Hacker for Hire

Ever since this jackass in L.A. stole money from me on a Yahoo!(another story for later), I’ve been extremely cautious with all of my online dealings. Every retailer I go to gets Googled and Yahoo-ed to death to find all horrid reviews, angry clients, and unhappily shaven monkeys. Since I’ve been in the market for a new cell phone, one of the first places I looked was eBay. Item number 9522329615 was a Nokia E60 that I was considering purchasing; however, it was an international order and the guy only had 2 prior “good” rating. Another red flag went off when I noticed that the seller was talking about “buy it now” on an auction only product. So I sent an email asking about shipping and what the costs would be.
Continue reading ‘Ripoff Artist’ »

As the time to join the Xetron workforce draws closer, I’ve been killing (hunting implies failure) around the mobile phone market trying to find a new phone/toy that will be “legal.” By legal, I mean no camera. As you can imagine, this is a huge pain the the butt because there are about 40 out of 4000 cell phones that meet this stringent little requirement. The number gets even smaller when you try to add Bluetooth into the mix.

Fortunately, I came across GSM Arena. They’ve got a niffy little “Phone Finder” tool that allows you select exactly the features you want (or don’t want in my case) and presents you with the answers. It worked so well, I was ready to cry. The best part is Google Notebook just arrived the other day and it makes a very nice place to keep my results. Here’s the phones that I’ve found that “might” meet Xetron requirements. I say “might” because I’m uncertain how they feel about phones that have internal memory even if you don’t have a way to access it other than downloading stuff from the web over a piddly 384kpbs stream. The phones are ordered as to my preference towards each, most popular one at the top.

Now I’m going to go complete off track and say “WTF?!?”

Would someone mind telling me why the “cool” phones never come out in the US first? If you look at my list, there are two Sony Ericsson phone on it. Both are usable within FCC regulations at connect to my Cingular service; however, Sony isn’t going to be releasing them in the US. I even checked their website. “Oh yeah!!! These are going to be out in the UK, the Middle East, Asia in about 2 months!” But the US is no where listed on the release schedule. In fact, all the countries around the US are on getting the phone … but not us. Explain this to me. Enlighten me as to why this stupidity is allowed to roam free in the world without someone killing it. Until then, I guess I’ll just have to buy it and import it off of the foreign websites. Guess what phone manufacturers … The Jerk Store called and they are all out of you! And while they were on the phone, they also said they were out of their biggest seller … your retarded marketing morons that say a camera has to be in every fricken phone!

Any project that starts off with breaking the piece that you are trying to replace and sawzall-ing the remaining components to make enough room to work is going to be one you never wished you started. Sound interesting? Well, read on for more.
Continue reading ‘Remodeling Part V: The Battle of Twisted Pipe’ »

Well, if you haven’t heard it from here or dugg it from here, Google has released a new application called ‘Google Notebook.’ Being the Google Fan Boy I am, I headed on over and installed it (you can find it here. These are my initial reactions to my experience.
Continue reading ‘Knee Jerk Reactions to Google’s Notebook’ »

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Heather had to move in with us a little sooner than planned. This of course has re-jimmied the remodeling schedule a touch. Basically, we needed another room upstairs to put all the excess crap in and for that to happen, the room of the “Pink Death” had to have the floor fixed. Make sure you read the whole article before you comment. Anyone commenting on something stupid will get the ban-hammer of pain thrashed upon their knees.

Well, I’m sorry about that. As you probably didn’t notice, I killed the server. Fortunately, Sara was home so she could reboot it (it took the second time, not her fault). It would have been back right away if I had given Sara the right instruction to reboot it AND I had actually built in the right ACPI so that it would reboot with a proper shutdown by pressing the reset key … not by holding the key for 10 seconds and having it blowup. I do have some good posts coming up though, so keep your eyes peeled … not literally though, you won’t be able to read.

Well, this weekend was Sara’s graduation so if you see her online or in person, give her a nice congrats please . The ceremony was really pretty good. Their speaker was apparently one of the key speech writers for the Regan administration; though, she was a little long winded with her point of America having a big “Help Wanted” sign on the front line. I would have to agree with her, especially considering that her most valid point is that our government is spending more time making sure that it looks like they are doing something other than really getting anything accomplished. The implications of that speak for themselves and I have no intention of getting into a political debate on my site … especially one that I don’t feel I have enough information to form a well thought out argument (check out the Dilbert blog for that explanation).

Back on topic, Sara graduated but the ceremony was longer than Janet Reno’s mustache hair. It was a great time though and I had a lot of fun. We got a lot of pictures and I finally just got them up on the photo site after a few table corruption issues (damned MySQL fsckedgrade that I should have just done the crappy way the first time). Apparently, the user table was messed up so you could view stuff, but I couldn’t log in to add stuff (really weird errors). But it works now, so go take a look at the pictures and let me know if their are any you like in particular and congratulate Sara !

OK, here’s the deal … my step-father has a contest for work to come up with a new name for the “superhero” of their motivational bull crap in the grocery store. The current hero has been struck by lightning and they are either looking to replace him or give him a new name. The hero, “Captain Stop,” (stupid ass marketing majors) fights against “Snidely Shrink.” The thing you need to know is that “shrink” is basically the waste of product(s) in the business, that’s basically what “Captain Stop” fights.

Why is this important? Because I am challenging you to come up with more creative names that we came up with and submit them as comments (as man as you like per comment). Here’s the list we came up with, try and come up with more or vote for your favorite!
Continue reading ‘Superhero Naming Contest’ »

As you may or may not know, I graduated from the University of Cincinnati and I am a member of the Alumni Society. Being a member is supposed to grant you benefits like having your Bearcat ID still active as well as other privileges.
Continue reading ‘You Can’t Spell _____ Without UC’ »

In response to the statistics, I’m going to try and make sure there are plenty of evil ideas to go around for all; however, I think I’ll change things up just a touch. In the past, I’ve just put these ideas out here for all to read and have asked nothing in return … now that is going to change. I humbly ask that IF you read the following ideas that you please leave a comment if you have anything to say. By “anything to say,” I’m looking for productive comments. Not the “Oh this is so great ++digg” bull-crap, but suggestions on improving, varying, questions on specific ideas, or issues with implementations. The reasoning behind all of this is the hope that I can provided a better service by having another perspective on my thoughts and ideas. I’m also going to encourage you to write to me asking for assistance with specific situations that require the finesse of an evil twist (details within). And the last thing before we get into it … I am not responsible for anything you do or think about before/during/after reading this. That’s called a choice … and if you make the choice, then your responsible. Enough with the verbiage, let get on with the good stuff!
Continue reading ‘Excuse Me, I’ve Got Some Evil-ing To Do’ »