My co-worker turned me onto the TTC/police Ebay pages where you can find a bevvy of unclaimed lost and found items, like sunglasses, jewelery and Hindu god icons (?).
I love how the person challenged with setting up these auctions uses a disembodied mannequin hand to show relative sizes:
Waxy Hand from the depths
It’s also nice to see people refusing crap merchandise when they see it:
Uh, thanks. I'll pass
Now, Dead Robot, don’t step out into the street or you’ll be hit by a bla bla bla mer mer mer.
Don’t stick that in the toaster, you’ll fry your blee blee blee!
Catch this sharp free frew fraw!
It’s apparent that some days I don’t listen. When faced with a big shiny thing in my face, the world drops away and my eyes become saucers. Cherubs anoint my forehead with myrrh and lyrical lutes can be heard over the choir of (hunky) angels.
Just like the day we decided to purchase a plasma TV.
You’ve heard the #1 downfall of plasma TV: Image Burn In! The current level of technology for plasma is that it’s a “manageable” risk, meaning if you read the instruction book, you should have no worries at all. Of course, as a guy, I ripped open the box and started licking the remote in anticipation.
In the days we were researching which TV to buy, I didn’t hear (or chose not to hear) was that for the first 100 hours you must do all you can to avoid stationary images on your screen: No CNN, no Logo branded channels more than 30 min, no 4:3 aspect tv viewing (all the sites recommend viewing a squished image for this period!).
I am sure the sales agent said that nugget of information while we were in the store but all I heard was “Bler bleg bloo!” while I was saying to myself “HolymotherofbabyjesusLOOKATTHATSCREEN!” Of course, we took care when we started to watch but we weren’t diligent, apparently.
Last night while watching You Only Live Twice, during the helicopter duel, we noticed dark lines in the sky, next to James Bond’s head. Uh oh. Closer inspection of the screen on an all white channel we found this bizarre hieroglyph:
Oh. My. God. It’s the “Position #1” icon from Mario Kart! Has SharkBoy been playing it THAT much?
Number 1 from Mario Kart Wii (image enhanced)
Quick! To the internet!
After a ton of reading on various web forums, including the Samsung sponsored CNet Gadget forums, I’ve en massed a few tips:
This whole ordeal hasn’t turned me off my TV choice (ha! make funny me!). I did the research and knew the options, I just didn’t heed them, so I have no one to blame but myself really. The way I see it is that it’s new technology and sometimes you make concessions as an early adopter. With that said, this TV is still my most favorite gadget in the house.
iPhones don’t count. They’re mobile.
Pay close attention to the details.
Soon I hope!
After 4 weeks I finally sold SharkBoy’s 9mo. old, 8G iPod Touch. At a greatly reduced price, I might add.
It was in perfect working condition and was jailbroken to 1.1.4 so there was a ton of free apps available for it. Very appealing. But it seemed for every channel I tried to sell it through, for every possible nibble of interest, great excitement to purchase it was immediately replaced with ambivolence and apathy.
Before you hit “comment” and suggest I need a Tony Robbins seminar, I don’t think it was my selling technique. I was honest and straight forward with the facts, I didn’t embellish any info nor did I pump up any “excitement” about the device like Jobs does at his Apple conventions. I kept it neutral.
After the 5th time of a definite sale transmorgifying into a polite “no”, I became familiar with the exact point were the sale would go south: making arragements for payment. It was exactly like cruising for sex online in a Toronto chat room. All talk, no follow through.
I reduced the price several times, same results. This went on until SharkBoy demanded the next offer along, no matter how low, I take it. $100, cash. Bang. Gone within 12 hrs.
No matter, it’s been sold to an aquaintence who we mutually share a certain degree of trust. I hope he enjoys it!
Holy eye maisma!
… Is the hardest part.
Looked at my stats since Sunday and wondered what I did to piss off my readers. Then I remembered that was when Rogers started their search page redirects. Before, a lot of people were viewing and/or hitting my site through searches.
Now, as you can see, I’ve dropped by nearly 50%
Rogers Hijacks my views
I wonder if I can get a slice of that lost revenue pie…?
As a reminder for my faithful: my RSS feed link is here. Clicking on “Subscribe Now” for Firefox users get all my post sent to them with a lovely scent of pine.
This morning, Rogers never showed for an appointment to fix our cable. Full details over on SharkBoy.ca.
While we were waiting, SharkBoy calls me over to see that his website wasn’t coming up. After a few manual tries, it worked. But not after seeing a couple Rogers/Yahoo search page result (none of which had his site listed…)
Today, Torontoist reports that this is a new feature! So Helpful! You don’t need to be told you’ve typed a URL in wrong from the server you were trying to reach, no. You need to see shitty ads and crap search results!
Thankfully Rogers subscribers can turn it off after jumping through a hoop or two:
One: type in this.sux.extremely into your browser. Just like that. Ta da! Rogers search page:
Two: Scroll down. You’ll see a little “What. The. Fuck. Is this?!” text link at the bottom. Click it:
Three: The next page, you’ll find another text link to turn it off:
The next error you get will be directed to a Rogers page, but weirdly (ironcially?) it displays an IE style error page with broken images. Funny to see on a Firefox browser. Ha. ha. ha.
Thanks Rogers! Eat diseased razor blades and gimme back my web, YOU STUPID DICKS
Last night while we were watching The Invaders on DVD, SharkBoy mumbles “The cable just went out.”
Lo and behold, two red Rogers trucks were blocking the back alley. One guy was up a ladder onto the pole outside our back door, the other was at the base, looking up, talking on a cell. As I approach, I can hear the cellboy say, “I guess order 100 metres of cable.”
“Hi,” I say with a smile to the Ladderboy, as he comes down, “I know you guys are busy, just wondering how long we’ll be in blackout.”
Ladderboy sighs. Looks at a laptop on the hood of the truck. Sighs again. Pause. I’m about to apologize for interrupting when he says “A couple hours at least. There’s a severed cable and Bell needs to remove some of their cable too and we can’t do anything until they’re here.”
“We have it all – Cable, phone, internet. You’ve killed my Friday night,” I say with a light manner. In all seriousness, I can find something to do, but the phone being knocked out always gets me concerned. After months of sporadic service, we just went through 8 months of no problems at all. I don’t want to spend another minute playing “reset the modem”.
“Call in for a credit,” he says without humour. And he’s back to his laptop before I can say “how?”.
I turn back to the house and wonder why we sacrificed competitive pricing for the ease of one bill, one company.