Haven't posted in a while...

I haven't updated for a while. I'm not sure why, I've just been very scattered I guess.

I just installed Google Chrome. I'm very happy with it, and plan to use it as my default browser. It's fast and has basically the same addons as Firefox, plus a few more I've found. The main reason for the switch, though, is because something about Firefox was overusing my CPU and making my laptop over heat. As a result, the CPU load would be almost 100%, and the computer shut down due to over heating a few times. I looked around, and found a post somewhere about how someone had the same problem, and traced it back to Firefox. So I decided to try it, and haven't had the problem in two days. I'm even burning a DVD while posting this, and the CPU load isn't even over 50%.

I'm not sure what else to write. I had an idea of what I wanted to say when I started this post, but then I lost it. I'm awesome like that. I will get back to you when I remember what it is.

Live Messenger; what the fuck is this?

http://imgur.com/AujLl.jpg

Okay, I think Microshaft has gone too far. I always knew I never will like them (unless they hand over their money to me). But this just reaffirms my belief. As this image shows, Microshaft has officially fucked the one thing that they might have had going for them. MSN has always been my preferred chat client, and not only because all the people I know use it (although that was a significant factor). But now they've gone and fucked it up.

I do not know a single person who uses any of the Live Messenger web crap. So in their genius they decided to make this an integral part of using the new MSN. What the fuck? If I want to know what my friends are doing I will check Facebook. Microshaft will never make anything that replaces, or even rivals Facebook, so they might as well give up now. I have never, nor will I ever, look at anyone's MSN profile. No one updates them and no one cares what they say. I did use my real name for my Hotmail address display name, but I can't any more since it will also be my MSN nickname. I guess no one will be using their Hotmail address for business purposes anymore.

Well, since I basically summed it up, I think you can tell I am quite pissed off about this. Here I was thinking that one of the most stable parts of my computing experience was safe...I am now off to find an MSN client that can actually be used.

June update (finally)

Please note my Lockerz link is still down. Please email me directly at <deleted>  AT gmail DOT com and I will get the email right away and will send you an invite. I am not sure if/when my Lockerz link will be up again since it is hosted elsewhere and I have no control over the hosting. I apologize for any inconvenience.

So quite a bit has happened since my last update. I recently got a job (at least I assume I still have it). It's through a temp agency, and I was told that, after working for a month, things are slowing down at the factory I work at, but they will call me in a couple weeks when they need me again. I hope it's true, because I have recently come to enjoy having money for a change. To celebrate, I bought a $900 laptop from Dell (although this was before I knew about the "slow down" at work). I have only had problems with the wireless card in this laptop. The battery also sucks, and doesn't hold more than a 30 minute charge at a time. I went all out on this laptop. It's got a 9 cell battery and a 500 GB hard drive. I figure I might as well since if I don't, it will be obsolete in a couple months anyway. I figured I'd get a new laptop now, while I have money, instead of waiting for this one to break when I don't have money. The thing that pisses me off is that Dell is super slow building their laptops, and they have the least detailed progress notes on their website. I can log into the Dell site only to be told every day that it's "In Production". I certainly hope it's in production, but I would also appreciate knowing what's being done and what stages of production have left to go. As one might recall from last Christmas, I had a problem with Dell. I ordered a laptop with Ubuntu on it, and they magically cancelled my order. I got pissed off, and just went out and got this one. I've decided to give them one more try, since they were really good to my girlfriend when her laptop started smoking (yes, literally smoking). They upgraded her laptop to a newer, more expensive model. I will update more as I can, but my laptop is expected to be delivered on July 9th as of now. I say as of now because it could change.

Another good thing coming from having money is the updates to my game collection. I got Singstar, Buzz Quiz World, Left 4 Dead 2, LittleBigPlanet, a Playstation Eye, and a controller/game combo package for the PS3 (came with a red controller and Resistance 2). All games I wanted, except for Resistance 2, which was a bonus. I am also going to acquire Mod Nation Racers tomorrow from someone on Kijiji. The guy is a douche who forgot to bring the game today to his work when I was picking it up, but I will go back again tomorrow only because he's selling it for $40 which is $10-$20 lower than the prices I've seen it at.

My Xbox 360 recently red-ringed. Yes, everyone who knows about the Xbox is saying "I told you so". But the fact still remains that it lasted for almost four years, and was one of the original "crappy" Xboxes, the ones notorious for red-ringing. So, I am still pleased with it's lifespan. I got a new console (just an Arcade, took the hard drive off the broken one). I do believe they have updated the components on Xboxes over the years, so this console should have better parts in it. I recently gave my broken Xbox to a friend to see if he could fix it, and he did. Apparently there was some soldering or glue that unstuck the processor from the component it was required to be in contact with. A very simple fix, but something someone would have charged $50 for, unless I ventured to do it myself. I don't think I could have since it took my friend and his friend all day to do it (one of them being very experienced with tools and machinery). I figured why should I let the console go to waste.

Well, it's late, I should go sleeping. Hopefully I will update more frequently in the future. I am pleased with the new layout editor that Google has added to Blogger.

not sure

Please note my Lockerz link is still down. Please email me directly at <deleted> AT gmail DOT com and I will get the email right away and will send you an invite. I am not sure if/when my Lockerz link will be up again since it is hosted elsewhere and I have no control over the hosting. I apologize for any inconvenience.

I am saving up my Lockerz points for a Mac Book Pro, but I don't think I will get it anytime soon, if at all. Lockerz needs to hurry the fuck up and launch because I am sick of competing for redemptions. I don't even try to redeem anymore because of it. But they will launch soon.

I am enjoying my new PS3. I got an HDMI cable and it didn't work. There was an extreme yellow tint to the image when using it, so I think that the HDMI port is fucked. I got a component cable and it worked, which made me happy. Now I have a beautiful picture and it's lovely. I got Burnout Paradise, which is a fucking awesome game. It is so fun and addictive. It goes far beyond the traditional racing/car game. I also got Fairytale Fights (which is okay but could be better), TV Show King (a quiz game that I got because my friend has it), LittleBigPlanet (which is just plain awesome, although severely frustrating sometimes), and the God of War Collection (which includes GoW 1 and 2). I got GoW Collection and LittleBigPlanet for $40. They are usually $30 each, so I got a nice deal (Best Buy had a sale this week).

Other than that, not much new technology wise. Might be switching internet providers since the one we have is using shitty Bell crap equipment and I am sick of being throttled between 4pm and 3am every day, especially since that's my main gaming time. We also only get 5 mbps (when it's not being throttled), which is super lame. The one I am looking at gives us 10 mbps and doesn't use Bell's equipment for more than the last mile of the connection. One of my friends says that they were told it is Bell's equipment, so I will have to ask about that again. We will see.

Lockerz invite link down

If you are here for a Lockerz invite, or wish for one, my link is down for some reason. It is being fixed, but there is no way of knowing how long this will take. So, if you want a Lockerz invite, please email me at <deleted> AT gmail DOT com. Please email me from the email address you wish for your invite to be sent to. I receive email on my cell phone so it will get to you within a few minutes. If it doesn't, please be patient because it is likely Lockerz having the issue (it happens relatively often). I am sorry about this, there's a whole bunch of server bureaucracy bullshit behind it.

New PS3!

I had another one of my spontaneous urges to acquire something technological in nature, and this time it was a Playstation 3. I bought it off a guy for $200 (they're $300-350 new). The awesome part is that it is one of the original PS3s which include backward compatibility with PS2 games. This feature was removed in the newer consoles much to everyone's dismay. The old consoles also come with a smaller hard drive, only 40GB. But the guy who I bought mine off of upgraded his hard drive to 120GB! So I believe I have one of the ultimate machines available. The only downside is that it has been repaired before. Hopefully that means it's less likely to need it again, but we'll see. The guy said the problem was something common; some of the soldering or something in the machine melts and stuff comes loose. All it needs to be fixed is someone to open it and stick everything back together.

If anyone is interested, my Playstation Network name thing can be found to the right of this post in the sidebar. I don't currently have any games but plan on borrowing some from a friend this week. Hopefully I can get some trophies and make my trophy card look a bit better.

The only thing I am really not liking is the fact I cannot add my credit card to my PSN account. I think it might be the card or something since it hasn't been working with my cell phone bill either. Lets hope some stupid piece of shit technicality won't prevent me from paying my phone bill on time.

I am also trying to sell my Blackberry on Kijiji but no one is biting so far. I think my price is worth it, because I am including some accessories with it. But people are cheap and annoying. I might lower it like $20 or something. We'll see.

iPhone again, iPad wtf?

As I mentioned last entry a while ago, I got an iPhone. I was really sick of my Blackberry not being able to play music, which I was under the impression that it could. Everytime I'd go to change a song it would freeze or skip, or just crash in general. I got fed up and just went and got an iPhone on Telus. I was with Virgin before and decided that I would cancel my plan (I was paying too much anyway) and switch to Telus. So now I am paying $15 less a month for basically the same thing. I've got the favourite five plan. I had ten contacts before, so I have less free contacts, but it's made up for by included picture and video messaging. I didn't even use all ten contacts anyway, not enough people call me. I have unlimited texting anyways.

But I have to say the phone is wonderful. It can do everything and has become a super awesome entertainment device for me. It's great because it's an iPod and a cell phone in one, plus other things. The idea of getting the iPhone was because using a phone for voice calls for me is basically a secondary function. The primary functions are texting and data, so it works out great.

The only thing I wish I knew before I activated my iPhone and set it up was that installing the firmware upgrade was going to prevent me from jailbreaking it. I would have kept the old firmware that came on the phone so I could have jailbroken it. I now have 1.1.3, and only firmwares up to 1.1.2 can be jailbroken; as in they haven't figured out how to jailbreak this OS yet. I've read in places that people are saying it's "impossible", but nothing is impossible. I want to jailbreak it to be able to customize the icons on the home screen (which Apple doesn't let you do, you have to keep their apps on there even if you don't use them). I personally will never use the Stocks app, so I would like it gone to give me more space. Also, I use a different weather app than what comes with the phone. It's also taking up space. Not to mention the fact that jailbreaking allows you to install free apps that perform many of the same functions of the ones you have to pay for on iTunes. Obviously Apple doesn't want this because they think they will lose money from people who are installing these free versions of apps (I say "think" because likely these people won't pay for them anyway, whether or not they get free ones or not).

Despite all that, I am loving my iPhone. Although I really hate the hold Apple has on their market, I am still willing to use my iPhone proudly since they haven't done anything too atrocious yet. Hopefully Apple doesn't go that route, and if they do, I hope something as widespread and comparable to the iPhone comes out.

On that note, here is an article: the new version of iTunes what isn't mentioned in this article is that every update of iTunes does something to block jailbreaking further. Needless to say I will NOT be updating iTunes.

That brings me to my next point of wonder: what the fuck is the point of the iPad? Basically to me it's a giant iPod touch. Won't people look a little retarded walking around using that as their music player? It's not like it can be used as a phone or anything useful other than playing music and maybe some apps you can use over wifi. Not to mention that it's huge, but that goes without saying. Basically you have to lug around a laptop sized device without laptop capability.

There are other issues with the iPad, such as the actual software components themselves. Even though I would never buy one of these anyway, and hopefully no intelligent person would (they cost around $500 for something you could buy for $300 that does the same thing, which is an iPod touch), people have issue over what kind of hold Apple is seizing over the usage of their products. See this petition for an example. I really hope despite all of this digital restriction that the hackers figure out how to do what they want soon. Oh well, I know I won't ever be buying an iPad.

I've always been a fan of Apple's products, both genuinely and because they are the main opposition to Microshaft. I really hope they don't do anything to change that really soon. As easy as it is to hate money grabbing corporate pigs, I don't like doing it (although some might beg to differ) because it severely limits my options. But at the same time I am not going to knowingly give my money to companies that fuck their customers over and use any means to get people's money. I have a huge problem with companies who do that. As soon as the customer becomes less than first place in the hierarchy of priorities, that's when companies need to either change or quit.