveiled their new “amazonmp3” service a short while ago, and it instantly replaced iTunes as my provider for purchasing legal music. Bye bye, iTunes, with your DRM/protection. Yes, I know Apple sells “unprotected” files via their store, but you’re paying more for that. At AmazonMP3, you’re not. Most tracks are .99 or .89, which is fine by me.

If you don’t understand what I’m saying.. If you purchase music through iTunes, just plain ‘ol .99 cent tracks, you’re paying for a track that is “protected” and locked to only work with iTunes and iPods. You can’t using the music in Windows Media Player, or any non-iPod digital audio players (well, you can, if you burn a CD, then re-import it, but that results in a loss of quality, and who has the time?!) — Apple is basically limiting what you can do with music you _own_.

Anyways, Amazon has a little downloader program too to help automatically download tracks you purchased and stick them into Windows Media Player or iTunes for you automatically.

If you like paying for music, head over to Amazon’s site and start browsing. They’ve got over two million songs. And the sound quality is great. Amazon says they’re 256kbps, but some of the tracks I’ve downloaded are actually VBR MP3s, encoded with Lame 3.97, using the profile “MP3 VBR V0”. If you ask the guys over at Hydrogen Audio, they’ll tell you those settings are awesome.

If you use Vista, you’ve run into this problem. Vista seems to think that every folder contains music, because the “Artists”, “Album”, “#”, “Genre” and “Rating” columns are always visible. Look at my example above. This is after resetting all of the file type settings, etc… and Vista still thinks that a directory containing two MDB (Access databases) and a ZIP file warrant showing media columns. Ugh.

Please, Microsoft, fix this for SP1. The fact that it isn’t fixed already via a hotfix speaks volumes about how slow you react to even the smallest of bugs.

Just got a Samsung 22” LCD today, which is now my primary display. My older 20” Dell is now my secondary/side display.

And hence, the current state of my desk:

Wasn’t that fascinating?

Yes, when you think PETA, think naked girls:

You guys are real winners! You sure convinced me to join your group after that video…

Oh wait, you didn’t. This hamburger is tasty. Mmm mmm good.

Heather and I registered (on our wedding registry) for a Dyson vacuum cleaner, and my mother was generous enough to purchase it for us. Today was my first time using the vacuum, and it impressed the heck outta me. This picture says it all:

That’s almost four inches of solid dirt, along with hair, fluff, whatever sitting on top. Yuck. I knew my house was dirty, but not this dirty.

Definitely the best vacuum I’ve ever used/owned, and for $400, it better be  The wife-acceptance-factor was very low for this at first (due to the price), but she now sees just how good it is at what it does.

Ahoy! Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day! Watch ye the video above, and ye be learn’n thar language!

Check it out. Microsoft’s selling Office 2007 Ultimate, which pretty much is every Office thing you can get, for only $59.95. But you have to be a student, with a current student ID and e-mail address. The site is http://theultimatesteal.com/ — check it out! And then you’ll be as amazed as that guy over there —>

Verizon Wireless wants to sell your personal information to marketers. Make sure they can’t do that, call this number: 1–800–333–9956. I just did it, took about 5 minutes to opt out of both Heather and I’s cell phones, and it was all automated.

As a side note, it really upsets me that so many companies sell your information like that. The law should state that the consumer is by default opted-out..

On October 13th, 2007, I will be marrying Heather Jones. And it will be amazzziiiiing.

She is everything I could’ve hoped for in a mate.. and more. As corny as it sounds, she does complete me! I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, and can’t wait to see what the future has in store, good or bad. We will face it together, side by side.

I remember finding this poem years ago, and really liking it. It seems rather poignant now, so I thought I’d share it again:

Storms
By Margie DeMerell

There will be storms, child
There will be storms
And with each tempest
You will seem to stand alone
Against cruel winds

But with time, the rage and fury
Shall subside
And when the sky clears
You will find yourself
Clinging to someone
You would have never known
But for storms.

I’m sorry I rant so much, but these things are really upsetting me lately. Maybe you can relate to some of the topics?

Dell – A friend of mine, Nicole, brought me her Dell laptop to take a look at, since it will no longer boot. I figure it’s a bad hard drive.. the signs point to that, so I order a drive and stick it in, preparing to reinstall Windows. System can’t find the drive.. or wait, it can, oh wait.. it can’t. It randomly just doesn’t see the hard drive. I check online, and find that the world pretty much agrees that the Dell Inspiron 5150 is the crappiest model of laptop to ever roam this earth, plagued with engineering flaws that cause chips to crack, the CPU to overheat (2), and power plugs to short out. This led to Dell getting a class-action lawsuit brought against them, and them losing. As part of the settlement, they must pay for repairs up until Sept. 30th, 2007.

Now, Nicole’s already had the motherboard replaced by a tech once before, sent the laptop in for repair, had yet another motherboard replacement, a power adapter replacement, etc… and it’s still not working right. I had her speak to Dell again and get another motherboard. They say they can’t send one at first, citing some policy that once a motherboard’s been sent out, they can’t send out another (what?!) but the tech eventually agrees to send one out. They receive it the next day, and I examine it. The “new” board is actually refurbished from 2005 and looks terrible. I decide to swap it out anyway, and what do you know? It doesn’t work.

I’ve heard that some people have had luck e-mailing the “Customer Advocate” team at Dell (Customer_Advocate@Dell.com) and I did e-mail them six days ago, but haven’t heard a peep. I’m e-mailing them back tonight and asking for them to at least respond. I’m seriously doubting they’ll bother responding back.

Microsoft/Windows Vista – I had to completely re-install Vista two days ago, because SQL Management Studio stopped connecting to servers. Just straight up would not connect to any server anymore. Just gave me a generic fatal network error message. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, cleaning out the registry, deleting files, etc… just couldn’t get it to work. And seeing as SQL Management Studio is pretty much a requirement to do my job, I had to reinstall everything to get it working again. Ugh.

Then, I decided to upgrade my laptop’s hard drive and memory, since I had skimped on it before, but now that I use it for work, I need it to be much faster. Bought a 100 gig 7200 RPM laptop hard drive and two gigabytes of RAM. Put the new hard drive in, and Vista says it’s now deactivated. What?!

Maybe you know that I’ve had problems with Vista’s lame activation in the past. How about the time I put in a soundcard? Or the time I reinstalled Vista (after having it installed for months beforehand?) Now I get it for installing a hard drive. Of course I have to call, read off a number to a guy in India, and then he reads me back another code, and I’m activated again. What a waste of my time.. and there was really no reason to get “deactivated” in the first place.

Microsoft/XBox 360 – My XBox 360 recently started getting the red rings of death. It wasn’t so bad at first, but then it got ridiculous, locking up like 20 minutes into a DVD, etc… so I decided to send it in. The first call, I spent about an hour waiting and talking to a tech, leading me through troubleshooting steps (which obviously aren’t going to fix the red rings problem.) Of course I get disconnected in the middle of this, so I give up for that night and try again a short while later. This time, the tech tells me that their computer systems are down, and I need to call back in 30 minutes. Ok.. so I do call back, and the automated voice prompts tell me that I can just do a service request online. Well why didn’t you say so in the first place?

So I file a request, they send me a little box to package up my XBox 360, and I send it back (to somewhere in Texas.) You can check the status of your repair via their http://service.xbox.com/ site.. at first it said my unit had not yet been received, then it changed to received.. and now it says “No Repair”, and that my warranty is invalid. Obviously I freaked a little, and snooped around online for “no pending repair”. Looks like this means they swapped it out for a refurbished console. Okay, that makes sense, but why should the service status be so misleading? Why can’t it say “swapped out” or “replaced” or “replacement shipped”? Instead, I have no way of even knowing if the accepted my repair, shipped it, etc.. talk about lame.

I guess I’ll wait a few more days and see if an XBox 360 comes to my door via UPS. If not, I’ll have to call and deal with a guy in India.. (gee doesn’t that sound familiar?)

Nissan – I love my car. No really, I do. The navigation system needs work, but other than that, gravy. Except I keep having a problem where my driver’s seat has it’s leather “unhooked” from the seat itself, near where the seat touches the center console. I attribute it to me being a bigger guy, but still, it shouldn’t be coming undone. I’ve had Nissan fix this twice now, and it still keeps popping off. So I e-mailed corporate and they e-mailed me back days later, asking for my mileage and where I last had it serviced. I send them back the information, and they say a “specialist” will be in touch with me by the following business day. It’s been two days, and nothing. I’m not that upset yet, but when you say following business day, you probably should mean it.

But even if they do contact me.. say, tomorrow.. what is this “specialist” going to do for me? Just tell me to bring it in to get fixed? It obviously keeps happening.. it seems like an engineering problem to me. I don’t sit in my car funny, aka slamming your butt onto the seat as you jump in. And I always try to be “centered” in my seat, so I just don’t get it.

 

Anyways, I’m sorry for such a long rant. But maybe you can relate to some of these. I don’t think I’m expecting too much from these companies, and it just goes to show how little they care for their customers in general.

(from the opening of The IT Crowd, series 2, episode 3)

All the internet's memes in one video.. it’s amazing!