by Matt | Nov 16, 2007 | Personal
Is that not the most epic title of all time. I can’t take credit though, I stole it from Something Awful. Still, epic. Which is my word of the day. Mostly because my vocabulary, while extensive, trends towards the obnoxious. “Epic” fits that category.
Trendy words are not why I’m posting. I felt that a general life update was in order.
First off, Mircosoft assures me that my console is in the repair process and I’ll have it by next week. I’m not holding my breath. I just realized that I didn’t explain the issue with the box when I last mentioned this. You see, last week they issued me a repair/RMA ticket and said they were sending a special box to pack my system in to send to them. Inside said box, according to their own instructions, was to be a pre-printed UPS shipping label. I got the box, I opened the box, I found no such label. Maybe I misheard them. Nope, according to the instruction sheet IN THE BOX, there should have been a label. I called them up, thinking surely they could just send me a PDF of the label, or a link to print the label from. Nope. Not only is the LARGEST TECHNOLOGY COMPANY ON THE PLANET not capable of sending me a fucking label, they can’t figure out how to let me print the label myself. No, they have to send me a whole new BOX! I wait another 3-5 business days. receive me second box and luckily this one has all it’s pieces. I pack up my xbox, send it to Mexico, well, close enough. Apparently the only Xbox repair center in the US is located dead center on the Texas / Mexico boarder. I’ve been down to the area and lets just say that restaurant menus aren’t exactly in English. Anyway, that was a week ago. Calling them yesterday to see if the system was going to be repaired or replaced, just out of curiosity, they inform me it’s been marked for repair and should be on it’s way to me soon. This should also be a good time to point out that the original rep I talked to indicated it would be a good 3-5 weeks, and most likely after Thanksgiving, before I got my system back. Either they’re over estimating and over achieving to look good for the consumer, or someone is lying to me.
This time without my system might turn out to be a good thing. I’ve actually had a chance to let these games come out, be played and reviewed, and add all these factors into my purchase decisions. I might end up waiting on Guitar Hero and Assasins Creed until post-holidays, and picking up CoD4 and Mass Effect, which I think will give me more actual playing time.
Enough games. I always talk about games.
Life itself is going well. Work is keeping me busy, which is always a good thing. My case is coming along nicely. I have to repair the lower front panel because I’m retarded and took off the painters tape with paint covered fingers, leaving big finger prints on the freshly painted stripes.
My folks were thinking about coming down for the holidays but it looks like that won’t be happening, which is sad because I was really looking forward to seeing them. My brother will be starting school back up in January. He had taken a long double semester internship at Standards & Poor’s (aka, what you hear on the news all the time as the S&P 500), the investment firm. Apparently he’s doing quite well there, enough so to buy a 360 in a whim. He called me at about 2am one night to tell me how right I was and how much it kicked ass.
Other than that, not a lot going on. I’m being constantly reminded about how much Comcast sucks all, especially now that they took over Houston from RoadRunner. RoadRunner, despite being morons, actually worked quite well. I never had any problems with them service/speed wise. The instant Comcast took over, I had 3 modem outages that week. No joke. My speed has also been cut in half, and I’m not talking about my bittorrent traffic either, I mean surfing and checking email. They advertise something like 4mbps down/512 kbps up. I think I’m getting 1/4 of that. It’s basically DSL now. Hell, I might as well switch to DSL. For the same shitty connection I could be spending $20 a month instead of $60. Actually, now that they “apartment monopoly” law was passed, I’m not forced to use Comcast anymore. I could technically get OpLink, which for $44 a month, I could be getting 6 Mbps up / 768 Kbps down. Either that or that AT&T UVerse thing looks kinda interesting.
Oh, and one last thing. The new Streetlight Manifesto CD is the most brilliant piece of music I’ve heard in a very very long time. It’s ridiculously good. I’ve got a bud here who isn’t a big ska fan, who thinks it’s unbelievable. Even Lauren doesn’t mind it, lol. Jason, back me up on this one bud.
Matt out.
by Matt | Oct 30, 2007 | Personal, Web
Nagle, being the awesome guy he is, was kind enough to hook me up with an invite to ffffound yesterday. I’m actually enjoying the service quite a bit. I find it to be almost a Digg + Flickr + Pandora kind of thing. You can select images you like off the front page and add them to your own collection or you can wonder the net, find an image you like, and add it to the collective. I find it very inspiring as a photographer, to see so much good work collected all in one place.
While ffffound is incredibly awesome in concept, it does seem to have a few technical draw backs that I hope they get ironed out before coming out of their closed beta. First on my list simply has to be the very odd image size bug. When you post a huge photo to ffffound, it shrinks it down to a more post appropriate size. When you find an image that isn’t so large, it tells you that it isn’t large enough to be posted. I found this to be the problem with 99% of the images on Flickr. Some of the images from my various favorite Flickr feeds weren’t large enough for posting BUT are, on the average, larger than the reduced size that ffffound uses. If you’re going to resize everything to be approximately 420×420, why on earth would a 480×480 image be too small? For example, I find the work of Tom McFarlane to be fairly interesting, if not amazing. Almost all the images in his photostream are larger than some of the small images on the front page of ffffound, but yet I can’t share them.
What compounds this problem is the fact that on the “how to” page, no mention of photo requirements is given at all. If they’re looking for a minimum size, I’d love to know what the actual dimensions are. All the page describes is that you can click on something to fav it, and that installing the bookmarklet is recommended.
Another small technicality is that of friends/followers. Either I’m completely retarded and can’t find the option to add friends or there simply isn’t one. If there isn’t, why does it say, underneith my screen name, that “I have no followers”. There is a short list of “favorite users” towards the bottom, but that’s comprised of people who’s ffffound lists I’ve added things off of, which is great if that person constantly uploads good stuff, but sometimes it’s a one-off and I really don’t care about their list of photos in general.
The last thing, which I’m sure they’re working on, is the if/then recommendation engine. As it is, I’m being recommended this image 3 times on my “found list“. Problem is, it too is already on my list. Why would an image I’ve already added to my favorites bother showing up in the list of “things I might also like”? Of course I like it… I just added it. Do they want me to add it again or something?
Like I said at the top, it’s a great little service, one I’m going to continue to use and will probably be a decent source of inspiration down the road. They’ve got a lot of kinks to work out, but if they pull it off, it’ll be a great site.
Oh, and if you want to check out my found photo stream, here it is…
http://ffffound.com/home/doc/found/
by Matt | Oct 29, 2007 | Personal
No Casey, no striking out, just joy. By now you all know that the Sox won the series. I can hardly fathom that not only did they win in 2004, but now they’ve won again. They had never won since my grandfather had been alive, and now they’ve won twice. It’s quite a new feeling for the Nation. It feels different. Much different than 2004. There was such a huge weight on them that year. It seemed like everyone knew they were somehow doing the impossible. This year it seemed more than possible, it seemed very likely.
Who I admire most is actually Terry Francona, not only does it seem like he knows that group of guys on both a professional and personal level, but that he trusts them. He knows when pitchers are done, he knows when someone needs rest, he knows when to put someone else in and when to stick with someone. I think he’s a great “players manager” and I think the next few seasons will be equally spectacular.
I also admire two of the most senior members of the Redsox line up, Jason Varitek and Mike Lowell. Lowell came through when everyone needed him to and was just totally and completely solid in the playoffs. And Tek, well, he’s just a classy guy all around. Papelbon and Beckett are simply money on the mound, but Tek and Lowell are two of the rocks that that team is built on. Rookies look up to those guys and they really inspired and helped make the younger guys confident going into a situation like that for the first time.
Speaking of which, it’s now occurring to me just how young this team is. In a perfect world, if everyone stays together for the next few years, contracts are resigned (and they had better resign Lowell), and everyone stays healthy, we’re looking at quite a team for the next 5 years or so. They may not win the Series every year, but I have little doubts that they’ll be playoff bound on a regular basis.
Others describe the happening in RedSox nation so much better than I do. I’ll let them handle the news. All I wanted to say was how proud I am to be a Sox fan, how happy I am that they won, and how excited and privileged I’m going to be to see them play over the next few years.
GO SOX!
by Matt | Oct 27, 2007 | Personal
Someone radio DJ schmuck the other day asked the always interesting question “what would you really want to do before you die?” Most people called in and said things like “spend time with my loved ones”. I’d agree with that whole heartedly. If a giant earth crushing meteorite was heading for Texas, I’d be spending my last moments alive… ummm… horizontal. But, a more interesting question might be, what do you want to do in life, at some point, before you die. Now, this question doesn’t involve certain death. It’s more of a “if you could do anything, what would it be” kinda question. I thought about it for a little bit, and came up with a short list of things I’d like to do before I die (of old age).
– Play a musical instrument in front of a live audience.
– Design a video game.
– Get really drunk in Scotland with a group of my friends.
– Drive in a professional race (not NASCAR), stunt course, or high speed police chase.
But the biggie, the thing I’ve always wanted to do more than anything, that keeps popping into my mind every time I turn on the radio/TV….
PIRATE RADIO
I don’t really know why. I guess it’s the whole letting your voice be heard thing. With a healthy dose of “sticking it to the man” thrown in for good measure. What would be even better is that if, somehow, my pirate radio broadcast inspired a second American revolution. It would be great. We could dismantle the credit bureau industry, smash anything with high fructose corn syrup, run the rich out of town, beat up some congressional lobbiests, restore a few liberties and have a massive BBQ on the front lawn of the white house.
But, if pirate radio doesn’t work out… well, it’s got to be a run for President. You’ve got to be 40 right? So, right this second, I’m officially declaring my candidacy for the 2020 elections. Perry for President in 2020.
What would my platform be?
“When I’m President, I will firmly kick, square in the ball sack, the heads of any major corporations that are leeching off of this country. I will fight, in an exhibition boxing match, any leader of a foreign nation that opposes us. I will invite over for ice cream, any leader of a foreign nation that supports us. I will surprise any leader of a foreign nation that’s plotting against us by inviting them for ice cream then beating them in a surprise exhibition boxing match. My domestic policy? Get a job. My foreign policy? Fuck you, we’re not accepting any more imports. Americans will use 99% American made goods, eat food that grows on trees or walks around on American soil. Everyone will have fiber, the internet kind, and lots of it. We invented the internet, there’s no reason I should have to wait for a video of someone getting kicked in the ball sack. Oh yeah, one last thing… free pie for everyone.”
If that doesn’t get some votes, I don’t know what would.
Anyway…
Back to the point. Pirate radio. Anyone has a transmitter? Seriously though, what would you do, at some point in life, if you could?
by Matt | Sep 7, 2007 | Personal
I haven’t mentioned this publicly on here before, but our very good friends Matt and Melinda are going through some trying times. Melinda was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of August and has been battling it since. It’s a very rare and progressive form of cancer but luckily she was able to get into the advanced treatment program at M.D. Anderson here in town.
We’ve all been praying for her and Matt and trying to help out whenever we can. Matt had been doing updates to their website by hand for their out of town relatives and so last night I installed a copy of WordPress for him. Hopefully that should make things a little easier.
Anyway, if anyone had a spare minute to pray, or if you don’t pray just think about, Matt and Melinda, I’m sure it would mean a lot.
by Matt | Aug 23, 2007 | Friends and Family, Personal
Can beer come in spades? Or is it limited to mere “pack” equivalents. Regardless, I had a multitude of brew last night and enjoyed it thoroughly. Yesterday we celebrated both my boss’ birthday and my good friend Dane’s birthday. My boss’ wife and I conspired to sneak a brand new xbox 360 into the office and set it up on the large, wall sized, projection screen. He received Guitar Hero 2 and Rainbow Six: Vegas and fun (and beer) was had by all as we “took the day off” to play some games. Talk about a good day at the office.
Those shenanigans immediately preceded the celebration of Dane’s birthday at a local pub called The Flying Saucer. TFS is known, at least locally, as the place with the highest number of beers available. They have a beer menu. It’s seriously crazy. I think they have 150-200 beers ON TAP with hundreds more in bottles. It was here that I was able to find my Bostonian favorite: Sam Adams Cherry Wheat. I had to order a few. Probably a few too many. I was actually amazed they had that, but apparently they have about half of the Sam Adams “Brewmaster’s Collection” of which the cherry wheat is apart. When I asked about the other varieties they were lacking (Cream Stout and Scotch Ale in particular) I was told that distribution of beers varies from county to county across the US. The distributor here in the Houston area only carries a certain number of kinds. It’s up to the distributor to request different varieties or brands. Dallas may have a completely different beer selection available to it than Houston.
I had to do a little digging, but Cherry Wheat is available at my local Spec’s Warehouse (think Walmart of booze) or, at the very least, they can order it for me. I think I’m going to have to stock up for the long haul.
There are very few beers that I like. I’m usually a vodka (or at least hard liquor) kind of guy. There are a few occasions when I’ll have a brew or two. Beer goes perfectly with pizza, so that’s always a possibility. The occasional cookout or party I’ll have one too, but rarely will I buy myself a six pack. When I do it’s one of a very short list of kinds. Sam Adams tops that list. As a local favorite, I think Sam was the first beer I had growing up, it’s what my Dad always drank. Now that I can appreciate it, I can see why. I’m also partial to the red ales. Killian’s, Red Dog, Red Hook for example, all are fairly tasty. I also like a cream stout or a porter every once in a while, but those are mostly “winter beers” because the ABV is a little higher and they’re more of a meal and designed to keep you warm than anything else.
Regardless, much fun was had last night and most importantly I learned something new. Now I know where to get my Sam Adams fix and Dane and my boss are both a year older. Win win.
Recent Comments