Category Rant

Yup, that’s right.  She is a talentless hack, and every time I hear her obnoxious voice on tv, it makes me want to change the channel.  Seriously… she is not funny, she is annoying, and usually offensive.

I can’t wait for Fox to cancel what will surely be one of the worst shows to ever air on Fox.

I don’t have much else to say about this other then most people across the country seem to feel the same way

Apparently Hulu will begin charging for it’s content in 2010
Hulu has done all it can to push away viewers of it’s service and it looks like it is going to deliver the final blow.
Why does Hulu think they can charge for their mediocre-quality streaming service that locks people in to their site and their ads… when anyone can download high quality HD rips of the shows WITH OUT ads for free?
I just can’t grasp where they are getting the idea that this will actually be a successful pay-for service.
News Corp (who owns Hulu) issued a statement saying “It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online.”

Hahaha, wow… what a bunch of pompous pricks. Good luck with that News Corp.  You make it sound like you deserve money for streaming media online.  Sorry, that is not how the internet works.

As I stated in my other article, I think you’ll find that people will do 1 of 2 things when you start charging for service. 1) They will simply go with out. People use it because it is free. Charging for that isn’t going to instantly create a group of people willing to pay for it. Or 2) People will use alternative methods to download shows and watch them.

So lately I have been bombarded with these “Wirelessly Charge Your Shit!” ads from Best Buy for a product called “Powermat”.  So I did some looking in to it and decided it is one big ass bucket of fail.  They claim it to be convenient, an energy-saving, and neater.

First off, lets take a look at convenience.  They say this because you won’t have to plug in your devices.  You just set them on the mat, and it charges via electromagnetic induction.  Well, that may be true, except they leave out this fact in the commercial… there are only Powermat cases that attach to devices for 8 devices.  Yup… unless you own 1 of those 8 devices, you get to use the Powermat “Tip”.  The “tip” is a white hunk of plastic that you plug in to your device’s USB port when you want to charge it.  Wait… what?   So you still have to plug in your phone to charge it?!  Oh, and it must remain perfectly seated ON the powermat, WHILE it is plugged in?  SERIOUSLY?!?!  What kind of fail is this?  So let me make sure I have this right.  To use the powermat with my HTC Fuze, I would have to plug in the “tip” and set my phone on the mat, and leave it there.  That means I can’t pick my phone up and use it while it is charging.  How the fuck is that convenient?  That sounds like a pain in my ass to me!  I frequently use my phone while it is plugged in and charging, whether it is playing games, watching videos, surfing the web, or talking on it.  The powermat would prevent me from doing any of those things.

Next, they claimed it saves energy by shutting off when you’re not using it.

I quote from this YouTube video:

“…you’re also using a lot of power especially when the products are not being charged, you know, nobody really unplugs their stuff “

Ole Ron claim that leaving your chargers plugged in is using energy.  Well, this claim sounded like pure bullshit to me, so I tested it.  Here is a picture of my HTC Fuze charger plugged in to a Kill-a-Watt power meter, showing how much energy is being used when my phone is not plugged in to it.  Get ready for this… it may surprise you:

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Well, it’s a mystery as to what the hell happened to my parcel, but it looks like it has been to hell and back…

When I received it it was folded in half and covered in packing tape.  Upon closer inspection, it looked like someone has cut it in half and taped it back up.

Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that my goods were rifled through to see if there was anything worth stealing in it (there wasn’t to the average joe)?  Maybe I am just being paranoid?

So I cut the tape and dumped out everything in the envelope.  My paypal receipt and the plastic baggie my product came in were completely mutilated.  Corners cut off and missing, pieces sliced away…  I know UPS opened it because I couldn’t find all of the pieces cut out of the plastic baggie… and my item was not in the plastic baggie, it was just sitting in the envelope.  Luckily my item was not damaged durring whatever destruction happened to my envelope on its journey from California to here.

This folks, is why UPS should go out of business:

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When you’re a company who has ONE job… delivering packages reliably and on time… and that is the ONE thing that is impossible for you to do, you should probably just fucking close up shop.

Every damn time I am shipped something UPS it is a fucking disaster.  Today was no different.  I had been waiting for this package all week, and it was finally scheduled for delivery for today.  I was excited to receive my precious goods I had purchased from the magical world of the internets.

When it became late afternoon and I still hadn’t seen a UPS truck, I decided to check their tracking site… my heart sank

SPRINGFIELD , IL , US 08/07/2009 9:35 A.M. MULTIPLE ERRORS EXIST IN THE ADDRESS LABEL. UPS IS ATTEMPTING TO DETERMINE THE CORRECT INFORMATION TO COMPLETE DELIVERY / THE ADDRESS HAS BEEN CORRECTED. THE DELIVERY HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED

Fantastic.  Now instead of having my goods on Friday as I should have, it will be Monday at the EARLIEST.

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With Windows 7 RTM hitting official Microsoft channels, I figured I’d load up the final version of Windows 7 and check it out.  I’ve commented in the past about being completely unimpressed with 7 and for the most part, that is holding true, with some added hatred for the big-wigs over at Microsoft for arbitrarily deciding what I should be allowed to run on MY machine.

I upgraded from Vista Home Premium to 7 Home Premium.  The upgrade process itslef took around 3 hours, but it did go off with out a hitch.  I was happy for the most part, until I went to fire up one of my virtual machines in Virtual PC 2007.

This is when my joy turned to pure black hatred for 7 and all it represents.  It is a step backwards in technology.  It is Big Brother watching over your every single move tell you what you can an can not do.

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No, this post is not about my Fuze.  My Fuze has actually been a very good phone.  It has yet to really piss me off, especially like the 8525 did on a daily basis to me.

Today I got the urge to play with some different Windows Mobile builds, and since I have had my 8525 laying around not doing anything, I figured it would be the perfect little test platform.

As a side note; from what I saw from Windows Mobile 6.5 I didn’t care for it.  I like what HTC is doing with their TouchFlo interface MUCH better then the stock WM 6.5 scrolly interface.

Aside from that the OS seemed fine… but the hardware…. oh how the hardware pissed me off so badly I wanted to throw it against the wall again and again.  With in the hour I played with it, the phone randomly locked up on me… and when I reset it, the device acted like it was a HARD reset.  All the stuff I had done (thankfully not much really) was gone?!  WTF?!

I am thoroughly convinced this was not a ROM issue as there are hundreds of other people using this ROM with out issue.  I am positive that this is a hardware issue.  I believe that there is something very wrong in the land of the 8525.  Who knows what it is… I want to blame it on the Samsung processor and accompanying chipset, but I have absolutely zero proof to back that up… it’s just a theory.

The 8125, which I loved, had a Texas Instruments processor.  The 8525 had a Samsung, and my Fuze has a Qualcomm.  I have also seen other Windows Mobile (Verizon) phones with Qualcomms, and they always felt so much faster then the Samsung and even TI counterparts.  I think that the Fuze is really benefitting from the Qualcomm as it always feels snappy, and can go for a week or more with out a reboot.  That is iPhone-stability-level right there.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this.  I am just posting up some experiences I had today which further push me to believe that the 8525 line of HTC devices had a lot more problems then just underpowered hardware.

I’m thinking of a fitting way to destroy the 8525.  Perhaps some shotgun blasts?  God forsaken hardware…

Well, I played around with the Windows 7 beta a while back, but not too much.

Recently the Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 came out, so I decided to pop it in and see what is new, and what I’ve found is painfully disappointing in most cases.

Microsoft is continuing in their tradition of dumbing-down their operating systems to the lowest common denominator, making power users such as myself feeling…  well… feeling like Micorsoft is calling us dumb.

Case and point; first thing I do to any machine I own running Vista (or Win 7 now) is to disable Windows Defender, and Windows Firewall.  These are 2 services I have never ever once found useful, and ALWAYS end up being a pain in the ass at some point, and they generally slow down your computer.  So, I went ahead and axed both of these services as usual by first disabling them in the control panel, then disabling their actual service from starting up.

So, a while after I did that I was getting stuff set up, and went to enable Remote Desktop, and what do I see when I try and enable it…

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