Hard Days Night

by Matt | Sep 24, 2007 | Games, Work

Well gang, I am, despite rumors to the contrary, still alive and kicking. We’ve had what I’m sure I’ll refer back to at some later point as the “month from hell” at work. I’ve worked numerous 12 hour days, come home exhausted and cranky, and I simply haven’t had the time to check even my email, let alone sit and write a post. Life should stop its whirring, buzzing, clamoring insanity soon, but for the meantime I just wanted to check in and say “hi”.

There’s a couple random things I wanted to touch on, first of them being my car. I’ve somehow managed to go through 3 sets of $60+ headlights in under a year. I was thinking it was a wiring problem or perhaps a short somewhere until this afternoon when I decided to do a little digging myself. You see, my car has a four light system, not the normal two. Each of these four lights are crammed so far up inside the front of the car that until today I always just had them changed when I got an oil change. I figured a trained mechanic could install a headlight, so I didn’t think twice about it. Well, today I decided to handle it myself. Mostly because my car just had an oil change and bringing it into a mechanic for a headlight replace just seemed ridiculous. I pulled out the owners manual and started to thumb through it. It seemed easy enough so after buying replacement bulbs I gave it a shot. Turns out that someone, at some maintenance long ago, had snapped off the retaining springs that actually hold the light bulbs in place. They were resting there, in their sockets, by only a flexible rubber washer. The one that kept going out had it’s socket completely mangled and was barely staying in place. The area around the bulb was also “scorched” for lack of a better word.

What this says to me is that at some point, probably $180 ago, someone had put my headlights in so completely wrong, that they’ve been causing problems ever since. This also means that I’ll need to order not just new bulbs but whole new headlights and housings as well. I think they run about $300 a set. I’m not pleased. All this because some ass tunnel couldn’t seem to get a paper clip sized clip back into place and instead broke it off to make it fit. The upside to this is that I now know what mechanic I’ll never be going to again and where I’ll be shopping now on (the guys at my nearest Advanced Auto Parts were exceptionally helpful, even looking under the hood to help me figure out my mystery).

I also wanted to touch briefly on Halo 3, and more specifically, Amazon.com. Of course by now you’ve seen the commercials and the ads and I’m sure everyone is fully aware that Halo 3 comes out tomorrow. I will not however, be waiting in line anywhere at midnight to obtain my copy. I stopped doing that a long time ago. I’ve also stopped shopping at EB and Gamestop entirely, but that’s a topic for a different post. No, instead I’ve taken to preordering things online. Having seen the “preorder it now and you’ll have it on the 25th” ads all fucking over Amazon I decided to preorder it there. I didn’t have any reason to distrust Amazon. I assumed that if they said people would have it in their hands on the 25th that, being one of the largest retailers on the planet, it would most certainly happen. I’m a little confused then to find out that my credit card has been charged (as in “we charge your card when it ships”) but my expected delivery date is October fucking 3rd! Sorry Amazon, this shit is unacceptable. Not only did I pay for 2nd day shipping (which it was suggested I wouldn’t need to – allegedly Super Saver was going to get it to me on the 25th as well) but Oct 3rd is most definitely out of the realm of “2nd day” as well. I wouldn’t have minded getting it on Wednesday. Even Thursday would have been ok. But NEXT fucking Wednesday is just out of the question. All of the cool launch week events will be over and done with before I even get my copy. I’ve already yelled at some Amazon guy at a call center in India about this and he kept saying in broken english that unless there was a problem with the actual product there was nothing he could do. I almost feel like going and buying a regular edition tomorrow (I ordered the collectors ed.) and then selling it when my copy gets here. Arg!

A couple of other random tid bits… my single day of TV is returning. Typically I don’t watch much TV (although the food network has addicted me from time to time) with the exception of Monday. Two and a Half Men, How I Met Your Mother, and CSI:Miami are all fucking brilliant. I’ll be watching the season premiere of the Office on Thursday as well, but tonight is really what I’m looking forward to. I was encouraged by Nagle’s list of shows he’s waiting for, there seems to be an interesting mix of stuff this fall. Now, if we could only stop things like “Kid Nation” from ever being made in the first place…

That’s about it for the moment. I’ve got to shut down this rig before the storm comes. It looks like doomsday outside and the wind is picking up. I’ll get back in the saddle of posting as soon as life calms down, which will hopefully be soon. I can’t take much more if it doesn’t.

Matt out.