cybrpunk.com

Less than a week

In less than a week Muse and our two dogs and two cats will be flying back to the States.  In less than a week I’m going to be quite lonely.

This morning I stayed home to help Muse get all four of the fuzzy kids to the vet for their final health inspection and certification.  Because of her flaky friend we had to wait for a hire car to get us to and from the plaza where the vet office is located.  Her friend was supposed to help her take the pets to the vet in her golf cart.  Knowing how flaky she is, I knew she would cancel so I let work know that I would need to stay and help.  Sure enough, two days ago her friend calls and says that she can’t go but we can borrow the golf cart.  OK we planned for that so no problem.

Yesterday she called Muse all pissy and gave her this lame-ass excuse about how she had to give up her golf cart for four days starting on the day we needed it.  Yeah… right.  Like this woman could possibly stand using the standard buses for four days.  That would be beneath her.  So we had to get a local hire car to come get us and take us to the vet.  It’s way to far to walk with them all.

Of course her “friends” golf cart has been sitting in front of her building across from ours all day.  It hasn’t moved and it was available the entire time we would have needed it.  But oh well.  That’s one good thing about consistently flaky people is that you can safely ignore them and plan alternatives in advance.

Whatever.  At least its done now.  One more thing crossed off the lists.

Our government: Clueless

Have you seen this yet?

House Passes Telecom Immunity Bill, Expands Domestic Spying Powers

I don’t think any commentary is really necessary on this one. Nice parting shot Bush. Asshole.

Not free… so not free

So what did you get your Mother for Mother’s Day?  Me?  I sent mine some flowers.  Which cost almost $200 US dollars.  Am I that generous with something that will wilt in a week or so?  No.  But the other charges on my credit card bill for unknown ’services’ cost almost cost that much.  Let me explain.

I made two different orders of roughly $40 for Mother’s Day on ProFlowers.com.  You may notice that I didn’t make that a clickable link.  For good reason.  When we did the checkout, we signed up for a service called EasySaver in order to get $10 or $15 off our next order.  Normally we wouldn’t have done that but we were planning on making two orders so it worked out fine.  We would just cancel the subscription before we were charged and be done with it.

The second orderlisted that it had free shipping.  Bonus! That plus our money off from the first order should make it a good deal.  I’m all about good deals so that made me happy.  So we get the e-mail from EasySaver (notice how I’m not linking these people either?) and we input the code.  It doesn’t work.  We tried the code in many different ways and in different browsers and even on another PC.  Still no work-y.  OK… so that sucks, no money off.  But at least we get the free shipping, right?

Well yes and no.  When we were checking out that last order it seems that you also get signed up for a site called FreeShipping.com (definitely not linking these bastards).  I had no idea what I was signing up for as it seemed like part of the check-out process.  The orders shipped and things were fine even though we didn’t get the money off.  Oh well.

I checked the credit card statement on-line the day after to see if it posted and saw that EasySaver had already billed us for $1.95 for their service.  It seems that they start charging right away unlike what I thought was on the checkout.  So now we didn’t get the money off the next order but we also paid more.  Well, we figure we just read it wrong and decided to cancel it.  Yeah we forgot.  Which is exactly what these companies hope will happen.

So I checked the credit card bill on-line last night and realized that I missed the last statement (dammit) so I go back a month to see why we seem to have an awfully high bill considering we rarely use our credit card.  That’s when I noticed that we had forgotten to cancel EasySaver and they had charged us an additional $14.95 and probably hoped to do so for ever and ever.  OK yeah we screwed up, shame on us.  What shocked me though was a mystery charge on the same date from FreeShipping.com for $72 and no explanation or contact number or anything.  WTF?  I called shenanigans and then called Chase to dispute the probable fraud charge.

The people I talked to at Chase were really nice like they usually are.  They gave me an 800 number that showed up in their records that isn’t publicly available for FreeShipping.com.  I say it’s not publicly available because it’s not on the credit card statement and the only form of contact on their website is a form you can fill out and hope that they contact you back.  No phone number or address or anything else.  It also mentions that they are personal information harvesters.  Nice.
The guy from Chase politely asked the person who answered the phone for FreeShipping.com about their service and how I got charged for $72.  They told him that I signed up voluntarily and had to accept their terms on three occasions during the process.  I told them both that I’d never heard of the website and having to accept anything three times would have definitely thrown up a red flag for me.  However they did have some information on me that would definitely have been something I would have typed.  So I asked the woman on the other end how I could have signed up for this and not realized what was happening.  I asked her if this was setup at all to be misleading.  That’s when the Chase guy stopped talking.

She told me that all the information is available during the process if you read all the terms and conditions.  I asked her if that meant that a person would need to read all the fine print to understand what was going on and she said yes.  I asked her some more questions and she admitted that she’s never actually seen the website that we’re talking about.  I asked her how she could be expected to answer my questions if she doesn’t even know what I’m talking about.  She was not amused.  I asked her why I had gotten an e-mail from EasySaver telling me that I had signed up for something but I received nothing from her company.  She said that they don’t send out e-mails like that.  She mentioned that a reminder e-mail is sent out a day before the trial period ends so you know to cancel if you want to.  When I asked her why I didn’t receive a reminder e-mail she told me that they don’t do that.  Uh….

I asked her (knowingly) why they needed to be so deceptive in not being open about who they were, what they were doing and what they were planning on doing.  I asked her why there is no contact information for this company and not notification that I’ve signed up for something that needs to be cancelled.  She apologized and told me that she would refund the pro-rated amount of the yearly membership costs.  I asked the Chase credit card guy if that was good enough but got no answer.  It seems that he must have dropped off when I started asking pointed questions.  Oh well.

I called ProFlowers.com next and talked to a very nice woman on the line.  I told her that I had a complaint about their partner offers and wanted to speak to someone about it.  She told me that she could help me.  So I told her about the charges.  I told her about the company admitting that their offer was deceptive.  I told her that there is no notification process at any point and that the costs of my orders was almost tripled.  She told me that she couldn’t help me after all.  However she was very nice and took down all my information and said she’d have a supervisor contact me about this.  So far, no e-mails or phone calls.  I’m not holding my breath.  I didn’t ask for anything from them but I do want them to know that I will not be using ProFlowers.com ever again.  Considering we used their service multiple times a year that really won’t be significant to them.  However I guarantee that I’m not the only one who’s gotten screwed on this and I’m not the only lost business they will suffer.

I hope for their sake that it was worth it.

You don’t know Jack

Oh, Jack Thompson, you poor deluded old idiot. I know Jack’s disbarment hearing is old news at this point but a lot of my readers don’t follow this kind of news on a regular basis.

Jack Thompson with his favorite video game

Jack Thompson is the florida lawyer who deems himself as a “moral crusader” who has slapped lawsuits against everyone and every thing over the past two decades (at least). He’s the one who got Howard Stern banned from something or other (no big loss there) and the one who flocks to every school shooting and teenage violence case to feed on the carcasses of the families left behind. He’s the worst kind of ambulance chaser because he doesn’t just try and make money off of other people’s tragedies, he parades these people in front of the world as a symbol of his insane fight to try and censor everything that ‘he’ deems improper.

Finally, the public and the government are catching on to this guy and doing something about him and is working to get him disbarred in the state of Florida. He walked out of that hearing. He refused to acknowledge the judge as a judge and accused her of falsifying her credentials among other things. He wrote a 14 page essay against his hearing where he actually stated “You don’t know Jack.” This guy has been a lost cause for a long time but I think he’s completely and clinically cracked at this point.

He’s also made it very clear that he has already applied for the ability to practice law in other states since Florida is obviously just out to get him. I’m hoping that no other states approve him but I’m not sure I have that much faith in the government. It’s hard to say at this point.

Your iPod makes you a criminal

Maybe its just because I’m still reading Atlas Shrugged but the whole deal with Hollywood (MPAA) and the music industry (RIAA) buying the United States government to further their corporate needs just scares the crap out of me.

So imagine my surprise when I read this article: Canadian Politicians Negotiate to Join ACTA, Will Criminalize CD Copies, iPods at Border Crossings Basically this is saying that the border patrols between the United States and Canada (and presumably borders between any countries involved in ACTA) have the authority to decide if you have illegal copyrighted material on your computer/MP3 player/mobile phone/USB drives/etc and confiscate and/or destroy the device in question. No proof on their part would be required if the rumors are true.

So have you even heard of this ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)?  I hadn’t till I read this.  Since then I’ve found that this is being called the Pirate Bay Killer act which goes along with the whole copyright issue.  As stated in the linked article above, when people have tried finding out more about this through the Freedom of Information Act, all they got was the title of the act and everything else was blacked out.  From what little information can be found about this, the governments are being very quiet about this whole deal and the process to create it.

As usual, I encourage people to do their own research and make their own conclusions but this kind of thing honestly scares the shit out of me.  Not because I have anything to fear from it but because of the possibilities of the kinds of violations of rights this kind of act can make possible.  Mix this in with Homeland Security and we may be looking a little more dystopian any day now.

My computer is broke. Nuh-uh!

Dealing with technical support at the best of times can be difficult.  Dealing with tech support in Hong Kong can be absolutely infuriating.  The DVD-RW drive in my Dell XPS M1710 computer has been slowly dying for months but Friday it decided to give up completely.  This is a pretty fast PC but it would take six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD because it reset every two seconds.  Now it won’t even read a disk.

In a nutshell, here’s how the conversation went:
“My computer’s broke.”
“No it’s not, that’s normal.”

Yes tech support in Hong Kong will regularly flat out lie to try and keep from actually sending someone to fix something.  It’s not just Dell or even computers.  Getting service in Hong Kong is painful.

Actually the Dell Optiplex support line is pretty good and they speak English.  When you call the Dell XPS support line, you get transferred to Mainland China somewhere and they don’t speak English.  Knowing this, I had an admin make the call for me and warned her that they may not even speak guangdong hua (Cantonese).

Sure enough, the first person to answer speaks putong hua (Mandarin) only.  Luckily most of the local staff in my office are at least able to handle most conversations in Mandarin but they still get mixed up sometimes.  Oddly enough, the tech must not have liked the admin’s knowledge of his language because he hung up on her.  So she called back and luckily this time she got someone who speaks Cantonese.  Mind you, this is a Hong Kong phone number we’re dialing.

Instead of going through all the details of what happened, I’ll just give you the excuses that were translated to me.  There may have been more that I didn’t hear or understand.

• “Has Windows been re-installed?” - This insinuated that it’s not the drive but that Windows is the problem and needs to be re-installed.  No.
• When the call was made I had a burned copy of Symantec AV in the drive.  He told the admin that “there was just an incompatibility in the way that the burned disk had been created.”  So he told her she needed to put in a CD provided by Dell and if it worked then it wasn’t their problem.
• So I put in the XPS Drivers and Utilities Disk.  Standing near the PC you can hear the drive spin and reset over and over and over.  I told her to tell him about that noise.  He responded with: “That’s normal.”
• When the Dell CD didn’t come up, he had her try another Dell CD because it must be a problem with that CD.  We entered another one which made the same sounds and didn’t work.  He told her “the drivers weren’t loaded” even though we told him it’s been working for almost two years.  He had her check Device Manager and sure enough there was no Exclamation Point marking a problem.
• When I told her to tell him it took six hours to burn 1GB of data to a DVD-R, he started questioning the software we were using and blamed it on that.  He told her then that “the software you use is just not updated.”  By this point I was well beyond pissed and glad he couldn’t understand what I was saying on speakerphone.

The admin started getting confrontational with him at that point because he was wasting our time.  We had spent 30 minutes on the phone at that point.  Finally he relented and told us someone would contact us tomorrow to replace the drive.

Of course I thanked the admin since I’ve made similar calls before and they were just as painful except neither person understood the other.  Imagine trying to convey “video card” to someone who only speaks Mandarin and you only speak English.  Painful.

Too busy

It’s been a long day and it’s almost time for nighty-night time.  I’ve been swamped at work for the past week and a half to two weeks and I just got off two calls to my management in St. Louis to make a very long day even longer.  I haven’t had time to post, to do any artwork, to work on the comic or anything today.  Granted I was at work and I was working but I hate it when I’m being pulled in three different directions all day long and don’t even get to take a breather for lunch.  Oh well, whatever.

So other than a little whining I got nothing much else to say right now.  Although I do have to mention that I just found out that my boss (soon to be my ex-boss in a few hours) has been diligently reading this site.  I guess it’s a good thing I don’t complain too much about work on here or name names, eh?  If she’s reading this I wish her good luck in her new project.

And with that, I’ll be signing off to go put my shoes on, take the dogs out and then crash.  It’s been a long day and I deserve some sleep.  That cat better stay quiet tonight….

The death penalty

The U.S. Supreme Court this week hears arguments about whether the death penalty can be imposed for child rape.
OK, honestly… who has a problem with this type of sentence?  Who thinks that a person who rapes a child deserves anything less than the most brutal and painful torment and death that can be conceived by the most depraved minds in the world?  I, for one, would be happy to give them suggestions on how to torture child molesters and would be happy to be their executioner.

So I guess you can tell where I stand on Capital Punishment.  I am all for it and I believe it should be a simple cut and dry process.  No languishing in prisons once the sentence is passed down.  Just do it right there on the spot and viewable on national TV.

• Rape a child (and probably kill the child): then we execute you.
• Commit cold-blooded murder: then we execute you.
• Torture animals: then we execute you.
• Cancel another TV show as good as Firefly: then we execute you.

But no, there always has to be some tree-hugging pacifist who thinks that we should spend millions of dollars every year keeping these bastards alive.  Feeding them three meals a day, providing them with workout equipment, basketball courts, satellite television, etc.  The best punishment we can hope for for their time in prison is perhaps the occasional beating  and/or ass-raping for the convict.

Why do we have so much crime?  That’s an easy one to answer.  Our legal system is broke or at least severely fractured.  Sure justice is served from time to time, but people are willing to take the risks that they do in committing crimes because they know all they have to do is pay for a good lawyer and if necessary go whining to the various ‘humanitarian’ groups.  People who are inclined to commit crimes are not afraid of the system and that’s where the downfall is these days.  And if you are a celebrity you already know that the laws don’t apply to you in the same way.

What happened to the public execution?  Entire cities used to turn out to watch the beheading of criminals.  When people were strung up to hang from their necks in the middle of a town square, everyone was reminded of the consequences of bad deeds.  When was the last time you saw a person die by execution?  Probably never in real life.  People are no longer faced with the very real consequences of evil deeds.

So my answer to crime in general is more executions IF they are publicly viewable on television, YouTube, HD satellite broadcast.  Start with those that have been rotting in our prisons for decades like Charles Manson.  Use the money that would have been spent to guard, feed, entertain, administer and heal him and others like him and use that money to setup an execution with advertising on the SuperBowl.  Why not?  It’s not like we are EVER going to let people like him out and yet we just can’t bring ourselves to kill the poor wretch.  It’s not his fault, it was his mother/his father/society/rock & roll/drugs/insanity/war/whatever.  Kill him.  Plain and simple.

But it will never happen.  And that’s why we will continue to see gangs on the streets because they know if they kill a baby in a drive by shooting they only have to go away for ten years and hang out with others from their gang and make more contacts for when they get out.  That’s why we will see random killings and hate crimes because there is no fear.  The system is a joke people and the more easily offended our society gets and the more politically correct everyone is forced to be because someone can’t handle reality the worse it’s going to get.

Food for thought: Every time I fly to Malaysia, the announcement before landing reminds everyone that anyone caught smuggling any illegal drugs into the country is subject to capital punishment.  I bet Malaysia doesn’t have the same drug problems that the United States does.  I wonder why?

The most expensive porn?

Can you imagine being the New York businessman who just spent 1.5 million US dollars on a 15 minute video of Marilyn Monroe giving oral sex to some unidentified recipient? I’m not sure if this is the most money ever spent on a single porn video clip, but I can’t imagine that it’s not. I mean… 1.5 million dollars… can it really be that important? He’s not even going to use it for profit.

I could possibly understand if he was planning on spending the 1.5 million so that he could make 3 million by selling it to the porn industry. But nope, he’s keeping it all to himself. Which is fine, I don’t need to see it but it just boggles my mind. He’s trying to protect her image. For what? She’s dead. I don’t think she cares too much anymore.

How did he become so rich? Was it through being a businessman? I can’t imagine that way of thinking made him much money in the real world. Maybe he was just born rich. That has to be it. How else could someone throw away that kind of money? Has he never heard of the Internet? He could spend three-fiddy on a porn site and get all the 15 minute sex clips he wants.
Sometimes, you just have to wonder about people.

No not again

No it’s not going to be about poop or doctors today. That’s not all I talk about here at cybrpunk.com. Today I’m going to bitch about chatting in Google’s Gmail. At first I loved the idea of the simple tiny chat window in my favorite free webmail service. And I still do mostly. Mostly. But it seems like ever since they started this integration with LAME… er… AIM, nothing has worked as well since. People show up as online but not able to receive messages. For example:

me: So have you tried Soulstorm yet?
Mike did not receive your chat.
me: What?
Mike did not receive your chat.
me: What do you mean that Mike did not receive my chat?
Mike did not receive your chat.
me: Now your just mocking me aren’t you?
Mike did not receive your chat.
me: you bitch
Mike did not receive your chat.

Obviously trying to reason with the Gmail chat doesn’t work as you can see above. Neither does name calling it seems. I know that Yoshi has problems with it too, but he probably has some super elite custom software that interfaces with Google directly to talk to their satellites to track who’s daring to speak to him. Or so I like to imagine.

Of course my biggest complaint about chat is that most of my friends are asleep when I’m awake. But I can’t think of a way to blame Google or AOL for that.