The other night I was watching Game of Thrones on HBO Now through my Apple TV (yes, how many products can I mention in one sentence?). Up until now, Apple TV and HBO Now has been a great service where I’ve really enjoyed the shows and the quality used to bring them to me. However, on this evening (and the following week), I discovered that the sound for Game of Thrones is horrible, to the point where I couldn’t hear the dialogue at all. I ended up turning up the sound on my television to practically maximum and still couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. When the show ended, the sound kicked back in and nearly blew out the speakers in my TV. Both weeks, I’ve been unable to hear the sound on this one show. I can hear it fine on every other show, both on and off the HBO Now service.
So, I sent an email to the customer support people at HBO Now and received one of those “we thank you for contacting us but we’ll have a real person get back to you later” responses. A day later, I received the most generic response ever, indicating that NO ONE read the email, but it was filtered through some program that must have caught the word “sound” or “volume” and then told me to go through the FAQ they have about how to handle problems with adjusting the volume with an Apple TV. Really? In other words, no human is EVER going to deal with the issue. In other words, having a customer support system is a joke and an insult to anyone who may ever feel the need to use it.
If this was just a one-off situation, I’d just chalk it up to that sort of thing. But no, I’m starting to run across this ALL THE TIME. An example: Electronic Arts, the company that is constantly competing with Comcast for the worst customer service on the planet. Some years back, back when the Internet was young, I used to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. And then I quit. A couple of years later, I decided to play it again. Except there was a problem. Let me explain.
When I first played Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), it was owned by Electronic Arts, but it was billed by its subsidiary company Origin. Sometime during that period when I was no longer playing the game, someone breached Electronic Arts’s servers and stole a bunch of accounts. One of them was mine (inactive at the time because I wasn’t playing any games that Electronic Arts owned). Someone tried to buy FIFA (some soccer game) on my stolen account, but was thwarted by the fact that my credit card had expired a year or so before the transaction was attempted. By the way, EA somehow has translated that to believing its crack crew of cyber security experts had “stopped” the transaction and did a great service to me. Keep in mind, the only “stop” that was conducted was my bank saying, no, that credit card hasn’t been valid for a long time now. Anyway, to make a long story short, EA incorporated Origin into its service as its process of charging everyone for everything, so when I went to reactivate my account for SWTOR, EA refused to let me put any credit card information onto the account because my credit information was now “flagged”, which really translates to “we tried to let a thief fraudulently charge a game to your account and the transaction failed, so we now have to flag your account as one we can never allow you to make charges on again, even though our customer service people have given back access this account to you, no longer the thieves.” All attempts to “fix” this account have failed, as I have escalated the issue to the top echelons of EA, and each time it gets rejected based on…well, no one really knows why. It just keeps getting rejected. And then I get a really friendly email from EA stating: “So, is there anything else we can help with at this time?” I guess just rejecting me isn’t enough. They want to rub salt in the wound, too. For the record, the people at SWTOR have been very kind, but have resigned to the fact that if EA can’t fix it on their end, the issue is out of the hands and incapable of being fixed. Sure, I could start up a new account, but I have a ton of maxed characters on this account and a lot of game money in their banks, or possession. Starting over is not something I desire to do, so I’ve pretty much just stopped playing the game. I could play by buying a monthly game card (for game time), but that means I have to pay the maximum price to play the game each month, which is a direct insult to someone who was a member of the game when it first launched.
Strangely enough, gaming companies do this sort of thing a lot. Sony is a good example of this. I had an Everquest account back in the day, but when I stopped playing, somehow my account then became “flagged”. I can’t get my account back now. It’s like I was doing horrible things in the game and am now banned. But I’m not the sort of player who does any of those kinds of things, but as usual, I can’t even get them to tell me why the account was banned, meaning it was probably compromised during the time I was gone, or it was breached during one of those early periods when entire batches of accounts were breached at once by overseas hackers and rather than deal with each case one by one, they just banned everyone as a consequence.
The point is: Customer service is almost nonexistent these days. Because of automation and outsourcing, we now have a situation where if you ever need customer service for a game or product, chances are pretty good that you’re going to end up very dissatisfied. There are some good companies still out there, but they are becoming rarities, and one thing I’m starting to recognize is that when someone recommends a company to me for good service, it’s usually because they had good service from that company YEARS ago and probably haven’t had a recent situation they’ve had to deal with concerning that company. I’ve had a few encounters like that recently where I went with a company because of past, good experiences, only to discover that they’re currently a crapfest when it comes to dealing with customers.
Not too long ago, Sony was attempting all sorts of mea culpas over the fact that its networks were hacked, and everyone who ever did business with them was royally screwed because Sony had lousy security in place. You’d think after something like that, they’d really walk on lots of egg shells around customers. Well, think again.
Turns out that yesterday Sony decided to push forth a new set of usage terms for anyone who wants to access the Playstation Network. Rather than something along the lines of “we’re here for you”, their new terms of service essentially state: “If something happens, go screw yourself.” Well, not the wording exactly, but they state that if you want to use their service, you agree to arbitration in case ANYTHING ever happens. In other words, if you want to use their service, you’re not allowed to sue them any longer. Translation: “Go screw yourself.”
Over the years, I’ve distanced myself from all things Sony mainly because their customer service has been atrocious. My last real brush with them was with Sony Online Entertainment, which were the original gangstas behind Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies. Aside from destroying both of those games, SOE made it quite clear that if you wanted to play one of their games, you did it on their terms and their terms alone. After awhile, I ended all of my subscriptions and sent any further emails (and attempts to “Welcome” me “back”) into my spam folder. Even my spam folder felt disgusted from having to deal with anything sent by Sony.
Years later, I made the critical error of buying a Playstation 3 because I wanted a decent blu-ray player. It’s been generally okay, but in order to access Netflix, I had to go through the Playstation Network, and let’s just say that it works fine until Sony decides to interject itself into the mix, and then I spend about an hour trying to get it to work properly again. And then it works fine for a week or so, so I don’t cancel it completely.
But last night, I got the indication that if I wanted to continue using my Playstation 3 in the future, I had to agree to their one-sided demands. So, realizing that to not agree would effectively turn my Playstation 3 into an electronic brick, I agreed. But I wasn’t happy about it.
At least until I discontinue Netflix, I have to deal with the Sony Mafia. And then I intend to cut them off forever. I have enough crappy companies I already have to do business with. One less won’t make me feel bad.
Hackers are a strange breed. To begin with, there’s really no one central reason why they do what they do. Some are altruistic, some are assholes, and some are just nuts. Others, well, who knows why they do what they do, other than the thought of trying to do something that others think can’t be done.
Recently, a group of hackers, the Lulz crowd, have decided to hack for the sake of hacking. I don’t know what their rationale is, although there is a sense that they have some kind of foundation behind what they do, as they vowed to protect Sega because of its business practices, while going after pretty much everything else. However, for the common person who is just using the Internet for the simple purpose of exploring all there is to offer, hackers are making the Internet a less attractive place than it was only weeks before.
Recently, they went through antics of hacking some database and then posting the passwords of people all over the Internet. What purpose does this serve, other than to show that passwords can be broken, and that people generally don’t choose the greatest passwords. Well, to be honest, most people don’t seem to be password protecting stuff that is critical or crucial. They’re password protecting a message board that forced them to create a password, and to be honest, when you have to keep making passwords for everything you access, you tend to get lazy and choose very simple to remember things. That’s where “Omega” becomes an option for a password instead of H78j738gckzh9peK>L;c. Yeah, that last one might be a lot harder to crack, but let’s be honest here. Most of the hacking that has been done has been because a database was broken into (one that most people don’t have the password to anyway), so that their passwords, which could be the greatest password EVER created, are automatically given to the hacker. So, it doesn’t matter how well you come up with a great password. If the infrastructure that you use the password on is stupid, so then is your password.
What has been happening is that these people are using their skills as cracking codes and making life miserable for common people, just for the sake of showing it could be done. I’ll let you in on a not very well kept secret. I’m an expert at killing people. Got trained by the Army and everything. But that doesn’t mean that I spent my free time hunting down people and killing them in order to show others how easy it is for me to do. There is some point where the common sense in people should show through, and with hackers the lack of restraint has made that almost impossible.
To make it worse, hackers are now to the point where any thought used against them automatically results in a group of hackers targeting someone who has nothing to do with them. Some years back, I was an opinion editor of a newspaper. When we ran an opinion column that made a couple of stupid arguments against moped riders, a group of glorified moped riders started point of service attacks on the newspaper and then on my own personal account. Rather than engage in conversation with other people, they took it upon themselves to attack people who disagreed with them. It actually took a member of their group to call for sanity before the attacks stopped.
This is the mentality of the hackers today. And they’re making it so that people don’t trust the networks with whom they do business. Right now, I have no desire to turn on my Playstation 3 and deal with Sony, mainly because I can’t trust Sony to stop hackers from stealing my personal information. I don’t blame Sony, but at the same time, I find it foolish to trust their network. This is an easy way to create a chilling effect on entire industries, as I also don’t trust a lot of other technology companies with whom I might have also wanted to do business, because this anarchic approach to business has made it so that I just don’t want to waste my time having to deal with the ramifications of stupid, evil people.
I find hackers to be one step below the screamer in a press conference who wants to shout down everyone who disagrees with him. The reason I put it one step below is that at least the screamer has a reason he’s doing what he’s doing, that’s not as simple as yelling just to stop people from being heard. A hacker, in this context, is a screamer who yells for no reason, wanting ONLY to make sure that no one can be heard and then demanding credit for being the one who yelled the loudest.
Unfortunately, businesses have almost no way to counter this type of behavior, which means that fewer and fewer of them are going to risk the chance of being destroyed by some malicious individual who only wants to create destruction in his path. They’re a lot like spammers who sent out millions of emails for the sole purpose of trying to scam one individual out of hard-earned savings.
For awhile, I was on the fence about hackers, especially when they worked to undermine oppressive regimes like Iran and China. But when they then turned their talents on the average person for no reason other than to see if they could do it, I stopped being a potential fan. I’ve seen too many good people who have been seriously hurt by people who thought it would be fun to disrupt the status quo.
You see a lot of this in online gaming communities these days. Some games have been completely obliterated by this attitudinal attack. They’ve even started to go after some of the biggies, like Eve Online. Why? Because they can. No other reason than that. Someone tried to make an obscure connection of a link to Sony, but even that was really weak. It looked like they attacked Eve Online just because it was there. And that’s pretty sad.
Unfortunately, I believe the problem is going to get a lot worse before it gets–no, actually, I don’t believe it’s going to get any better. As long as they remain anonymous, they can take the cowardly route of attacking people behind masks. And that’s been the problem with the Internet since the beginning. What was its one fundamental strong point, its anonymity, has also been its weakest as well. From Internet chatroom fights with flame wars started by anonymous big mouths to where we are today, as long as this element continues to dominate the field, it might bring about the demise of the usefulness of the Internet itself.
I received an email today from Sony Online Entertainment, indicating that their networks had been compromised and that, as a result, a LOT of my personal information (possibly my credit card information as well) has been compromised as well. It states how sorry Sony is this happened, and that it’s essentially now my responsibility to cover my own ass for the near future because of the complete, utter incompetence of the empire that is Sony. The fact that they waited until they couldn’t sit on the story any longer only makes it worse, because if someone was going to compromise my identity and start emptying the accounts in my name, the damage is probably already done.
What bothers me mostly is that I’ve always felt Sony to be incompetent and really hated the company with a passion. Granted, I own a Sony Playstation 3, which I use mainly to watch blu-ray dvds and Netflix streaming, but because of this whole debacle, I’ve basically lost any ability to do anything involving Netflix. Yeah, I can watch a dvd (at least I think I can; it’s been some time since I’ve actually turned on my Playstation 3), but that’s about it. Thanks, Sony.
But as for me hating Sony, I’ve felt this way ever since I first started playing online games that had Sony Online Entertainment tied to it. Everquest was my first experience. And while I enjoyed it when it first came out, at some point you started to feel that Sony’s only intention was to separate as much money from you as possible before you realized there was a lot of bait and switch going on with that game. You know the kind I’m talking about. They promise one thing, but in the end, they give you something you weren’t really desiring. Everquest was constantly like that from servers that couldn’t handle the capacity of the players (or just constantly failed) or quests that were broken, and no matter how many times you contacted customer service, they would never be fixed. And then they started the whole micro-transaction thing where they tried to sell you a whole bunch of things that you should have been able to get for free within the game (because you were already paying them for access). After time, I started to feel I was a cash cow for the company, and I left.
Then SOE started integrating themselves into other games that really could have been so much better if Sony was never involved, like Star Wars Galaxies. Some of the worst decisions of online computer gaming were made by SOE with this game, to the point of where I began to believe the whole process was some kind of psychological experiment to see how much ridiculousness they could spread to their user community before people threw their computers out the window. Again, I left that game very upset.
Whenever I heard that SOE was going to be involved in yet another game, I decided to pass. Even when I hear they’re only slightly involved, I pass. I just no longer felt like being fleeced by that company.
So, yesterday I receive an email from SOE telling me they screwed up again. Except I’m not even a customer of theirs anymore. No, they screwed up with information that was on file YEARS ago when I was subscribing to one of their games. For reasons that escape any rationality whatsoever, they maintained my information so that someone could break into it and steal it. YEARS AFTER THE FACT. We’re talking half a decade here. Yet, Sony has proven yet again that because I made the mistake of doing business with them years ago, I’m screwed.
Which brings me to my supposition that this proves that no matter what I do in the future, I”m always going to be screwed because it now means that every company I’ve ever done business with is just waiting to screw me because of incompetence. So, because I bought a toaster from the Good Guys (a company that’s been out of business for about a decade or so), someone can break into their records and have all types of personal data on me that they can use to take over my identity. I mean, we haven’t even touched the surface of the crimes against individuals that exist because someone might have your personal information, yet all of us are victims because we can’t do a single, freaking thing to avoid the fact that at some time we trusted a commercial entity with our information because they required it in order to buy a package of Twizzlers.
All we can do is be more suspicious of everyone we do business with in the future, which is great, but it doesn’t change the fact that at one time we were stupid enough to not realize that the future was one where Big Brother isn’t government, but it our own information. Okay, I take that back. I still don’t trust government, but instead of just worrying about them, I have to worry about any dealings I did by paying with a check at Chuck E. Cheese back in 1970.
So what is the common person to do? We have no recourse whatsoever. Sure, we can sign onto a class action suit, but that doesn’t do anything but make a bunch of lawyers rich, and the rest of us get a month worth of coupons for Tide laundry detergent, if we choose not to send in an opt out form. Count on Congress to respond? Yeah, I’ll hold my breath on that one.
Basically, we’re all screwed. And we have Sony to thank for that. And then every other company we’ve ever made the mistake of ever doing business with in the past.
There was a battle over dvd standards a few years back that was similar to the fight between VHS and Beta Max a decade or so even earlier. Sony had released their Blu-Ray player, and Toshiba had invented a rival called HD DVD. On the surface, the upcoming battle didn’t really seem all that significant (DVDs were still working fine), but Sony was about to release its Playstation 3 with a Blu-Ray player, and Toshiba was putting its HD DVD into the new XBox 360, made by Microsoft. So, the battle waged.
Strangely enough, even though the XBox 360 was the stronger seller (Sony dropped the ball and took way too long to release the Playstation 3), in the end, enough movie companies fell into Sony’s camp, and the Blu-Ray player eventually defeated the HD DVD format, becoming the only survivor. I don’t even think you can find an HD DVD movie anymore.
Yet, for some reason, even though Blu-Ray beat HD DVD, it still has yet to surpass DVD as the standard way of releasing new content for movies, TV shows and computer games. Instead, there has been an almost rebirth of the normal DVD player, the Blu-Ray remaining a higher end product but with an inability to maintain its dominance based on superiority alone.
And it is superior to DVD. In all ways. If you put a DVD player next to a Blu-Ray player and play them both at the same time, it’s obvious which one is better. But is that enough to make a difference?
You see, a couple of other things are going on that made the move to Blu-Ray not happen. First, Blu-Rays never replaced DVDs when it comes to price. In order to be the replacement, the price needs to be set at what people are willing to pay for movies and TV shows. For an average movie, there was a set price that people were willing to pay, and this came from years of establishing that market. Blu-Rays are almost always much more expensive. This was supposed to change over time as they took over the market, in that the prices would come down to match what DVDs used to be, so that they would effectively replace them. But that never happened. Instead, if you paid $19 for a DVD, you were always paying $29-35 for a Blu-Ray. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, it is when it comes to the economics of how DVD entertainment was expected. As long as Blu-Rays remained higher in price, it was always going to be seen as an exclusive item, and more of a luxury.
Blank Blu-Ray dvd prices never came down. They’re really expensive. A colleague pointed out to me that a dvd with the actual movie on it is sometimes cheaper than a blank Blu-Ray dvd. As long as that’s the case, you’re never going to get full adoption of the product. Plus, the players are still very expensive. It’s a no go all the way through.
One problem that Blu-Rays have that you never had with dvds is that you often have to make firmware upgrades. People don’t like that. Sorry. When they’re forced to keep updating their software for their dvd player, they get annoyed. With a dvd player, they don’t have to do it. Chances are pretty good, they’re not going to switch. When many dvd players are not connected online, you have even more of a problem.
The last point is probably the most important for the current situation. Blu-Rays needed to be the replacement for dvds, but instead we’re quickly moving online to streaming technology. People don’t even need dvds anymore, and if they see that as the obvious future, the replacement of the dvd is almost dead on a arrival. The thought was that people would pay more money for better quality, but instead streaming has gone the opposite direction, where people are willing to take less quality with more convenience. With that trade off, you might see why Blu-Rays might never take over the world.
It’s a great technology, but it may have been brought in too late to replace the model that was already going to be replaced by something different. Not necessarily better, but more convenient. Unfortunately, not always does the obvious successor become the winner.
The post isn't about the movie, but the picture definitely works
As I know I’m the one everyone turns to for on topic news reporting, I thought I’d give some opinions on what’s currently happening. Okay, no one reads me, so I’m ranting to the wind, but it’s my blog, so I’m going to do it anyway.
1. Obama Takes Credit for Lame Duck Victories. Um, okay. It seems that our current president seems to think that he has done great things by using the lame duck Congress to get a lot of legislation pushed forward before the end of the year. A couple of thoughts: First, Obama didn’t really do anything. The lame duck members of Congress did. So it was really them that succeeded in doing what they did. Second, while it’s wonderful that a lot of gridlocked legislation got pushed through (DADT, Bush Tax Cuts, START treaty, Adoption of Stickman as Ambassador to Iceland [okay, the last one didn’t happen, but it really should have]), when the new year starts up, we’re back to where we were before, except now we’re going to have a lot of pissed off Republicans who still think they have some kind of mandate to provide gridlock to the presidential agenda. Basically, the Democrats rammed through a whole bunch of legislation that required them to use their majority that is going to disappear at the start of the new year. That can’t lead to positive relations in Congress for the next year. Expect a lot of political partisanship to get much worse in the very near future, all of it blamed on the lame duck stuff. Lesson: You really don’t get a free ride when the odds are stacked against you for the future. Even the Bush Tax Cuts, which the Republicans are all happy about being passed, are going to be seen as Obama’s lame duck stuff that will cause immediately cause Republicans to blame Obama and the Democrats for anything that comes out negative, even as Republicans use the money to fuel their own desires.
2. Rahm Emanuel is Cleared to Run for Emperor of Chicago. Or Mayor, or whatever it is he’s running for. Basically, an Obama Administration guy is running on that name connection alone, even though everyone who had anything to do with Obama was thrown out of office during the last election. Supposedly, this might work in Chicago, which is Obama’s former backyard. But how does this affect the rest of us? It doesn’t. It means absolutely nothing to us. For all I know, he’s probably going to lose because he’s not actually Obama. The people of Chicago aren’t voting for Obama; they’re voting for some guy who once worked for Obama. He has to run on that. No one outside of people who might gain from any connections to this guy really cares in any way, shape or form. So, everytime I see an article about this, which is practically every day even though I don’t subscribe to any papers that have anything to do with Chicago, I want to claw out my eyes with a rusty spork. Please make him and his personal desire to be god of Chicago go away. Please, even if it’s just for the children.
3. Steven Spielberg is not going to advise Democrats on how to win over the voters. Thank God. It’s not that I don’t like Steven Spieldberg. His movies are great. But they’re movies. And as we learned from World War II, when a movie director like Kapra is making movies for the country, they’re not movies; they’re propaganda. Having a famous filmmaker try to change the perception of Americans about the Democrat Party is a disaster just waiting to happen. What’s wrong with the Democrats right now is that they’re constantly running on a platform of being for the people when they’ve been so out of touch of what the people want and need that they need education, not propaganda. But they’re not going to get that education because they don’t seem to realize what’s wrong. People are pissed at the Democrats right now because they came in with a plan to give the people what they wanted and then and went and did things that politicians have been doing for decades (filling their own pockets). We saw Rangel and Conyers and all sorts of shenanigans that benefited none of the people, but only the people in power. THAT is what they need to fix, and trying to get a famous movie director to advise them to change their public image is never going to work because it’s not their public image that needs fixing. It’s their actions they conduct in the name of the public interest. But I doubt they’re going to figure that out because the people who advise them are the same people who have been advising them while they were holding $1000 a plate fund-raisers to get elected.
4. Facebook is a networking program, not a lifestyle. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg was voted as Time’s person of the year. I really don’t care. He’s a rich, elitist, misogynist who happened to be at the right place at the right time to steal the right idea at the right time. Ever since then, he’s been trying to become important, but he heralded the creation of a platform for people to find their old friends and keep touch with their current friends in ways bordering on stalking, but only if the victim was sending texts to her stalker to announce where she’d be going next. Yes, I have a Facebook account. But it’s not my only means of oxygen or survival. It’s an interesting tool. And that’s it. For me, the person of the year would have been Julian whatever his name is who was running Wikileaks. That person really made an impact last year. Facebook didn’t. Neither did that rich billionaire, irrelevant sack of shit owner of Facebook either. It’s almost as if Time went out of their way to create the easiest winner of the award, realizing that if they chose the guy who should have got it, the government would have actually shut down Time Magazine as a threat to the country. I honestly don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to realize that this had to have been part of their discussion the night before they made their decision.
5. 2010 Kindle Sales will reach 8 billion. So what? Oh wait, I mean 8 million. Whatever. I mean, it’s kind of cool that Kindle will sell that many, but as expected, this kind of announcement fails to mention what’s really important: How many books are being sold, and how many are available? You see, it’s one thing to sell a bunch of devices, like Barnes & Noble is doing with the Nook Color, but when they don’t tell you how much information is available for the device, it’s really doing a disservice to the buying public. An example: I bought a Color Nook from B&N, and I’ve been nothing but pissed about my purchase ever since. I bought it, expecting the market to be represented in books, magazines and newspapers, but so far the selection has been abysmal at best. I have yet to see a justification for the color device because the magazine selection for the device is horrid. I have yet to see any new magazines sign up, other than really crappy ones that I would never flip through at the bookstore for free. When they start getting the marketplace to respond to their product, I’ll be happy. And don’t get me started on prices. The price for practically every book I’ve seen with the Nook has been either exactly the same price as the Kindle or much higher. Computer books are ridiculous in that they’re sometimes more expensive for the Nook version than they would be if I bought it in a physical copy. Not a good sign if they’re trying to capture a market. Or even tap into one.
This is the same problem, I have with the Kindle. The prices for books just don’t seem to justify the device itself. When books are $9.99, it might be worth it, but there’s a mindgame being played here that they don’t want to own up to. A lot of these books are now out in paperback and available from some retailers for much cheaper than $9.99. Yet, the price for these books doesn’t go down. They remain at $9.99 or recently, $12.99, which seems to be some bizarre sweet spot the book companies think they can get. In other words, they’re making the market reliant on the hardbook, brand new price model when most people haven’t even really been reliant on that model in the real bookstore of the past. I bought a few books that were “discounted” at the $7.00 range, and I realized while buying them that I could probably get these books for less than $5.00 because they’ve been out in paperback forever. Kindle is trying to take the Apple approach of “people are suckers who will pay anything for something digital, and if we capture that market, they’ll always pay us full price”. Kindle started out well with their price model, but then they caved in against the book publishers, and that bit of working together has managed to screw the average customer who is now faced with paying stupid prices or going back to the old model of waiting for physical books to go down in price. Without even trying, the e-reader market is doing a good job of killing its own future marketplace.
6. The iPad. The hype over this product has completely overwhelmed me. Not enough to buy one, but enough to cause me to wonder if people really are that daft. I mean, it’s not like the technology was really all that new. We’ve had tablets on the market for a few years now, but they never sold because people didn’t see a need for them. And then Steve Jobs announced the iPad during his yearly announcement meeting, and suddenly everyone had to have one. I’ve looked at it, and almost even bought one, because I’m a stupid Internet geek who buys stupid things like the Nook Color. But I waited a day and then realized I didn’t want OR NEED one. It didn’t do anything I couldn’t already do with devices I already had. I mean, it’s got a bookstore so I can read e-books. They’re more expensive than any other store, because it’s Apple, and I already have a Kindle and an Amazon Nook. Not worth it. It does some word processing. So does my laptop. Much better, too. It looks like a Star Trek datapad. That’s cool. But that’s about as useful as it gets. It doesn’t actually do anything my iPhone doesn’t do. It’s just that my iPhone is smaller.
7. Which brings me to my iPhone. I bought an iPhone when they were first released. And it rocked. Back then, I had a crappy cell phone that was not very smart, and the move to a phone that did everything was great. But it’s been some years since I first bought that phone, and the marketplace has finally caught up to it. You see, there are some things that the iPhone won’t do, mainly because of Apple and because of AT&T. I have been getting a lot of phone calls from telemarketers lately, including one that calls me every day. I can’t block their calls because AT&T won’t let me do it without paying for a special service that does just that. Apple won’t let me get an App to block calls because for some reason Apple just doesn’t seem to think that’s a good App. So I’m left having to be innovative and work around my phone in order to get my phone to do what I want it to do. So a few days ago, I bought an Android phone that lets me do all of the things an Apple phone won’t let me do. And I’ve been really happy with it since. I had to move to Sprint PCS instead, and well, it’s working out like a first date with a supermodel who only orders off the children’s menu to watch her weight. Apple managed to push itself out of my market when I used to say nothing but wonderful things about them and their phone.
8. The Spiderman Musical. Now, as much as I love a train wreck like everyone else, I’ve kind of hit my saturation point with this story. Okay, they tried to make a musical that was too innovative to actually be done successfully. Fix it or move on. It doesn’t really matter to me.
10. South Korea is trying to rile up North Korea with live fire exercises. Um, poking a tiger is not always the best way to entertain the kids. But what do I know?
That’s all for now. Have fun and avoid eating the yellow snow. Just cause it looks like lemon flavoring doesn’t mean it’s going to work out that way.
