16 posts tagged “tv”
Some days, I really have to laugh.
In our old place, we had RCN HD with a DVR. It was magical. We got RCN because Comcast wanted to basically tear apart a wall to install, but RCN didn't think it was necessary.
Then we moved, and the new place was wired for Comcast already (we later found out that it was Comcast or nothing - yay collusion). The guy who owned our place before us had upgraded the basic services he got as part of his assessment to get a Comcast DVR, and we wanted to do the same.
First of all, it took a month of misinformation from Comcast and chasing him to finally get his account closed so we could open our own. The day it happened, not only did his extra services get shut off, but so did our basic cable TV. A doi!
They set us back up, but on the wrong billing code. As a result, our television service went out, resulting in four individual technician visits. It took the fourth guy to put two and two together (despite the fact we had mentioned the previous owner's account closure as the starting point of the issues to everyone we talked to) and now, apparently, the problem is over.
After two months with barely two weeks of TV service, numerous phone calls, live chat sessions, emails, and snotty responses to my request for help from my building management company, I thought I would ask Comcast for some kind of compensation. Surprisingly, they agreed. Guess what they offered me? Actually, you'll be here all day, so I'll tell you.
Apparently, they raised some bogus installation fee on my account at some point over the past month (I assume for "installing" the replacement cable box when their third visiting technician thought that was the issue). They are going to refund that charge.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is my compensation.
GAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Show us your favorite room in your house.
We spend a lot of time here, obviously.
This weekend has been... yeah, it's been alright.
Jess made last minute plans to go up and visit her mum in Wisconsin - her mum just had surgery and needed an extra pair of hands, plus they haven't seen each other since Christmas and there's been... stuff in between then and now. I was going to go to some event downtown with co-workers but between the weather and being tired, I lamed out and had an early night.
On Saturday, my friends Jim, James and Nick from back home wanted to play some Mario Kart Wii online. We set up a video chat session on Skype, buggered about forever getting our accounts connected on Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection service then played and chatted for a couple of hours. Although Nintendo's online system is absolutely retarded and as un-user-friendly as it gets, it was good fun.
Other than that, I watched a ton of VH1 countdown shows, played some Grand Theft Auto IV online (which, by the way, was infinitely simpler than the Nintendo solution) then had an early night.
I started my Sunday by watching the Radiohead special, followed by more GTA IV; a trip outside to pick up a package/trade in some games/get supplies; yet more GTA IV; rubbish TV, and so forth. Now I'm having a relatively early night ahead of work tomorrow.
I won't see Jess till after work. Bo.
And now I shall try to sleep in spite of the screaming morons outside.
Yesterday, one of my most anticipated CDs of the year came out - the eponymous album by comedy folk duo Flight Of The Conchords.
The songs mostly seem to be culled from the excellent HBO series bearing their name, which makes me happy as it means I get to listen to fantastic songs like 'Inner City Pressure', an excellent parody of 'West End Girls' by Pet Shop Boys:
This song isn't even the funniest, as you will discover when you RUN OUT AND BUY THE ALBUM RIGHT NOW.
Last year, I tried to get Comcast to install their cable-based internet in my apartment. I made the appointment, took the time off work and waited for the guy to show up.
He was a really friendly guy and made a good attempt at hooking me up, but it seems when the owners of the building remodelled, they embedded the cable Comcast needed access to inside the dry wall. The guy kept on saying that he could find the RCN cable, but not the Comcast one.
I gave up and just got a slower mobile broadband card. This is great for a lot of things, but to hook my Xbox 360 and Wii up, I have to connect on my MacBook Pro then link via Wi-Fi or ethernet. It's cumbersome.
Recently, RCN were in our building trying to drum up business, so I thought I would try them out. I investigated their packages and eventually ordered their 5MB internet service, plus their premium cable TV package with an HD/DVR receiver.
The man came tonight and started prodding around inside the aerial thingy in the wall. After doing his tests, he first concluded that the cable coming into our apartment was Comcast, not RCN. Uh. Of course, he soon realised it was neither - it was the crappy free TV we get throughout our building.
After talking with the doorman of the building and his supervisor, he is coming back tomorrow to make a hole in the wall outside our apartment to reconnect the RCN cable to our aerial socket and give me the internet and TV gubbins I've ordered.
There have been a couple of things on Fox that have made me want to square up to the Australian media mogul and give him a swift barrage of blows to the ballsack till he fires every last one of his backwards, right wing cronies.
First, Fox News broadcast a hatchet job on the video game Mass Effect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L13Ct40cFIU
That's right, it contains full digital nudity and sex! I for one am seeking a refund, but only because in the hours I've spent playing the game, I haven't seen any of it. That's lucky, though, as that 30 second footage of the side of a blue alien's boob will turn me into a sex maniac.
But this, dear reader, wasn't even a blip on the radar compared to Fox News radio host John Gibson. His comments about the death of actor Heath Ledger were nothing short of despicable.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/01/23/gibson-mocks-ledger/
The Fox News channel is hardly known for being a fair, honest, compassionate news source, but Gibson's comments make their regular right wing idiocy look positively liberal. Don Imus got sacked for saying less horrendous things, so let's hope this fuckwit is out on his ear shortly.
I can't believe how conservatives are supposedly representative of Christianity when they are narrow-minded, spiteful bigots who hate anyone who doesn't fit with their world view. This is anything but the message of Christianity. I don't even believe in Jesus but I conduct myself in a far more Christian way than any of these people.
One of my surprise favourite TV shows in 2007 was Rock Of Love With Bret Michaels - a tacky VH1 "celebreality" show in which the Poison frontman tries to find true love with a house full of strippers, rock chicks and psychopaths. The winner, Jes Rickleff, was the only sane/non-slutty one amongst them, and her interview snippets provided endless comic relief as she pointed out what dumb whores her competitors were.
Needless to say, by the time of the reunion show, she and Bret were not together and thus the inevitable second series was announced. One girl's narrow escape is my guaranteed viewing pleasure.
It started tonight. Jess and I prepared by watching the casting video on Xbox Live Marketplace. It really isn't disappointing, bearing as it does all the hallmarks that made the first series so watchable:
- Bret Michaels somehow being turned on by *everything*
- More tramp stamps, fake tan and surgically modified flesh than you thought existed
- Hairstyles and dresses that have been hibernating in the Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Strip since 1982
- Lots of disgusting displays of lip-locking/face-sucking affection
- Plenty of screaming, swearing, crying bints clawing at each other to win the heart of a man who wears more make-up than them
This time around, the plastic surgery quota is through the roof and the skanks are skankier, but I am rooting for Kristy Joe. Of all of the girls, she seems sane and together - wiping Bret's mouth before kissing him to avoid germs, not slutting it up in a vain attempt to get his attention, and generally being more likeable than the other duck-limped bimbos.
Winner
I should not like this game.
1. It's science fiction.
2. Conversations between characters last forever.
3. Prior to Mass Effect, Bioware made two very similar games set in the Star Wars universe: Knights Of The Old Republic and its sequel.
4. It's as buggy as hell.
But like it I do. For starters, the graphics are sumptuous:
Other than when those aforementioned bugs kick in (slowdown that's sometimes so bad you have to restart your machine, textures visibly popping onto the screen, characters mysteriously going cross-eyed), it is the most beautiful game I've ever played.
You're fairly free to progress as you want. There is a main storyline that is told through conversations, cutscenes and setpieces, and you have to take specific missions to further this, but you also have a number of side quests you can do. Your choices - in which missions you undertake and how you interact with other characters - affect two morality charts (Paragon and Renegade), which in turn shape future interactions. This lets you play the game as a good guy or a bad guy, with some grey space in between the two: this is a progression from the otherwise very black and white morality presented in similar games, but it's still a way from realistic.
With any luck, the technical woes will soon be fixed with a patch. When that happens, this is as close to perfect as a game has gotten for me (I'm talking subjective perfection, nitpickers).
Runner-Up
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
For: Mac OS X
Plenty of good games have come out this year, but I'm basing this on the games I've enjoyed the most, and in that respect, this is my second place. I know what you're thinking:
"Good games on a Mac? No way!"
Way! And here's how. Instead of spending money developing the game for the Mac outright, EA hired a company called TransGaming, Inc. to wrap a little piece of code called Cider around the PC version. Cider lets programs written for the PC, specifically games, talk to the Mac OS X operating system as if they were talking to Windows. Here is a fictionalised conversation:
Command & Conquer: "Hey bud, here's sum graffix, LOL!"
Cider: "I believe what you are trying to say is that you have some images for my friend here to display."
Mac OS X: "Golly, images you say? One shall fire up the electro-projectamajig with much haste, what what."
Shockingly, this had no impact on the game's performance on my MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 256MB GeForce 8600M GT) - it took a little while to load, but when it was running it ran very slickly indeed. I had all the settings maxed and the game was running at 1440x900 without any slowdown. High fives and Kool Aid all 'round.
If you are oblivious to the franchise, Command & Conquer is a real time strategy game. You have to harvest resources, build manufacturing and techological infrastructure, then produce and command military units to complete different missions.
In this game, you can either choose to be the GDI - a bunch of goody-goody, All American Heroes; or the Nod, a cult who believe in the power of tiberium, a mysterious matter from space that is taking over the planet (and handily doubles as the game's harvestable resource, so its abundance is a good thing). Between missions, the story is told in video cut scenes that feature a few familiar faces including Michael Ironside (V, Top Gun, Total Recall); Josh Holloway (Sawyer in Lost), and Jennifer Morrison (Dr Cameron in House MD).
The missions vary. In some, you could control a lone commando as they sabotage a base. In others, you have to amass huge forces and obliterate the enemy with force. In others still, you intercept convoys of nuclear weapons then escort them out of the war zone as fast as your little wheels can carry them. The game gets as tough as nuts a few missions in, so I had to resort to cheating to keep my use of the F word down to once per sentence, but no matter what I kept going back to it.
And writing about it makes me want to play it some more.
Today was the second morning I woke up without Jess. It doesn't feel right, but it's only going to be a brief and temporary sensation so I can handle it. At least she's having a good time in Hawaii - yesterday, she tried surfing, which makes her far braver than me.
So far, I haven't been very rock n' roll. On Thursday night, I went out drinking with some folks from work - Leslie, Bryan, Kristian, Eric and Jason Y. The most outlandish it got was me drinking a $9 beer called Delirium Tremens (as in "the DTs" - latin for trembling delirium). I got home at a reasonable time, and made myself veggie chicken burgers without burning the place down.
Last night, I ordered in pizza and spent the night watching stand-up comedy on Comedy Central and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace on [adult swim]. It's nice seeing weird British TV make the leap over the ocean almost completely intact (apart from minor bleeping - this country is so puritanical about rude words on TV). I also cleaned the cat box, tidied up a little and tried to get my Ozone working with Leopard, but it doesn't like it till new drivers are released. Boo. So much for recording this weekend.
Tonight, I'm meeting people from work for some alcohol and a midnight showing of cult classic Donnie Darko. Of course, I own it on DVD and can watch it whenever I want, but it'll be good to have a night out. I think it'll be myself, Jason S (I blogged about him before - he writes for Chicago paper Redeye) and his boyfriend, Leslie, Eric, Erin, Brandon B, Brandon H and his fiancée, Laura and Guy, a freelancer who worked for us recently. Of course, you don't know any of these people, but it's a good little crew.
In the time it's taken me to write this, I've listened to an awful lot of The Cure. Time for something a little perkier methinks.
Film & TV writers are on strike, which means everything except reality TV could halt production. Do you support the strike? Are any of your favorite shows in jeopardy?
Of course I support it!
1. The Motion Picture Association Of America (MPAA), like the Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA), claims piracy hurts the artists creating the content... but its members shaft those content-creators constantly. This is a way for the talented (and untalented) writers of our favourite films, TV shows and radio programmes to get a fairer slice of the pie.
2. A side effect of this strike is that certain shows are in danger of having their seasons cut short, or in the case of certain new shows, being cancelled entirely. Why is this a good thing? Let's face it, for every great new show, there are five or six horrible shows... and while I am scared that Pushing Daisies will go off air before I get a chance to watch it and get into it, it's a small price to pay if junk like Cavemen is canned.
3. All the time Tina Fey spends picketing is less time making 30 Rock and wasting Alec Baldwin's considerable comedic talents. I'm sorry, Tina, but your show is not as funny as the shows on either side of it (My Name Is Earl and The Office)... and you leaving Saturday Night Live seems to have turned that into a chuckle-free zone too. Did you ever stop to think about poor Amy Poehler?!
