A person once said something to me.

You are such a creative person. The stuff you write is so vivid, so alive.

They then asked me a question, followed by a statement.

Why don’t you draw? You would make a great artist.

I stopped what I was doing. I drew my head upward, looked at this person straight in their eyes, and said:

You wouldn’t like what would come out of my mind. If you saw what my mind’s eye can see, what the words I put to paper tell, you would think me crazy.

They wanted to see what would happen, so over the course of an hour I took pen to paper. The following slideshow/gallery is what the result was.

A few notes: These were all done in pen, not pencil, on lined college rule paper. That means I had to get these done right the first time, as there were no second chances. The only Photoshop that was done to these was to get rid of as much rule as possible without spending hours on each image.

I have left some of the original writing on some of these. Those who have seen my handwriting these days: told you I had damned good handwriting.

I CANNOT draw for shit. This is known and continues to be. I found these tonight and decided to show the world that I am not bullshitting when I say I can’t draw.

These were all drawn when I was in high school, over 15 years ago.

There are two thumbnails that didn’t generate correctly for this slideshow. I am working on fixing it, but the images still work when you click on the “ERROR” thumbnail. As well, if you go into “FS” (fullscreen) mode you can see higher res versions of each of these.

As you can see, some of these were a bit on the dark side. After the person saw these, they asked me to stick to the written word because they didn’t want to know what else resides in my head.

I think that is some of the best advice I ever received in my life.

There has been an epidemic hitting Craigslist lately and it is bugging the fuck out of me.

I have RSS feeds setup so that I get notified of new posts in the creative and computer gigs areas of Craigslist for the Twin Cities and Oregon (where I lived previously to the Twin Cities). When you are self-employed it benefits yourself to do this for not just Craigslist but other sites as well so you can pick up that one gig that will pay that one bill that you just need to get out of the way.

Yet as of the past year or so (and much more as of late) there is a disturbing trend in these postings. More and more a person is running into the dreaded “expand your portfolio” method of payment.

For those not in the know; “expanding your portfolio” is akin to an unpaid internship, except you are doing the work you usually get paid damned good money to do for the right of the person you are doing the work for to claim as their own instead of knowingly doing it for free so that you may break into an industry.

The Labor Department just this year stated that most unpaid internships are illegal, which means that more job posters are resorting to the “expand your portfolio” method of payment.

An example of the listing I am talking about:

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/hnp/cpg/1772964289.html (this may disappear)

I am looking for a website designer who would help me build my website. Looking for someone whom wants to add to their portfolio or design service credits.

So if you’d like, message me….

• Location: Hopkins
• it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
  Compensation: no pay

That is a very basic example, and the person who posted that listing got right to the point: “I want someone to do something for me for absolutely no pay, I want it to benefit me so that I make money, and all you get is to add a link in the footer or a blip in your portfolio.”

What you will generally see is more akin to the following:

We have this great idea that we need someone to help come to fruition! We need a website, hosting, domain name, email addresses, business cards, door hangers, logo, cd/dvd cover, video editing, video post production and more!

We don’t have any money to pay you because we used it all to get everything going, so we are looking for a college student or someone who wants to add to their portfolio. This is a great portfolio project and could lead to greater gigs for you.

If you can’t read between the lines, here is what that type of ad says:

1. We don’t have any money at all, as we spent our last $55 filing the DBA paperwork.
2. We need all of this stuff because somebody told us we need it, but we have no idea how to do it ourselves.
3. We want some struggling person to come in and give us everything we need to get our business going so that we can make money.
4. We are offering you the chance to work yourself to death, meeting our deadlines, creating to our satisfaction, and you get to add it all to your portfolio because that is going to make you rich.

These people are parasites. They are not only switching from the usage of the term intern but they are still preying upon people who need the work. They read these articles in the local paper, on some “BE RICH LIKE ME” website, or see something on their non-tech knowledgeable news station and think, “hey, I can do that!”.

In the meantime those of us who actually know what we are doing are getting pushed out of our own market by the people who accept these offers thinking this is the way to get into the market.  We then have to cut our prices to become “competitive” with people who aren’t charging a dime.

I build websites. I edit video and do video post production work. I convert from old media to new media. When I have time I write (which I never seem to have time for anymore) articles for various publications and try to finish these novels I have been working on since I was 16 (I am a bit of a perfectionist). Yet, when you come here you see a site that isn’t the greatest, you read copy that isn’t up to snuff, you see things that are sub-par. Why? It is the cobbler’s son conundrum;  I don’t have time to put shoes on my own child’s feet, I need to keep the shoes on the feet of the people who pay the bills.

And right now? There aren’t enough feet for the shoes I have built, yet I am putting out more shoes then ever. I have more projects right now than I can properly handle and yet I am only pulling in enough money to keep one project afloat.

I do attribute this to the emergence of the “expand your portfolio” gig listings on Craigslist and elsewhere; not only are the good paying gigs going elsewhere but people who would normally pay standard fare for my work are moving in this direction. They think they are getting some great deal, yet in the end it comes to me to fix it. Problem is in the end I have to cut my fee even more because it isn’t new, it is a fix of someone else’s work. So since I am not building something from scratch I get paid less.

Yes, most of this post is rambling nonsense and I realize that. The point I am trying to make is that “expanding your portfolio” is a bunch of bullshit and it needs to stop. If you want quality work you are going to have to pay for it. You are not going to get it for free, you are not going to get it because someone wants to expand their portfolio because guess what? The people who do good work already have a portfolio. I am not saying I am the greatest web designer in the world because evidence is to the contrary and in abundance. However I have been building my portfolio for over 15 years and am still building it to this day. The projects I am working on now will get added to the portfolio and I will be paid for them. I didn’t give anything away just so that I can claim I built it.

So if you are a builder, a consultant, anyone who works in the creative area of the world, do yourself and all of us a favor: DON’T TAKE PEOPLE UP ON THIS. Your work is worth more than nothing, worth more than a tiny link at the bottom of a page, worth more than a mention in a bibliography.

It is worth what you put into it. If you put everything you have in it, than you should be compensated properly. If you just jerked off and threw it up on the screen, then you can pay your bills in used kleenex.

While it has been a bit quiet around here lately, that hasn’t happened without good reason. The reason being that wonderful purveyor of cable technologies known as COMCAST.

Ever wonder how to make someone's head explode like Scanners? Just say that word one time

This saga begins, much like Star Wars, a long long time ago but not really that far away. There was a man and a woman, they fell in love, got married and moved into a house. The house was falling apart because the landlord wasn’t exactly what you would call “on top of things”, so we had Comcast come out and put in all new wires and wall outlets so we could enjoy internet, telephone and HD television.

Before we get into this I want to state a fact: none of MY equipment is faulty. I know people say that but I am a geek and a tech myself and I know how to troubleshoot and fix issues. My television, telephones, and computers (including all routers and such) are all performing at top condition they can. As well, this is going to be a long post as a lot has happened to create it.

Things seemed to be fine until winter hit. Suddenly all quality was lost in picture, sound, and speeds of the internet. Myself, Spider, being a former cable tech, decided to check out what I could without stomping on Comcast’s territory. Nothing came of it as there was nothing I could do. I did, however, find out that all infrastructure in the Twin Cities is above ground.

For those who don’t know (and have never looked at a weather map of the Northern MidWest during winter) it gets cold up here. We have snow and lots of it. We have ice and frozen ground. This creates a “Good” and a “Bad” about above ground infrastructure.

The “Good” being that even during those harsh winter months Comcast is able to fix pressing issues, they are able to get to their infrastructure as needed. The “Bad” being that the snow, rain, winds, and other crap knocks out service left and right. We were getting horrid internet speeds (to the point of having to reset the modem on a daily basis), bad picture quality on the television (pixels, frozen images, sound dropouts, suddenly not being able to watch channels we were paying for) and poor voice quality on the phone. We left it be for the winter as we figured, somewhat rightly, that it was the weather wreaking havoc.

As summer came around we noticed those issues weren’t going away. (We also noticed that a lot of channels we were paying for had HD equivalents we weren’t getting, such as BBC America, Comedy Central and more. Other carriers had these but not Comcast Twin Cities.) We noticed that they were getting worse. Each time I called to have the technicians check their infrastructure they would say “nothing wrong on our end, must be you”. This went on for a few weeks until I finally had enough.

I called the local Comcast center and ended up being connected to Theresa (no idea if that is the correct spelling) as well as a higher tech. I laid out the issues we had been having for an extended period of time and stated, matter of fact, that there was something wrong with their infrastructure in this neighborhood and that they need to fix it. (These two gals were, and continue to be, the best Comcast reps I have ever dealt with.)

The gals sent out a senior technician to check my equipment, the infrastructure leading to the house, and the infrastructure in the neighborhood. Guess what? A bunch of infrastructure was broken; the same infrastructure that the original technicians had said was “a-okay”.

The issues cleared up some but never completely as we still had to reset the modem every week, and the sound on the TV would still cut out now and again. At least the phone worked properly afterwards.

Flash forward to the beginning of March of this year (this makes it a total of two years dealing with these issues so far) and we are moving. We are moving to a new, better place with better infrastructure for Comcast as well as better infrastructure inside the building itself. We are optimistic that our issues with Comcast will be resolved by this move, yet we learn to never use the word “optimistic” in a sentence with the word “Comcast”.

We call Comcast to setup transfer of service to our new residence. It is going along fine until the painful part hits; it seems Comcast is upgrading their lower end Analog channels to be Digital channels to open up bandwidth. In reality this is a great move that will benefit both customers and the company in the long run as Comcast is taking a load off of their infrastructure and will be able to use that extra bandwidth to provide faster internet and more HD channels (BBC America and Comedy Central perhaps?).

The painful part of this is that Comcast requires any television without a cable box (those with the coax coming from the wall direct to the television) to have a special adapter dubbed the “Digital Transport Adapter”.

Yeah, that tiny little thing.

The rep we spoke to stated that we could either have the technician install the adapter for us at a charge of $30 or have Comcast mail them to us in about six weeks. Neither was appetizing, especially when Comcast says they are free and hooking them up is no harder than a VCR, but we opted for the mailing to us because we didn’t want another charge.

During our tour of our new residence we noticed that whomever had installed cable there before did a piss poor job. They put in one outlet, attached two splitters, and strung out sub-par coaxial cable to the three rooms. Splitters suck, even the ones that Comcast uses (although they will tell you they are top notch they are cheap, lose signal quality and die quickly), and make a mess of wires for your home.

We requested that two additional outlets be installed and that a line direct from the box be put to those two outlets for the extra two rooms. We had no problem with the cost of this procedure as we wanted as direct a connection as possible for the HDTV, the internet, and the SD TV in the bedroom. This not only brings in quality signal to each room but allows easier troubleshooting if one service isn’t performing as it should by allowing elimination of lines. We set up an install date (someday between March 28th and April 1st) then proceeded to move.

When it came to the install date we literally had nothing unpacked but the HDTV and a computer. Two technicians (later learned to be contractors) came to install the service. From the get go one could tell this would end badly as there were no extra outlets installed, they just replaced the coax that was there with the same sub-par kind as before, then called it done and left. Cheap, shoddy, and poor all around.

Shortly after this I had a myriad of doctor’s appointments and a septoplasty so we weren’t exactly right on the ball calling to complain, but had set in our minds to do so. Our hands were forced quite a bit as shortly into the month of April internet speeds starting slowing down again, accompanied by service completely dropping out. The pixels, freezing, and audio drop outs were happening on the television again and voice quality on the phone was piss poor. As well, it had been past six weeks and we had not received our Digital Transport Adapter in the mail.

Speed Test 1

Speed Test 2

The above speeds are on a 16Mbps tier of service. I am not asking for 100Gb/s here, but this is sub-par even for the lowest of tiers Comcast offers.

I call Comcast and get an appointment set for May 12th (with an actual Comcast technician, I was adamant about that) and that day came. The technician looked everything over and found, to no one’s surprise and especially not mine, that the splitter was bad. The exact thing I was trying to avoid in the first place had occurred, validating and angering me at the same time.

Once again I am on the phone to Comcast talking to a representative. I tell her all of the above (in a condensed version) and she immediately informs me of the following:

1. The original rep was wrong. There was no $30 charge and no six week mailing wait for the Digital Transport Adapter. One was never sent out to us either, so she sent a new one that would take five days.

2. The charges are removed. The $30 charge was for the outlet installs, not the Digital Transport Adapter installs. The rep was trying to charge us twice for the same product. She proceeded to remove the whole installation charge from our account for this debacle after I asked her nicely.

3. A new, actual Comcast technician would be out. Instead of a contractor an actual Comcast technician would be out to fix the issue(s), just like I prefer.

That appointment was set for yesterday, May 23rd between 2pm and 4pm. We cleared some stuff out of the way as we still are not completely unpacked and waited. Waited. Waited. Waited. See a pattern emerging here? That’s because the technician never showed up and never called.

Just about an hour ago I called Comcast again. I got a rep that asked me questions I have never been asked before such as security codes, special numbers and whatnot. Even though I failed to answer any of these I was let through and talked about the account. (Account Security – Only as good as a flustered phone rep!) This is what was learned:

1. Five days is not five days. That Digital Transport Adapter that has only been seen by myself in an online video? It still hasn’t arrived, and it also seems to be the Missing Link in the evolutionary chain as evidenced by….

2. Appointment was canceled. According to the rep I spoke to the appointment was canceled by Comcast’s internal systems, with no notification to us, because of that Digital Transport Adapter. The reasoning was unclear as the rep muddled her voice through the explanation (twice) but somehow that Missing Link swatted a butterfly in 400 B.C. causing a ripple effect that prevents me from ever getting it. Supposedly when #3 happens it will be brought to me….

3. A new appointment! Yes, another one and the third one this month. This time it was set for June 5th because that was the earliest they could get someone out. A bit of light at the end of that tunnel is that the technicians called shortly after my hanging up and switched the appointment to May 27th (this coming Thursday).

4. Customer guarantee is crap. Comcast is making a big deal out of their new “Customer Guarantee” with print ads, television ads, and more. The problem is that when you mention it the rep quickly changes the subject to something else so they don’t have to give you that $20 credit.

Customer Guarantee from Comcast's Website - As good as the paper it is printed on

We are now approaching three years of service with Comcast at these two residences and we still have not had a month without some issue. We understand that not everything is going to be perfect all the time and that issues arise now and again, but let us recap (quickly) the issues in these past three years…

1. Poor service. Poor performance across the board on all services that we have been paying approximately $140 a month for.
2. Poor technicians. Not just the contractors but those at Comcast who couldn’t figure out their own infrastructure issues and a customer had to do it for them.
3. Poor delivery. At this point I don’t think even Indiana Jones could get that Digital Transport Adapter to me if he handed it off to Marty McFly in 1956 and brought it back in time. At this point in time there still are not outlets I had initially paid for (hopefully fixed on Thursday) almost two months and three appointments ago.
4. Poor customer satisfaction. Throughout the whole time we have had service at these residences we have paid in excess of $4200.00 in monthly fees (this is not counting installation fees, upgrade fees, lost time & productivity, etc) and what have we gotten? All of the above, $60 removed from our account (that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t brought it up) and the subject changed when the “Customer Guarantee” is brought up.

I work from home and when I lose internet either completely or with speeds as shown above I lose productivity. I have a lot of clients who are thinking of going elsewhere because of the perceived “laziness” of my work timetable. There is only so many times a person can hear “the internet crapped out on me” before they believe it to be an excuse. I shouldn’t have to upgrade to the business class internet when what I do does not require that class of internet. The residential customer class is just fine when it works right.

I am not one of those people who asks for anything free or demands compensation. I just want a service I pay for to work right 99% of the time. Poor service, poor customer satisfaction, poor everything should be the exception and not the norm.

Comcast's "Norm"

Yet with all the money being put out and lost at the same time I would like to make Comcast a deal: you folks come out and fix the issues, deliver the equipment that is supposed to be delivered, and I don’t have to call you for a problem for three months and we will call it even as it stands right now. If I have to call for an issue within those three months then I want something. I don’t care if it is faster internet free for six months, HBO free for six months, or what as long as it shows you actually do care about one customer who has gotten absolutely nothing but migraines from your service. Migraines that could have been prevented easily by service reps, technicians, and corporate themselves.

Three years is a long time to continually screw up. It takes a special kind of talent to be able to do that for so long and only give scripted apologies. Put your “Customer Guarantee” on the line and make it come true. I would say put your reputation on the line but you have already lived up to that.

Truly, we have achieved what our not long ago ancestors thought we would as the internet has given us unparalleled freedom.

We no longer need to leave our house. Hell, just look at your email and you can get the following with just a few clicks of a mouse, personal information, completing special offers, or cashing a check and sending back the lower amount.

1. A bigger penis. Yes, men, the plague of all time is fixed. You can get Viagra, Cialis, pumps, bumps, and even implants through the mail. All discreet, no one will know. You will not believe how much she will enjoy it more.

2. Ladies, your breasts can now be mistaken for water buoys. You will be the hit of the airplane crashing into open water as your breasts inflate to the size of beachballs at a Grateful Dead concert by rubbing special lotion on them (and us men can watch on webcam, now, all legal!), taking pills, or even just by testing and keeping implants!

3. We can get food delivered. Amazon is shipping food and if you sign up for their Prime service you are guaranteed to get it just before the expiration date.

4. Want an HDTV? Wii? PS3? iPod? iPhone? Any hot product? Just complete a few of these special offers that end up costing you more than going to the store to buy the product and you will be 120th on the list to get the product as soon as it becomes available.

5. You can buy and sell anything online. It is a virtual garage sale. You can finally get rid of that tacky green shag carpet couch handed down since your grandfather went through his “experimental” phase in the late 60s. You can also sell your soul, burnt toast with the graven image of a dead person from over 2000 years ago, and even get $500 for a Cheeto in the shape of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

6. Have a weird fetish that you just can’t find any porn of in the sticky floored local shop? Not a problem. Rule 34 of the internet will make you happy: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” Bugs Bunny being gangbanged by the cast of Three’s Company? You got it. Minnie Mouse taking on the cast of Fraggle Rock? Pssh, that is so last week. The Internet moves faster than that. The Internet makes porn faster than a quickie with The Flash.

7. Need human interaction? There are more sites just for telling people how great, wonderful, and right you are. You get to call them names such as “doody head”, “anusburger”, and “poopydoodoobuttfart” without worrying about them hitting you. You are always right too. You are THE person of the internet after all. Oh, and you have a second cousin who saw it happen, no lie.

8. “But what about the things we need in case of disaster?” you ask. The internet has you covered. Auto insurance, health insurance, and trips to that double door van in Ecquador are all just a jaunt down the virtual hallways of the internet. You can get free healthcare (after taking out a loan), airfare (after helping a few illegals come over the border), and so much more.

9. You can win the lottery in 135 different countries at once because YOU have been randomly selected in an email lottery you never entered.

10. Want movies or music? All at your fingertips. You can download to your heart is content the content you wish to have. Who needs to pay for it? Why help stimulate the economy? Those big corporations are so last century. Stick it to the man while you inhale your Doritos, slurp on your Peruvian double mocha latte with cinnamon swirl whipped topping and chocolate chip crunchies surrounding the rim of the double insulated foamed cup bearing a corporate branded logo on the hot pad to make sure you don’t burn yourself because you forgot you ordered a hot drink so you won’t sue them, all the while asking your mother to not touch your Star Wars “action figures” because they are in battle scenes from the fifth book in the tenth series of unauthorized companion stories about how Princess Leia traveled to the planet of Er’Nak’Tek to save the race of Ibmipri animals from becoming extinct because the Jawas like having sex with them (see Rule 34 in about one week, this will be there soon!).

Who needs to go outside? Who needs to travel places to do things? The internet has given us so much freedom we can’t imagine living without it. Why experience the “real world” when you can travel the world from the comfort of your undies in your living room, shades up for a little sunlight and your neighbors seeing the parts of you you haven’t seen in five years?

Thank goodness for the internet. What a wonderful invention.

*The above is a piece of satire. While some of this is true and many people do behave or do these things on the internet, I do enjoy the internet and use it as a tool and to keep in communication with people across the world. I just wish people would read a fucking book or spend more time interacting with other humans in the real world.

The Culprits

You know about the Westboro Baptist Church (heretofore referred to as WBC), right Dear Reader? Just in case you haven’t heard about this group of folks, allow a slight history lesson before the point of this post.

According to Wikipedia the church was started in 1955 by Pastor Fred Phelps in the state of Kansas, city of Topeka. Their purpose, as stated by Shirley Phelps-Roper, one of Fred Phelps’ daughters in the documentary The Most Hated Family In America:

“You think our job is to win souls to Christ. All we do, by getting in their face and putting these signs in front of them and these plain words, is make what’s already in their heart come out of their mouth.”

Their purpose according to the rest of the world? Spreading hate in the guise of gospel. The rest of the world has a compelling case if photos of their pickets and interviews with members are to be taken into consideration.

Fred Phelps, his wife, and one of his daughters

More members of the church protesting

Read the rest of this entry »

Perfect example of how the Healthcare system in the USA works:

The wife and I go to the doctor on the same day at the same place. She goes in first, I go in second. She is diagnosed with a virus and let’s me know. I am diagnosed with the same one during my appointment. I also went in for a Tetanus shot update.

She gets a prescription, I do not. I also don’t get my Tetanus shot. We both still have to pay.

We have to pay the health insurance, we have to pay the co-pay, I have to pay for another visit to get the shot I didn’t get in the first place, and still deal with the virus itself which will probably be gone by the time I get back to the doctor.

They just made triple money on one virus and one shot. Healthcare doesn’t need fixing, GOP? Then you pay our premiums, our co-pays, and our prescriptions. You argue with the insurance policy holder that I did not, in fact, get the shot I am being billed for and that yes I need a second shot to be covered by the policy. You can argue with them that as I did not get the medical care I was promised and paid for that I should not have to have that last visit taken out of my deductible, that I should get my co-pay back, and that the doctor’s office should eat that visit.

Healthcare isn’t like any other industry; if you don’t get the proper service or product from a doctor it can be the difference between life and death, not the difference between a widescreen DVD or a Full Screen one. Not the difference between strawberry ice cream and raspberry ice cream.

My situation isn’t life threatening by any means as it is a simple virus of the throat that is more irritating then anything. Yet, as with other times in my medically infiltrated life, the lack of care is the concern. How many people have to double or triple pay to get better when it could have and should have been taken care of the first time? Our bodies and our organs are not something we can just take back to the store and exchange for the right one. If something goes wrong with our bodies and our organs we are going to have to spend even more money to get it fixed.

THIS, right here, is one of the many reasons that healthcare sucks in the USA and why it needs to be fixed. (I have about $1.5 million more reasons but that is for another time.) People are in debt, people are ruined, people are literally falling apart because the insurance industry wants to make their buck even when the doctor makes a mistake, but when the doctor makes a mistake the patient pays for it three times:

1. They pay for the first visit.

2. They pay for the second visit.

3. They pay with their health, and sometimes, with their lives.

I usually don’t talk about politics, even with people I know, because it usually leads to really bad things. My views on many things are so far out there that even the worst dictator in the world would say, “Dude, chill.” Yet, I urge anyone reading this to call their Senator, their congressperson, their local representative. Write them, email them, show up on the steps of their office.

Let them know that healthcare needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed now….because the way things are going you might not have the chance to do it come tomorrow.

I am starting to lose faith in Sony.

As stated in the Blu-ray sucks posting before this one, I am an early adopter. I purchased a PS3 a bit early (not as early as some) and spent a lot of money on the unit. I have enjoyed my PS3 immensely. The majority of the new generation of games purchased in this household are for the PS3, even though we have a Wii, Xbox360, and Nintendo DS.

Back in December you read about the problems I had getting the service box for my dead drive PS3 from UPS. It took some doing but I finally got my PS3 sent into Sony and repaired. It came back and everything seemed to be fine. The PS3 had worked better then ever and we were enjoying movies and games like mad.

Are you ready for the sequel?

Designer #1: "We'll use solder that heats too fast and breaks the system!" Designer #2: "Brilliant!"

As anyone who is into games will know that image above signifies that my PS3 has become a victim of the dreaded Yellow Light of Death (YLoD). The YLoD is akin to the RRoD (Red Ring of Death) on an Xbox360. Hell it even comes from the same exact problem: Sony and Microsoft allowing their consoles to heat up too much, using inferior solder on the logic boards, and resulting in the solder literally melting away and preventing specific circuits from completing. The machine then shuts down and does not allow itself to be turned on again due to it knowing further damage will occur.

Microsoft, to their credit, extended warranties on their console and repaired without charging customers. This was in no small part due to not only the gaming press but the mainstream media pouncing on anything Microsoft might do wrong and spreading the word worse than Lindsay Lohan spreading disease in a public bathroom tryst. Sony, on the other hand, doesn’t get much bad press as their name rightly implies standards and quality assurance. (Microsoft is everyone’s punching bag.)

Yet now, for the second time in a year and under 1.5 months from receiving my previously repaired PS3 back from Sony, I have to send it in again. Yes, this is the same physical console as the original purchased one.

The problem I have (outside of this having happened) is that I have had the PS3 for quite awhile now, I have had some marathon gaming sessions that would put a lot of the pros to shame, but the YLoD decides to show up after the PS3 was repaired.

When I originally had to send the PS3 in for service two things needed to be done: replacement of the Blu-ray drive and a cleaning. Sony is well aware that the PS3 Phat is a vacuum that sucks dust like you wouldn’t believe. (There was even an incident where Sony denied an owner warranty repair due to the amount of dust in that owner’s PS3, he eventually got it repaired under warranty after Sony relented.) If during the course of this cleaning Sony’s techs did not check to make sure that the solder issue, which contrary to popular opinion happens more often then not, was not occurring on this particular console then fault lies with Sony.

The long, drawn out point I am trying to make is that I find it hard to believe that a console that was repaired not more than 1.5 months ago is failing due to something that takes time. A lot more time then what has passed since receiving the repaired console.

It is averaging lower than 30ºF outside and the house never gets above 68ºF because heat here is expensive. From the owner’s manual for the PS3 supplied by Sony the operating temperature is 41ºF to 95ºF, which is well within the parameters of what the house it at. We control humidity here too, otherwise bloody noses happen way too often. I could understand if it had happened the first time, but not after having been repaired. I truly believe that the tech at Sony did not do their job properly as a cursory check of an item like this would seem to be normal operating procedure when doing a cleaning.

The YLoD had to be something that was coming for awhile, yet Sony missed it. Now I get to ponder whether I will have yet another UPS/Carrier Lost issue since most of the country is still going through snow storm hell, including here where our snow has turned into solid fields of ice.

I am an early adopter.

I am one of those geeks who sees something really cool and has to have one of them before the masses. Not to keep ahead of the Joneses, but because when I see something cool it usually sticks around, and I want to enjoy it for as long as possible.

I, like many others, predicted that Blu-ray would win out over HD-DVD. I predicted this the first moment that the format fight hit the trades, which was long before it hit the populace news sites, and made the same arguments throughout; storage space, quality, and the PS3.

Blu-ray: It rocks socks

For those who don’t remember back when the PS2 first came out DVD was in its infancy. DVD had just got done fighting a war with DIVX (Digital Video Express, a failed attempt by Circuit City to co-opt the next generation of media) for supremacy of the next big home video format. When both hit consumers it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that DVD would win out since DIVX was a rental disc while DVD meant that people owned a copy of the movie they could watch at any time without having to pay again and again.

Another factor was the release of the PS2 which brought a cheap DVD player into the home of millions of families the world over. The PS2 was the first DVD player for many people and remains that way for many more. Read the rest of this entry »

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