Category Archives: Consumer

Cheeky Bastard

Posted by on October 13, 2008 3 comments

I hate people.

Who drive, when I am driving.  Seriously stay off the road.  You suck at driving.  Being in the left lane does not make you cool.  Sorry, but I thought you should know.

Fall is a terrible time in my life now.  It’s championship of musical chairs and I am deaf.  (Don’t ask how I got there in the first place.  Blame the French judge.)  In no particular order (ul vs ol), here are the chairs:

  • Fallout 3
  • Midnight Club: Los Angeles
  • Saints Row 2
  • Fable 2
  • Far Cry 2
  • Quantum of Solace (Think Goldeneye in a COD4 engine)
  • Shaun White Snowboarding
  • Need for Speed Undercover

In addition I’ve been having issues with my spanking new computer.  I get an ATIKMDAG crash/recover when playing World of Warcraft.  It’s fairly annoying and I’ve tried everything short of RMAing stuff.  I’ve decided to just live with it and hope new drivers will fix the issue.  Very naive.  I should RMA the card before it’s too late.  Only issue is that WoW is the only application (including desktop) to cause the issue.  I did get the issue on the desktop when I went to the Cat 10 beta drivers.  That means very little to me considering they are beta drivers.  I have a feeling my sound card may be to blame.  The crashes seem to happen when new sounds or spell effects fire off.  Either graphics or sound related in my book.  (The card is definitely not underpowered.  I’ve got a 4870.  I could run 4 sessions of WoW and still be fine.)

iPhone has worked well since I traded in the POS one for this new one.

New Jack’s Manequin album is out: The Glass Passenger.  Pretty darn good.  My favorite track is American Love.  It’s got some kind of poppy 80s like beat to it that I love.

The wonderful new car broke 2000 miles today.  It received a chip in the windshield about a week ago.  I let a semi merge in front of me, being nice and not 1 second later up comes a rock.  That was a bad morning.

Back to the waterfall of work.  If anyone needs help with Hyperion Financial Management, Data Quality Management or Financial Reports, I’m available.  At the discount rate of $250 an hour plus expenses.

Wish me luck as I try to maintain my youth while I dive into the maw of adulthood.

If I seem a bit down, it’s because it’s near midnight and I’m doing work and not reading, playing games or sleeping.

A Foul Furnace Fumble

Posted by on September 4, 2008 2 comments

In today’s computer age, referrals and customer loyalty are the keys to success.  Small and Large companies alike rely on word of mouth advertising.  Hence the insurgence of viral marketing.  While this can provide tremendous benefit to some companies, it can be a veritable minefield for others.  Such is the case with McQuillan Brother’s Plumbing and Heating.

As some of my readers (Hello all 3 of you!) may know, my best friend Justin recently purchased a home.  He lives there with his wonderful new wife Amber.  There couldn’t be a kinder couple on the face of the earth.  They were looking forward to married life and enjoying the company of each other in their newly purchased house.  They took all the right steps and precautions in purchasing the house.  They had help from experienced home buyers and were fortunate enough to be buying the house from a very nice couple.

During the routine inspections, they had the furnace inspected.  Part of the closing agreement was to ensure that the furnace did not need to be “red tagged” (read: replaced).  The inspector from McQuillan gave them the green light and the house was eventually closed on.

Fast forward a few months.  The furnace has since the inspection not been used and we find ourselves in a frustrating situation.  This is because in an unrelated incident the A/C unit had gone out.  A different company was brought in to replace the A/C unit.  At no cost, the new company performed an inspection of the furnace.  It was at this point that the furnace was “red tagged.”  Keep in mind that the furnace had not been used , if even touched, since McQuillan inspected the furnace.

McQuillan is now fighting tooth and nail to try escape responsibility for poor quality of work.  It’s down right offending to find a company who has no customer loyalty or honor.  They must take no pride in the work they deliver.  If they can’t back up every inspection they do, they don’t deserve to be in business.

If you want to read more about this, make sure you head over to Justin’s site where he gives a much better explanation of why you and anyone you know should avoid ever doing business with McQuillan Brother’s Plumbing and Heating.

shatter terrible business practices

iSuck 2.0

Posted by on August 27, 2008 1 comment

I’ve done quite a bit of work on the Mighty Mite build, but this post is reserved for some ranting.

The new iPhone is a great wonder and a piece of crap.  As I may have stated earlier, my vibrate switch broke the first day I had my iPhone.  That was an annoyance more than anything but everything I read told me to bring it in and they would replace it.  I did that today and I have a new phone that seems to have a working vibrate switch.

However, before today it was able to cause great havok.  As I stated in a previous post, the phone had issues upgrading to 2.0.1.  I had to yoink out the USB cable in the middle of a restore to get it to stop restoring everytime I plugged the damn thing in.  (This did “fix” it.)  A week or two went by and I decided to upgrade to 2.0.2 the other night.  Mistake.  That failed upgrade “bricked” my phone.  Luckily Justin was there to help and provide some insight.  I spent 3-4 hours Tuesday night and Wednesday morning trying to breath life into the phone.  Thank god there is this mode “DFU” (which I think stands for “Definitely Fucked Up”), that allowed me to restore from a software boot (I think that’s what it did.)  It failed 3 times.  2 times trying to go to 2.0.0 and 1 time going to 2.0.2.  One last time before bed I tried to restore to 2.0.2.  I awoke in the morning to find it had succedd and it was looking for a backup image.  That was the final straw.  I brought it in today and told Apple my issues.  They were nice enough to exchange it on teh spot after running some diagnosis programs.

I brought the phone home, tried to restore the previous phones image.  That seemed to succed, but it again asked if I wanted to restore the phone or set up as new phone.  Not having anything to lose I choose to set up as a new phone.  Only this time I named it “Phail” and not “Cube Phone.”  Phail is certainly fitting for as I tried to upgrade to 2.0.2 tonight it again bricked my phone.  I got an error 1602 the first time.  I restarted itunes it saw the phone, thank god (unlike last night), and I tried to restore.  This time I got an error 13.  I fucking hate this piece of shit.  I’m uninstalling itunes and going to reinstall it.  Maybe I have a bad version of something.  I’m also going to switch USB ports.  If that doesn’t work I’m writing Apple a nasty email and I will demand retribution for all of my time.  So far I figure I’ve spent 15 hours, 30 Miles of gas and car use and loss of sleep to try and get this thing to work.   Now to the reinstall and redownload and reimage and reboot and re re re re re re re re re re!!!!

Not happy.

iBuy, iPay, iBreak, iPhone

Posted by on July 31, 2008 No comments

Justin convinced me into buying an iPhone. It was either the iPhone or the HTC touch pro. Seeing as the touch pro would be 800-1000 and not yet released, I think the iPhone is overall a good decision.

I have to hand it to apple, they know how to provide one sexy GUI. It is a pleasure to use the device (for the most part.) I was worried about the on screen keyboard, but the phone has a wonderful system for predicting what you want. In most cases I don’t have any issues getting the message across. Only in username and password fields is it an issue.

Microsoft Exchange is up and running with my Accenture email. It is fantastic. I feel so important now. Too bad Best Buy is against, but I can still use webmail to get at my best buy email.

My only gripe so far is that my vibrate switch broke. This seems to be a common problem for some of us and it looks like I will have to take it into one of these so called “genuises” to get it sorted out.

Other than that, I’m so impressed by the apps. Pandora and Twinkle (Twitter with so much more than just tweets) right now are just friggen cool. AIM is functional and there are plenty more free apps to try. I’m tempted to start programming some of my own. We shall see.

I only hope that I can get to bed tonight at a decent hour.

Apps I have and look useful:

  • Twinkle
  • AIM
  • Facebook
  • WordPress
  • Google Mobile App
  • Pandora