Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Unknown Said...

Fed Ex Lies

I spent the a large part of today working from home waiting for a Fed Ex delivery. I waited and waited and waited. I was watching the package tracker on-line all day. At 6:45 I decided to run down to the office to see if Fed Ex had dropped off my package there early in the morning and failed to tag my door. My wife and son waited at home while I did this. When I returned,5 minutes later, my wife reported that nobody had come by. I didn't need her to tell me that, though, since the Fed Ex truck couldn't have gone through without me seeing it during that time. However, when I checked the on-line tracker it said that delivery had been attempted and that nobody had been available. I checked saw this at 6:51 and, oddly enough, it said that 6:51 was the time of the attempted delivery and I though "He's right outside! Somehow I must have missed him!" so I looked. He wasn't there. In fact he wasn't anywhere in the neighborhood since in order to get in or out of the are he would have to have driven where I could see him out of my office window. I think the driver just got lazy and didnt feel like finishing his route so he lied and said I wasn't home. He never even went by. If he did go by early in the morning he didn't leave a tag or leave it at the office. The office opens at 9 and the wife didn't leave, today, until 10 so he didn't come "after we left for work but before the office opened." So there was a two hour window in which there was nobody in my apartment today but during that time the office was open and there were no packages left in the door (which is what everyone usually does) and no tags left on the door. I'm considering taking the day off work tomorrow so I can call the dude a liar to his face when he delivers it tomorrow... assuming he delivers it tomorrow. Maybe he just plain kept it.
Unknown Said...

Lumines

Pronounced *luminous*, this game takes way too much of my time. I was trying to explain to someone, today, how good this game is. Words can't do it justice. That's why there's this. It's tiny and only has a few levels and the graphics are about .0163 as badass as the 360 version but still, it'll give you the idea.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Unknown Said...

Swearing in the office increases moral.

"Swearing in the office increases moral." was the gist of a headline I was Y!IM linked by Mean Jean yesterday. It was an article written about some researchers who were claiming exactly this: that swearing in the office allowed employees to more accurately express annoyance and more completely diffuse frustration. There was more to it than that. It even included some proof/evidence in the form of research result interpretations. I saw this on Digg.com today and not only related to it directly but also related it to the article about workplace swearing I had already enjoyed. I did swear (to myself anyway) that I wouldn't post anymore videos for a while but fuck it. I'm doing it anyhow.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Unknown Said...

Word of the Week 10.15.07

Teabagging: a slang term for the act of a man placing his testicles, specifically the scrotum, in the mouth or on the face of another person, often in a repeated in-and-out motion and often combined with the Turkey Slap.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Unknown Said...

People Are Stupid...

I work for an ISP. I work in the field in a fairly large market with a couple of branches that shoot off to cover more remote areas. One of these areas is pretty far out. The microwave link from the main market to this town alone is 17 miles long and there are no main roads going directly from one to the other. Getting there is an hour long pain in the ass of driving through alternating chunks of Amish country and butt raping hillbilly backwoods. I don't enjoy having to go there.

I went there on Thursday, though. There was a customer who was complaining of slow speeds. No signal? That's my department. Throughout my career, however, slow speed has almost always meant that the problem is on the customer's end. Our phone techs are absolutely useless though so they, as our phone techs nearly always do, blundered past about 300 obvious signs and issued a request for me to check it out.

I get there and do my initial assessment.

1. Good signal.
2. Wireless router with 1 desktop, 1 laptop, and one xbox 360.
3. Computer work area completely covered with food crumbs as if an animal had been living there.
4. Customer who couldn't have been more of a doofus if he'd had buckteeth and laughed like Goofy.
5. Internet speeds are extremely slow.

I ask him to turn off the wireless laptop. I reset the router. Improvement already (duh) noticeable. I begin a series of ping tests. Extremely high latency. Customer is in my ear bitching that Halo 3 is unplayably laggy and blah blah blah. Is your computer on when you are having lag problems with Halo 3? Yes. Hmmm... I wonder. Go to system tray, right click on Limeware icon and choose exit. Ping latency clears up immediately. I told the customer I turned off Limewire and it fixed the problem and he informed me that he didn't have limewire on. I turned it on. Showed him as the problem came back. Clicked the red x to exit and showed him that it was still running in the sysytem tray. Closed it from the system tray and showed him that the problem had gone.

He had songs and some (and of course I looked at his queue! are you kidding?) seriously kinky ameteur porn downloading about which he made a really pathetic excuse. Apprently he "accidentally clicks on porn sometimes when he's choosing songs to download." I don't know what kinds of songs come up with the search terms that bring up this particularly consistent strain of porn. If I ever hear a song called "Teen Rape" from a band called "Russian Amateurs" I'll entertain the possibility of believing this dudes story.

Anyhow, he proceeds to tell me, as I'm recommending anti-spyware software, that his computer is spyware free because Norton scans come up clean. His norton is in a state of warning which, when checked, says that it has long since expired. His virus definitions date back to 2005. He also states that he's using Limewire pro so his music downloads are all legal. That's when I chose to stop keeping my mouth shut. I explained that paying Limewire just means that you are getting the spyware free version of Limewire's software. The downloads are still illegal. He countred by stating that because he's not selling the stuff he downloads it is legal. I explained that it's illegal either way but that your more likely to get caught sharing than you are downloading. He counters that he doesn't share. He downloads the songs directly to My Documents and bypasses Limewire's "Shared" folder. Aww... stupid man. Unless you know what you are doing this does not prevent you from sharing. He didn't know what he was doing. I showed him, with delight in my heart, that for years he had been sharing his entire My Documents folder with everyone on Limewire. This included family photos, personal documents (his Resume and the like) and home movies. He told me I was wrong but as I clicked through the options in Limewire I got to watch it dawn on him that I wasn't. I explained to him about file sharing and legalities. He didn't understand how they could tell where it was coming from since his computer had a private ipaddress from the router. The router has an ip address from the ISP. It's like a funnel. This shit isn't conceptually difficult unless your in serious denial about the fact that your bedroom pics of your girlfriend have been shared with p2p users the world wide. HAHAHAHAHA. Yeah, my meeting with this guy went on forever. He wanted me to watch him play Halo 3 so he could show me how it lags and prove that turning off Limewire didn't fix anything. Of course, Halo 3 performed perfectly because turning off Limewire had, in fact, fixed the problem. He wanted to show me his videos of him playing Halo 3 and explain how he was putting them on youtube. He even explained how he had made a (godawful) intro graphic to match his Xbox Live screen name. When he finally conceded that everything I had told him was correct and that the problem had nothing to do with me or the ISP I turned to leave. His girlfriend came home at that moment. She was pretty and well dressed. She spoke to me for a few minutes. She seemed pretty smart too. She certainly seemed to not only understand my explanation but also seemed to have known in advance that the problem was no with the ISP and that her boyfriend was just a big windy doofus.

So there it is. If anyone is interested contact me and I'll tell you where she is and shit. Someone needs to rescue her. She could do better... easily. Most women could, my wife included. This, however, was an extreme case. So... eligible bachelors in OH please email me and I'll find a way to get you in contact with her.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Unknown Said...

Gingerminge Denied

Most sources list today (Tuesday Oct. 9th) as the release date for Valve's Orange Box (a five in one game pack consisting of re-releases of Some semi-aged Half Life content along with some Brand Spanking new Half Life and two completely new games). I have been excited for this release since the Xbox Live videos started coming out detailing Team Fortress 2 but what really sold me was the video for Portal. I made some calls to find out where I should go to get the game at midnight. Walmart didn't have any. The game released tonight at midnight (1 hour and 23 minutes ago) but Walmarts in the area did not have a single copy. Representatives from Meijer said, however, that they were supposed to have copies and that they would go on sale at midnight exactly. I gave in to my urges and went to the Meijer on Stroop. I asked someone in person. He confirmed what I had been told. I went back in at 10 to midnight and a Meijer employee approached me and stated that they had combed through the shipment that was supposed to have the games but there were none there. They hadn't recieved either their new games or their new cd releases. Only the new DVDs seemed to make it through. He called the Meijer on Alex Bell. Same story. How the hell does a highly anticipated game go on sale and not a single retailer has a copy? They weren't sold out they just didn't have any. Game Crazy doesn't have any. I called them earlier in the day and they stated they would get them on Wednesday. Everyone blamed it on the Columbus Day holiday. WTF. Ship a day earlier. That's hard. Is Columbus Day a postal holiday? I thought I got mail today. Does OH celebrate Columbus Day? I could have sworn I saw school busses and kids at school today. Why do we care about Columbus? He "discovered" a land that already had people living on it and was also already known to Europeans other than himself at the time. He found no pepper so he found some spicy chilis and called them pepper. Good job! His ribalderous crew set an instant precident for the oppression of indiginous people that lasts to this day. He was probably bad in the sack too. Fuck Columbus.

Monday, October 08, 2007

EZMezzo Said...

It's BACK!

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Unknown Said...

Informational poetry of the week: 10.08.07

lex parsimoniae
nominalist heuristic maxim
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
Occam's Razor cuts as the crow flies

-KMB

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Unknown Said...

Oh Holy Chrispy Christ's Milkless Lavender Nipples!

I am often enraged by things I read.
I am not often as enraged as I was when I read this.