STAY CLASSY, COMFORT WIPE + MUSIC!

Ok, a bit of a chimera of a post here, but I've got three things I want to say and it's a hell of a lot easier to do one post:

1. Down Goes Brown has a great post on the "Stay Classy [fill in city]" Trend in hockey.

For that sin [cheering Crosby's injury], Wings fans are taking heat today from the media, blogs, and just about everywhere else.

They stand accused of the one apparently unforgivable sin among hockey fans these days: not being "classy".

Yes, it's time to break out the top hats and monocles. Because while the NHL can forgive fans for being fickle, apathetic, and even just plain non-existent, the one thing we simply can not tolerate is a lack of class.
[...]
This should be the rule when it comes to injuries: Unless the player is laying motionless or squirting blood into the stands or otherwise showing sign of a career-threatening injury (i.e. the Michael Irvin Exception), there's nothing wrong with cheering a big hit. Nobody likes to see an injury, but hockey is a contact sport and a few bumps and bruises are part of the deal.

Amen!

2. If you've never heard of Madrugada you probably don't listen to Radio Paradise. In any case, this is a great song, IMHO.



'Course the guitarist has to go and OD in 2007, so you won't be hearing any more from them.

3. The "Comfort Wipe" has been getting lots of press lately (which is probably making the inventor rich). If you haven't heard of the Comfort Wipe you probably don't have the interwebs (and hence aren't reading this) or you don't watch late night TV. You can watch the unadulterated ad in all it's glory on the Youtubes. For the record I use a backscratcher to get that itch, so why not consider...ok, that's not possible.

Anyhoo, Chris Bucholz from Cracked.com tried to return his for a refund. LLOL hilarity ensures:

CALL CENTER LOG: 06/14/09 11:34 CST
TELEBRANDS CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE
TeleBrands, this is Marci speaking, how may I help you?
[...]
CSR
Well, so long as the product is unused, I think we can work something out.
CALLER
Oh I used it. I thought I’d show her how to use it before she gave up on the whole idea, and well, that just made things worse.
CSR
I’m sorry sir? You said you used it? I thought it was in its original packaging.
CALLER
It is. I put it back in the original packaging afterward.
[...]
CALL CENTER LOG: 06/15/09 11:46 CST
TELEBRANDS CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE
TeleBrands, this is Steven speaking, how can I help you?
[...]
CSR
OK. Let me pull up the Returns screen. I’ll need to ask some questions first…. Oh lord. OK, how did the product fail?
CALLER
Don’t worry, it wasn’t on my ass.
CSR
Please do not tell me how you were using it sir. I just want to know how it broke.
CALLER
I was using it on the bus.
CSR
Damnit, what did I just tell you?

[BTW, I realize this may be made up or at least exaggerated...It's comedy not Climate Science...oh wait...]

THE BEST WAY TO CONVINCE ME TO NOT USE YOUR SERVICE

So I'm looking for a non-DRM online music store. I have iTunes, and it's easy to use and all, but it bugs me that I pay 0.99€ (which is like $1.46) for songs that are stuck in iTunes and on my iPod...I just hate Apple on principle. I don't know, I need to do research about DRM music and what I can do to make this music available elsewhere.

I guess the bigger news here is that I'm looking to go legit. Don't get me wrong, I don't really feel bad about using BT or whatnot, it's just that at a certain point it becomes such a pain in the ass to find one obscure song through p2p, when iTunes (or somewhere else) has the ability to provide this for a small fee right away...Plus I'm an avid capitalist and this type of system helps to prove my ideology that the way forward isn't suing and being a general bitch but innovating and creating demand for new and unique services. As much as I dislike Apple and Steve "Hand" Jobs, it's hard to be a hater on what they've managed to do.

Anyway, the whole point of the post was that I'm looking for an alternative to Apple. I found Sony Connect Europe and click on the Google link and got the following message:

For those of you that can't read the text it says: "We have performed a basic system check and detected that your system is not compatible with the CONNECT service. We recommend to download and install the item below and try again."
The download is MS IE...The last way to get me to use your service is to tell me that I have to use the insecure and for-shit Internet Explorer because Firefox is "not compatible." Fuck off Sony. No really, just fuck off.

F*CK OPEN OFFICE

Goddamn it...dammit, dammit damn motherfucking fuckers.

They've been bugging me for a the last week to update to the "NEW" Version 2.3.1. I thought that maybe some of my instability issues experienced earlier this week would be resolved with an update. That remains to be seen, but for an update that "is a minor bug fix release with no new features for users" it was a 80mb download.

And the icing on the cake (which I ran into the last update, but subsequently forgot about), they delete all your dictionaries when you update. And installing dictionaries is somewhere between nuclear physics and time travel on the standardized scale of difficulty.

FUCK OPEN OFFICE. It's almost (only almost) enough to make one think of how good Microsoft can be.