The Xbox One’s excuses suck June 15, 2013

Neowin has a post from an anonymous Xbox Engineer. One of the things he claims, which could be valid, is that games could be cheaper without resales. But the amount of sales on Xbox Live is few, and the discounts are usually not very good. I’ll equate it to a REAL LIFE COMPARISON! A lot of used books on Amazon are cheaper than buying the eBook. Sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, and you always have to count shipping. But! I’ve read of Amazon wiping a kindle and deleting an account with no explanation OR REFUND. That cannot be done with a book, and that cannot be done with a game you have on disc. If Microsoft decided that you’re a bad person (maybe your kid gets on halo and screams racist profanities while you’re not around), they can ban you and as of yet no mention has been made as to how a banned player can continue to play games offline.

Anyway, Microsoft still charges full price on their store (MicrosoftStore.com) for games years old, while other sellers like WalMart and Amazon may sell new copies at $30 or $20. I frequently buy from Best Buy when they offer crazy discounts on 3DS games.

I’ll stay wary, and stick with my Xbox 360. If I wanna watch TV in my underwear, and not worry about being checked on by the always-on Kinect camera, I can do that by just unplugging the USB cable. Poof, sorted.

(I imagine an after-market product from Nyko that you can install on your kinect to slide a cap over the camera coming, but I’m not sure what to do about the audio.)

Also, if a cat is staring just above your head, you may have a fly buzzing around.

Brita’s Faucet Filter sucks July 25, 2011

The knob gets stuck. Citations:

ePinions

For a while it gave easy, clean tasting water, but it got harder and harder to turn the filter knob, and now, as you’ve read, its completely useless. Even worse since I had boughten their expensive replacement filter packs that will now be wasted.

purfilter

The knob to switch between Brita water and tap water is also more difficult to turn than I think it should be. It feels awkward and I’m always afraid that just the movement of turning that knob is going to loosen the filtration unit even more.

fixya

I have a brita faucet filter. And the selector knob is getting harder to turn. If it gets any worse I will need to use a wrench.

Barbara

I haven’t had too many problems with this system leaking or popping off, but the twist-knob on the side, which switches from unfiltered water to filtered drinking water, is terrible. It’s difficult to grasp when your hands are dry and strong, and if they are wet, or if you have even mild arthritis as I do, the tapered design is impossible. I have taken to keeping an old- fashioned bottle opener by the sink, fitting that over the knob and turning the handle in a wide arc, but this has now left little gouges in the soft plastic, so the knob is in worse shape than ever. I’m currently shopping for a replacement unit, and probably won’t buy Brita again.

MasterHoyt

The little turn knob was a little difficult for my girlfriend to switch, but I generally had no trouble.

target

Before it literally hurt my fingers trying to turn the tiny knob to turn the filter on and off – now it is a simple switch that moves like a breeze.

Seems the more expensive one has this fixed, so they know it’s a problem.

We’re on the second new filter housing since I moved in and every time the knob just gets impossible to turn. Looks gunky too. If they wanted you to use this and buy refills instead of new housings, they’d have installed a lever. It’s like trying to turn on an outside spigot with the handles removed. Just the little nut on a screw. Stupid.

CTho9305 January 30, 2009

[20:31:55] ← iTom left IRC. (Quit: Closing Rooms for iPhone)
[20:40:21] • CTho|zzz is now known as CTho.
[20:45:32] <@Tom> i'm gonna rape you
[20:46:00] <@CTho> apparently i suck at estimating weights
[20:50:26] <@CTho> washing machines weigh closer to 200lbs than 100lbs
[20:50:32] Tom changed the topic to #fs - eff ess || LOL NEXT TIME CUBE? http://tedjesuschristgod.org/ || jX will marry this woman, she'll play the kazoo at the wedding http://l.mbilf.com/4l || Popsicle: http://l.mbilf.com/4j || Turn right at Peniston, then it's only 50 miles to Wetwang. http://l.mbilf.com/4k || <@CTho> apparently i suck
[20:53:00] CTho changed the topic to <tom> i am a pedophile and rapist
[20:53:19] ← biesi left IRC. (Ping timeout)
[21:15:13] <@Tom> CTho
[21:15:46] <@Tom> That's childish, I didn't say any such thing

CTho is over 18 so I don’t know where he gets this crap from. It’s not the first time he’s inserted a completely false quote in the topic, and it’s not the first time he’s stepped over boundaries of good taste.

I need to work on my projects January 18, 2009

As in, I need to have a todo list.

todo: clean mac of crap. Plug mac into time machine disk. back up. perhaps burn some stuff to DVD since I’ve got a DVD burner, maybe make room to move time machine backup to another drive so i can re-format the time machine drive (with all 500gb instead of just 400) and put it back.

then work on other things.

I don’t do my share December 19, 2008

A while ago, my girlfriend finally got a job after about 1.5 years. This was good. It’s a part time job, and while the pay isn’t fantastic, she tells me she loves her job. That’s good.

However, she claims she now has less time to do housework and so I have to chip in (even though I was supposed to chip in before, too, and she does about as much housework now as she did previously as far as I can tell).

I last vacuumed probably 2 weeks ago, so she was very upset at how the bottom of the stairs was looking, and was telling me so in the car as we were leaving. I told her I acknowledged her complaints, and that I can’t do anything about it at the moment.

She continued.

I said if she feels that strongly, I can turn around and go home, and she told me she did not want me to do that.

She continued.

I told her if she continues any further, I will turn around immediately and go home.

She continued.

I turned into a parking lot, and she was really surprised I was actually doing it. I asked if she could cease her (didn’t say nagging, but that’s what it was), and she said no, and explained that she just really wanted me to clean the house. So I said, ok, we’re going home.

She began to sob. I didn’t turn home just yet, I gave her a final ultimatum (as I was thinking she’d wisen up and allow me to drive us and get our errands done without constant nagging about how I’m doing errands instead of cleaning the house).

She continued.

I turned for home. She thought that while I was cleaning the house, she could do the errands herself. I said no, I’m keeping the keys (after all, the car is fully mine).

I just finished vacuuming downstairs, and as she was upstairs she realized that she hadn’t been doing housework either, and that it was unfair for me to be doing work and her to sit on her ass, so she cleaned the bathroom (finally!).

Really, I’d have rather taken her to get her paycheck and gotten groceries and pet food, but she persisted. I am tired of her shit, and so I did something about it. If she cares so much as to nag me when I can do nothing about it, I will change the situation.

In short: be a man.

My letter to WordPress Support December 13, 2008

I used to write for a now-deleted blog

And apparently you’ve decided to setup robots.txt on all deleted blogs to disallow *, so that Archive.org won’t show pages from deleted blogs. I was pretty happy a while back when, for a short period, you broke that and I could see some of _my work_ on flocksucks.wordpress.com in archive.org. Now you’ve “fixed” it so that deleted blogs are removed from the web permanently. Please break it again so I can retrieve my work? All you have to do is explicitly allow Archive.org, and they will almost immediately (when they get around to it) let me see those posts again.

Will There.com unban the banned? September 3, 2008

Shortly after There.com banned me in April 2004 (for mediocre reasons, especially their “no, we won’t consider an appeal, you paid $35 for a lifetime membership and we’d rather not keep all these non-monthly accounts” response), the company behind the site sold it to another company and went strictly military applications. The community died quickly, and it is a ghost world now. Few old names remain. The ones who do seem only to be going through the motions.

Now that There.com is trying a revival, would they want some of their best, most experienced, most knowledgeable users back to keep new users from leaving after a few minutes? We’ll see. I might even send in an actual appeal!

Interestingly, in my early days in the World of Warcraft stress test beta, I spoke with a former employee of There.com who actually agreed that the banning was a little unfair but it was because we were using server resources without providing any money to the bottom line, and that any reason for a ban was a good one. It apparently didn’t work!

The entire joke is in the URL of LOLCats pictures. August 21, 2008

Check funny-pictures-when-cat-is-done-with-you-you-will-need-medical-attention.jpg, and what’s in it? HEY, THE SAME JOKE THAT WAS IN THE URL. Check the url of ANY lolcats pic on ICHCB, and it is the same, joke is in the url. That ruins it, Ben Huh. Will anyone get on you about this? Will you even see this? No and no.

Blog comments are like cash August 18, 2008

In that if you disable them, and somehow think

It has opened the door for stress-free site maintenance and publishing in a way I didn’t understand until experiencing it. When I hit publish – I’m done. The article has now been completed. It’s off to print. That’s all she I wrote.

then someone out there will call you out on how you hit publish way too soon, but on their own blog, in a very public way.

Shawn Blanc, when you disabled comments on your blog, you didn’t do it to save time. You did it because you are lazy. Too lazy to close your parentheses on item 2, too lazy to spellcheck encoureges into encourages, too lazy. And it shows, for when you mention e-mails, you say

Some noticed typos and/or misspellings (which are a dime-a-dozen around here).

which is a sentence fragment in a post made just over a year ago (August 14, 2007, if you can find it in the convoluted webpage design, it’s a blog, not flickr) that still has not had these glaring errors corrected.

This is not a free offer to call me out on mistakes I made and call me a hypocrite, but it is a free offer to call me out on mistakes so that I can fix them. You can do so below, in the lovely comments area provided for your benefit.

WordPress for the iPhone August 5, 2008

Pretty cool but no way to change settings after adding a blog 😦