Category Rant

Seriously.  What happened?

Linkin Park has 2 absolutely amazing albums with Hybrid Theory and Meteora.  Not a dull song in the group, original music, awesome fast pace rhythms, and totally bad as solos.  Then what?  We got some remixes with Jay Z (which weren’t bad, just nothing new really), then we were handed the shit fest known as Minutes to Midnight.  While Minutes to Midnight had a few good songs on it like Bleed It Out and What I’ve Done, even those good songs didn’t sound like the Linkin Park we’d known and loved from Hybrid Theory and Meteora.

Well, everyone is allowed one stinker album right?  I figured I would let Minutes to Midnight slide and still call myself a Linkin Park fan.  That was until I heard the songs off A Thousand Suns… wow.  They got even worse than Minutes to Midnight.  What the hell?  A Thousand Suns doesn’t have a single good song on it.  They’re all electronic fucking garbage.  What happened to the bad ass guitar solos, bad ass drum, and original lyrics not the shit like “god bless us everyone, blah blah blah”.  Every single A Thousand Suns song is absolute garbage.  Just filth.

So again, I ask, WHAT HAPPENED?

Did someone get off drugs?  Someone go on drugs?  What?

Whatever it is, I am no longer a Linkin Park fan.  I am still a fan of their original albums, but this new stuff as just awful.

I leave you with my favorite Linkin Park song. RIP Linkin Park.

Two years ago I wrote about what Microsoft needed to do to turn their platform around.  Now with Windows Phone 7 only months away, it would appear Microsoft has failed in every way imaginable.

Windows Phone 7 will be a miserable failure.  There are many countless reasons why it is going to epic fail, but here are some of the most important:

1) Microsoft doesn’t know mobile phones from a hole in the ground.  Just look at the current state of Windows Mobile.  It’s built on the Windows CE platform, created in 1996.  Yes.  Let me repeat.  Windows Mobile is based on a platform created in 1996.  Sure, the platform has seen updates, but it’s still based on a world created 13 years ago.  Back when Windows 98 was nothing but a dream.   Windows Phone 7 is based on Windows CE.  Yup.  Microsoft’s newest “cutting edge” Phone OS is STILL based on Windows CE.  They just couldn’t get rid of it.  Thanks Microsoft.  The same bullshit you’ve been jamming down our throats for the past how many years that has NEVER worked right is your platform for the next Windows Phone?  EPIC FAIL.

2) The Kin is a disgusting failure.  The Kin is running a hacked down version of Windows Phone 7.  Don’t believe me it sucks?  Here are a few quotes regarding the Kin and it’s abilities:

“…Lofty goals indeed for a product like this, and unfortunately for everyone, Microsoft misses the mark by a long shot. It’s not even close.”

“…we also take issue with the browser, which is abysmally slow and buggy (it consistently crashed while trying to load any complex web pages like Engadget), and the email client, which seemed to have trouble displaying even the most rudimentary HTML messages”

“While using the One and Two we found ourselves consistently confused or surprised by how many bad little interface problems there are. Not only does the phone make it hard to do simple tasks — and not only are the social networking features poorly implemented — but the handsets are often sluggish, hiccupy, and downright crash-prone. We were told by the devices on more than one occasion that we needed to restart (while performing basic tasks), and often it would just throw us a blank screen while we waited for the device to come back from whatever tragic internal situation was occurring”

That’s enough of that.  If you want to read more though, you can head over to Engadget’s review of the Kin One and Two.

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I was setting up some brand new HP Probook’s today (typically VERY nice machines in my experience) when I was suddenly rendered crippled by a IMPOSSIBLE to use touch-pad.  What a DREADFUL piece of shit this new design is.

Basically, the touch-pad and buttons are all one surface.

Observe:

The problem comes from the fact that the “button area” is still part of the touch-pad.  So you place one finger on the button, and now you can’t use the fucking touch-pad.  Your cursor will either sit there and stare at you like a vegetable or it’ll jump all around the screen like crazy.  Either way, the touch-pad is completely unusable if you’re touching either button.  This is incredibly frustrating because my style of laptop mousing is resting one hand’s fingers on the buttons while using the other hand to navigate the mouse, or resting one finger on the button, while the other navigates the mouse for faster mouse action.  The only effective way to use this touch pad is with one hand and one finger.  Christ.  It’s awful.  Seriously.

I ended up grabbing one of those USB ball mice and plugging the damn thing in and using that, because trying to use that bloody touch-pad was making me want to kick puppies.  And I love puppies.

Thanks for the SHIT design HP.  I’m sure as hell glad this isn’t my machine.  I would be returning it if I had to put up with that damn thing.

It seems like only 7 short months ago I wrote… wait, 7 months?

I can’t believe it took 7 months… but yes folks, Fox has FINALLY canceled the Wanda Sykes show.  Let us all rejoice.

That is all.

Pssst, Walmart… it’s hard to believe your silly commercials about efficient truck routes and less cardboard in shipping to help save resources, when I go to your store, buy a 12 pack of soda and some saltine crackers, and I get a receipt that is 15 inches long!!!

Seriously?  2 items should warrant a receipt no longer than 4 or 5 inches.  A 15 inch receipt is just an extreme waste of paper.  I can’t believe your shitty commercials when you pull crap like this hundreds of thousands of times a day across the country.  No one wants to take your crappy survey, shrink the Xbox-huge logo at the top, shrink the barcode, reduce the white space.  Bam, 4 inch receipt.

Here, I even mocked one up for you.

It’s hard to even figure out where to start with a company as truly awful as New Wave Communications is, but I’ll do my best to start where my problems with them started, which is as soon as the took over my local cable network from Charter Cable in Spring of 2008.

Since the very first day New Wave took over and my IP address switched to their network I have had atrocious service, and no one from New Wave cares about it.  By fall 2008 I had called them no less then 10 times over a network congestion issue. I honestly lost count of how many calls I made and every single time I reached a “tech support” person, they were 100% incapable of understanding my problem and 100% unwilling to even do anything to attempt to solve it.  The exact problem I was having was network congestion.  During peak internet usage hours (evenings after work and weekends… basically any time I wanted to actually USE my internet), the service was unusable.  My ping times would often shoot from 30ms ping times to over 500ms ping times during peak hours.  Trying to use my “broadband” service for any “broadband” activities like streaming video, playing games online, was 100% out of the question.  Pages would often take minutes to load, streaming even music was not even possible.

At the time I didn’t know exactly what was happening, so I took it upon myself to write a script that sent out 1 ping per minute and log the response time.  After running the script for a few days I quickly realized that my problem was because of network congestion.  The sad thing is, I diagnosed in a few days, what New Wave had been unable to tell me for months.

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Apparently HP does.  In their mice.

Come on people.  It’s 2010.  Optical mice can be had from Newegg for $4.  I can’t believe ball-mice are still being packaged with new machines.  And this wasn’t even a cheap piece of crap Acer, this came with a brand new HP Proliant server!  Sheesh.  Spare no expense with that fancy fuckin technology why don’t yah?

I guess since it’s a server it’ll be remoted in to 99% of the time anyway, but still.  Like it would’ve broken HP’s bank to throw an optical mouse in there?

I had forgotten how absolutely frustrating ball mice are with out a perfectly flat surface until now.  Thanks HP.

For the most part Windows 7 is great.  There are a few – things – about it that annoy me, and I have found another.  This “feature” has popped up a couple times and is very frustrating when it does.

For files created/modified in the last 24 hours, Windows 7 does not display the file time in the File Properties dialog.  It just gives a very unspecific “X hours ago”.  What the fuck is this shit?

So if I wanted to know the EXACT time this file was created, I can’t see that.  Fan-fucking-tastic idea Microsoft.  Where do you idiots come up with this shit?  Seriously, who ever thought this was a good idea should be punched square in the balls.  What good does “5 hours ago” do.  Ok, so it was created some time 5 hours ago, giving an hour of buffer time in there.  That really doesn’t help me.

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