Bad bad bad

How can I say it with such certainty?

We're being induced. I'll be taking a week and a half off. I'll be catching up on house chores, sleep when possible, some xbox, and lots of bottles and dirty diapers.

I'll post pictures soon.

Stay tuned.

WHEN YOU PURCHASE APPLE PRODUCTS.

Yeah, that's right. What am I talking about? Well my iPod Nano died, a few months short of the 'one year' warranty. The screen went bad, like tons of other Nano owners. I was relieved to find that I had all the original packaging, and the receipt.

So a trip to the mall was in order. We arrived at the Apple store, to be greeted by a friendly salesperson that informed me I needed an appointment to meet with a 'Genius'. I had called earlier and explained my plight, why didn't they tell me to go online and schedule an appointment!!!!????

Anyways, I was able to get an 'appointment' about 1/2 an hour later, so I sat at the 'Genius" bar, and watched a few sessions of people trying to understand the complexities of their apple hardware (read sarcasm).

There were quite a few people with broken iPods, and not just Nanos either. One guy had his iPod go bad, and they informed him it was under warranty, but he had to pay $29.95 for shipping and handling to replace it. I was confident that I would not have to pay this, after all I had a receipt, and all, this guy had nothing but a broken iPod.

So it was finally my turn, after close to 45 minutes, they took my iPod, and tried all the fruitless steps to revive it as I had done. They finally agreed that it was a hardware problem, and would replace it, for $29.95.

I was furious. But I kept my anger inside, and tried to rationally explain to the guy, that this seemed like extoriton. If you ask me, $30 seems like the amount most people would pay to get a new iPod, any more, and you're risking some really mad people.

Several other people were there, and they all thought this seemed like a shady business practice.

Come on, face it. Apple knows I have no choice in the matter. Am I going to throw my busted Nano away over $30? Hell no. And that's where they know I'll pay the blood money.

I think it's a SHADY business practice, and I'll be looking forward to Microsoft's iPod Killer, whenever it comes out some day. I'll certainly think twice before making another Apple purchase in the future.

Rant over.

So a week ago, my xbox died. After 1/2 hour on the phone w/ xbox support, they determined I had a bad power supply. I argued, even insisted that was not the case, but they held strong.

The new power brick arrived today. I figured I'd plug it in, and nothing would change, I'd have to call xbox support again, and wait.

I was totally wrong.

I'm happy to report it's working again.

So Friday afternoon (evening) I was playing Oblivion, after about 1/2 hour, the screen went blank, the xbox turned off, and my daughter said "There's red blinking lights on the Xbox!"

Oh crap. With over 1500 different internal parts, I was pretty sure my xbox had just died.

So I called Xbox support and went through the usual non-helpful, troubleshooting tips. I had quickly read some stuff while on hold that stated the three blinky lights meant hardware failure.

So the tech support rep, who was very nice, had me do a ton of things and she finally said, "I think it's your power supply, we'll ship you out a new one ASAP." I kind of argued and said, I don't see how it would be that... blah blah blah....

So I guess I'll have to wait to get the 'new' power brick, plug it in, and see that it's still broken.

When I called the rep also told me, "Wow, you're lucky, a week later and you'd be out of warranty...do you want to purchase an extended warranty?" I usually hate doing this, but now that I know how much we (all of my family) use this thing, I opted to purchase a 1 year extended warranty for $29.95.

The good news, is that when I ship this in, I can remove the hard drive, preserving (in theory) my games, demos, and everything I've done thus far on my console.

Let me tell you this, if my oblivion game is lost, (I had just gotten to level 10) it's going to be pretty hard to start over.

Here's what you DON'T want to see:

So last night, seemed like any other, we watched Alias, and Lost. Played some XBox, etc. Standard same old same old. At about 11:45, my wife got up and said she was not feeling right. I was still up because I'm a night owl, and I can't seem to go to bed before midnight for some reason.

I went upstairs, and we tried to figure out what was up. She had serious abdominal and back pain. Since she is only 30 weeks into the pregnancy, we knew what was going to happen. We'd call the nurse line, and they'd send us to the hospital.

After the on-call Doctor called us back, we were getting dressed and headed to the hospital, I was pretty sure that it was overkill, every time I've called the nurse line they are convinced you're going to die. "Ummmm hi... yeah, I've had this headache for a day now, it's not bad, but should I just take some aspirin?" Nurse: "Ummmm no, you need to get to a hospital right away, this could be brain cancer!"

You get my sarcasm, I hope. So after calling a dear friend to be at our house from midnight (she had to get up at 5:30 AM to get to her job) to be there for Katherine, we were off to the hospital.

We went into the ER, and they sent us up to the Birthing Suites. They put Dawn on a monitor, did some tests, and after about an hour and forty-five minutes, they determined she was having small contractions! So I guess it was good we went in after all.

Well, it was too soon for Jake to join us, so they gave her a shot in the arm of (Phynetnyl?) to basically stop the contractions.

By the time we got home, it was almost 4 AM. I'm a tired one today. But, I'm very glad that we went in and that everyone is doing ok now.

It's not enough. Go out TODAY, and buy a CROSSCUT shredder. Shred everything. Any mail you get, that's not filed, or retained, shred it. With the rate of identity theft on the rise, and the amount of people out to get you, it's just too easy for people to get info out of the trash.

We even keep our trash can inside our garage, and it goes out just before the garbage man comes. We don't even let it sit out all night.

Credit card companies even tell you just rip up the application, and you'll be safe. Check out this link from "cockeyed.com", Rob Cockerham, a guy that loves to pull pranks, build crazy things, and perform 'social engineering' projects via his website, decided to see how far a credit card company would go to issue a new card. He completely RIPPED up his application, re-assmebled it, changed the address, and phone even, and was issued a new card. It's down right scary.

http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/creditcard/application.shtml

Seriously shred it all.

Ok, I'm just not suprised any more, I'm excited, just not suprised. Google has release a new 3D modeling program callled Google Sketch Up, for a novice like me, I'll check it out, I can think of some good uses for it. The program claims to let you model anything (simple) even your house, and add it to google earth. Crazy, amazing.

http://sketchup.google.com/product_suf.html

I usually don't post stuff like this, but a friend sent this link, and all I can say is man this gal gets clocked. I'm not sure what led up to this, but it looks like news footage from a court building. If you listen, the clockee mentions something about "THC in her system".

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6640225987281635407&pl=true

So Friday night, I played poker with one of my best friends, in his monthly neighborhood game.

The chips were FLYING! I played pretty conservative (imagine that), and I made a couple of really good lay downs. (They showed me their cards, I love it when they do that - validate my play!) But the best hand of the night, didn't win me a ton, but it was so fun to play.

I started off w , I think I was the big blind, everyone folded but one player. So in a spot like this you're really hoping you flop a flush, or at least 4 to the flush. The guy I was playing against was a decent player, but he plays really wild, he loses sometimes, but other times that wild image gets him a lot of chips. So I was cautious to say the least.

The flop came  Cool, I had a pair, but what if he had an ace, he had to have a better kicker (higher card to break a tie). So I casually bet 2x the big blind. He called (initially he had checked). At least I wasn't check raised!

Fourth street produced  Wow, now I had a set. It's pretty unlikely he had an ace now. It's possible, but highley unlikely. I made a really weak bet of just under 2x the big blind, to make it look like I was just trying to steal the pot, he raised me 2x the big blind. I just call, trying to act really weak.

The river put the best card in the deck out there for me  Now I know for a fact he does not have another ace, unless these guys are using some sort of weird korean deck of cards or something (pause for laughter). So now he bets 2x the big blind, and I move in raising it 4x his raise. He had put so much money in at that point, and I could not figure out what he had, he called me with  I was a tad puzzled, I figured he had to have a 3 or a six, but oh well. It was a nice pot to win, and I feel like I played it perfectly.

Had I bet any more, I'm sure he would have folded. I was able to get second place, I made a really bad 'all in' bluff at the end against Big Slick, and lost Big Time!