by Matt | Jun 15, 2009 | Aggravation, Personal
I checked my GameStop order today and it still said “pending” instead of “shipped”, so I decided to call them.
Apparently, they sold so many, they’re now on back order.
Good news is that they sold out of the “weathered” and beat up boxes, so I’m getting a brand new one from the next shipment from the manufacturer.
Bad news is that they won’t get more in until June 30th.
Good news is that I sounded pissed so they upgraded my shipping to “overnight”.
Bad news is, I still have to wait until the 30th for it.
So…. I still got it for a good price. But for $100 off, I’ll have to wait another 15 days.
I thought about canceling, but I let it go. It’s already paid for and it would take 15 days just to get a refund anyway. It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything, just really disappointing. Now we won’t have anything to play this weekend at our already planned cookout. 🙁
by Matt | May 15, 2009 | Aggravation, Music, Personal, Web
In preparation for the release of new GreenDay CD today, I fired up the old iTunes store last night because I heard there were bonus and exclusive track available if you pre-ordered it. Sure enough there was. There were two bonus tracks (that can still be purchased separately) and 2 additional bonus tracks that were only for people that pre-ordered. They were two covers of Who songs. Not that I’m a big fan of the Who, but getting 4 bonus tracks for free was appealing. So, I clicked on “purchase album”. Nothing happened. I clicked again, same thing. I figured maybe the page wasn’t loading, so I hit the “home” button to back to the main iTunes Store page. The featured ad was still there, touting the inclusion of said bonus material, so I clicked on it again. Nothing. What the hell was going on? I tried another tactic, I searched for GreenDay in the search box. I found the artist, then found the album. It still said exclusive/bonus/preorder, so I clicked “purchase album” again. Then I got an error. Not a normal error either. A big, giant red exclamation point saying simply that “The iTunes store has had an unexpected error: please try again later”. What the hell?
So I quit iTunes, restart, and try it again. Same thing. Then I realize something. It’s 11:04pm, central time. Midnight on the East Coast. It’s no longer the 14th, it’s now the 15th. Since it’s the 15th, I can’t actually pre-order something that’s been released. I go back to the iTunes store, search by artist, find the CD and this time select the regular, non-bonus CD. It starts to walk me through the purchase process and I nearly loose it.
The iTunes store had updated the CDs status from “preorder” to “purchase” while I was looking at it, eliminating the version of the CD I was trying to buy. I can’t buy a CD with pre-order only songs if I’m not technically pre-ordering it. The only problem is, they left all the ads, albums and descriptions up. I checked back at a little after midnight (central) and they were still up. The big “pre-order” button was still featured on the homepage.
So, fuck the iTunes store. You know what I did? I went to Target, my go-to for everything these day. They opened at 8am, had the album displayed in a big “new releases” rack, complete with a deluxe 2-CD edition featuring not only the bonus songs but an entire bonus 6-track Live CD, for $9.99! So, fuck iTunes. Fuck it and it’s pre-ordering bullshit right in it’s $14.99 face. Midnight on the east coast is NOT midnight to ME. If I was waiting at a store for a “midnight” release, I’d have to wait one hour longer than my east coast counterparts, that’s just how it is. Just because it’s the 15th in one time zone doesn’t mean it is in all the others. What if I was on the west coast, that would have been 8pm. That should have left plenty of time to preorder it if I was living in Cupertino. If we’re going to ignore timezones so completely, why couldn’t I “buy” the full release at 6pm? That would be midnight in Europe. Asshats.
Luckily, the only things I missed out on were the two Who cover tracks, which, to no ones surprise, are now floating around on a torrent raft in the middle a certain notorious body of pirate waters. Double fuck you iTunes, complete and total fail. Ha!
by Matt | May 12, 2009 | Aggravation, Work
I was just asked to change the font on all the brochures I designed from the always awesome, and completely contempory, clean and visible Gotham to Imprint MT Shadow. I’ll give you a minute to check those links.
The reason? They liked the “font shape” of Imprint better.
Every time I make these changes, I die a little inside.
by Matt | May 1, 2009 | Aggravation
There are ants in my keyboard. I don’t know how, or why, but there are. I’ve taken it apart 4 times. There’s nothing for the ants to eat in my keyboard, but they keep coming back. Now I have to go buy a new one, which is $50, because it’s Apple. Ants cost me $50. That is all.
by Matt | Apr 30, 2009 | Aggravation
Yesterday I was asked to work on a redesign for our inter-office “Good Practices” manual. It’s a fancy way of saying “Employee Handbook”. It’s ugly, boring and no one wants to read it but every new hire is required to. I worked on my design, which is simple, clean and very usable on multiple levels. It features a different main photo, in black and white, for each of the six volumes (did I mention this thing is 6 binders worth?). Along the top is a semi-transparent strip of white where the name of the company and the name of the volume are written in a nice and clean font (Gotham HTF). At the bottom right corner is the corporate logo. That’s it. Super simple, super clean. Just what it needed.
The design that was approved? A 1990’s Photoshop collage nightmare featuring random bits of clip art mashed together and a large title with a Photoshop “metal” effect and drop shadow.
The reason it was approved? It was similar to what we had and they didn’t want to change it “that much”.
It’s occurred to me that if they were paying a design firm to design things for them, changes/rebrands/redesigns like these would be taken as gospel truth, handed down from the mountain. Apparently an internal art department has all the respect and wisdom of a bathroom stall.
Things like that make me angry in such a way that I want to shut down and deal with it tomorrow. That somehow my not working the last 20 minutes of the day represents some sort of compensation for their stupidity or perhaps some sort of mental rebellion against bad design as a whole. Or perhaps I’m just thinking too much about a cover for a binder that no one reads anyway.
by Matt | Apr 30, 2009 | Aggravation, Culture, Personal
This Swine Flu crap is making me laugh. Seriously. I’ve gotten, in the past 3 days, multiple emails from governement agencies (because we get internal emails here at work) telling people to really be careful about this. This is totally and completely blown out of proportion.
I’m typing this as my co-working, sitting 15 feet away, is on the phone CANCELING her trip to Mexico in JULY. It’s the top story on every major news outlet, the top result trending on every search engine and the most talked about subject around the water cooler.
Let me put this into perspective for you. As of this morning, according to CNN, 230 have confirmed cases of piggy flu, including 91 in the US. By comparison, between 50,000 and 70,000 people DIE every year from the NORMAL FLU. Don’t believe me, check the numbers. How about a statistic with closer numbers. Every DAY, 5,000 people are rear-ended in a car accident. Or how about 341 people, per day, are killed in a head on collision. There ya go. You have a better chance of being in a deadly head on collision today, than contracting the pig pox.
Of course, the news isn’t going to tell you that. They want you to panic. They want my co-worker to cancel her trip. They want to fill up ERs, drug stores and doctors offices. You know why? Because it makes for awesome news. Their ratings go through the roof. People who don’t normally watch the news or watch news exclusively are suddenly glued to the channel. They make a mint in advertising dollars. Why do you think that “coming up next” or “when we return” they’ll tell you something new? It’s all a tease, a game, a bunch of steaming BS.
I should probably mention, that of those 91 people in the US, 1 kid has died. One baby. That baby came up from Mexico the day before. So, there ya go. The poor kid who died is just another number in the expected 70,000 to be killed by flu this year. It sounds bad, 70,000 sounds like a bad number, but you just have to put it into perspective.
Drive safe.
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