I decided that I wanted to have a little more control over, well, everything to do with this blog. I've been on this kick lately as things have moved to The Cloud, as everything has become more networked, and perhaps even having gotten a bit older where I want to know that the stuff I do now I will still have access to ten or twenty years from now. If there is one thing I have learned in the last ten years, it is that storage is cheap and I never have to throw data away.
See the rest at my new blog!
Friday, May 3, 2013
Saturday, February 2, 2013
The Abusive Relationship That Is the American Cable Industry
I just got done reading I Fought the Cord and the Cord Won over at MacWorld. It is a well-written article that examines one man's attempt to divest his family of cable television and to use Internet-based alternatives, an option that is becoming increasingly more attractive for many and one that I have been using happily for several months now.
I've always been somehow distrustful of any commercial relationship that is based upon negotiation or haggling. I'm certain this is naïve of me, to be honest, because the larger a transaction is, the more likely it is to require haggling: purchasing a house, a car or even negotiating your salary at a job, for example. But for smaller purchases, the merchant should simply state what they consider a fair price and then it is up to me whether I want to pay it or not. It makes me more comfortable to deal this way because then I feel that the merchant is treating me equitably and helps me trust them more.
But when someone tells me a price and then when I say no and begin to walk away they tell me a new, lower price, I feel like they were trying to cheat me. I feel as if the original price wasn't a fair one, but a price that they were quoting me to see if I was a sucker, a mark, a chump. And so now, how can I trust that the new price is truly any more fair or just another step along the way to see how much of a sucker I am?
Yet, this is how the American cable industry constantly does business with their special offers to get you to switch providers and their deals to get you to stay, but that always have an expiration date. Not to mention the bundles and the packages, always trying to maximize the amount of money they get out of you each month. How many times have you come away from one of these negotiations and known exactly what your monthly bill was going to be? And how many times have you been correct? For me the answers are "almost never" and "not one single time".
So, with the exception of the Internet service (that I desperately wish there was an alternative to, though where I live there are at least two choices), I cancelled my subscriptions from the cable company in favor of services such as Netflix, iTunes and Amazon Instant Video that tell me what they're going to charge me ... and charge me exactly and only that.
Anything else is just someone trying to put one over on you ...
I've always been somehow distrustful of any commercial relationship that is based upon negotiation or haggling. I'm certain this is naïve of me, to be honest, because the larger a transaction is, the more likely it is to require haggling: purchasing a house, a car or even negotiating your salary at a job, for example. But for smaller purchases, the merchant should simply state what they consider a fair price and then it is up to me whether I want to pay it or not. It makes me more comfortable to deal this way because then I feel that the merchant is treating me equitably and helps me trust them more.
But when someone tells me a price and then when I say no and begin to walk away they tell me a new, lower price, I feel like they were trying to cheat me. I feel as if the original price wasn't a fair one, but a price that they were quoting me to see if I was a sucker, a mark, a chump. And so now, how can I trust that the new price is truly any more fair or just another step along the way to see how much of a sucker I am?
Yet, this is how the American cable industry constantly does business with their special offers to get you to switch providers and their deals to get you to stay, but that always have an expiration date. Not to mention the bundles and the packages, always trying to maximize the amount of money they get out of you each month. How many times have you come away from one of these negotiations and known exactly what your monthly bill was going to be? And how many times have you been correct? For me the answers are "almost never" and "not one single time".
So, with the exception of the Internet service (that I desperately wish there was an alternative to, though where I live there are at least two choices), I cancelled my subscriptions from the cable company in favor of services such as Netflix, iTunes and Amazon Instant Video that tell me what they're going to charge me ... and charge me exactly and only that.
Anything else is just someone trying to put one over on you ...
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Well, I'm Never Giving EA Any More Money
There is only one word for this behavior, reprehensible.
I was actually telling my daughter just a few days ago that in the early 90s Electronic Arts was my favorite game company. And in the late 80s, EA published some of my favorite games of all time.
I was actually telling my daughter just a few days ago that in the early 90s Electronic Arts was my favorite game company. And in the late 80s, EA published some of my favorite games of all time.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
How to Rebuild All of Computer Science Using a Blank Computer and a Floppy Disk
I found this post on Reddit and wanted to save it for posterity. It reminds me of the old days in both good and bad ways ...
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Planetside 2
Once again, I am reminded why I do not play Sony games. Planetside 2 is full of bugs. How do I loath thee? Let me count the ways ...
- I use a Dvorak keyboard layout. This makes keyboard remapping a complete necessity. Which they do offer. But I have to remap even the most basic movement keys for being on foot, in a land vehicle and in an air vehicle. How about we just make movement a global setting?
- Constant crashes. I only play for about half an hour before the client locks up.
- There are many cases where Vanu Sovereignty purple and New Conglomerate blue are pretty much indistinguishable ... cases in combat where milliseconds count. And I'm not even color blind! My best friend, Punish, he's color blind in such a way that makes it hard to see the red in colors ... like distinguishing purple from blue.
- Graphics glitches. I had to experiment with the graphics settings for about half an hour before I could get some settings that actually worked. It turned out that I needed to set the basic "Graphics Quality" setting (that has no description tooltip) to Low. Everything else I can set as high as I like. From what I can tell, this forces the client to use the low-quality models. If I set the graphics quality setting to anything else, even Medium, I get strange artifacts where polygons aren't erased and everyone has crazy-ass googly eyes ... (it appears the eyeballs are drawn on the outside of the head).
I am soooooo glad I didn't pay for this piece of crap. Oh, and the most hilarious part ... in one of those frequent crashes I noticed something. When I went to Task Manager to kill the locked up client ... it had the version number in the description: v0.470xxx. It's not even version 1! They knew they were shipping crap.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Tribes Revisited
While I was trying to find the time to coalesce the thoughts and feelings I had around Tribes: Ascend, Tycho over at Penny Arcade went ahead and did it for me.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Another Potential Boon to Wargaming - Kickstarter
If you haven't heard about Kickstarter yet, you should take the time to check it out soon. Kickstarter is a crowd-sourced angel investorish system that anyone can get in on. The idea is that if you have a project or product or something that you want to launch but don't have the money for, you post the idea on Kickstarter and ask if people want to invest in your idea. You give a goal of a certain amount of money by a certain date and if enough people invest in your idea to where you reach the goal in the time allotted, your project gets funded. It's a great system that has funded a lot of cool new businesses.
The reason why I think it could be a boon to wargaming is that a little company calling itself Tectonic Craft Studios has already used Kickstarter to fund its idea of making a new line of wargaming terrain. All they asked for was eight thousand US dollars, but the Kickstarter community put together over $40,000 for them! I hope that they are able to take this start and make a great business out of it.
What other ideas are out there in the wargaming community where the creativity and the initiative has always been there ... but the money to get started has never materialized?
The reason why I think it could be a boon to wargaming is that a little company calling itself Tectonic Craft Studios has already used Kickstarter to fund its idea of making a new line of wargaming terrain. All they asked for was eight thousand US dollars, but the Kickstarter community put together over $40,000 for them! I hope that they are able to take this start and make a great business out of it.
What other ideas are out there in the wargaming community where the creativity and the initiative has always been there ... but the money to get started has never materialized?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)