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Okay, self. You’re a tech geek. You like shiny things. Sell yourself an iPhone.

Well, okay. I guess I would have to start with…DUH. IT’S A FREAKING IPHONE. Not only is it the coolest damn looking mobile out there, but it’s an iPod. And don’t tell me you don’t like iPods and that you’re not an early adopter; you had a first-gen Windows iPod a full month before they hit stores.

Yes, but I have an iPod. A Touch.

Just bought it a couple months ago.

Go sell that brick on eBay then. Angela’s Ashes download The Chair full With an iPhone you get every feature your iPod has plus, like, a zillion more. Literally. Steve Jobs’ boys were actually able to locate the number zillion; it’s actually one of the free apps available. Along with AIM chat, Facebook, GPS locator crap, song recognition technology, AOL Radio, a zillion (again, literally) games, live WeatherBug radar and you don’t have to be near an open WiFi network to use it all like with your pitiful iPod Touch.

I’m under contract to Verizon for another eighteen months, and I’m not paying the early termination fee.

So get around it, then. Balto full Consumerist lists a way to do that, like, everyday. In fact they just gave instructions JUST YESTERDAY for the EXPRESS PURPOSE of people USING IT TO GET OUT OF THEIR CONTRACT AND GET AN IPHONE. Extreme Movie on dvd The Graduate release You stop by that site like ten times a day; how did you miss it?

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Wow, you like to shout, don’t you? I didn’t miss that post, actually. I just ignored it because it’s not as easy to break free as they make it sound. Plus, I’m not the only one on the account: Emily and my mother are on it as well, and of the 700 minutes we’re allotted each month we usually have just under half of that left since we don’t talk much on the phone and most of who we do call are also Verizon customers, so the call is free.

But you could get a similar deal for them on AT&T…

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Not with an iPhone I couldn’t. The data rate is horrid, and even worse since after they reduced the price of the new iPhones they jacked the rate you pay for your subscription. It would cost me in one month to have just one iPhone what I pay for three phones now. And AT&T certainly isn’t any cheaper as a whole; Lifehacker pointed me to this site that runs a comparison of your current plan with every other available one for your ZIP code. It’s conclusion was that it couldn’t save me a single dime by switching to another plan.

So basically you want me to literally double my mobile phone cost per month AND probably pay Verizon an ETF just so I can use Google Maps with GPS in the car and control my iTunes from six-hundred miles away.

I’m just going to repeat what you just said: Google Maps with GPS in the car.

Oh. Drool…

So we’re going to the AT&T store then?

Still no.

I read The Consumerist all the time.  At home, at work, on the road, in the shower, while asleep, in my coffin.  It’s a great resource of fun stories about our idiotic capitalist overlords, and occasionally they run with one my tips

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Today editor Ben Popken ran a video from a PowerPoint presentation he recently did showing how businesses can hurt themselves with automated customer service, whether it be on the phone or through email. All of his points are valid, and for the most part these robots need to be done away with. But I wanted to pass on a recent example of how efficient it can be as well.

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When we moved to Litchfield I was finally able to sign us up with DirecTV, a horrid little penny-pincher of a company that will screw you out of your grandma’s last nickle…but they have all the high defs. And cable here sucks. So we got hooked up literally four hours before the Cardinals’ season opener on FSN Midwest-HD. I wanted a three room system and only had two TVs, so the installer – seeing that I knew what I was doing – didn’t worry about dragging the little 13″ TV from the office to the bedroom to activate it. When I wanted to do that all I’d have to do is call DirecTV, tell them I have a “Error 22″ code (or something like that…those of you Googling that code please ignore my usage of it) and they’ll send me the programming. Okay, cool.

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Several days later I did just that, and instead of having to talk to an operator I just pressed the button for service and said “error 22.” It made some noises and then the error code on my TV changed to a different one. I hung up, called back, thirty seconds later I said the new error code and *POOF*: the Fresh Price of Bel-Air was in my bedroom. Awesome. Great use of automated service.

Rascal movie full On the other hand, I called a credit card company several days ago to activate our new piece of plastic, hoping and praying all the while to get an automated system so that some human didn’t try to sell me a protection program that I had no use for. Instead I got the real live person (who told me about sixteen times that he was in Phoenix. Phoenix, Arizona or Phoenix, India I don’t know, but it sounded like the former.) The man then proceeded to try to sell me nothing, instead explaining the rewards program, the website, activating the card, and then – gasp – spelled out exactly how long to the exact day the 0% interest lasted and what the APR would be after that.

Damn. I didn’t know credit card companies knew how to be honest like that. Chilling.

Paris, the desktop I built in December of 2003, has been giving me random freeze issues for the last year. Given that I only use her sparingly thanks to the laptop (“Chuck”) and the fact that she only seems to freeze up when idle (and I’m out of the room) I wasn’t too motivated to do much about it. Emily wants to use it for some of the programs she needs for her Master’s research, though, so suspecting the issue was with the RAM I jumped on Crucial to upgrade.

Four years ago I put a pair of dual channel PC3200 DDR sticks in the machine totaling 512 MB; at the time it ran me just north of $100. Yesterday at 1:30 PM I found a pair totaling 2 GB for $91. Not bad. I tossed $7 on top of it to get “two day delivery” and was given an estimated arrival of April 28.

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At 2:30 this afternoon the FedEx guy knocked on the door. Hello, RAM.

Dead Set I love Crucial. And so far no freezing.

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Webs dvdrip Memoirs of a Geisha film Growing up in the industry and thus having a fetish for all things radio, my computer over the years managed to build up a large cache of audio files, namely various programs I produced and airchecks from my years at WHCO, an archive of production elements and music beds, as well as random songs and other crap. Many of them were larger, uncompressed formats (read: .wav) that are used by multitrack editors and automation/live-assist programs and thus they take up far too much room on my computer. Actually, I should pluralize that: computers. This all started three or four boxes ago and slowly migrated over to my current desktop and laptop.

You can imagine what a mess it was.

The only reason I could ever find anything is because I just happened to remember where I put it, and that wasn’t always the case. Adding to the jumble is iTunes; occasionally a file or two would get added to the library to get burned to a CD or copied onto my iPod Shuffle, and now there are two copies of the file on my hard drive: one where it started and one where iTunes copied it into its own hellish structure of folders.

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Finally I was motivated enough to fix this mess. The last couple days has seen me completely organize and rearrange all of my audio, gutting duplicates out of iTunes and then recataloging all of the files into a logical order. “Illinois Loyalty” and all my CBS NFL music? That belongs in “Sports Music.” My Beatles parody songs and the oldies countdown shows I produce? “Radio Production.” All those wrestling themes? Out of iTunes and into the “Wrestling” folder inside “TV, Movie Themes.” Soooo much nicer now.

download Rugged Bear Even better: converting all the .wav files into .mp3s. At most I deleted 150 to 300 files off of my computer; the rest were retained and converted to .m3s. The haul: 104 GB was used before the project, and now only 89.7 GB is utilized. That still counts a whole slew of .wavs that have to remain due to their use in my multitrack program or else I could probably clear out another couple gigs.

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All that room saved after only deleting a handful of files. God bless the MP3.

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EngadgetHD has a gallery of screencaps from various new HD channels The Princess of Nebraska full such as CNN and The Weather Channel, making your author drool with jealousy (especially the graphics on TWC.)

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Emily and I have a 27″ Samsung tube that I bought in 1996 to get us by, and it works (other than a nagging loose composite connection problem) for now and we see no reason to buy an HDTV until it craps out for good. That said, I find it hard to explain the level of my enthusiasm when I found out that our Mediacom DVR box, which is used as their HD box for customers that desire such options, passes through all the local channels in HD, which means I can watch the national HD feeds on the broadcast networks. Even on my little tube the difference between The Office in widescreen on the analog feed and the HD feed is incredible, with a sharper picture, far more brilliant color and a Dolby 5.1 sound mix to boot. Even better are the programs not fed in widescreen on the analog channels, in particular sports; watching some football on Sunday was far better having Fox and CBS’s widescreen presentation.

(Speaking of, NFL Picks tomorrow.)

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The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John movie MLB TV, just because I live in the state of Illinois it doesn’t meant that I have access to Comcast’s Chicago sports channel. That means I can’t watch the Cubs/Astros game on broadcast, cable, satellite or apparently your internet service.

Of course Verizon’s IP addresses are silly, you actually detect me as residing, on this current connection, in southeast Indiana, far closer to the Queen City than the Windy City or Mound City. So you lose. Now you’ll know how Jason Marquis feels – a lot.

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Side-by-side comparison: maybe my widescreen MLB.TV feed isn’t that bad.

SD:

HD:

It’s not a huge difference, mostly because FSN Wisconsin isn’t in as tight on their shot as FSN Midwest is. I looooove widescreen baseball, it’s just tough to watch on a computer screen.

I guess it’s tough to watch any format, though.

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I say this because the feed I’m watching on the internet on MLB.TV is in widescreen with FSN’s HD chyron (the Fox Box is in the middle of the screen rather than taking up the entire width.)

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This is awesome for those with HDTVs and access to the feed. It’s less awesome for me who already has to contend with such a small screen since now I get even less real estate to watch.

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Don’t get me wrong: I’d rather have the widescreen picture so I can see all of the broadcast. But it’s unfortunate to have to watch it this way, this tiny.

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Running several websites that use Movable Type Seed of Chucky psp as content management software, I’m well-versed in the annoyance that is comment spam. Since Google lists pages based in part on how many other pages link to them, a trick to raising the profile of your cheap Viagra substitute is to create a bot that crawls all of the internets, finds open MT comment scripts, and register random, stupid comments that include links to your pathetic webpage.

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, which uses MT to run its guestbook:

I’m receiving often messeges [sic] like this:
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*four spam links deleted*
How do you fight with spam?

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Be Kind Rewind rip Rather than risk easy deletion by including no content of even remotely imaginable concern, the spammer has opened up the door to inclusion by making the webmaster think that just maybe this is a legitimate comment by a fellow flustered pagescripter.

No dice, son.

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