Breaking Windows

I cannot tell you how much time I have lost in the last week or two because of our Verizon DSL at work. I spent no less than six hours on the phone with them this weekend.

Our download speeds are fine, at 3 MB, our upload speeds are next to nothing, and should be 768 KB.

This makes for non working conditions. It takes literally five minutes to upload a 70 KB file, as the file starts to upload, then the connection just drops out, and will not complete the request for minutes.

Not exactly The Book of Genesis, but I think you get my drift. Sadly, my post of April 1 was no joke. I counted, and for 20 days (and 20 nights) we had no upload speed, yet Verizon did nothing but give me excuses.

Why they could not have re-routed our Internet almost a month ago is beyond me, because it is obvious that was the issue from the start. As soon as we were back online I was getting my full upload speed, I didn't even have to reboot anything.

So we finally got work done at work. We also got a nice credit on our next bill.

The first thing I am doing for Haley is web updates on a couple sites, nothing terribly exciting, or even worth posting about - except that I am now using Adobe GoLive on a production basis.

I have used every version of GoLive, even before Adobe owned it. When GoLive owned it, GoLive CyberStudio was a pretty good product, even though it was more a designer tool than a coder tool.

Yea, you read that right, Dragon's Lair on Blu-ray will set you back $50.

It has a lot of extras. Is it worth it? Does nostalgia + extras + frame-by-frame cleanup = $50?

Digital Leisure is obviously betting on it. Space Ace and Dragon's Lair II are up next for them too.

It has some nice options, such as Home or Arcade game, as well as a hard difficulty mode.

No celebrity death in the past decade has affected me as much as that of Kurt Vonnegut, yesterday in his sleep at age 84. Ronald Reagan, John Paul II or Anna Nicole Smith? No, none of them were as intimately real to me, as comfortingly cynical, as this modern day Mark Twain.

Full story at Washington Post.

We have an OKIDATA C5150n printer in the office. It is a nice printer, even has Bonjour (Zeroconf). Setting it up on the Mac was a breeze, even without using Bonjour. Download the driver, go to Print Center, click More Printers, choose OKI TCP/IP and pop in the printer's IP address, and you are done. Or just use Bonjour and you are done in one step. But I explained the "hard" way to prove a point.

We have a couple Windows XP-based computers in the office. Installing this printer on Windows, not very strait-forward. No instructions or FAQ on the OKI site had a shred of help either. I am not joking.

... Will be the death of Matt. He is a freak about that game.

At first glance, Adobe's pricing structure for Creative Suite 3 is insane. They are no longer offering two versions -- oh no -- they now have six different configurations to chose from. Creative Suite 3 comes in Design Premium and Standard, Web Premium and Standard, Production Premium, and the one box to rule them all, Master Collection.

Why would they do this? Well, for one, they bought Macromedia and are rolling out CS3 versions of (most) all of their acquired goodies. Why didn't Director get the CS3 treatment? Who knows, but Flash, Dreamweaver, Contribute and Fireworks did.

This is rich, a must read.

Utterly amazing that he was not only billed as any kind of expert, but tried to further his cause based on this tragedy. Wait until he actually begins to cry for show towards the end. Unbelievable.

EDITOR: Kotaku has a good run down of his lies from the phone call.

Monkey + Sharp object + Balloons - Cheese = Greatest Flash Game Ever.

This past Monday bore witness to a horrific event, when a Virginia Tech student killed more than 30 other students and professors. Such a massive and sudden loss of life in a setting intended to be one of safety and growth is absolutely worthy of personal reflection and sorrow. Unfortunately, this tragic event, like others in the past, has also been seen as a prime opportunity for politicization.

Good read, I highly recommend it. Actually, I think it should be mandatory for one Jack Thompson.

You know it's your birthday when you get 392 emails from forums all over the globe wishing you a happy birthday!

Now, 392 might be a little exaggerated, but I do frequent quite a few message boards. I got an email from every last one of them this morning.

Cheap Ass Gamer was the best, they actually took the time to edit the standard template (DP did a good job in changing the standard form email too). I am going to enjoy my cheap ass birthday, thanks!

So, yea, I turn 29 today. Yay.

If I was the parents of this kid, I'd sue the school for suspending my kid.

The short of the story: A middle school student (no age available) was dared to put some ham on the table of Muslim students. Pork is against the religion. The Muslim students were offended, and the kid who did the deed was suspended... they called it a HATE CRIME. The police were called. Seriously. You can't make this stuff up.

More of the incident and a piece on another parody article that Fox News ran as a real story can be found here. If he's in middle school the kid is, what, 12 at the most? Unbelievable.

This past Wednesday a large part of Bowling Green, including BGSU, was without electricity.

I was actually working on my computer when it all went dark. I am happy to report that my UPS works quite well.

Getting home was a chore, as their were traffic cops on Wooster and Main. The back roads were risky at best, as apparently when the electricity is out, drivers cannot comprehend the meaning of a four way stop sign.

With no power, I fired up my PSP and played my new review copy of Pocket Pool (which is absolute crap). I lit my apartment by the screens on my PowerBook and Dell Inspiron. Yea, I'm a geek, but it worked just fine.

Power came back around 11 PM, and I had to get the newspaper server running again so they could hammer out a paper, it got done pretty far past deadline because of the blackout, at around 2 AM. Always fun times in the newsroom.

If you get the reference to the headline, you have good taste in music. If you get the double reference, you are a Mac geek.

Cleveland.com has syndicated Blogcritics content for a while now. They just added three more sections of the BC Network: Movies/DVD, Gaming, and Relationships. The link is not up on cleveland.com/blogs yet, but it will be soon. The headlines from the blog on Cleveland.com will also be on other sections of Cleveland.com, and other Advance.net sites.

Pretty darn sweet.