How To Write Off Both Your iPhone And Your Trip To New Zealand

1. Write a website that specializes in taking apart Apple products as soon as they're released.

2. Realize that the first people in the world to get the new iPhone are in New Zealand.

3. Fly to Auckland to be fourth in line IN THE WORLD for your iPhone, so you can immediately take it apart and post pictures online.

4. Write the whole damn trip and the price of the phone off as business related.

5. Enjoy some gorgeous New Zealand scenery.

The Most Complicated Evil Plot I Have Yet Devised

I think I've figured out how to land myself a job interview next Friday.

This theory came to me as I was waiting for my Chinese food for an hour and 15 minutes. I really had to pee, but I just KNEW the guy was going to come while I was in the bathroom.

Sure enough, I said "Oh the hell with this, I'm not waiting any longer," and the guy came while I was in the bathroom.

This always happens to me: I wait and wait for what's supposed to happen to happen, and then when it doesn't, I start doing something else, and THEN what was supposed to happen happens.

Working from this trend, I've come up with a plan to have at the very least, a job interview by the end of next week.

My job finishes this Friday, and I had been planning (barring a sudden settlement with SAG) to try and leave town next Thursday for about a week and a half to visit my dad up in Idaho. I'll be driving, so I'll be stopping in Vegas on the way up next Thursday if all goes to plan.

I knew Dark Knight was coming out next Friday, and I really want to see it in IMAX, since they actually shot some of it in IMAX and I hear it's brain-meltingly awesome.

So of course, I got online to see if there are tickets to the midnight IMAX screening in Vegas (and I'd like to pause here to note that IMAX tickets in Vegas are cheaper than regular movie tickets here), and there were.

So now, my evil plot: I bought my ticket to that midnight Thursday showing in Vegas.

By purchasing that ticket, I have close to guaranteed that something will come up in L.A. and I won't be able to leave until Friday or Saturday, maybe not even at all.

Clearly, as I'm packing my shit into the car to leave on Thursday morning, I will get a phone call from someone who wants to interview me Friday morning, maybe even for a job that starts Monday.

And if my frustrating luck does not continue to hold...Well, I'll get to see the Dark Knight in IMAX on opening night then spend a week in Idaho with my dad. It's pretty much a win-win.

Excelsior!

You know you're a geek when you think, "God, this job-hunting would be so much easier with a spreadsheet."

You are an even bigger geek when you actually make that spreadsheet.

You realize being a geek is a good thing when said spreadsheet actually does turn out to be helpful.

Let's Never Fight Again *Hugs Computer*

Hooray! My computer is back!

What makes me really happy is that they didn't wipe my hard drive, so I'm pretty much back up and running immediately, with the exception of a few files I had to move around from the external drive I was saving everything to while I was using the temporary computer.

The really excellent news is that because they turned the repair around faster than they thought they would, the rental place only charged me for two weeks, even though I had it a couple extra days. Saved me another $80.

So basically, for waiting four extra days to get my computer back, I saved almost $700 in the great scheme of things.

I mean granted, this was still a very, very expensive excursion into the world of Setting An Example For People Of Why You Should Not Drop Your $2500 Computer.

But good lord, it could have been a lot worse.

Bad News/Good News

I got a call from the folks at Apple about my computer today.

The bad news is, because I have a matte screen on my MacBook Pro and will not even consider getting a glossy screen, they won't have a part in until Feb 7th, and won't have my computer back to me until Feb. 11-12.

The good news is, to compensate me for my inconvenience, they offered me two options.

1. Ship me a brand new computer with the exact same specs for the same amount I would have paid for the repair, and have it arrive Friday (Feb 1) or Monday (Feb 4), or

2. Cut the price of the repair in half, and get it back the 11th-12th.

I have to admit, option #1 was thoroughly tempting, especially because after a week of using the temp MacBook, I'm more certain than ever that I made the right decision to spring for the Pro. The reflections on the glossy screen drive me batshit.

But after calling the computer rental place to see how much it would cost to extend the rental and running some numbers with sales tax, I realized that waiting was going to save me almost $600 to just wait for the repair.

So, the bad news is, I have to put up with the tiny, glossy, pain in the ass rental for a while longer, but the good news is, I save six hundred bucks.

At this point, the option that saves me $600 wins, even if it involves fire ants. Which, thankfully, this does not.

If You Need Me, I'll Be Moving To A Cave

...Where there are no electronic things I can break or have crap out on me.

The fucking hard drive on the laptop I rented while mine's getting fixed up and died on me when I got back from work.

I ran disk utility off my Leopard install disk (a way you can sometimes fix problems with a pesky drive), and it was like the laptop's drive wasn't even there.

If, somehow, the shop I rented from decides this is my fault, I'm out a $1500 deposit on top of everything else. It's a low level possibility, but the way my tech karma's been fucking with me lately, I wouldn't be surprised.

I'm starting to think I should have just sucked it up and bought a new computer. At least then, among other things, I wouldn't be typing this on my crackberry.

When It Rains, It Pours

I had put my MacBook Pro on that counter before, a thousand times before. I had no reason to think last night was any different.

No reason until it came tumbling down, open, about 10pm last night. And that's when today's nightmare began.

I thought it was fine at first: Everything was working properly, no readily visible damage, at least not in the piss-poor lighting of my apartment.

I always work with my laptop on my lap, so the first, "Oh fuck" didn't cross my mind until I put the laptop on the coffee table so I could get up and start doing my foot stretches. I noticed it wasn't quite sitting level.

Okay, that's not too bad, I thought. Then I tried to eject the DVD I'd been watching, and it bonked against the case in a futile fashion. Crap, that's bad.

I decided to call and get some estimates in the morning. Taking it in to a reseller (who I thought might get me a better price than Apple directly, since Apple's warranty doesn't cover butterfingers), I noticed that when I closed it, the lid was obviously bent at a weird curve.

That was when I knew this was going to be REALLY expensive.

On any laptop, if you seriously damage something related to the casing around the screen, nine times out of ten you have to replace the whole screen, even if you've been lucky enough not to have the screen itself break on you.

Since the screen is one of the single most expensive parts of any laptop, and particularly expensive-ass MBP's, this was going to cost me.

The reseller gave me an estimate in the mid $1300's, but advised I go to the Apple store since they'd have to send it in to Apple for a repair that serious anyway, and perhaps I could throw myself upon their mercy and get something at least a little cheaper.

And a little cheaper it was: If I wanted to have all the damage repaired, rather than just the more egregiously fucked bottom part of the case (and the full repair is necessary to keep the warranty in force), it was $1240.

The good news is, the $1240 figure covers ANYTHING else they find wrong with it. If I fucked up the disk drive too, then that's covered. If they have to just send me a whole new computer, it will still be $1240.

I would also be without my computer for anywhere from 5-10 business days, necessitating renting a temporary computer, since the only work I have right now is freelance tech consulting, for which you need a computer.

The only place they could find that would rent to individuals (as opposed to buisnesses) gave the fairly reasonable-for-these-things rate of $170 for two weeks.

So immediately, I would be out $1460. Considering the computer itself cost $2800, this was a fairly substantial sum. It is also, I'd like to note, more than my incredibly steep rent for one month.

And in case you're thinking it, nope, renter's insurance won't cover it since it was a very obvious drop. If it'd been stolen or lost in a fire, maybe. Not dropped.

I briefly considered just bagging it and getting a new computer for the same money, but the problem is that I didn't get the cheaper MacBook for a reason: I do audio recording which strongly benefits from more advanced ports (firewire 800 vs. 400), as well as web design and photo stuff that really needs the extra boost of the bigger screen and better graphics card.

Plus, the glossy screen drives me batshit to absolutely no end. I'd been helping a friend set up her new MacBook and had been ever more convinced I'd done the right thing springing for the Pro.

I probably could have sold the busted Pro for parts, but I had no idea if it'd bring in enough money (around $1000-1200) to pay for the difference between the cost to fix it and a new Pro. Without that knowledge, I was kind of up a creek.

So I sucked it up and decided to get it fixed. I'm now typing on the rented MacBook (which, by the way, is good for basic stuff but is heavily reaffirming my decision to just get the damn Pro fixed).

Now I will admit, I'm EXTREMELY fortunate that I have some deep-freeze funding that I'm being allowed to access (which I normally would not have access to, but the parental units who control it deemed this a worthy exception) to pay for this debacle.

I'd be super-duper-mega-extra fucked without that, and I'm REALLY not happy I had to access that in the first place, especially since this was due to my own carelessness.

Lord knows when the busted computer comes back from the shop, I'll be velcroing the fucker to my desk/coffee table any time it's not on my lap.

Dork Dilemmas

Being unemployed in January is probably a good thing for the average gadget geek like myself, since the twin peaks of lust for shiny things both take place during the first couple of weeks of January.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is taking place in Las Vegas this week, where almost every electronics company is unveiling its product lineup for 2008.

Next week brings the annual MacWorld Expo, where Apple faithful come to drool over whatever lickably shiny object Steve Jobs deigns to unveil during his keynote address.

Both of these events lead to an absolute orgy of gadget blog coverage (Google Reader is buckling under the weight of the feeds just of Engadget and Gizmodo), and to try and keep up even without having a job to do on top of it is a bloody nightmare.

I mean, it is fun to read about crazy shit like the leopard-print Taser with mp3 playing holster, the LCD you install on your car bumper so other people can watch what you're watching, or the 150 inch plasma TV that is over five times the size of my Gigantic Damn TV.

What would have been even better is to have seen these ridiculous items in person. Alas, it is not to be.

The thing that really sucks is that theoretically, if I had the money, I could have gone to both CES and MacWorld and at least gotten on the exhibit floors. This is also one of the very few times I would actually be able to attend either conference.

The problem is, between rent and COBRA, I'm burning through my unemployment checks completely before the first of the month is even over, and every other expense I have comes straight out of savings.

So burning $40-50 on admissions fees per conference plus approximately one billion dollars per tank on gas (just over two tanks to Vegas and back, more like three to SF) is not really in the cards.

I tell you, it is going to kill me next week to be sitting here, knowing that I could have been in San Francisco groping the goofy gadgets I'm simply staring at pictures of, but my stupid fiscal responsibility is winning out.

IM Fun

I hereby present a screencap of a brief conversation with a friend and former co-worker that I had yesterday that amused me greatly.

I am represented by the Santa chugging a bottle of Jack on the right, while my friend is represented by MacGyver.

Spam Subject Line Of The Week

Made it through my web server's spam filter, so I got it on my crackberry (although it did get caught by my mail program's spam filter):

Vacuum Carrot Elephant Meteor Backpack

There's something eloquent in the utter randomness.

Sarcastic British Geeks = Hilarity

My cousin Mark, who enjoys the Halo series very much, sent me the following video, which he said captured his feelings about Halo 3 very well.

I'm not a gamer much beyond Tetris and desperately trying to find a Wii (and then finding it at the one point I couldn't afford it) for the last few months, but I thought this review by a Brit for an Aussie magazine was hysterical:



Now every time someone says the words "Easy Street" I'm going to picture a little sign below it that says "We've got hookers!"

On a separate but related note, I was listening to one of my BBC podcasts and I heard a member of Parliament (a Conservative who was chairing some committee related to finance) describe the missing data fiasco I wrote about the other day as "a major cock-up."

It still sounded more dignified than anything anyone in Congress has said in some time.

Damn You, Time Warner Cable

You and your "system upgrades" that leave my interwebs running at the speed of cold molasses (ie, 400kb/s). Seriously, if I wanted speeds this slow, I'd save myself $25 a month and get DSL.

I'd better be able to view four thousand pictures of cats with goofy captions nigh instantaneously when this "upgrade" is finished.

Mmmm, Pointlessly Translucent

If you can read this, Leopard has been successfully installed on my computer.

I'll be spending my saturday night enjoying all the hilariously pointless translucence I can handle, because I am the most easily amused person on earth.

Shiny!

Unspotted

So as my fellow Mac nerds know, it's Leopard Day, and no, I am not in line with the rest of the fanboys.

Sadly, this is not just because I really needed to save the $45 the $20 off and $25 rewards certificate I had at Amazon bought me.

No, this is because I'm so busy from work overflowing into the weekend and three (three!) parties I have to attend to go installing a new operating system on my computer.

I rarely even have two things I absolutely have to do on the weekend, but I can think of at least twelve I have to do this weekend.

The fact that this week at work was insane on a level I've never seen before didn't help, as it's pushed several work things from the week to the weekend.

The bigger problem for my inner geek is that I don't think I'm going to have time to install until not next weekend, but the weekend after. The disc, which is arriving Monday, will just sit there and taunt me for two weeks.

Next weekend I'm dragging my ass to San Diego, to visit my mother who will be there attending a conference. And weekdays? Fuhgeddaboutit, I'm up to my eyeballs and then some with work.

Even if the writers' strike armageddon comes to pass (god forbid), I'm still not going to be out on my ass immediately enough to have the small consolation of being able to install a new OS, since we'll be filming for a week or two on scripts that would already be written.

So I guess I'm just going to be a sad Mac for a couple weeks while I go out and try to have a life.

That Is The Question

Will It Blend? is a hysterically awesome series of two-minute-ish videos produced by a company that makes industrial-strength blenders for the home.

They take all sorts of shit (everything from a fruit smoothie to a rake to a bunch of old cellphones), toss it in one of their blenders, then ask the simple question, "Will it blend?"

Generally, the answer is yes, though you often don't want to breathe in the smoke created during the blending process, as it carries a slight risk of...well, fatality.

So of course, I knew they would inevitably blend and iPhone. The only question was when. The answer? Today:



They also have a great recent one of some Transformers, where the guy talks about his 25(!) grandkids and how much they enjoy watching grandpa pulverize stuff with his blender.

Because I Have Already Been Asked Several Times

No, I am not getting an iPhone.

I had a very bad experience with Cingular in college, and even though it's now AT&T, you still couldn't pay me to deal with those assholes again, I don't give a shit if the iPhone turns lead into gold or whatnot.

At least I'm saving myself $600!

Happy Nerd Alert!

This is why you should not give nerds like me a new computer like the one that showed up on my doorstep two days early today. Because we will do shit like this:


The good news is, by running a benchmark test that compares the same stuff on both computers, the new one is 5x faster (got a score of 107 on the new one vs. 22 on the old).

Now, to finish reinstalling nine tons of software...

Indecision

I want to buy a new computer. I'd been planning to buy a new computer around now, until Apple pushed back the release of its new operating system, Leopard, from WWDC (which was last week) to October.

Common sense says I should wait the four and a half months it'll take for Leopard/iLife to come out, thus saving myself about $200 (129 for the OS, 70ish for iLife), and probably getting a slightly faster computer in October.

The extra 40 seconds it took that sentence to appear after I started typing it are making me think, "Fuck common sense."

The computer I have works great...on occasion. Other times it's so painfully slow I want to throw the fucking thing out the window, with one simple task sending it spinning into 20 minutes of total uselessness.

I can't add any more RAM (lower slot's blown), so that's not an option. And I still have several gigs free on my hard drive, so that's not the problem. The computer's 3.5 years old, so I think it's just simply old and tired.

Money at hand is not the issue. Again, I thought I was going to be buying a new computer now, so I saved and I have the money for a new computer now.

The inconsistency is what makes it hard to pull the trigger. If it were always awful, the decision would be made. But sometimes it'll work just fine, even for several hours.

The other reason it's hard to justify: Part of the reason I'm noticing all this is that I've been working from home because of my ongoing foot troubles.

Even if I were to order right now, I'll likely be back at work, where I have a much faster computer (than this one, the new one would be even faster than my work one), before I get much of a chance to use the new one.

Maybe I'm just being a cheapskate, though. The question is: Is $200 enough money to suffer through until October with my current computer?

After trying to write this post and having the computer seize up on me three times between writing and proofreading, I think the answer is no.

Edited to add: Yeah, I officially cracked. It'll be here either Friday or sometime next week. Yay!

Damn You, Apple

You are sorely testing me, you evil fruit.

First, you push back Leopard until October, then you go and release these shiny new LED backlit laptops that I would have bought sometime in the next month with a copy of Leopard had it come out on time.

Instead, my aging, creaking, full, angry PowerBook will be forcing me to Force Quit for another four months, because I can't justify buying a new computer just to drop another $130-150 on a new OS 4 months later.

I suppose the one good thing is that maybe I'll have time to pay off my giant pile of medical bills and get my Computer Fund back up to snuff by the time Leopard actually comes out.

In the meantime, the Spinning Beachball of Death will taunt me and taunt me, until nigh upon All Hallow's Eve when, to quote Wayne's World, "It will be mine. Oh yes...it will be mine."

Technology: Off The "Dead To Me" List

It was officially corrupted data, so I had to erase my hard drive. Boo.

But thanks to Super Duper, I was able to get back to where I was on Thursday when my last automatic backup ran. And it took about 3 seconds to redownload the email I'd received since then, and I hadn't done anything else on my computer since then. Yay!

Although I did come perilously close to buying a new MacBook Pro while waiting for the guy at the Genius Bar to confirm that it was just software and not hardware causing the problem.

I do hope they were able to clean up all the drool after I left.

Thanks, Technology!

I love it when my computer chooses one of the busiest weekends of the year to crash rather spectacularly, necessitating at the least a trip to the "Genius" Bar at the Apple store, and given what it's doing and what it hasn't responded to, rather likely a wipe and restore of the hard drive.

God bless the Crackberry (from which I am posting this), Super Duper (the auto-backup software I run twice a week), and the old-ass PC that's been gathering dust in my living room (from which I was able to schedule an appointment with the Apple store).

You Kids Get Off My Videogame System!

Now I know why I can't find a damn Wii: They're being snapped up by retirement communities.

Well, and everyone else and their brother, mother, sister, and now grandparents. The video that's on that story is pretty cute though, especially the 89 year old woman who hasn't bowled since 1945.

Why Am I Stupid?

I have a busy enough weekend planned. I'm going to the tax accountant. I'm having an Oscar party. I'm going to attempt to wall-mount my TV (though if that fails spectacularly enough, I will not be having an Oscar party).

So, with all that on my plate, you'd think I wouldn't be stupid enough to decide that this is the weekend to buy an expensive new router, attach my hard drive to it, and try and get the ports forwarded in a way that doesn't expose all my data to the interwebs.

Apparently, you'd be wrong. I am exactly that stupid.

And It's SPECTACULAR

Well, it took four guys from the cable company standing around my apartment for an hour to get the two CableCards properly installed in my HD TiVo, but good lord, SPECTACULAR HD (™ Laz) is pretty fucking cool.

I'm watching the Lakers-Wizards game right now (ironic, since a) I hate basketball and b) I hate DC even more), and the picture is absolutely unreal. You can see the individual beads of sweat on Gilbert Arenas as he comes up to the free throw line.

Nate came over earlier and The Empire Strikes Back was on HBO HD, and...wow. Darth Vader's helmet was so very, very shiny. You could count the individual hairs on Chewbacca.

I moved the new-old TiVo that had been in the living room to the bedroom and disconnected the old-old TiVo. I'm in the process of trying to find a home in L.A. for the old-old one (since I'd prefer not to ship it), but if I can't, you kids will get first dibs before I put it on eBay.

I also changed my TiVo naming scheme, since the old one was a bit too practical ("living room" and "bedroom" were the old names). Fixed that problem: The new-old TiVo is now Pinky, and the HD TiVo is The Brain.

Between this and my new Netflix subscription (Snakes on a Motherfuckin' Plane arrived today) I think there's a very real danger that I'm never going to leave my apartment again.

Fiscal Irresponsibility is Fun!

It all started when a coworker came up to me tuesday and said, "You're big into tech stuff, right?" Always dangerous words, but I had no idea how dangerous they would prove this time.

And so it was that he told me of the absolutely absurd deal he got on a really, really nice Panasonic HDTV from a liquidator in Silicon Valley, hired to dispose of some late-2006 model plasmas with little to no wear and tear at low low prices.

How low? Less than half of what the 42", really high quality plasmas were going for new. Enough that instead of simply getting the television I could afford, I got the entire A/V setup I wanted for the money I'd saved up.

After some hemming and hawing (and coming thisclose to convincing Nate and Liz to be as stupid as I am), I went for the deal. Because it was going to be super-expensive to ship, I convinced Nate to come with me to Menlo Park to pick it up today.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Gigantic Damn Television:


Now since Nate and I are both huge geeks, we looked at the map and realized we were going to only be a few miles from Cupertino. Since we were running a good bit early, we decided to make a quick stop:


And to take our nerdiness officially over the top:


When I asked one Charlie Chaplin the Cat what he thought of this entire endeavor, he pulled this face, which I'll bet more than a couple of you are pulling right now:


Special thanks to Nate, who not only accompanied me and had the intestinal fortitude to resist purchasing one on the spot (which I surely could not have done), but who helped my half-cripped ass lug the damn thing up to my apartment.

Nate, without you, I couldn't watch spectacularly awful television in truly spectacular HD.

More TK when I get the HD TiVo (oh you better believe it) and everything else up and running.

The Torture of 24 Time Zones

Mark and I are both obsessed with 24.

Mark lives in Chicago. I live in Los Angeles, and despite actually working on the Fox Lot, do not have access to the east coast feed of 24.

This results in text message exchanges like the following text messages, which were exchanged between 6:34pm and 7:04pm yesterday:

6:34pm
Mark: Holy shit. 24. Holy Shit. U will shit your load. [uh...what?]

6:38pm
Ellen: Damn you. It's not on for another 3 hours here!

6:38pm
Mark: Holy Fuck!

6:42pm
Mark: this is incredible.

6:44pm
Ellen: It's just going to be Jack driving to Pasadena for an hour, isn't it?

6:44pm
Mark: No, it starts with jack going door to door saving america. But then. holy shit.

7:03pm
Ellen: Damn you, how many times must I tell you, TELL ME NOTHING!!!

6:55pm [arrived 7:04pm]
Mark: aaagh! Awesome!

7:05pm
Mark: You wouldn't believe me if I told you.


Having now watched the episode, I can say Mark is absolutely right. I would never, ever have believed him. And yet I believed every second of the show when I watched it.

Sweet lord, this show is awesome.

About Tonight's 24

I will not say anything specific so as not to spoil it for those who are time-shifting it but...Sweet Holy Crap On A Stick, the last 10 minutes?

The one thing I thought was the big end-of-episode turning point and then they turn around and pull THAT shit?! God DAMN, I love this show.

The 'Pod is Dead, Long Live the 'Pod

My trusty old iPod, which I bought about two and a half years ago, finally started succumbing to the daily drudgery of being carried in my pocket without a case about a month ago.

I waited patiently for MacWorld as it deteriorated further and further, but when no new standalone iPod* was introduced, I could justify waiting no longer.

And so it was, I walked into the shiny shiny Apple store yesterday and walked out significantly lighter of wallet with a shiny shiny new black 80gb 5.5gen iPod.

Yes, I know I'm a trendy schmuck for going with the black, but there's some trick of the eye that makes video look better on it, so I went for it. Plus: Shiny!

The best news that comes from doubling my music capacity is that I can now carry my entire music collection around with me again, something I haven't been able to do since I filled the my old iPod up three months after I got it.

I also now have a little free space to try these things the kids are calling "podcasts," so if anyone has any to recommend (I'm already subscribed to the NPR All Songs Considered one), please do.

Hooray electronics!

*- On the iPhone, I only have two words: Fuck Cingular.

Geek vs. Geek

This week my boss is still directing. More 16 hour days on set, and a lot more learning. The TV geek part of me is very happy.

However, the gadget geek part is having a slight panic attack. This week is both the international Consumer Electronics Show and the Macworld San Francisco expo.

Now, I realize not finding out about things AS THEY HAPPEN! is not the end of the world, but seeing all the dueling coverage and seeing the goofy reveals live is pretty damn entertaining, and I'm going to miss about 90% of it this year.

I've got several people promising to keep me updated on anything big announced, though I'm fully expecting a couple fakes ("Steve Jobs just announced a personal spacecraft! It's called the iOrbit and it's the size of a newt! I totally want one.").

Luckily, a few companies are releasing stuff at CES today for me to drool over or laugh at tonight.

Speaking of things to laugh at, The L Word starts up their new season tonight. I'd like to say it cannot possibly be worse than their last season, but when they scrape the bottom of the barrel, they have a a remarkable ability to punch all the way through.

Ooh, Shiny

New Blogger has arrived, and I have just found the way I will be wasting the time I'm spending not skiing (and not working on other stuff I should be working on): Going through my archives and tagging all my posts.

Sweet.

Edit: I'm trying to get the label alignment work right (they should be right below the "posted by Ellen" thing), and it looks great on preview and in Safari, but it's about 10 pixels lower than it should be on FF for Mac once it publishes. Any geeks want to help me fight through blogger code to make this look right cross platform?

I Am Now Officially An Asshole

This Onion article is hilarious from beginning to end, even more so because I just finally got rid of my Treo and got almost the exact same model of Blackberry mentioned:

New Mobile-Device Purchase Makes Asshole More Versatile

NEW YORK—The new BlackBerry 8703c has allowed total shithead Robert McClain to assign more work to his assistants while he is gambling in Atlantic City.

For the record, I got the 8703e.

The Anti-Crap Cam

I bought a Nikon D50 about a month and a half ago because really, I need some of the most advanced photographic technology available to take a picture this cute:


More photo phun is available at my flickr site. Chaplin's going to hate my guts very, very soon. Especially once I get a macro lens and start in with the extreme closeups.

Success!

If you can read this, Time Warner Cable officially just got much lower on my Shit List.

Give Me One Reason

Ok, contingent on there being decent cell reception in my new place: Can anyone think of one good reason I should keep my landline?

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

Possible big announcement coming tomorrow...well, today. Possible big venting of frustration. Stay tuned, it'll be one or the other.

Note: This has nothing to do with either this or this. Although both of these things do raise my gadget-nerd-o-meter to dangerous levels.

Me vs. Electronics

ROUND 1: ME vs APPLE

The pins on my ethernet port are all bent out of shape, so I head over to the Apple store to see if they could replace the port. They take one look at it and tell me I'll have to mail it in.

So I go back to the office and call Apple to get a box, and they say, well, there's basically no way other than physical damage that the pins could have gotten bent, so the repair isn't covered.

All right, looking at the way things look, I can see where they're coming from on that. So, I ask, how much will replacing the port cost me?

Turns out the port is soldered to the Logic board, so to replace the port, I'd have to replace the entire Logic board. How much does that cost? Only TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

I decided to say fuck that shit, I'm going to get an ethernet adapter. So I go over to MacMall, grab a CardBus ethernet adapter that the CSR assures me is Mac-compatible.

I get it home and start trying to test it, and no dice. I do some googling, and it turns out that there are only a very few adapters that work with Macs, the one I just purchased not being one of them.

Awesome. Proper Adapter is on its way from Amazon.

Round 1 Winner: Apple

ROUND 2: MY APARTMENT vs ROOMBA

I took the Roomba out for its first spin (and watching it spin in a growing spiral pattern over a stain is REALLY entertaining), and it was quite fun.

Chaplin seemed confused at first, scared shitless the first time it bore down on him and he realized it wasn't going to stop, and then generally amused by it.

He was very entertained when it got stuck under my TV stand, and the motor whined pitifully as it tried to extricate itself. He stood over it, lord of all he surveyed.

And then, the 'bot freed itself, and he ran for the hills.

The roomba did a decent job of vacuuming, though the fact that it got caught up on my shoelace, a belt, and a cat toy reminds me that I really need to clean my damn apartment.

Round 2 Winner: Draw

ROUND 3: MY STOMACH vs MY FREEZER

I went grocery shopping on my way home Monday night, and was reminded why I usually don't.

Everyone knows that grocery shopping while hungry is a bad idea, but this was beyond ridiculous.

They were out of the little DiGiorno's pizzas I usually get, but they had a "crispy crust" version that was bigger that I deemed sufficient.

What I didn't realize until I got home was exactly how much bigger it is than the wee pizzas I usually get. You guessed it: The damn thing wouldn't even fit in my freezer.

Luckily, I was REALLY hungry, so I just ate the damn thing for dinner.

Round 3 Winner: My Stomach, by Technical Knockout

OVERALL WINNER: Draw.

The World's Most Expensive Cat Toy

It is here. It has to charge for sixteen freakin' hours before I can use it to entertain Chaplin, so the full report will have to wait until tomorrow night.

However: I am fucking giddy about trying this out. I own a robot! This is the coolest thing ever.

Signs That Perhaps I Watch Too Much Television

I had to create a spreadsheet, with the aid of the Futon Critic's schedule, to figure out which TiVo to use to record which show for the upcoming fall season.

While doing that, I determined that, if I permanently add every show I'm trying out, I will be recording 25.5 hours of television a WEEK.

That figure is only in primetime and does not count the 4 hours a week of Daily Show and Colbert Report I always watch. Oddly, there is not one show I will be recording on either Friday or Saturday.

Thankfully, I will probably not watch entire seasons of at least some of the shows that I'm trying out, either because they get cancelled or I determine they suck.

For the curious, here's the list of new shows I'm giving at least one shot to, in the rough order of day/time they're airing:

- Heroes
- Vanished
- Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
- Friday Night Lights
- Knights of Prosperity
- Standoff
- Smith
- 20 Good Years
- 30 Rock
- Justice
- The Nine
- Ugly Betty
- Six Degrees
- Brothers and Sisters

I'm also probably going to track down Shark, but I've already assigned both TiVos when it airs, so I might have to use slightly more nefarious methods.

Having mapped all this out, I now understand why, precisely, I have no life.

A Modest Proposal

I was describing my ongoing troubles with Chaplin to my mom, and she mentioned that when her old cat was acting up, the vet suggested she try and interact and play with him more.

I said, well, that's all well and good, but I'm out of the house about fifteen hours a day most days, there's really only so much interacting I can do.

So we got into a discussion of other things he could interact with. Another cat has been ruled out because of his history of fighting with other animals, and a guinea pig was ruled too small.

Then, the solution came: Get a Roomba.

It's actually kind of ingenious: Not only will it keep the cat occupied, but it might actually encourage me to keep crap off my floor.

I'm taking the cat to the vet to rule out any medical causes of his misbehavior, but if it turns out he's just being a little twit, then perhaps I'll occupy him with his very own Most Expensive Cat Toy Ever.

Scenes From My Three Hours At LAX

The Hilarious

I got to the airport three hours before my flight, as directed, a feat accomplished by literally sprinting out of work, then doing a flight-of-the-bumblebee at home of grabbing my stuff and feeding my cat and almost grabbing my cat instead of my laptop when the cab came.

I'd printed out my boarding pass earlier in the day to speed things along, but when I got to the top of the escalator to the security lines, I burst out laughing.

There were eight people in the three running metal detector lines. I got through in under five minutes, including the time it took to remove and replace my belt and shoes.

The Ironic

I waited longer in line for CPK than I did for security. Like, three to four times longer.

The Triumphant

After almost six months of trying to get my computer to cooperate and use my Swiss Army Phone as a modem, I finally got it working. It's slow as shit and kills the batteries on both the phone and my laptop, but if you're reading this, it works.

Also, I found a power outlet at CPK, so my bringing you this update doesn't totally kill my battery and I can still watch Pinky and the Brain on the plane if I don't immediately pass out upon taking my seat.