One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

The net always seems to have a damn good sense of how to do “cheeky and fun” on the 1st of April. Today’s highlights:

• Youtube (and uk.youtube.com) – all the featured video links take you somewhere you’ve probably already been
• Slashdot always posts the most shocking news stories today. For a second there I thought that story about Rambus winning their patent litigation was fake, but unfortunately it was real. Hopefully it’ll get funny later.
• Wowhead looks curiously like something else.
• Thinkgeek is “selling” caffeinated cereal and Youtube-enabled tasers. I’m thinking about ordering the Betamax-to-HDDVD transfer machine. Sounds useful.
• Woot is wooting off, but something seems curious.
• Gmail introduces new feature allowing you to custom-date email. Create your own alibi. That’s useful.
• April Fool’s Day on the Web (warning: lots of dupes, they don’t seem to be tracking well) and This SA Forums thread appear to be tracking some of the highlights.

Even though technology like this has existed for a really long time, watching video of the shuttle achieving orbit seems fucking surreal to me.

Further updates on the equally surreal Macbook situation later.

My Mac, for what it’s worth, has already been repaired, and will likely be heading back to me soon. So far, the repair is exactly what I had expected it would be. No surprises whatsoever, which is exactly what one wants in a repair.

Other things, though, aren’t so hot. Stream-of-consciousness entry follows below.

Chappy stopped by last night. He was in town briefly, brought a 6-pack of Corona and we finished ‘em all off in an hour plus. We should have gotten more beer. It’s always really fun to talk to him and now I really want to visit Austin again. After DFW I really don’t think I’m up to living in a big city, but it would be really fun to visit Austin for a few days.

When he was here we were talking about Netflix and watch now. I had previously set up my media center PC to run Vista Ultimate, solely for the fact that I wanted to use Media Center and its plugins and they’re virtually all Vista-only now. Fuckers. So anyway, I tried to install and watch a movie in Play Now. No go. It reports some sort of video driver error. Well, all my hardware’s old enough Vista supports it without drivers, save my video card, so I had already downloaded and installed the latest nVidia driver less than a week ago. So it’s not the driver out of date. I fucked around with it a bit last night but after four beers in rapid succession I was a bit loopy, figured I had fucked it up.

Talked to RD about it at work today and he figured it was a DRM thing. I had my system plugged directly into my TV via DVI, no HDMI or component, so I figured that wasn’t it, but I came home and tried playing movies at 800×600. Well, at that res it would at least play one frame, but then it would stop and flash like a spastic monkey – which was basically what it was doing last night, so no go.

I thought about trying it on my gaming rig but due to my own stupidity the updates on that box are totally hosed. No chance of getting Media Player 11 on it, so I figured fuck it, I don’t have a whole lot invested in my current HTPC install, let’s put XPMC 2005 back on it and see what happens.

The rest of this entry will be called “Why I’m Completely Ready To Fucking Give Up Computing Forever and Go Live in a Tiny Cabin in the Fucking Forest and Fucking Write Manifestos All Shit-Eating Day Long.”

I install it (after hassling with my stupid optical drive, wherein during the first gui install phase I got so pissed off at the damn thing I fucking hauled off & punched it, causing the system to bluescreen. Miraculously, both it and my hand survived unscathed. Note to self: No more NEC optical drives. Not even at gunpoint. They sound like a cross between a bench grinder and a rabid wolf and don’t work for shit.)

Once I finally got the OS installed, I put on the latest nVidia drivers, and discovered my fucking audio card still isn’t working. Well poop. Regardless, I tried to install & run Netflix movie player. Which meant I had to install Media Player 11. Which meant I had to pass WGA. Which meant my fresh, virgin, untested install had to be activated.

Once again, my brain is smashed up against the infinite stupidity of requiring activation TO GET FUCKING UPDATES.

I’m using MSDN media provided as a work perk. Every OS gets 10 activations. After that? Jig’s up, bought the farm, go fuck yourself. So just to TEST this fucking thing burns up one of those, even though I don’t know if it’s going to work and if I’ll have to hose the whole fucking thing and start over.

Now, let’s be realistic. Microsoft has said on several occasions that almost every version (exempting only OEM and volume-license) of Windows has a limited number of activations, no matter where you got it. You can only activate it a certain number of times. The only difference between here and retail is that I know what the magic number is, instead of MS keeping it a big fucking secret from you, and I’m not out 299 bucks when they decide your Vista Ultimate has had enough activations and you get to buy it again.

Still, it really seems like I’m getting ripped off somehow. I’m giving up one of my precious ten chances to get this OS installed and working (EVER!) before I even know if I have a fair shot at making it work.

So.

I activate it (which, since I haven’t run out of activations, goes smoothly) and try to install WMP 11. It tells me to go fuck myself, XPMC 2005 needs update rollup 1. “Well screw you, smart guy, because I downloaded that from MSDN! Ha ha!” I say out loud, while flipping off the “Fuck you” screen. Who needs pride when updates are at stake. So I pop in the UR2 disc, and run it.

It then rather unceremoniously reports to me that I have to have some .net framework shit installed before it can run, and I need to run Windows Update to get them.

Well, if I run Windows Update, it’ll make me install all of those mystery updates PLUS Update Rollup 2, so you just downloded it twice, asshole.

I’d swear that alert screen is flipping me off.

So I run Windows Update. This is always a multi-step, fantastically annoying process.

Last week Apple took a bunch of flak for installing Safari as an update item for Windows iTunes users. Microsoft has been doing that same shit for YEARS and nobody ever called them on it.

First run: Windows Update gets updated. Then the browser reloads and goes into limbo, and eventually bails out and tells me fuck you, I can’t run windows update, no I don’t know why, here’s some sand, please pound it up your ass. No, your EULA does not include the use of a mallet, go find your own fucking mallet, butthole.

Second run: Windows Update hangs and hangs and hangs and hangs. Eventually I shut it down and reboot.

Third run: Windows Update runs, advises me I need to update Windows Update again, and I have to install the WGA checker. It runs and does all those things.
.
Then, after all fucking that, it finally runs and actually gets actual security updates.

Everybody wonders why Microsoft thinks security is a joke. Microsoft is the only company I know that requires you to go through an activation AND another check to make sure your software is legit before you can actually install the security updates you need to make your computer safe. VMware costs $10,000+ and it doesn’t even remotely make you go through that much hassle to get updates. So fuck you, Ballmer, you bald-headed fuckjob.

So after all the updates are done, I go back to Netflix. I run the video player. It asks me to install WMP 11. Which in turn asks me to validate that my Windows is genuine. Third time in 30 minutes. There must be some goddamn fast pirates out there. Which in turn gives me the “You need Update Rollup 2″ message again. So I run it, and guess what, Windows fucking Update didn’t install the Dot Net fucking Framework.

This is good software. You do what it tells you to do, and it doesn’t work. Gotta keep the user guessin, keep him on his toes. The second you start doing what you should be? Poof. Fuckin’ element of surprise is gone.

So I manually go out and get the .net framework which is probably what I should have done from the fucking start. I grab the latest version, install it and reboot. I then try to run Update Rollup 2, which tells me to get fucked, I don’t have .net framework 1.1 and 1.1 SP1.

At that point I grabbed my Fubar and spent the next twenty minutes turning my media center system into a fine powder.

Well, not really. I went out and manually installed .net framework 1.1 and .net framework 1.1 sp1, because apparently .net framework whateverthelatestfuckingversionis doesn’t include previous versions, and apparently Microsoft doesn’t offer a version of .net framework 1.1 that automatically includes sp1. Both of those things are utterly ridiculous, but I can totally believe Microsoft thought them up.

After installing the .net framework bullshit and going back to Netflix’s video on demand page – as well as verifying once more that my software really is legal, I promise – I was finally able to run the thing that downloaded more stuff and eventually, finally, after being far too patient I was able to install Media Player 11. Then I reloaded the page and….

… video driver error.

So I started dicking around with drivers, and discovered that after my Revolution 5.1 experiment I hadn’t re-enabled the audio device on the system board. I knew things were eerily quiet. So I enabled the audio card and reinstalled the driver.

And the movies started playing.

So who’s the idiot here? The guy who forgot his sound card disabled, or the myriad of errors I got, none of which reported ANYTHING about this being an audio problem?

Fucking computers. If they’d make the goddamn things play on a PS3, I think at this point I’d just get one of those.

Really, I’m mostly just trying to avoid thinking or writing about work. It’s really scaring me a lot lately. I can’t seem to get around the fact that I’m basically one issue away from being outed as the fuckup that I really am, and getting walked because of it. I gotta stop now, before I start freaking out.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll espouse at length about what really, really blows asshole about using Linux as a desktop. There are many things, most of them stupid. And none of them my fault (or so I can tell.)

I’ve been doing tech support for a while now. For a large company, three years, three months and four days (give or take a few hours.) Professionally, since August ‘94 or so. It’s been a goddamn long time. It’s hard for me to deal with support. All I can really think about is all the shit I see that goes wrong. And that’s a whole lot of goddamn shit.

So that fact, coupled with my inherent ability to procrastinate (took the silver in ‘98) it took me something like six months to call in my broken optical drive. Happened back around the release of Leopard, the damn thing stopped burning CDs. It would throw out a power calibration error no matter what media I used.

So after stalling for something like 4 months I finally used my trip to DFW to drop it by the Apple Store, but they couldn’t repair it on site. I had intended to call it in as soon as I got back but now that didn’t happen, did it?

Anyway, what it all comes down to is that Saturday morning, I finally broke down and called Apple support, talked to some rather indifferent guy whose name I’ve forgotten, but at least he was competent enough to listen to me and set me up for a mail-in repair.

Today I got the box which, predictably, I have to ship back DHL (fuck, fuck fuck fuck shitting fuck. Might as well just ship it back via giant cannon, fuck I hate DHL…) So I nuked and paved and packed it up and tomorrow my Macbook will be leaving for Apple’s repair center in Houston. Hopefully it will be back by next week. I can only hope.

Even the box was classy. It came with precut lengths of packing tape and full-color printed instructions on how to use their universal mailing foamy thingamajig. Terrifying there are people out there who can’t figure it out.

In the meantime: I’ll be using Linux. Trying to see how practical it is to use it as a desktop. I’ve never really done that before, outside of small bites; my Linux systems have always been supplementary/server systems. We’ll see how this goes. I’ll be happy if I can just figure out how to install the codecs necessary to play Xvid AVIs on Ubuntu 8.04 beta.

They finally cast both leading roles in the Max Payne movie.

Max will be played by Mark Wahlberg.
Mona Sax will be played by Mila Kunis.

I fucking hate Hollywood. I want the writers’ strike back.

In celebration of the wholesome people of South Pasadena, CA and their “cuss-free week” I submit to you this wonderful, wholesome, family-friendly video which you should play with your speakers turned way up.

Happy no cussing week! (one) (two) (neither one of those is worksafe, watch out)

A California court shut down Wikileaks today. Bunch of cocksuckers. In case you haven’t heard of it, Wikileaks was probably made most famous when they released internal documents from Guantanamo Bay, detailing operations there.

Thankfully, there are a zillion other places that will allow you access to the same content. Proving once again that the Net really does treat censorship as damage and routes around it. Fuckin’ A.

An act of curious timing, David Pogue wrote an article a few weeks back bitching about movie trailers and how inaccurate they have become. He even got Jon Turteltaub to respond specifically to his complaints about the National Treasure: Book of Secrets trailer.

I remember quite some time back last year seeing the Cloverfield trailer. I checked it out briefly on the net and discovered, among other things, its production name (which ended up being its release title) and that it was J.J. Abrams’ baby.

Now I have a real love-hate relationship with JJ. Lost was nerd crack until season 3, Alias was insanely ridiculous but fun, and Mission Impossible 3 was only good because JJ was involved. I’m pretty sure that at this point, Tom Cruise could even ruin the fantastic Philip Seymour Hoffman had he not been held back with JJ’s careful hand.

Well, Cloverfield is really interesting and fun. It is very different. Its trailer is absolutely, painfully accurate, almost to a fault: not only does it have the best line of the movie in it, but it is basically a slice of the first 20 minutes of the movie. From there on out, things get really, really, amazingly fucking rad.

It’s the same basic monster movie theory that works over and over again: Alien, Pitch Black. Tell a story about people being chased by monsters. Importance is in that order. The story you tell about the people must be interesting and you have to sympathize with them on some level, or no level of coolness on the part of the monster can help you. Witness the colossal failure of the Godzilla remake.

Cloverfield succeeds on both counts in massive, stunning quantities. Considering the entire movie is told by a man who is seen only on rare occasions, as he’s always behind the camera, that’s really saying something. The first-person handheld view changes the equation a bit, though; instead of telling an engrossing story about a specific set of people, inundating us with backstory and attempting to seduce us with endearing characters, we see an everyman story; a going-away party, a successful relationship, a confused relationship, a man infatuated with a woman. Everyone can relate to these things. Then all hell breaks loose, and these people, these representations of us, must flee. Really fucking quick.

The shots of the monster are marvelously well-done. In the beginning you see enough just to scare you. Then you get pieces, parts, and a smattering of scary scenes. At the end, you get the full monty. It doesn’t answer the big questions – where did the monster come from? Is it alien? What is its goal (or does it have one?) It doesn’t answer them because its job isn’t to answer them. Its job is to show you the attempt to flee from the monster. I won’t give away the ending by telling you whether they get away or not. If this bit and watching the trailer don’t intrigue you enough to want to find that out for yourself, then you’re not this movie’s target audience. And that’s OK. Because it isn’t for everyone.

It’s just for the cool people.

Thanks, J.J.

Imogen Heap peforms Just For Now a capella, and it sounds better than the album. It’s also fascinating to watch.