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A place write I write things about stuff

Author: Rob

The State of the Site, pt. II

I learned how to change a toilet seat today.

Now before everybody starts jumping to conclusions about why this took place, let me set the record straight: I did not race to the bathroom in a diarrhea-induced panic and blast humanity all over the old toilet seat. It wasn’t anywhere near that exciting – one of the bolts snapped for some reason, leaving me with a seat swinging around on one bolt. No big deal, replacement seats were $10 at Home Depot, problem solved.

I’ve been sleepwalking through the day, thanks to being awakened at about 830 this morning. That includes the escapade with the toilet seat, dinner with the folks, a few hours cleaning up the storage drive on my PC, etc. It wasn’t anything in particular that woke me up, but I suspect the sun being out and shining into the room had something to do with that. I’m going to have to hang some curtains I think; getting four hours of sleep on a Saturday is criminal (and having it happen several Saturdays in a row as it has to me is even worse).

I had some issues with the cable after moving everything in here last night – apparently the signal coming into the cable outlet in the bedroom is significantly weaker than the one going into the living room. Running the cable box and the modem through the bedroom outlet resulted in the cable box not being able to pull down the programming schedule from the provider, even though pulling down a list of channel names and displaying the correct time was no issue. So now the modem is hooked back up out in the living room and everything works fine. Cox wants $45 to send a technician out within the next week or two to ramp up the signal in the bedroom – screw that.

Actually, it’s kind of funny – at work all we charge for trouble tickets is the price of any parts used, and we try to adhere to a 24 hour response time. Here Cox is charging me $45 just to roll the truck sometime in the not-so-immediate future. No thanks, I’ll work this one out on my own.

I’ll post some tidbits about some other crap here in a day or so.

And on a side note… what’s the deal with MTV advertising hip-hop ringtones during Headbanger’s Ball? What am I ever going to want with a “Throw Some D’s” ringtone?

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Shame on you, Newegg

So the DVD burner in my computer is finally taking a shit. I paid $30 for it and got two years of use out of it, so no complaints there. Last night there was $150 sitting in my Paypal account as a result of me selling my World Of Warcraft account. I had intended to leave the money there and slowly build on it so I can put together a new rig for school in a couple of months, but I can’t very well go without a CD drive in my computer. I figured, it’ll just be one less thing for me to buy later.

So the first place I looked was Newegg. I found what I wanted (a burner capable of burning dual layer disks and Lightscribe), and checked out. I told Paypal to use my balance on hand to make the transaction, and accepted it. Then, five minutes later, I got this e-mail:

Unfortunately, PayPal has not sent us confirmation that you have completed your PayPal transaction. This means you have not confirmed your payment to newegg.com on the PayPal website. Therefore, your newegg.com order xxxxxxxx can not be processed.

We welcome you to contact PayPal to resolve this issue, then reattempt to order with us. Alternatively, you are welcome to attempt to reorder through newegg.com and select a different payment method.

Sincerely,

Newegg.com Customer Service Team

What?

I checked my Paypal account, and still had $150 sitting there. Did I miss something? Surely not, I order most of my company’s equipment through Newegg and am quite familiar with their checkout procedure. So I went back and tried it all again. Five minutes later, the same e-mail (with a new order number) showed up. Newegg is not taking my money, and blaming Paypal for it. Dumb.

So I went to Tigerdirect instead and found a comparable burner around the same price. I ordered, and used my Paypal account. Great success. The money’s gone, and my order status says “shipped”.

Congratulations Newegg, you just lost a sale! I welcome you to contact Paypal to resolve your issue.

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A weird dream I had

I woke up at 6am, had breakfast, watched the news, and checked my e-mail. By 715 I decided I needed an extra hour of sleep, so I e-mailed the office explaining I was going to sleep off a headache and that I would be in by about 930. I set the alarm for 815 and the second I hit the pillow I zoned back out.

What happens next all happened in my head while I was asleep.

It was about 930 in the morning. I was chasing after my brother in some public place in down/mid-town Omaha, either the zoo or the airport or something. He was driving some souped up golf cart (like the ones they use to haul injured athletes off a football field), and I was getting pissed because I was late for work. To make things worse, I had brought my old work cellphone (which was no longer in service) so I had no way of calling in to the office to let everyone know where I was. Finally I realized we were chasing through the same set of kiosks over and over in circles, and I turned around and went the opposite direction. Sure enough, we found each other face-to-face, and my brother decided enough was enough. We loaded up and headed towards my parents’ house in Papillion.

Along the way back, we were stopped on Highway 370 about halfway between Bellevue and Papillion. Two people stepped out of the car behind us, and we got out of our golf cart to see what was wrong. They looked to be in their 20s, both either hispanic or asian (I couldn’t tell), both around 5′9″ and 160-170lbs. They were wearing some uniform I didn’t recognize; I got the impression they were military personnel based out of Offutt back in Bellevue.

“You guys were going way too fast,” one of the guys says. My brother and I just kind of looked at each other and went WTF, we were in a golf cart, how were we going too fast?

So we’re working through the situation with these two guys, and one of them looks at me and says, “we’re probably going to take you in for being a drug addict anyway. You have long hair and you’re dressed in black.”

Well, the long hair part is true, but I was dressed in traditional slack gear – a black t-shirt, olive-colored shorts, and sandals. I’m not exactly Johnny Cash here. I explained this to the guy, but that didn’t seem to make any difference; he was convinced he was going to get something on me and was taking me in whether I liked it or not.

Meanwhile my brother’s getting into some kind of altercation with the other guy, and things turn violent. I didn’t catch what it was about, but now they’re struggling over a gun. Somehow my brother gets ahold of it and shoots the guy. By the time he turns around toward me the guy I was arguing with already has his gun out and shoots my brother. I wrestled the gun away from him and either shot him or clubbed him to death with the gun; I forget which, but either way I’m the only person left standing with three dead bodies around me.

I checked both of the guys for cellphones and found one on each. I opened one of them up and dialed 911, but I didn’t get an emergency operator on the other end. It was somebody requesting a status update on something. I didn’t know what was going on there, so I hung up and started looking for my brother’s phone. I dialed 911 on that instead and got something a little more familiar-sounding, so I explained where I was and what had happened. The operator advised me to stay put until help arrived, but for some reason I was concerned those two guys had friends who would be looking for them shortly. I told the operator I’d be heading west on 370 and hung up. I grabbed all three cellphones and just took off running.

A few minutes later I had made my way into one of the new commercial developments along 370, and stopped at a convenience store to catch my breath. Next thing I know, a fire engine pulls in to the lot and somebody yells at me to get in. I hop in and somebody explains they got the 911 call and saw me go to the convenience store while they were tracking me down. We go back to this place to chill until the police can catch up to us; it’s either a house or an office, I couldn’t tell. I just remember pacing in this open room keying through saved text messages on the phones I picked up off of those guys, trying to figure out anything I could about them.

Somebody was complaining in the background, “he’s going to lead them right to us.” I disregarded it.

One text message stuck out on the phone I was looking at: the name on it was familiar, and it was talking about some drop he had just gotten in WOW. A good friend of mine had sent that text, but I couldn’t decide if that had anything to do with anything or if it was just an odd coincidence.

Knock, knock, knock.

I stayed out of sight from the entrance while somebody else answered the door. After a few seconds, they called my name and I went up front to see who was there.

It was three more guys wearing the same uniform as the two from before.

I shot back awake and looked at the clock: 807.

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Two things

1: The pictures of my SNES are located at http://www.madpwnage.net/images/snes – they were taken while the paint was still a little wet.

2: The amount of spam that’s showing up in the comments is starting to ramp up a bit and I’m not liking that a whole hell of a lot. I am going over my options to figure out what to do from here.

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It was awesome 15 years ago

I finally gave in to pangs of nostalgia and got a Super Nintendo last weekend. The selection on games was limited (and in fact so were the systems, I got the last one Gamers at Oakview had), but I managed to get out of the store with the deck, F-Zero, and Super Metroid.

Side story on that…

Gamers in Omaha officially sucks donkey balls. Things were wierd when I worked there 6 years ago, but I presumed it was for self defense against abusive customers more than anything else. For one thing I had to give my name, address, and phone number just to get a receipt and a warranty. What is Gamers really doing with that information? When I worked there, the explanation was we just wanted to get to know our customers, but if somebody objected we were cool with that. Not anymore. If you value your privacy enough not to divulge information about yourself to someone you don’t know working for a business you don’t patronize too frequently, you are a second-class customer to Gamers. Nevertheless, I wanted a Super Nintendo, and I was willing to take the risk.

Everything I bought looked and ran like absolute shit. This wouldn’t have slid by when I was working there. The simple fact is we would pay somebody $10 in cash for their Super Nintendo and turn around and sell it for $35. With a profit margin like that, you can afford to have a kid making minimum wage spend 15 minutes to make a used item look presentable to customers, not to mention check to make sure everything works. Anyways, when I got home I found that neither of the games I bought would work. Was it the games, or the console? Time to troubleshoot, with the prospect that I might have to go buy another SNES if this one is busted in the back of my mind. I gave the each of the games the Windex + Q-tips treatment, and that didn’t work. So apart came the console, and an hour later I had the solution – turned out the 62-pin connector that the cartridges slide into needed a good shot of compressed air. I cleaned that off and closed the case up, and voila – working games. Except for Metroid, because the PCB is dented and one of the connectors is basically destroyed. I can get that game to load maybe half the time. That’s ok though, because my copy of Final Fantasy 2 just came in the mail today and I have a feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of time revisiting that classic as it is.

It took me in excess of 2 hours to actually clean the console. Rubbing alcohol, paper towels, toothbrush, Q-tips, and elbow grease. But the real reason I cleaned the console wasn’t because I’m anal about how my electronics look (I am), or because it actually presented a threat to its own operability (it didn’t), but because I had plans in mind for it. Plans that involved spray paint – lots of spray paint. Can’t very well spray paint something when you’ve got somebody’s crayon on it, can you? Anyways, the paint job is finished and the console has been put back together – still in working order – and the results are pretty slick. I’ll post pictures when I get them.

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