As if the iPod Photo wasn’t already a case of “fewer features, higher price,” it appears it won’t even work on the fly with Belkin’s media card reader. That’s right—not only do you have to lug around another iPod-sized device just to dump photos onto your iPod Photo, but it won’t even recognize said photos until you dump them off your iPod Photo onto your computer, and then BACK onto you iPod via iTunes.

Idiots. To think the iPod Photo could’ve had a media card slot built-in. And if not that, then at least USB Host compatibility with this sucker. Speaking of suckers, you are one if you buy an iPod Photo—unless, of course, you enjoy paying $100 US for a colour screen and three more hours of battery life.

Idiots.

Adobe Creative Suite hates me. Now that shades of grey appear as brown, Photoshop is practically useless to me. I’ve tried everything I can think of, and then some—turning color management off, changing color management settings, changing proofing color spaces, deleting Adobe Gamma, changing my monitor profiles, uninstalling and reinstalling Creative Suite. Nothing. I still get a face full of dark brown when I paint an image with black.

TGhe only thing I can think of is the problem started when I got to Vancouver—I plugged in a new monitor. But surely that can’t be the issue here, can it? Especially since Photoshop can be coerced into showing the right black values, and Windows does it without assistance. Furthermore, it’s obvious that the Creative Suite is the problem and not the monitor, since if you repeatedly capture the screen and paste the result into Photoshop, you’ll see a brown tint appear over the original captured images, and Photoshop will read those colours numerically as brown, NOT black.

Short of a complete wipe and reinstall of Windows and CS, I’m out of ideas. Looks like I’ll be doing a lot of backing up and reinstalling in early November.

A list of what’s wrong with Dell technical and customer support.

1. Hold times. If every call I make to you bastards has a “longer than average” wait time, guess what that means: it’s not “longer than average” anymore, it’s average. And that average is creeping past a half-hour wait for technical support. Now, a show of hands: how many people do you know who can afford to take a half-hour out of the work day just being on hold, never mind trying to solve the actual problem?
2. Misdirection. I have an MP3 player that needs to be replaced. I entered my personal Express Service Code into your stupid phone system. So why have you put me in every support queue EXCEPT the one for MP3s? I don’t have a desktop system or a laptop, and every time your stupid system makes that mistake, they have to kick me into another queue, meaning another half-hour wait.
3. Over-compartmentalization. “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that for you from my department. Here, I’ll transfer you over to another one.” This has happened at least once every time I’ve called (see above); it’s happened twice on a number of occasions.
4. Simply not being there. If your return get screwed up for whatever reason (”Hi Purolator, I hate your fucking guts. Signed, Wesley”) you have to call their returns hotline to fix the situation. Do you know what the returns hotline sends you to? AN ANSWERING MACHINE. What the fuck is wrong with you? An answering machine? EVEN WHEN YOUR FUCKING MESSAGE SAYS YOU’RE OPEN FOR BUSINESS BUT LEAVE A GODDAMNED MESSAGE ANYWAYS AND WE’LL GET BACK TO YOU IN ONE BUSINESS DAY?
5. Lying. They didn’t get back to me in one business day.
6. Losing stuff. When I first ordered this MP3 player, they lost my initial order and I had to buy it again. When I returned my first MP3 player (the hard drive died), they lost the replacement order and I had to wait a month to find out some idiot didn’t key in the order. When my second MP3 player died, I found that the same idiot typed in my service tag wrong, meaning I had to wait another month until Dell finally added a number to it to reflect what’s on the back of my player, a process that apparently requires head office approval. Why so much stuff just keeps getting lost or screwed up, I don’t know.
7. Hold times. Yes, again. I’ve been on the phone for an hour today. Over the past 47 days, I’ve spent probably six or seven hours on the phone in total, five of those on hold. And in that time, I still have nothing but a broken MP3 player.

So, in short, not only will I never, ever buy anything from Dell again, and not only will I dissuade people from buying anything from Dell, but I will break anything made by Dell that someone else owns, just so they too can experience the joys of your shitty customer service. If islamocryptosuperfascist terrorist superheroes ever attack America, I want the Dell offices at the top of the list.

Piece of shit motherfuckers.

Jon Stewart was on Crossfire yesterday. I didn’t catch the segment when it originally aired, but after hearing about the segment from various sources and watching the clip myself (bittorrent link), I can safely say that the interview was the best piece of television I’ve seen all year—maybe ever. To actually see someone call bullshit on the people who engage in the histrionic shouting matches that pass for bipartisan debate practially brings a tear to my eye. I think it’s damned near impossible for me to love Jon Stewart any more than I do now.

Google may be censoring its search results. Try it yourself: see if you can find any images concerning the Abu Ghraib torture scandal on Google’s image search. Then try it on Altavista.

No word yet on why this is being done, or if it’s a systematic thing. Not a good precedent, however, considering Google’s stronghold on not just internet searching, but increasingly on the whole internet as well.

It’s hard to believe anyone would have the balls to air a candid conversation between Iraqi and American college students about the war in Iraq on national television. It’s even more of a shock when you find out who was behind the special: MTV. A surprising move from the same network that gave you a horrible-sounding rock-the-vote music video starring Spongebob and Lara Croft. I suppose we should be thankful for small miracles.

Speculation about the upcoming Nintendo DS and a possible “revolutionary” multiplayer mode. It’s an interesting conspiracy theory, if true, and it’s definitely gotten people talking about the DS, which has so far been overshadowed by Sony’s upcoming PSP.

Speculation so far seems to suggest that DS units will be capable of forming a peer-to-peer wifi mesh—in other words, an ad hoc wireless network of DSes acting as repeaters, thus eliminating the need for a seperate hub or router. This in itself is already a pretty cool idea, assuming the DS gains a large user base. There is, however, a possibility that hasn’t been fully considered yet, and it has to do with some of the interactive cellphone games / art projects that have popped up in the past couple of years.

Majestic was an Electronic Arts interactive game that tried to go beyond the traditional gaming experience by integrating fully with the player’s life. Depending on how much access you granted Majestic, the game would send you pager messages, emails and even call you on the cell phone to alert you to game events and further the storyline. Majestic only lasted for a couple of months and has since been written off as a failure, but since then other games taking advantage of the medium have sprouted up. Several of these games utilize GPS tech in cell phones, creating a city-wide scavenger hunt or Assassins game. More recently, Blast Theory have held a number of events involving wireless and GPS-enabled PDAs such as Uncle Roy All Around You and Can You See Me Now? The latter involves real Blast Theory “runners” chasing virtual players in a real setting; the latest event just finished in Brighton, with another scheduled in Barcelona at the end of the month.

Gaming in general has moved towards persistent-world models; witness the rise of MMORPGs like Everquest and City of Heroes. And then there’s the popularity of massive real-life games like Street Wars, which just ended its run in Vancouver. In short: if someone can create the killer app that exploits these trends, they will have a legion of new game players at their doorstep. Has someone at Nintendo or Warp Pipe figured it all out? If they have, it’ll definitely get me to finally buy a Nintendo system.

“Blood from inside of my body comes outside from an opening between my legs.” Let’s make-believe that blood is coming out from inside your body through an opening between your legs now! (11MB Windows Media Video file)

I suppose this is the companion piece to “I learned that it’s okay if you masturbate, but it’s also okay if you don’t!” Not for weak stomachs.