ribbed.us …

After weeks of trying to sell an item on eBay, I have given up and I don’t think I’ll ever try to sell anything on eBay ever again. Three times my auction was won and not paid for. Three times I did not get back my seller fees which I’m supposed to receive if there are issues with my auction.

The first auction, the buyer never paid for. The second, the buyer used an apparently hijacked account. The third time, the buyer was unregistered when I came back after seven days of no payment. Isn’t eBay supposed to inform users of events like this? I paid eBay in seller fees so I could waste my time.

Yes I know there are evil people on eBay, but not being able to sell a single item is just ridiculous. Where is the security? Why can’t users choose what kind of people can bid on their item? I will never again list on eBay unless I can choose how much reputation a bidder has to bid and how recently they have used their account.

I am not a big seller. I do not have the resources or patience to deal with all this fraud without even a valid bite. eBay, you fail.

On the bright side, one can still participate and enjoy bidding on items at eBay providing they are buying from reputable sellers. That is easier to figure out than when you are actually selling items.

Deep breaths. Live long and prosper!

This post is going to be full of colorful language. Please leave the kids at home.

Every new release of Itunes seems to have become a test of my will and of my patience. I have very little of either when software that should just work shits on me every damn time.

First off, yes I have a Mac and a PC. I choose to run Itunes on my PC because I have a huge music library in excess of 500GB that takes a hell of a long time to load on a single core lowly Mac notebook. I manage my music (more accurately … I put up) with Itunes because I happen to like Apple mobile devices. That is where my love for Apple ends.

OS X does not impress me. There is nothing on OS X that I couldn’t do in Windows or Linux.

My hatred for Apple comes to a climax when they create software for Windows. If there was a decent application that could manage my library … playlists, import of ratings/playcounts, app store support … I would switch in a heartbeat. Instead, I have to put up with Itunes on Windows that makes me want to kick cute puppies every time I do it … yet do it I must for the sake of firmware upgrades.

The first Itunes I had issues with was with version 7.x. After an update to a newer version, Itunes refused to detect my Ipod Touch. My guess was it had something to do with the Apple Mobile Device software. I merrily hop my way to Itunes support and it suggests that I completely uninstall Itunes. The problem was the damn fucking installer didn’t want to uninstall Itunes. It kept rolling back before it finished uninstalling it. How fucking hard is it to delete the shit you put into a computer? I’m sure an army of Apple engineers could have figured that out … but yet didn’t because none of them probably use Windows, never mind test on it. That venture ended up in me reformatting my whole damn setup because I was so fed up with the installer.

That iPod touch by the way is sitting on my desk … a brick. Sending it to Apple for warranty repair got me a “Fuck you, there was physical damage”. Yes … a lot of physical damage just sitting on my desk after Apple yet again fucks me up the ass after a firmware update. No power, no nothing after a firmware update, yet they conveniently tell me I did physical damage to it. However, I come back to Apple for yet more pain and punishment and buy another 32GB iPod touch. I should have learned.

Fast forward a few months and Itunes 8 and the 2.1 firmware comes out. What a surprise, I get installation problems while installing iTunes. The install finishes with an error, so while the application was probably installed right (mostly), it wasn’t quite finished. Itunes still thought it wasn’t version 8 even though Help -> About Itunes clearly said I was running Itunes 8. Fucking Itunes and it’s bipolar disorder. Because of that, I couldn’t install the new firmware which was the very reasons I installed Itunes 8 in the first place.

I proceeded to uninstall Itunes and honest to God, it actually learned how to uninstall itself. Progress! I begin installation of Itunes again and it doesn’t install! It doesn’t even give you any damn hints on what might be wrong. Going to Apple’s support site pretty much told me what I already knew … that I did not like putting fingers up my ass. Very helpful.

If you have this problem, you can probably run msconfig and do a Selective Startup and unchecking Load startup items. Restart your computer and Apple should have a clean slate to do it’s install. I’m sorry Apple, you don’t own Windows, you are going to have to play nice with other software. You might be the head honcho over there with OS X, but I shouldn’t have to fucking do anything but install software to use a device I paid five hundred dollars for … TWICE. Get off your fucking high horse and get with the program or get the fuck out of my Windows. While I am on that subject, why the hell don’t you use Windows themes? I have Aero on because I happen to like Aero … so WTF!?

So yes, Apple Itunes installed successful after much bitching at the wall which I lovingly called Apple.

I proceed to plug my iPod in and Blue Screen of Fucking Death. I have not once encountered a BSOD in Vista since I began using it on launch date … yet Apple seems to bring the best out of Windows. A search around the internet seems to tell me the same thing … Apple is a douchebag. It’s so frustrating that it’s funny that every release of a new Itunes version is always like this. They never fucking ever do anything right … at least not on Windows … where oh yeah … more Apple device users use Windows than Macs. After reading through a forum thread where other people have been getting the same error, I start turning off other USB devices. It turns out, my HP printer is have emotional conflicts with Apple devices. The question is then, how did they work together before? The official Apple stance seems to always be … “it’s not me baby, it’s your other woman”. Seriously, own up to your damn mistakes. No one should have to start turning devices off because you fucked up when it was unfucked before.

Time wasted this go-around with Itunes … four hours.

Thank you very much … and oh yeah … can’t wait for a new version of the Zune. Please get the import of Apple libraries right.

Over 100k tracks, all tagged correctly, many rated, I tunes fucked up. The recently released Itunes 7.7 which was supposed to bring among other things … a new firmware and apps to the Touch and Iphone have made me unable to update my Touch because an updated Apple Mobile Device Support won’t install. Every damn document and discussion in Apple forums tells me to “uninstall Itunes and related software” … the problem is, Itunes doesn’t want to uninstall! It keeps rolling back. So how the hell do I uninstall Itunes? Way to go Apple. My apologies I’m not an asstard Apple fanboy. I only love you until you fuck my tunes over.

First off, I love gamerscores(GS) because it makes me feel good all over about my e-peen. It is however a distraction to my gaming because …

It makes me play games that just aren’t fun solely because there is gamerscore to be had. I hate every minute of it … but … must … get gamerscore.

They aren’t done very well or very fairly. Games like Devil May Cry 4 give you less than 200 GS for beating the game even on the hardest levels … I mean what the fuck? On the other hand, NBA 2k6 gives you a full 1000/1000 GS in one game … I mean what the fuck? There really has to be a benchmark on how hard it is to obtain GS. You shouldn’t have to play a game until you want to gouge your eyes out to get a decent amount of GS in it. There really should be no online only achievements unless the game is specifically targetted as an online game. If you are going to have single player at all, you should never have online achievements. Call of Duty 4 for example has no online only achievements, but yet online play is such a big part of the game. Kudos COD4! Achievements should also be possible by mere mortals not the geek with bionic fingers. Congratulations to those bionic geeks, but hey lets throw the rest of us a bone.

It makes people cheat. For their love of gamerscore and big e-peens, people cheat their way to it. People love online e-peens, but the whole system of detecting achievements is fubar.

Gamesaves! Gamesaves! Gamesaves! Sometimes I just want to use a friend’s save or a downloaded save and dick around already completed levels, but for some reason Microsoft makes everyone feel bad about it. Sure there people who cheat, but what about the ones who just want to play around? It’s my game. I paid money for it, I should be able to do whatever I goddamn feel like. You can find PS3 saves in big gaming sites like GameFAQs, but if you want 360 saves, you have to go underground in some seedy forum shunned by the outside world. Because of Microsoft’s paranoia and it’s implementation of DRM, you can’t simply upload saves to the Xbox. You need a “resigner” to sign the games to your profile which you either have to go to said seedy forum or buy from Xploder. Hey Microsoft! … let us legitimately use someone else’s saves! Fix your gamerscore system so that you CAN’T get gamerscore from simply loading someone else’s save up.

To conclude …

I have a PS3 and a 360. GTA IV is coming out in a few weeks … I’m getting the 360 version because of achievements and gamerscore.

Dear Game Developer,

Where the camera controls at? In this day and age, there is no reason why we should have games like Devil May Cry 4 where camera control is limited to a small number of areas. In the case of Overlord, there are no camera controls at all. The right stick is use to control minions but ends up just fucking things up because you can’t monitor your minions and you inadvertently send half of them to certain doom. I want to play the game, not play camera viewpoint mini-games. I usually put up with games through the end, even bad ones, but bad controls and bad camera just made me give up on Overlord even though I enjoyed being an evil bad-ass.

So yes, if stuck camera angles are even on your drawing board, be innovative and find something else instead of settling for lock on cameras.

Love,

Vernon the Great

PS: People seriously overlooked The Darkness in 2007. Yes, I know it shouldn’t have put in multiplayer since it blows.

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? ‘No!’ says the man in Washington, ‘It belongs to the poor.’ ‘No!’ says the man in the Vatican, ‘It belongs to God.’ ‘No!’ says the man in Moscow, ‘It belongs to everyone.’ ‘No!’ says the man at Netflix, ‘It belongs to us.’ I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose … Rapture … or at least some kind of fair warning when a service charges my credit card.

After putting my Netflix account on hold because honestly, I didn’t get my money’s worth when I couldn’t even watch the movies I rented, Netflix decides to take my account off hold and charge me. I was aware that my account would eventually be taken off hold after a certain period of time, it still seems pretty sleazy for anyone to just charge you without telling you and give you any warning aside from two e-mails one after the other. Neflix has of course thought of this and one cannot get any sort of refund since cancelled accounts forfeit the remainder of their paid time.

Note to Netflix, it is first of all bad customer service when you take the control of one’s account from the account holder to re-activate their account even if you say so. Netflix, would you kindly change your sleazy company policy. I guess not.

eh, it’s four in the morning and my level of caring about losing fifteen bucks has sunk to ‘who cares’.

For some time now I’ve been looking for a media player for Linux that really fit what I wanted. Granted, even with Windows, there wasn’t a media player that didn’t have things I hated about it. Itunes for example wanted pushed me to hitting newborns after I fixed some of my albums by correctly specifying certain albums were part of compilations with multiple artists. I had to re-tag and move around almost one hundred albums because Itunes decided it wanted a different directory structure in my music folder. Instead of uniformly doing it to all tracks in one album, it picked and chose which it wanted. Enough of that, this isn’t about Itunes. But it does show you how frustrating trying to manage a lot of music is.

Some time ago Songbird was released for developers to play around with and it has matured steadily. At the time my main desktop was Vista Ultimate, so I didn’t think nothing of it. Since transferring to Ubuntu 7.10, I have been looking for a decent replacement and it was the perfect time to try out Songbird. Songbird is a multi-platform (runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac) media player that looks like a marriage between Firefox and Itunes. The built-in web browser is powered by the same engine that powers Firefox and the interface eerily looks like Itunes, even amongst different themes which Songbird calls “feathers”.

… not that acting like Itunes is a bad thing, the results are not as gratifying as Itunes however. Search doesn’t work as desired or as expected. Little things like the difference between “Cafe del Mar” and “Café del Mar” made searches give vastly different results. They shouldn’t, the program should either give you the results of both or be smart enough that when you input one thing, you also mean another. Resizing is fubar, at least in Ubuntu … it simply doesn’t maximize. Tagging could also do with a lot of work. Anyone who is going to use a complicated music manager such as Songbird or Itunes is going to want to tag their music … yes please I’ll have tagging on top … preferably something more intuitive than that included with Itunes or Windows Media Player.

Lots of features (ie. Album Art) that should be built into the software aren’t and people are relied upon to build extensions. While extensions in Firefox are great, core functions such as Bookmarks aren’t extensions. On the same note, feathers and extensions on the addons page should really be separated into different sections as well as in the extensions section. Feathers and extensions are NOT the same thing, or shouldn’t be if you are used to the way Firefox does it.

Last, but not least, what is up with Skreemr? While we’re at it, let’s add a link the The Pirate Bay. Nothing against it, but in an app like this?

In the end, there is a lot of things that can be improved in Songbird … but that is a given in Developer Release. Duh! No wonder why there is so many things wrong with it! It’s a developer release! I started using Firefox in it’s pre 1.0 form, I can only hope that Songbird is as great by then as Firefox was. In any case, I look forward to further Songbird releases, but for now, back to Rhythmbox.