Erm… yeah, and stuff.
Posted on Friday, August 25, 2006 at 3:03 pm
As usual, it’s been awhile since I’ve written much on here. Sorry about that. Many things have happened, and many things continue to happen, that simply make it much more of a hassle than it really should be to get on here and write things.
First of all, I recently celebrated my first anniversary. Yup, that’s right, I’ve somehow managed to stay married for a year. I, for one, am amazed. Seriously, I would have bet money that by this point my wife would be huddling in the corner of a padded room in some 1950s-esque mental hospital after living with me. Cuz I’m batshit crazy, I tells ye! I gotta hand it to her, though, it takes a lot of guts to be able to handle me on a daily basis, so I’m proud of her for having come this far. Also, I’ve managed to keep her from finding all the dead hookers in the closet. Which helps.
The anniversary was quite nice. I had reserved once of the uber-expensive executive suites at a local Hilton, complete with the “romance package” (which includes a bottle of sparkling wine, chocolate-covered strawberries, and free breakfast in the morning). Mind you, I had to take out a mortgage for a house I don’t even have yet in order to pay for all this… but hey… you only get one first anniversary, right? Well, theoretically you only get one. What with the general purpose degredation of modern society, that’s not necessarily the case all the time. But it should be.
What else?
Lots of family has now come and gone. Rather than spread out the family visits throughout the year, we were stupid enough to think that we should just have everyone come all within the span of about 3 weeks. Not a good idea, for future reference. Especially when you’re living in an apartment that suffers from a general lack of space. But we made it through alright.
I’ve now finally gotten back into working on Scourge on a semi-regular basis. The summer was pretty rough, but now I’m taking time to finally get it back up to speed, and I’m hoping for a public release sometime before year’s end. (*crosses fingers*)
Umm… not much else. Oh yeah… check out the Saw III trailer. It’s looking pretty good. The first two were great. This one looks like it ought to be quite the disturbing and generally grotesque piece of cinematography that we’ve come to expect from Lions Gate. Yay that.
Ok, I’m out now. You go… and… um… do something important with your life. Now, dammit! I’m not kidding!
1 Comment
iBook Episode III: Return of the iBook
Posted on Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 5:28 pm
A few posts ago, you may recall that I was forced to once again send my iBook to Apple to get the “logic board” fixed. (Also, this brings up another point: unless I’m sorely mistaken, “logic board” is Applespeak for “motherboard,” so why can’t they just friggin’ call it a motherboard and be done with it?!)
Well, that was sort of a bad idea. One would assume that if Apple can successfully deliver an empty box to the correct address, and can then subsequently read the return shipping label on that very same box when it gets returned to them with an iBook all snuggled up inside it, they would probably safely assume that when they fix the iBook and send it back to its owner, it should probably go to the same place it came from. I mean, that’s the logical thing, right? Well, apparently not. Obviously, some else’s “logic” board failed as well. (Hehe, see what I did with that? Cute, eh?) Because the support guy who originally took my support request failed to update the return address in their tracking system (they still had the shipping info, for the place I used to live, from the last time the iBook died).
So I sent them the iBook in the empty box they’d sent me, and waited a week or so. All good, SOP and all that. Then I checked the repair status on Apple and noticed the return Fedex tracking number. Gravy, let’s see where it’s at. They’ve already made a delivery attempt… wait… I don’t recall any delivery attempt. Which is probably because they sent it to the wrong bloody address. Thankfully, whoever does live there currently refused the package, otherwise I would have been out one iBook.
I called Apple and let them know, and they said they’d immediately contact Fedex to try to redirect the package from the shipping facility in Abilene, to my actual home. Great. “You’ll have the computer by Friday,” they told me. Ok, good then. But Friday came and went with no computer. Then Saturday. Then Sunday. Finally on Monday I called, and they kindly informed me that Fedex hadn’t actually redirected the package, and instead had just sent it back to them, and they’d been sitting on it since Thursday. Ok, fine, so just send it to me. “Sure, no problem, just call us back tomorrow and we’ll get your tracking number.”
Didn’t get a chance to call them the next day, so I called on Wednesday. “Uh… yeah… call us back tomorrow for a tracking number.” Um, how bout no? Since you told me that two days ago already, and I should have had the computer back a week and a half ago if y’all wouldn’t have fucked up. Finally I got to a manager after, including this call and the previous three, a combined total of about six hours on hold (a) waiting in line to speak to a CSR, (b) waiting while the CSR waits in line to speak to their shipping center, (c) waiting while the CSR connects me to their shipping center, and (d) waiting while the CSR finds a manager.
Manager still couldn’t tell me why it hadn’t been sent out yet, but he promised he’d track it down and personally give me a call by Sunday and if he hadn’t figured it out by then, we’d start talking about getting a replacement computer. Even gave me his direct extension and told me how to bypass the phone menu in case I had any questions before then. He does indeed call me back on Sunday, and asks if I’ve got the computer yet? Err… no… was I supposed to? Yeah, he says, DHL delivered it on Thursday. Oh really, fool? So I go online, and sure enough, DHL delivered it… to my apartment leasing office. Gee, guys, thanks for notifying me. Really. Unfortunately, this is Sunday, so I won’t be able to get it until the office opens tomorrow. Which I do. Finally. Thank Christ.
All is well, I’ve got my computer back, and everything should be done now, right? Well, not quite. See, the manager guy was actually cool enough to call me back again on Wednesday and ask if it was all working and everything. Called my wife at home first, asked her if it was working, then asked for my work number and called me to ask if it was working. Yeah, it’s good. No problems. Thanks dude, I didn’t figure I’d ever hear from Apple again. But yeah. S’all good, iBook works great. Thanks for getting it taken care of so quickly.
“Well, that’s great. Since it took so much time to get your laptop, we’d like to offer you a goodwill gesture. What color iPod Nano do you want?”
Thanks, Andrew. Coolest. Tech support manager. Ever.
2 Comments
New month. New host. New video card. New forums.
Posted on Wednesday, August 2, 2006 at 8:08 am
It’s now August. July was a terrible month for blogging. I had so much stuff going on, I didn’t have much of a chance to post anything. But now it’s August, maybe I’ll get a little more time to post stuff here. And maybe I’ll try to get back to posting some random stupidness like I used to, instead of constantly discussing my own trivial existence.
Se7enet, and all my other sites, are now on a new web host. Dreamhost was good for awhile, but I think they got a little too big, a little too quick, and couldn’t keep up. The last three weeks were simply abhorrent, and the service level had been steadily declining for several months already. Anyway, I’ve now moved back to A Small Orange. I’m on a smaller, cheaper plan, so I’ll be saving money, which is good. Also, their PHP/MySQL configuration is much more efficient, so even if we ignore the connectivity problems on Dreamhost, everything should load quite a bit faster now. That was one complaint I always had about DH, was the PHP configuration was just slow. I checked Dragon Scourge, and it’s actually running faster than my own localhost server, which was never the case on DH. But yeah. If you can see this post, you’re seeing it on the new server. Yay for that.
I was also forced to order a new video card, when my trusty old Hercules 9800 Pro decided to crap out on me. It’s still kind of chugging along, which is good, since the new Radeon X1600 Pro won’t arrive till tomorrow. But I think the fan is dying or something, and it’s causing it to overheat. Cuz it’s artifacting all over the place, even just idling at the desktop. It’s served me quite well, for three years – almost exactly three years to the day, based on the date of that post I linked to. The problem is, I really wish it would have done this a month ago. Because I just bought all that other stuff – power supply, DVD drive, etc. – that I didn’t necessarily need. So it would have been nice to have the video card die first, that way I could have bought the new one instead of all the other stuff, rather than already having bought the other stuff and still having to spend more money. But oh well.
Also, I went for a card on the cheap this time, instead of like last time (and next time) when I bought the biggest, baddest card on the market. For one, I couldn’t get the really big ones because they’re all PCI Express, and my motherboard is still AGP. And as soon as I can afford all the new good stuff, I’m going all out – new badass mobo, new badass processor, and a couple new badass video cards. But this one will serve my purpose for now.
And finally, the newest beta version of Threads 7 is up and running. Please feel free to check it out and play with it. Beta 2 is much more stable than Beta 1, and the importing process went a lot smoother and fixed a number of problems I noticed with Beta 1. So it’s getting pretty close to when I will be killing Threads 6 altogether and officially making the live forums run on T7.
Ok, that’s all for now. I better get back to work.
