This is crazy stuff.
I knew this sort of thing happened and what was possible, but I guess I didn’t realize just how much it really is used.
Archive for category geek
I posted a little while back about some of the really nice things Bing was doing with their maps. Good stuff.
This shows where it’s headed and takes it to ridiculous levels:
(link)
It really blows me away. Literally, my mind races at the possibilities. That video is a glimpse into the future.
Just wow.
Was messing around looking at some stuff on Bing maps and saw a link to a new beta version of the maps, so I clicked it.
Wow! Really nice stuff. The map now changes from map view to aerial to bird’s eye automatically as you zoom in and they’ve added a “Streetside” feature that viciously crushes Google’s Street View. The whole thing is ridiculously smooth and intuitive – it just feels right and it looks damn good.
Definitely go check out the beta.
(note: this is the 600th entry to my blog)
I am one of the few coaster enthusiasts out there who is more interested in riding this than riding this.
I’ve ridden the latter too many times in too many places for it to still be something I anticipate. Hell, I’ve only ridden Diamondback once since the media day marathon. It’s fun and all, but I just dont care. Same thing at Carowinds. The ride will be fun, no doubt, but I’ve floated over hill after hill (in all of its subtle variations) plenty of times. I prefer the dynamics of the Intamin rides better and the low layout looks fast and crazy.
Virginia, FTW!
Today was a slow Saturday. The wife was at work all day and my daughter had a birthday party that took up the entire afternoon, so my son and I spent the day just hanging out at the house. I did some stuff online and got some more photos done. We watched an episode of Hometime (you’re welcome HGTV, DIY, etc) and used my new favorite tool (the Dremel) to get the last bits of ceramic number and adhesive off the front of the house after leaving it look like hell for the past two months.
At some point during the day, my little man was playing with his Transformers. He’s usually pretty good about transforming them himself. Maybe a little quick guidance in the correct order of steps, but for the most part, he’s pretty solid for a 7 year old. And when he’s not he’s usually pretty good about holding on to the instructions and digging the right one out and taking a look to refresh his memory.
So today he comes to me with one that I know he’s been wanting to turn back from robot into vehicle for a while now and making absolutely zero progress and generally getting blown off by me (just being honest) when he’s looking for someone to figure the damn thing out. So today he hits me up with this damn Transformer in hand and I figure what the hell.
Of course, he doesn’t have the instructions – which is probably ok because they all show you how to go from vehicle to robot and tell you to just reverse the steps to go back to vehicle and no matter how long I stare at the pictures, I just have more luck figuring it out on my own. And that says a lot about the system, because I’m generally a ‘read the instructions before you begin’ kind of guy.
So after a few moments of bewilderment and asking my son questions, we figured that this is apparently the most difficult toy in the world to get to go from robot to what appeared to be a tank of some kind. With no instructions, we thought to look online. Somebody is bound to have a site with scans of instructions for figures…the only catch was that neither of us know what fucking Transformer I was holding in my hands.
We searched all kinds of things, looked at too many fan sites, toy sites and whatnot and I was starting to get a little frustrated because:
1. We we getting nowhere fast.
2. I didn’t give a flying fuck if this thing ever looked like a tank again.
So I decided there had to be some marking on it or something that I could put into Google and get results. After looking it over, part of the graphics on it’s shoulder/gun turret thingy read, “GALV-25″ and I plugged that into google.
I got a bunch of results about drywall so I added transformers to the query and realized we were dealing with a Galvatron figure. Great.
After a little more searching we settled on this video of some annoying kid doing a review of the figure while chomping Cheez-Its like…well, like a Transformers geek chomping on Cheez-Its. About 13 minutes in he gets to showing us how to take the damn toy back to tank from robot…even commenting that it’s one of the most difficult figures of the Transformers Universe series (see, we’re not idiots – seriously, watch that shit) and that even when done correctly, some parts snap off, some never collapse and connect correctly and it’s easier to do if you flat out pull some pieces off and put the toy back together at the end.
So even playing and pausing the video of the kid doing it step-by-step we still found a lot of frustration, but between the two of us, got it back to tank form with strict instructions (with a wink) to never, never, ever, unless it will somehow magically save your life and even then think twice before you do it, transform this damn toy into the robot again.
So I spent the late morning and early afternoon with Jeff at Kings Island for the Diamondback media day stuff. (totally didn’t grab a media kit) (Diamondback Pictures)
Then I got home and we drove back down in the evening to process our passes.
Tomorrow morning (in a few hours, actually) we’re getting up and going back down because my tales of Diamondback goodness convinced the family they need to ride it now…not later.
I’m getting my fill this weekend.
I remember these ads like yesterday now that I’m seeing them again. Fun to look back and see how this all turned out or how the basic idea is there or how things never really panned out. I love going back and checking up on things like this – too often in life people say shit and it just floats off to nowhere. I like accountability. But I digress, these ads are fun (and make me realize how old 35 really is):
8 Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh PA 15212
Sampsonia Way & Arch St, Pittsburgh
…
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Actually, if you explore that street a bit there’s lots to see.
I read Carrie’s blog post the other day and almost posted something of my own because of it several times, but either got distracted, busy or lazy. The I saw more thoughts and even more thoughts being posted and figured I had to chime in now.
Carrie initially asked:
Does what I contribute have any value? Am I offending people with my posts? Do I need to insert more emoticons so folks know when I am kidding?
If I ask myself these three questions I come up with:
1. Probably not to many people.
2. Oh God, I hope so!
3. You can never use too many emoticons.
That’s pretty much my approach to this whole thing. Seriously.
I started this blog because it’s a shame to own lordgonchar.com and do nothing with it. No, that’s not entirely true. I decided to put a blog here because I didn’t have the time, desire or idea for a real website. Isn’t that what a blog is? A website? But not like a real website? Kinda?
I decided to toss my hat into the ring for two reasons really. I liked reading all the blogs of the CampusFish folks and I felt like I wanted a place to be more ‘me’ than I could on coasterimage.com and to a greater extent than I could be on the other forums I post at.
The number of people visiting my little domain here isn’t life changing or even impressive, but it’s an alarmingly high number if you consider what I post here. I pretty much expected a handful of people (mostly those online acquaintances) to swing by once in a while and that’s that. While those online acquaintances might be the ones who actively participate, for each one of theme there’s another dozen or so people swinging by daily and just looking. Some never come back, some do, some keep coming. So that’s cool.
I don’t know what I intended with this blog. Like most things I do in life, I just started doing it and keep seeing where it takes me without any real plan or experience or intention. I like to just go along for the ride a lot in life…but I also like to drive. That’s one thing that makes me me. Defines a bit of my character if you will. I’ll like to get the ball rolling and just see where it rolls to. If it gets boring or old or too dangerous or stupid, I’ll get off. If not, I ride until it does.
Just a chance to publicly be me, I guess.
If something along the way strikes someone as funny or entertaining or insightful or useful or informative or fascinating or whatever – just makes a little moment in their lives – then I guess that’s all I can ask for. And that’s cool. Oddly enough, I think that also sums up much of my approach to life in general.
What’s really weird is that the interaction I have here comes solely from my ‘online’ life. (and Carrie touches on that a little in her original post) I’m a little weird in that my ‘online’ and ‘real world’ lives rarely cross paths. All you have to do is look at the people posting here or the blogs I link to and you’ll see it’s mostly people that I don’t see in ‘real life’ too often. Not never, but not too often. But perhaps even more strangely, they’re people I talk with frequently.
On the flip side, if you met my real-world friends you’d find a bunch of people that probably don’t even know lordgonchar.com exists. Hell, I don’t even think my wife knows I bother having a blog…but she almost certainly knows everything that ends up getting posted here anyway.
So a little like Jeff says in his post, I do blog towards a specific part of my life – a certain audience of friends and acquaintances with whom I enjoy sharing things and debating ideas and talking about shit.
I post as an entertainer, a friend, an informer, just a guy. Whatever might be something to someone…or nothing to no one.
Most importantly, I don’t take it too seriously. Life’s too short. I post shit here that I want to post publicly. If people want to gawk at it, then we all win.
*Video Removed because I couldn’t get it to quit autoplaying. See the video at the link below.
…
A little awkward at the beginning because I tried to play off of both ‘Gonch’ and ‘Lord Gonchar’ – use your real name and it’s a nice little video. If your name is common enough, the line about ‘our special guest’ that Goofy says at the end will be personalized. Even cooler (if you’re send it to someone) is that a whole page is created around the video.
Good stuff.
I believe I left off on Friday evening with the installer promising to return.
Well. He never made it. We had the football game early on Saturday, so I called him when we got home. He was completely on the other side of town and said he’d try to make it again. I explained my patience was running thin and he apologized, but in a way that kind of said, “I’m doing what I can…deal”
So by Saturday evening I’d finally had enough. We called AT&T’s 800 support number. They were extremely polite and as helpful as they could possibly be. It did turn out that the system wasn’t showing us as having those additional boxes. I got pushed to Tier 2 support and spoke with Jesus. (not literally Christ himself, but a hispanic fellow)
Again, great service and as helpful as can be. He confirmed the problem in the system and fixed it, but the boxes still didn’t work. The soonest they could get a tech out was Monday the 29th between 2pm and 4pm.
In total we were on the phone about 3 hours with AT&T support and they did everything they could. I was impressed, but still without TV.
So we lived the rest of Saturday and Sunday without TV except for the big one.
Cut to Monday at 2pm on the nose and the doorbell rings. I open it to find the original installer. I asked if they’d sent him or he came on his own and he was like, “I told you I’d get out here as soon as I could.” I explained that another tech was on his way.
The original dude went through all the processes again. Doubled checked connections. Ran tests. Tried things three times. Finally the other tech showed up and they’re both running in and out of the house all around looking at cables and wires, hooking up different gadgets, taking readings.
Finally after an hour of this, they walk in an inform me that the only thing it can be is a bad RG (residential gateway). For the uninformed the RG is the centerpiece of the whole system. The line in feeds to it and from there everything (TV, internet, phone) feeds off of it. Kind of a router for your home. This didn’t make much sense to me as the big TV and the internet have worked fins since day 1, but they swapped it out.
As soon as it booted and the bug TV was up again, we went upstairs and booted the other TV’s. A few minutes later and…
…everything was working.
The original dude just looked at me with a look that clearly said, “Motherfucker!” without saying a word. All of this time and hassle and all it was was a bad RG. It was as simple as swapping out one piece and connecting 3 cables and everything worked.
So the story has a happy ending.
After a week of kinda-service I have to say I can’t think of a thing that really bothers me about the service. My TV looks awesome, the channel selection is much better than Time Warner, my internet is just as fast down and three times faster up (nice for uploading pics to coasterimage) and the kids now have converter boxes and get the whole range of channels instead of the basics like we did with TW. On top of all of this, the monthly bill will be less than it used to be.
Now I can finish watching the Steelers suck it in crisp HD.
We’ve lived lots of places and dealt with lots of service providers with results running the gamut from awesome to acceptable to downright shit. When we moved to Dayton we just signed up with Time Warner and all was well – a little pricey, but fine.
Last Summer we got our HDTV and were less than impressed with Time Warner’s lineup. Not many HD offerings and some glaring omissions – like NBC in HD. Still we stuck with it mostly out of convenience and partially because of the standard promises of more to come. So over the past 15 months we see channels being dropped and replaced with ridiculous shit no one watches, still no more HD, not a lot to like, more price increases – but still we stick with them.
Then a week or two ago news break on how Time Warner and WDTN (our local NBC affiliate) can’t come to an agreement on a contract renewal and that on October 2nd we’d be potentially losing NBC too. Now I know this is unlikely (I’m not sure TW is dumb enough to let their customers go without NBC. But then again, they let us go without a basic network HD signal, so maybe they are that stupid…we’ll see.)
In the meantime I’ve been keeping my eye on AT&T U-verse. It looks like a solid service for a decent price using some fun technology and they were slowly getting it rolling in our area.
Cut to last week and things fell into place and we were placing our order with AT&T.
The installer dude showed up right on time this past Wednesday morning. He took a look at our place and the layout of things and was going to need access to the cable box on the side of the building – which was locked by Time Warner. So while he began, I got hold of TW and explained how they sucked and need to get here to open the box for the AT&T guy. After a long fight, they relented and said someone would be out, but they couldn’t guarantee when.
The AT&T dude got the big TV up and running and the internet as well, but couldn’t do any of the upstairs TVs because he was going to backfeed using the coax and needed into the box (locked by TW) to do it. So he hung around a bit and finally bailed for his afternoon appointment and I agreed to call him after TW has come and unlocked the box. He assured me that it’d be just 10 or 15 minutes to get the other TV’s working once we had access.
TW showed up late in the afternoon and I gave him a call and we agreed to finish Thursday morning. Cool.
Thursday morning he shows up, we get everything connected and…
…
…nothing.
He puts a call in to the level 2 support and does the whole thing on speakerphone so I heard it all. Basically the connections were all correct. There was no reason we should be getting service. After a while the support guy notices that no one put into the system that we should have 3 additional boxes. It should just be a matter of entering the info and letting it make it’s way though the system and then booting the set-top boxes. Cool again. The support guy says he’ll take all the necessary step to expidite it and it should be 2 or 3 hours. At that time he’d give the installer dude a ring, who in turn would be back to boot the boxes. After he hung up I informed him that I was more than capable of booting them (read: plugging them in) and the installer dude agreed to give me a call when he got his call…blah blah blah.
So a few hours pass. Nothing. Then a few more. Finally I cal the installer dude. He says he still hasn’t heard anyhting, but surely we’d be good to go. I booted the boxes. Nothing.
The installer dude said he’d get ahold of support and let me know. I never heard anything.
Late last night I said fuck it and tried again. The TV’s in the kids rooms booted, but the lock up after a few seconds and the TV in our room still won’t make a connection. Sigh.
So this morning I call the installer dude. He said he hadn’t heard anything back and was currently on an install. He asked what I had tried and I told him the deal. He seemed even more confused than before. He told me he’d stop by after his installs this evening if he finished early enough or tomorrow at the latest.
And that’s where things stand. I put my patience hat on and understand that shit happens, but it’s been 2 days since my ‘installation’ and I still only have 1 working TV and no real answers as to when or how the issues with the others will be resolved.
My patience hat ony has a few threads left…
The thing is, I really like the service. The picture is as good as or better than Time Warner’s in all cases and since it’s essentially a network, there’s lots of fun things you can do – like watch recorded shows from any TV with 1 DVR and customize weather, sports, stocks and traffic info to display on the TV and access the system from my desktop (or any PC) and set recordings or change things. Entry-level geek stuff that amuses me. I want the service. I like what I’ve seen so far. The channel offerings are superior to TW, the internet cnnection is faster and the price is about 25% less.
I’ll keep y’all updated.
Looks interesting. Might be fun to play around with.
You know things are bad when you have to resort to marketing that is essentially damage control, but my overwhelming desire to see people look like asses makes this great. Good Job, Microsoft!
Thinking about snagging an LG Dare.
Anyone able to give me a reason not to?
Just happened across the story about the $175 burger that will undoubtedly be passed along to you shortly via e-mail by someone amused or amazed or outraged by such things and noticed that one of the toppings on the burger is foie gras.
Immediately, the little light went on in my head – I know what that is!
Just two days ago Tyler passed along a story about 8 forbidden delicacies on his blog and foie gras was one of them.
I learned somthing and was able to turn around use it in a matter of days. God bless the internet – even my evolution is more efficient now.
Amusement park fans rejoice! A whole new season of fun awaits visitors this summer, and Charmland USA is blazing a new trail of excitement with the addition of 450 majestic California Sycamore trees. Perfect for taking shelter beneath on a blazing hot sunny day, the trees are the perfect complement to the park’s wide assortment of foliage, breathtaking streams, natural soil midways and historic rides.