Shouzer

My contract with AT&T runs out at the end of June, and, frankly, my iPhone is starting to piss me off. It’s gotten slow, it’s had visible hotspots on the screen for at least a year now, and iTunes is the biggest pile of shit I’ve ever had to deal with on a regular basis.

With that in mind, Megan and I picked up a pair of Pres when they were released.  So far (and this is coming from somebody who stood in line for the iPhone the day it was released and has talked it up previously), I’ve got to say the Pre is better.

• The keyboard on the iPhone is better than a lot of people would have you believe, but a physical keyboard is just better.  And a slider is just slick. 
• The browser is much faster.
• The plan is better.  I was paying $60/month for 450 minutes, 5000 night & weekend, 250 txt msgs (NOT picture messages–the iPhone will but still doesn’t support them), and unlimited data.  Now we’re paying a combined $103 for 1500 minutes, unlimited nights & weekends starting at 7pm, unlimited txt (including pics and video…), and unlimited data.  Inflation’s got nothing on Sprint.
• Multitasking, anyone?
• A crisper, brighter screen.

You could probably make the argument that some of my iPhone complaints would be placated if I were to wait for the 3G S, but frankly I don’t want to.  Apple’s exclusion of picture messaging has irked me from day one, and their dumbass decision to not support it on the original phone doesn’t do much to inspire confidence…

Oh yeah, Palm stock is up nearly 1200% percent since December.  Coincidence?  Not a chance.

Apple came out and announced iPhone OS 3.0 a few days ago.  It’s got some great new stuff in it, including (finally) push notifications, copy+paste, MMS (picture/video messages), turn-by-turn navigation, and more.  Reading the news, I thought to myself, “Great, I’ve been wanting MMS since this thing came out.”

Honestly, how is it that a $600 phone was ever released doesn’t have one of the most common features in existence?  I’ve heard arguments that it wasn’t required, because the phone handled email.  After all, email is better than picture messaging, right?  Apple was one of the first companies to stop putting floppy drives in their computers, because they were ahead of the curve.  Such is the case with MMS, right?

Wrong.  Dead fucking wrong.  As long as you have friends out there who have and use MMS, email is worthless in filling the void.  It certainly has its place–after all, I use email on my phone all the time.  But almost none of my friends or family have a phone that does email.  Nope, they all have regular phones that “only” to MMS.  It’s bothered me since the day I bought my phone.

Great, right?  They’re finally fixing a fundamental flaw with the phone by adding in a missing feature.  Oh wait, there’s some small print.  “Only available on iPhone 3G.”  Huh? So because I was there in line on the first day, giving Apple my money without ever seeing the phone in person, I got fucked.  Well, fuck you too, Apple.  I’m buying a Pre as soon as the damn thing is released.  Ironically, that likely means Palm will screw me somehow, too.  But, at least they haven’t done it yet, and Apple has.

I bought a Netbook about a week ago, and I’ve gotta say that I love it so far.  For $300, there’s not much better you can do than an Asus Eee PC 900HA in my mind.  The next step is to install Win7 on it, but for the time being here’s a pic comparing it to my 15″ Macbook Pro.

Click the image to check a few more photos if you’re interested.

Last year, when I built my computer and got a new TV, I invested in a few surge suppressors from CyberPower for the house (namely, I got two of the 1090′s and one 895). Since I started using them, I haven’t had any real opportunities to see them in action. We’ve had plenty of power outages, but no surges … until tonight. We had two consecutive surges within about 5 seconds of each other. The surge suppressors did exactly what they were designed to do (all my of electronics kept power, while the rest of the house flickered), but it was just extremely cool to see it happen. I will never, ever go back to the generic 6-outlet power strips.

Am I really the only one who thinks the first Android phone, the HTC Dream, is ugly?  Honestly, after some of the great things HTC is doing with its Touch lineup (the Diamond and the HD are both beautiful), how can anybody be happy with the Dream.

You’ve got to admit, it would be kind of cool to be able to tell people that you were in one of these planes.  They weren’t really that close to colliding, but they were close enough that they had to take evasive actions.  Then again, I don’t know how soon after that I’d feel like flying over the open ocean…

It’s pretty strange to see things like this, knowing that Scott was there just a few months ago. I honestly haven’t kept up on world news like I probably should have recently, so I don’t know too much about what’s going on.  It sounds to me like there’s people who feel that the current government is really just a proxy for the previous government, which was ousted a few years ago.  Yeah, that would seem to defeat the purpose.

Next up is Google Chrome.  Apparently Google doesn’t think that we have enough browsers between Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, and whatever else is out there.  They’d rather have their own.  Honestly, I think that’s pretty silly.  Who knows, maybe it’ll be the greatest thing ever, but I doubt it.  Wouldn’t their time be better spent investing in Firefox, which is itself an open source browser?  Hell, they already employ Ben Goodger, who used to be the lead dev on Firefox.

Lastly, I thought this story about the credit card companies and Mythbusters was pretty weak.  Basically, the Mythbusters were going to do a show about RFID hacking, and Visa/Mastercard/AMEX shut them down.  How about instead of trying to hide security flaws, you just fix them?

Steve Jobs announced iPhone 3G.  It’s pretty well exactly what I was hoping for the last time around, too.  It’s thinner, slicker, has 3G support, built-in GPS, 3rd party app support, and enterprise support.  What more could you honestly hope for out of a phone?

A price cut, that’s what.  And, fortunately, that’s exactly what Apple’s delivered.  When I bought my iPhone a year ago, I paid $599 for that sucker.  The price for a 16gig iPhone 3G (twice the size of mine) is now a measly $299, fully half the price it cost a year ago.  For 8gigs?  $199, 1/3 of the cost less than a year ago.  Damn!

Anybody else noticed that iTunes is an absolutely horrible, bloated piece of shit?  For as much love as Apple gets (and hell, I provide my fair share), iTunes 7 really is one of the worst apps I’ve ever used.  The simple fact that it mysteriously requires Quicktime to be installed is bad enough, but on top of that it’s just dog slow.

Stupid iPhone and its software lock-in.  If I could sync that bad boy with Winamp, iTunes would be uninstalled in a heartbeat.

My TiVo flipped out on me the other day, and I have to admit…  I was scared.  I rely so much on that sucker that it would just be weird watching TV without it nowadays.  Seriously, people still watch commercials?  What’s up with that?!

Anyway, word around the campfire was that we had gotten some new HD channels the morning of the day this frightful event occurred.  Knowing that, I was surprised to see that my channels weren’t tuning.  I decided to just restart the TiVo (through the menu, of course) and hope the CableCARD would repair and give me my new channels.

Everything was going according to plan (which, in TiVo land, means waiting like 10 damn minutes for the stupid thing to boot), when out of nowhere my whole screen just turned green.  I looked up and read some goofy message about how there was an error it was going to try fix for the next three hours.  Huh?  What could really take that long?  I could wipe the whole hard drive and reinstall an OS in that time, no problem.  So what gives?

I started scouring the internet for clues and found a number of things, mostly related to people having dead hard drives.  Great, that bodes well for me.  But, suddenly and not more than 10 minutes later, the TiVo restarted itself and it’s been working ever since.  Crisis averted, I guess.

I caught this article a couple days ago, and I found it to be a pretty good read. It points out, among other things, that more music is being sold than ever before. CD sales are down, and the record labels’ profits are shrinking. But more music is actually being sold.

I’d encourage everybody to read the article–it’s fairly short at just two pages. The main impression it left me with, though, is an upsetting impression of how long and how much the record labels have been ripping us off…

With EMI and Sony now releasing mp3s without DRM through Amazon’s mp3 store, it looks like they’re finally starting to learn. It makes me wonder just who else is ripping us off, too.

In my opinion, the point of a console is that every one is supposed to be the same. That way, game developers don’t have to worry about different possible configurations like they do on PC. That’s the power of a console–it’s easier to develop and optimize for.

That’s no longer the case now that there’s a 360 Premium, 360 Basic, 360 Arcade, 360 Elite, PS3 20gb, 40gb, 60gb, 80gb, etc. The different PS3s vary more than just by hard drive size, too. Some support full PS2 compability, some just a bit, and some not at all. Some have built-in WiFi, some don’t. It goes on and on.

Really, the Wii is the only console left that is a true console. There’s only one version out there. They all play the same games. They all do the same things. They all have the same hardware. Oh my, how smart…

I happened to catch this article on Engadget about Sony adding it’s music catalog to Amazon mp3. It’s amazing to me how quickly all the major studios have come around on drm-free downloads after EMI showed that it was perfectly sane.

EMI couldn’t have put drm-free mp3s on iTunes anymore than a year ago. I don’t actually remember when it was, but seriously… After such a long-fought “battle” against college students, you’d think one of these companies would have jumped to this conclusion a little earlier.

As far as I’m concerned, DRM of all forms is anti-consumer. It’s not pro-copyright or anything like that, it’s just plain old anti-consumer. Bought the first couple seasons of The Office on iTunes? Too fucking bad, you’re going to have to get the next couple on Amazon Unbox, and you’ll have to watch them on different devices. Fuck that shit. You know what that’s going to do? That’s going to make me more likely to pirate it. That’s the only way I have any guarantee that it won’t quit working at some point.

This whole HD-DVD vs Blu-ray thing is absolutely pitiful. Here we’ve got a bunch of asshole movie studios, tv producers, etc. refusing to pay the writers who are responsible for everything they make. On top of that, we’ve got mostly the same bunch of assholes who couldn’t come to a decision on a standard to replace DVD. And finally, we’ve got the same assholes suing people left and right claiming piracy costs them over $6 billion per year.

Whatever. Maybe you’re losing money because, as I’ve mentioned already, you’re all a bunch of rich fucking assholes that nobody wants to give their money to. I’ve done my research when it comes to the WGA strike, and the writers have every right in the world to be pissed. What’s more, they were actually willing to work through their current shit contract. It’s not as if they’ve got a contract, and they want to renegotiate. No, their contract ran out, and they’re wanting a new, better one. But the execs aren’t willing to give them anything reasonable. Basically, they’re just a bunch of rich, greedy bastards.

As for the HD formats, it’s hilarious to me that the movie studios ever consider themselves to be for consumers. When I got my TV, I got a PS3 also, because it seemed to suit me best. It would give me access to PS3 games and Blu-ray movies both, which sounded pretty appealing. However, most of the Blu-Ray lineup sucks, and I don’t own a single PS3 game. In the same time, I’ve bought four 360 games. What a mistake that was. Hopefully the games will stop sucking, but as far as movies, I certainly should have gone with HD-DVD. One way or another, two formats is dumb, and it’s horrible for consumers.

The sooner the studios embrace reasonably priced, reasonably versatile HD downloads (and I’m talking 1080p), the sooner I might start to think they actually know what they’re doing. I wanted to buy Transformers in HD, but it’s not on Blu-ray. That’s cool, I figured, I’ve got a TiVo, so I’ll download it on Unbox. Nope, I can only download it in SD. Well, that’s just too bad, now you don’t get my money. And you wonder why your sales are down? Dumbasses.

Kyle was explaning to me yesterday that oftentimes cable companies will broadcast a number of channels in HD for free. Typically this means all the major networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. As it happens, that’s the case for me with Comcast, and I didn’t even know it. I’ve had my TV for a month now, and I hadn’t watched any HD TV yet.

But late is better than never, I suppose. Right now as I type this, I’m watching the Broncos on Sunday Night Football in glorious HD. It’s really a huge difference compared to standard definition.

Now I just need the Broncos to get their heads out of their asses and finish this game out. So far it looks like they’re trying their best to lose. Two losses in a row is never a good thing, much less four.

I want to warn you this post is probably going to put the ‘ol spit glands in overdrive. You know, with the drool and such. It might not happen–it’s not really something I can promise. I just felt a warning was appropriate.

People who know me have most likely noticed I use the phrase “that’s how I roll”. So, I figured I owed it to everyone to know what that actuall entailed. This is what I came up with.

There’s my brand new 50″ 1080p plasma. It’s a Samsung FP-T5084, to be exact. It’s amazing. My buddy Ian and I beat Halo 3 on it last night, and I enjoyed every second of it more than I would have on my old 20″ RCA.

Every good TV needs a good stand, and this one is no exception. That stand is 62″ wide, and as you can see, every bit of that shelf real estate is used. From top to bottom and left to right we have a 360, PS3, Xbox, Comcast digital cable box, and my Media Center Edition PC (aka my mythbox).

Lastly is just a quick side shot to show off how thin this beast is. So far, I really couldn’t be happier with this thing. Also, I’d like to give a big “Happy Birthday!” to the K-man.