Remember when I posted about the free Dr Pepper the company was giving away if Guns ‘N Roses released Chinese Democracy this year? I got my coupon yesterday:
Thanks, Dr Pepper! I’ll be enjoying your deliciousness soon!
Friday Fun Random Post
It’s Friday! Woo-hoo! That means the weekend is upon us… better yet, that means only two days until football comes back! Rejoice and kick back with these random images!
First, we have Gemma Atkinson! Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard:
Hey, does anyone remember this “video game” from the late 70s or early 80s:
I saw a picture of the game online, and it brought back a flood of memories. I had that game, and I used to play it for hours. I love pointless nostalgia!
Here’s a picture of Jenna Fischer looking cute as a button on the set of The Office:
And lastly… because it never gets old, here’s one more pic from the Cowboys\Steelers game last Sunday, at the point of the Steelers’ victory:
Picture of the year
They say a picture is worth a thousand words… but this one is worth a million:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Suck it, Dawgs!
The USB lunch bag!
Asians have this “thing” for USB gadgets. Sometimes these gadgets are useless, like the USB Fragrance Oil Burner, the USB Humping Dog (no, it’s not a flash drive, it’s just a toy that looks like it’s humping your USB port when plugged in), a USB fridge that only holds one can at at time, or the USB-powered Hamster Wheel (it’s a toy hamster, by the way).
Even when a USB gadget is actually useful, Asians like dressing it up. Take the USB thumb drive that looks like sushi, for example. Even the Brits have gotten in on it with the USB mincemeat pie flash drive!
I’ve never been interested in actually owning any of these USB devices… until now! Behold the USB-powered lunch bag:
The manufacturers claim that the bag will hold the contents at 140F as long as the device is plugged in to a USB port on your computer. Engadget doesn’t know when (or even if) the bags will make it to the US.
All I know is that I want one!
It’s GWINNETT, dammit!
I spent the first 24 years of my life living in Gwinnett County, Georgia. When I was born, Gwinnett had a population of 72,349. At the time, much of the county resembled Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show. Everyone knew almost everyone else, and there was a sense of “community” there that I haven’t really felt since.
During the 1980s, however, Gwinnett experienced massive growth. The county frequently placed at or near the top of “America’s fastest growing counties” lists. The county grew so much that the 2010 census estimates its population at 808,167. More people live in Gwinnett County than within the city limits of San Francisco, Memphis, Charlotte, Baltimore, Boston or Seattle. Hell, the Gwinnett school system – the largest in Georgia – has more students (159,258) than Dayton, Ohio (155,461), Springfield, Missouri (154,777) or Salem, Oregon (151,913) have residents. The Gwinnett Arena, originally considered a boondoggle by many area residents, has hosted concerts by Bruce Springsteen, The Who, Depeche Mode, Snow Patrol, Bon Jovi and more. The county has their own East Coast Hockey League team (the Gwinnett Gladiators) and in January of this year, the Atlanta Braves announced that they were moving their AAA club from Richmond (population: 200,123) to Gwinnett.
Gwinnett is big. It’s for real. So why the hell do people still misspell it? To this day, I’ll see “Gwinet”, “Gwinnet”, “Gwinett”, “Gwinnet” or “Gwinnette” on websites and blogs. Just the other day, I was looking at a band’s page on MySpace, only to find that they were playing the “Arena at Gwinnette Center” soon. And it drove me nuts!
Time Warner Navigator: Still Sucks
Back in April, I wrote this hyperbolic review of the new Time Warner “Navigator” software that the cable giant is rolling out to all their DVRs. The upgrade had only just happened at the time, and it seemed like a giant step backwards from Passport, the previous software. But a few months have passed now. Maybe I’ve calmed down a bit. Maybe Time Warner has rolled out some updates and fixes for it… Or maybe it still sucks.
Here’s a calmer, more reasoned list of my beefs with Navigator. Time Warner needs to address these issues as quickly as possible… especially since AT&T’s U-Verse just rolled into town:
Boot time sucks: It took the old Passport software around four minutes to boot. Navigator takes just over nine minutes to fully boot. Since I have the same problem on my computer with XP vs. Vista, I can only conclude that Time Warner’s programmers are taking a cue from Microsoft on how to make your software worse, not better. Obviously, rebooting your DVR is not something you do every day… but when Navigator was new and crashed a lot, waiting almost ten minutes instead of four for the TV to come back was (and still is) infuriating.
Search still sucks: As I mentioned in the original review, Navigator took away “keyword search”, so you can no longer search for “Kate Winslet” and find movies or chat show appearances featuring the actress. As much as that sucks, I could deal with that. But something that really does suck is that Navigator, for some unknown reason, allows multiple entries for the same program. For example, if you want to see who’s going to be on David Letterman this week, you could search for “David Letterman”. You might get three hits. If you click on the first result, you’ll get a submenu that lists Monday and Tuesday’s episodes, and you’ll have to navigate to the second entry to see Wednesday’s episode, then navigate to the third entry to see Thursday and Friday’s episodes. Passport would have a single entry for The Late Show With David Letterman, and all episodes would be listed in a submenu off that single category. So Navigator, for no good reason, makes things harder, not easier. And that’s assuming it works: just the other day I searched for Whatever, Martha!. The show never appeared in the results window, even as I typed more and more of the title. By the time I had fully typed out “Whatever”, I just scrolled down to find the show.
My cat loves fruit!
So… as you might know, Lisa and I have four cats. Lisa already had Haley when I met her, and a couple of years ago, we got Mimi (Bittle) from the Humane Society. I thought two cats was plenty, but when a friend of Lisa’s family sent out an email about a bunch of kittens they were trying to find homes for… well, I knew we were gotta get at least one more. That one turned out to be two, and now we also have Simon and Chloe.
Here’s the funny thing about those two “country kitties”: they love fruit! Seriously! When Lisa comes home from the store, she has to make sure to put the plums and bananas (and especially tomatoes) somewhere where the country kitties can’t get to them. And little Chloe apparently loves honeydew melon, too:
ZoneAlarm for FREE today!
I’m not a big fan of ZoneAlarm – a firewall program for Windows – but I know that many of you *do* like it. And if you do, you might want to take advantage of an awesome deal today.
In honor of ZoneAlarm’s 15th birthday, Check Point is giving away ZoneAlarm Pro for free! The only catch? This offer is valid for today only. So fire up your browser and head over here to get some free software!
What a cake!
You’re seen Red Velvet Cake before… but what about Blue Velvet cake?
Awesome! Read more here.
Best Buy is the Devil!
If you know me at all, you know how much I hate Best Buy.
It all started with the simple stuff: their Duluth, Georgia store used to have a single cashier for all 40 people waiting in line, so it took you longer to actually check out than it did to listen to the CD you just purchased. Then they started pushing their replacement plans for almost anything (I once had a cashier try to sell me a $6 replacement plan for a $20 CD player!). Then they started with the magazine subscriptions (in several instances, cashiers felt so pressured by management to sell subscriptions that they signed up customers for them anyway, even though they declined). Then Best Buy bought Geek Squad and customers reported being charged hundreds of dollars to fix computer issues that would take me (at most) five minutes. Oh, and let’s not forget Geek Squad employees peeking on female customers in the shower, rifling through customer’s personal desks, and copying their personal data to websites and thumb drives. And then there were the amusing stories, like the guy that tried to pay for a car stereo installation (which was supposed to have been free) with 32 $2 bills and was arrested because the cashier thought they were counterfeits!
But this story… well, it just takes the damn cake. A Consumerist reader from Charlotte, NC took his father to “the newest” Best Buy in town (is that Northlake Mall? Any Charlotteans out there that can verify this?). At the store, he saw a demonstration of Best Buy’s optional (but heavily pushed) “TV calibration service”. Robert reported that one TV looked beautiful, while the other was soft and grainy. It took him a second, but he figured it out: the “calibrated” TV was showing ESPN HD while the “non calibrated” TV was showing a stretched version of ESPN SD! And the reason it took Robert some time to figure it out was because Best Buy had helpfully placed a box advertising their “Black Tie TV Protection Plan” over the lower right side of the SD TV screen, so that customers wouldn’t be able to see the “ESPN” or “ESPN HD” logos! Classy!
When Robert complained to an employee, said employee not only saw nothing amiss with the display, he helpfully added that their calibration service would “decrease power consumption on my TV by 30%”… which is, of course, a flat-out lie.
Look folks, there is such a thing as calibrating your TV. It’s not, strictly speaking, necessary, but it *will* make your TV look slightly better. But don’t pay Best Buy $299 to do it – you can do it yourself with a special “calibration DVD” (available from Amazon for only $22.65 here).
Read the whole sad story here.