ATT/Dish Network Sucks
Posted By leanna On January 4, 2009 @ 11:47 pm
I’ve never had sattelite TV, ever, and I hate landline phone. That said, I tried so hard not to hate this. But I can’t get cable where I am, and that sucks. But, you live with it. After receiving a $1030 bill from ATT Wireless for 7.5 GB of internet usage, I didn’t think my week could get any worse.
Then ATT struck again.
First, my home phone stopped working… and hasn’t started working yet, for three days. Now, my dish is all pixely and sucky. And me without any Family Guy DVDs to keep me company, what’s a girl to do? Call ATT and bitch? Yes. Cancel Dish Network immediately? Yes. Order DirecTV in the morning? Yes and Yes.
Yay for fucking everything up before I leave!
As a side note, I promise all of the IR Blogging reader(s) (Hi Del) to prod Eggo with a cooking spoon until he writes blogs while I’m there earning my money err.. distracting him while I steal his Rock Band cooking and cleaning for him. 
Movie: Street Kings (Review)
Posted By Jeff On December 31, 2008 @ 12:25 am
I went into this movie not actually knowing what movie it was, which is the best state ti be in for movie watching imo. It wasn’t until about 20 minutes into the movie that I realized ‘hey I think I saw a trailer for this’. Quick summary is saying that Tom (Reeves) is a detective who is top dog and kills people. He then gets caught in a weave of corrupted cops and scandals.
The plot annoyed me for the only reason that I went most of the movie feeling as though I was watching a sequel. There was a gap between the first scene and the second (which started the chain of events) that was so poorly and briefly explained that I had to pause it and think/make up what ‘might’ be the reason for this (that and to get banana bread). If there is going to be a linear plot, the inciting force has to be explained well. Aside from the initial gap, the rest of the movie had a decent flow to it.
I can’t say anything about the selection of actors, Reeves played his part well: Dumb and simple. With a supporting cast of Whitaker, Cedric the Entertainer, Mohr and Nolasco (Go Sucre!) it was well cast.
The only thing I would have liked to see is a little more character development. They noted on the fact that Tom was drinking a lot, but it had no significance to the plot. The same goes for his romance, no significance. If you’re going to try giving a character a life, give him a reason to have it or avoid it all together and throw in some more explosions.
Overall it wasn’t all bad for a movie about cops.
Final Score: 6/10
$$ I R Blogging for Bucks! $$
Posted By Jeff On December 13, 2008 @ 11:02 pm
Want to win $10? How about $15? Even better, $20? You can earn that just from posting here at I R Blogging. Free to enter and very little requirements.
Have you entered yet? Check out the I R Blogging For Bucks page for full details
Movie: Twilight (Review)
Posted By Jeff On December 6, 2008 @ 6:57 pm
Movie: Twilight
Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Thriller
To start off, I was going into this movie with big expectations since 2008 seems to be the year of the vampire. I wouldn’t consider this a good representation though.
A quick summary: Girl (Bella) moves to new town and becomes the new girl in high school. New Girl falls in love with outsider kid (Edward Collins) who is a vampire.New Girl and Vampire have strange relationship, girl almost gets killed by evil vampire. End.
The nitty-gritty that bothers me of this movie is not only the inconsistency within itself, but the fact that the attributes of these vampires seem to be lacking towards those that we commonly know. For example, these vampires do not sleep at all (aka no coffins). I can live with this I suppose, it doesn’t effect the plot. However, they also are able to survive sunlight. In fact, not only does it not harm them at all it makes them shiny. Worse off, the Collins’ family states they only drink animal blood and it is left at that. Well there goes the entire vampire aspect of these people.
The plot itself that annoys me is that for the first hour and twenty minutes of this movie you could replace the ‘vampire’ factor of Edward (the male love interest) with just a pale emo kid and it wouldn’t change the plot at all. There is no real vampire-human obstacles that they’re overcoming here, just a lot of him saying “I don’t know if I resist myself”. *yawn* Now at this 1h20m point, it does a complete 360 degree turn here and suddenly they’re being chased by an evil vampire (who was awkwardly placed in the story might I add) and they’re trying to kill Bella. So it was 1h20m of high school emo garbage then the final 30 minutes is a horribly cliche fight scene.
As an added bonus to this pathetic attempt of a movie, Edward is able to read minds. He can’t, however, read the mind of Bella. He also often refers to her as ‘the one’ or similar there of because she has a different scent from the rest of the humans. It might just be me, but I’m pretty sure I already saw this before…Oh yeah, on True Blood. Suki (the female on True Blood) has the different scent and she can read minds. She is also in love with a vampire named Bill. It looks to me like somebody stole somebody else’s idea and just mixed it up. I think I like True Blood better.
Final Summation: Avoid this movie, watch True Blood on HBO instead. If you don’t have HBO, run over your face with a lawn mower, it’s still more entertaining than this movie.
Score: 4/10
'cause Webnotes stick on me!
Posted By Jeff On November 19, 2008 @ 1:33 am
Now with invites and annotations!
Ever wish that you could have a cheat sheet for a webpage? Get through all that useless junk that the author wrote? I’m sure that most of my readers do. And thus comes Webnotes.
Webnotes is a new web-working tool designed at letting users add annotations and highlighting to websites. They combine two of my personal favorite things: Post-it notes and websites, it was just a matter of time. The utility is easy to use, just install the toolbar (Firefox plug-in FTW) and you’re set. There is a button to create a sticky note, button to highlight text and a button to share what you’ve done. It’s that easy.
Once you have that done, it’s easy to place sticky notes around. I know I’m going to have the bad habit of putting them on every site I visit (I have 29 of them in sight right now around my desk offline, yikes!). The good use for this is that you’ll be able to see a site, put your options on it then send it to your friend so they can see it how you see it. Here, check out I R Blogging with some annotations I put in (I may have put a few too many…).
Some uses for this that I came up with:
- Looking at somebody’s website and giving them pointers.
- Studying notes and highlighting the parts that would be important.
- Adding reminders for the next time you visit the site (like checking out a certain link that you know will be a time-sink)
- Being used as a bookmark when going through archives.
The only thing I can think of right now that this is missing is a social aspect of this. For example, if I could make my notes, send it to a friend then have them add some of their notes and send it back to me (displaying both sets of annotations) it would make it a great collaboration tool. Also, being able to select the color of sticky note would be pretty cool as well.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on a few invites (Thanks Ryan!), so for those of you interested in some just leave a comment to this post. Be sure to include your email address when filling out the comment form, I’ll be using it to know where to send it.
What's your best customer service story?
Posted By Jeff On November 16, 2008 @ 10:41 pm
Everybody has their ups and downs with customer service, usually down. But how about those times where you get off the phone and think “Wow, that rep was freaking awesome”. Given that I work in a call center, I usually try to leave the customers thinking that as much as possible. But when the shoe is on the other foot, it rarely happens. What is the best customer service that you’ve received? Here’s my latest.
On my way home from work, I had to catch a cab so went to the bank to get some money from the ATM so I can pay him: It was rejected because “Couldn’t process. Contact Service”. Twice. Turns out I had just enough on me to pay the taxi fare ($0.26 cent tip!). Then it was rejected at Wendy’s. When I came home, I decided to give them a call and find out what was going on with my card.
I called up my bank, expecting to have to go through a million automated messages and never get to anybody to help me out. I put in my card number, it told me it couldn’t be processed and the next thing I knew Michelle was on the line. Michelle was awesome. It was 9pm and she sounded like she had just woken up. I asked her what’s going on, and she said my card was put into ‘deposit only’ because fraud thinks that one of the places I used it at might have duplicated it. It’s not likely, but whatever. I just have to go into a bank and change my PIN on Wed (my next day off). That whole conversation took 5 minutes, tops.
She then asked me if I had the funds to last me until Wednesday, I said I’d just use my VISA the next two days if needed, I should have enough change kicking around for coffee. We then talked about coffee and debating the whole ‘quantity VS quality’ between Tim Hortons and Starbucks. Needless to say, on Wednesday I guess I have to go buy a “signature hazelnut hot chocolate with a double shot of espresso”. I never was very good at debating with females. But it was a great conversation, and is awesome to see a place with real people on the other end of the line. TD, you’re cool. Michelle, you’re fantastic, thanks for the chat.
Post your best customer service story below, the one I think is the best will win $1 via paypal in 2 weeks from today. Cheers!
Ticked Tuesday: Google
Posted By Jeff On October 18, 2008 @ 9:05 pm
Yes, it’s on Saturday, it’s a special edition
I’m mad. Like Really mad here, enough to actually put down Google itself and write a Ticked Tuesday on a Saturday, so here’s the story.
I use Google Apps with my domains, it manages all of my emails and makes calendars and docs a little be easier to share when needed. Normally, this is awesome. I also access my personal email through my phone (though apps, so still gives a general gMail interface when access on my computer). Up until yesterday, this worked great I just used pop to get everything. Then they added in a little damn button of fucking-retarded.
Now, under Settings->Forwarding and POP/IMAP You have to select to enable POP. Well would have been nice if they let us know. When my email just stops working on my phone, I assume by default it’s my service provider. So they say they’re fine, Google should always be fine. An hour later I find the button.
Short form: Let us know when you decide to be asshats or at least leave the stuff that we previously had enabled as they are when you decide to give us the option to turn it off, thanks.
Make some wings, then learn to fly
Posted By Jeff On October 17, 2008 @ 2:19 am
Ever wanted wings? I know I have. But the true question is: Feathered wings or Dragon wings?
Well now you don’t have to choose, you can make both for just a few bucks.
Head on over to the great How to make a pair of Angel Wings by T0BY @ Instructables . These are very well done and use real feathers. On top of that, they are able to open and look very real (I suppose being real feathers does technically make them real, huh?) This is definitely the coolest way to go if you want any sort of feathered wings, store bought suck.
or
Check out the awesome How to Make Moving Dragon Wings video by gryphern @ YouTube. These are very cool, especially with the material they used. The fact that they also are able to be expanded on will makes these that much more realistic. Not to mention, these are made tough as nails. Heck, they may even be able to survive trying to fly off the top of a building: But you won’t.
Now that you have your wings, how to do fly? “The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I am Batman Pac-Man
Posted By Jeff On October 10, 2008 @ 1:08 am
Let’s stick with some gaming fun here. To follow up with the totally badass furniture that I showed last week, I have found some more cool Pac-Man stuff that I would love to own.
</a.First off, the Pac-Man Hoodie from Think Geek. If this doesn’t confuse people and earn you a hand full of cherries, an extra life and the all time high score, nothing will.
If that design made your headspin, you might be suffering from a Dot Overdose and need this shirt from Dead Zebra. Friends don’t let friends OD on Dots…But they do buy them the shirt.
And the last one for today (though not pac-man inspired) is the Most Deadly shirt from Busted Tees. You may recognize this from Perfect Dark (or maybe you don’t if you suck at it) but even the biggest lamer *cough DEL cough* can pretend to be old school now.
Vampire Game
Posted By Del On October 2, 2008 @ 3:38 pm
Vampire game
One of the only shojou manga I have ever read. Started reading not knowing it was shojou since I tend to keep away from them as they are targeted towards a female audience. Since it is a story mainly targeted at females, it has some story elements that I didn’t really like sometimes even though the overall story was really good.
Vampire Game is about the reincarnation of Vampire king, Duzell, who died 100 years ago in a fight with King Phelios who defeated him using a powerful spell that sacrifices the caster. Duzell vows to reincarnate after 100 years to get revenge and destroy the reincarnation of Phelios. Fast forward to the present: The descendants of King Phelios are all fighting for the throne, like you’d expect from any royal family. Princess Ishtar, the main character of the story, is 15 years old and currently first in line to the throne. She is a willful and troublesome princess, always causing trouble for her head bodyguard Darres. She escapes the palace one day as usual causing trouble only to happen upon the reincarnated Vampire King Duzell, who is in the body of a cat. She adopts the cat and promises to help him find the reincarnation of her ancestor Phelios so he can kill him. Through out the 15 volumes they set out to find who in the royal family is the reincarnation of King Phelios; all the while trying to stay ahead of power hungry royals aiming for the throne and Ishtar’s head. Full of political intrigue, Vampire game is a an excellent manga with lots of twits and turns to keep any reader entertained till the very end.