Recently in Fuck You Category

I've been dealing with computer problems all morning, have been stuck in meetings, and have been dealing with general worky bullshit. So, I get a moment to make my lunch. I go into the freezer to grab my frozen meal, only to find some fucker decided it'd be a great idea if they just helped themselves to it. I hope they choked on it. I really do.

After hearing about how a bunch of J-Pop stuff was added to iTMS, including m-flo, I was all over it. I began to browse the available albums and artists. All kinds of good stuff that I'd totall buy. I click on an album to see what tracks are available from a particular artist, and I get this lovely screen:

Your request could not be completed.

The item you've requested is not currently available in the US store.

Hey, Apple. Fuck you. If I can't buy it, I don't want to see it. Don't tease me like that with something I can't buy. Leslie was running into this too. It's obvious they are smart enough to tell what market you're connecting to iTMS from, so they really need to make it smart enough to not show tracks that I can't buy. It's just common sense.

To bastardize the immortal words of Kanye West, except it's not about George Bush, and not about black people (even though there are black students of UoP), but the part about not caring certainly echoes.

It's true. University of Phoenix doesn't care about its students. If they did, they wouldn't pull the boneheaded and retarded move of taking our former three weeks of holiday breaks at the end of the year and compress it into one week.

See, here's how it used to be: 1 week off for Thanksgiving week, and 2 weeks off for Christmas and New Years. Although it could be jarring to classes to have that type of break, it would at least be a time to enjoy the holidays with family and friends, and take a breather from school work, and hell, even get caught up on some class work. Well, apparently they did some "research" and decided that students really don't want to take breaks over the holidays, and cut it down to a single week's break during Christmas. Gee, thanks.

To make matters even worse, no official e-mails went out to explain this change of policy. Two friends of mine didn't realize there would be no Thanksgiving week break. Great communication, or maybe their SPAM[sic] filter ate it.

For me, it really sucked. Over Thanksgiving week, Leslie's parents, her brother, and sister-in-law were all here for 3 days. These plans had been put into motion for a couple of months, and of course, I assumed I'd have that time off from school. Not so. And, to make matters worse, it happened to fall during week 4 of my class, which is traditionally the most assignment packed time for a course. The instructor showed little sympathy basically saying that, "since you only have to participate 4 days a week, that should give you plenty of time to do holiday things." Let's not mention there's assignments due that pretty much fan out through the entire week.

This just once again goes to prove that to UoP, its students are nothing more than dollar signs, and they don't care about providing a quality education experience. By chopping off holiday time, it means they can cram more (unqualified) students into more (crappy) classes with (unqualified) teachers.

Just how much of a cluster-fuck was this current class? Well, I'm in Week 5, and I plan to write all about it when it's over, and my grade is cemented. Here's a hint as to how much of a cluster fuck it's been: as I said before, I'm in Week 5. Guess what I got a couple of days ago? My Week 2 feedback. And, it's a research/statistics class, so each week's material builds on the previous weeks'. Timely feedback is a necessity in this type of course, but it's pretty obvious the instructor doesn't care about that. For instance, in week 1, one of the members on my learning "team" mailed the instructor with our research concept, one which I was vehemently opposed to, one which the instructor said, "looks great, I can't wait to read it," is now, "I'm very concerned about this topic," in the Week 2 feedback that I received a couple of days ago. Thanks a heap.

A few months back I blogged about how much I hated Best Buy because of the clusterfuck from the problems with my dying iPod, which included how it took forever to get it back from the repair depot. Well, after the first repair, the fix was to "reseat the cable." I was skeptical, and sure enough, a few weeks later, my iPod started exhibiting the same behavior again, that being it would lock up my computer, make crunching noises, and generally acting broken. I brought it into Best Buy, they sent it back to their service depot with a message saying, "not fixed the first time, please fix," among other things. After about 3 or so weeks, I get it back. Guess what they did? They jiggled the fucking cable again and called it fixed. It was the same tech as last time, too; we could tell by the identical handwriting and wording on the work release form.

At this point I was livid. It obviously didn't help the first time, why would the same fix help a second time? We got the Geek Squad person to get a manager. We got a cool manager who put it in writing that if the same problem happened again, we could get an instant replacement. Since normally it takes four fixes to be considered a lemon, I felt this was fair.

So, of course, after a couple of weeks, it starts acting funky again. Crashing the computer, reporting bad blocks, even a few Sad iPod screens here and there. The little guy was just not happy at all. It took a few days for Best Buy to actually get them in, which in itself was pretty ridiculous. Once they had some new 60s in, I went there to do an exchange. It wasn't one of the new video iPods which had just come out (they had the 30s, but not the 60s -- I didn't care at this point) and they honored the signed agreement from the manager and exchanged it on the spot for a brand new, still shrinkwrapped 60GB 4G color iPod.

I eBayed the iPod as quickly as I could and made a respectable $350 from the sale, especially considering it was now an "old" model. I already bought a replacement 60GB when it died the second time around, so I didn't need it. I figured the saga was closed, and Best Buy at this point had redeemed themselves enough to be considered a place I would shop at.

Yesterday, Leslie and I went to Best Buy to buy some new component video cables for today's home theater re-cabling project. As as were walking by the section with the MP3 players, I saw an iPod in a plastic shell being sold as an open box special. Upon closer examination, it was the iPod, dock, USB cable, and unopened earbuds that I had returned a few days ago! Ain't that about a bitch. I feel sorry for the poor sucker who will purchase this cursed iPod. Maybe they will have better luck than I, but I doubt it.

If you go to the Bellevue, WA Best Buy and you see a too good to be true deal on a 4G 40GB iPod, look away. Just look away.

I still don't have my iPod yet. That should say it all right there. But wait, there's more! According to the UPS tracking information, it arrived at their facility on the 14th. That's last Thursday. As of today, nobody has look at it yet! To top it off, despite it being delivered on the 14th, it wasn't even processed by them until the 18th. That's a 4 day delay from delivery to processing. That seems a bit excessive to me. "Darrin," Geek Squad rep at the Bellevue Best Buy location helpfully informed me that, "they get truckloads of iPods a day," and that after all, "[you're] not the only one having problems." Yeah, thanks a lot, asshole.

I talked to a somewhat helpful rep at their HQ who informed me that it would be looked at tomorrow by a tech (a week from it actually being delivered), repaired, tested, and shipped out no earlier than Monday. Fucking Monday. So, at best, I'll have my iPod back on next Wednesday. Over two weeks from when I brought it in. Of course, I could always get lucky and they will authorize a replacement, but somehow I'm doubting it at this point.

Makes me regret ever buying their product service plan. Again, I must stress that their employees told me that I'd get instant replacement for any problems, and something to the effect of, "if it breaks into a million pieces, bring the pieces in, and we'll replace it." Yeah, so you can send them to your service center and make me wait 50 years for you to duct tape them together and call it fixed.

I recently switched majors from the way-beneath-me major of Bachelors of Science in Information Technology to the more business oriented Bachelors of Science/Business in Information Systems. I have to take some elective classes to make up humanities credits, so I'm taking an Eastern Religions class. Fun stuff, actually. Anyway, for this week, one of my assignments was to do a matrix of Eastern Religions and compare various elements. That was quite literally all the direction we were given. Since I was going out of town a couple of days before it was due, I wanted to get it done early. I pretty much guessed how it should be done (and my guess was correct), and I posted it as an Excel with a grid comparing various aspects of the major Eastern religions.

It took me a couple of hours to do because of all the research involved. It also has cool Unicode characters (such as the swastika, yin/yang, etc). I was pretty proud of it. So, I post it and am done with it (I'm also the first person to turn in the assignment since I did it way early). Since this is an online class, and the instructor has assignments go to a class forum, anybody in the class can see anyone's assignments.

I check in a couple of days later to see how others did their assignments. I see one that is an Excel, just like mine (everybody else posted Word docs). That person's Excel has more stuff there, but it's quite obvious that about 90% of the content was from my original assignment. Bitch done ripped me off! At this point I'm seething with anger. Leslie suggests I look at the document properties to see if there's any history, and check out the File->Properties->Summary that shows:

They took my same assignment I wrote and just added a few extra lines of text to it. Didn't even bother to copy and paste it into another document, or even change the filename. What the fuck! At this point I immediately went to my teacher and academic advisor, where it's now a pending issue.

But, goddamn, talk about a blatant rip off. This person took what I spent hours to do, and essentially added a couple of extra sentences to it and called it their own. Kind of like if I took a Harry Potter book and added a few extra sentences here and there about him going to the arcade at Diagon Alley to play some DDR with Hermione and coming up with some awesome freestyle routine (with matrix walks, natch), selling it as my own book, and not thinking I'd get the shit sued out of me. C'mon.

I hope this person gets expelled for this, or at least is forced to retake the class. The whole class they've had this attitude like, "oh this is my last class, I can do whatever I want." Expulsion would really show them (on their last class too, ha!), but I'd be happy with them having to retake it.

I originally talked about this close to a year ago the last time my iPod died. When I bought my iPod from Best Buy in January of 2004, I purchased it with their Product Service Plan (PSP). Two sales persons, a manager, and the cashier all said that they would replace it on the spot if I ever had any problems with it. All four people I talked to were -very specific- when saying this. So, last October, my iPod would not hold a charge any longer. It would last about 1-2 hours and then the battery would completely drain. After raising a shit fit back then, they replaced it on the spot.

The past few days, my current iPod has been having lots of hard drive problems. It would basically freeze up multiple computers whenever I had it connected. I was able to reformat it on my Mac (which took about 45 minutes), and then reformat it on my PC last night. I then tried to sync it, and it wouldn't sync more than around 1GB before failing with any number of I/O errors. So, Leslie brings it to our local Bellevue, WA Best Buy (where we bought it from originally). The support person told her that it would take 1-2 weeks for them to repair it (yeah, like you can really repair them, not even Apple bothers to do this) or authorize a replacement. Since I kind of need it for a trip that I'm going on later this week, that doesn't really work.

Last time we went to Best Buy with an iPod issue, they said they could verify the problem and replace it within a couple hours (and they ended up replacing it on the spot anyway,) but it looks like they don't do this anymore. The manager was rude to my wife to top it off. So, she calls their customer complaint line, and they basically offer to do nothing, or nothing.

So basically, you have inconsistent policies, employees at levels from cashier to salesperson to manager all blatantly lying to us, and now support people who say it will take weeks to get it "repaired."

So, at this point, I have an iPod that's pretty much useless with a service plan that's pretty much useless. They will have my iPod for up to two weeks which is irreparable anyway, and then I'm not sure what will happen from there. All I know is I'm never purchasing another item from Best Buy ever again, and anyone who is offered a Product Service Plan needs to be very wary of the false claims and outright lies they will tell you to try to get you to buy it. You'll be better off with AppleCare (I never thought I'd say that with a straight face). Their iPod turnaround can be up to around a week, but at least they are up front about it, and they don't bullshit you like Best Buy does with their service plans.

Yes, I know it's a Product Service Plan, not a Replacement Plan. That's not my gripe. My big gripe here is being outright lied to by multiple employees and the fact that they cannot seem to maintain a consistent policy throughout even the same store with regard to how they act on the Plan.

Because of the several thousand comment spam attempts on my blog over the weekend, I've decided that MT-Blacklist just isn't working.

I now have a CAPTCHA system in place ensuring that at least if somebody wants to spam my blog, they will have to do it manually.

I think it works, but I welcome any testing.

Why couldn't you have made the awesome "Autofill" option for the new iPod Shuffle available for regular iPods? *sigh*

I went to Fry's to buy a new DVD burner. We also picked up some compressed air. They carded me for the compresed air, saying you had to be 18 to buy it. What. The. Fuck? Apparently kids these days use it to get high or something. What ever happpened to good old modeling glue?

this post enabled by airblogging.com.

Payroll claims they sent me an e-mail on Tuesday (of course I was out of the office on Tuesday and Wednesday on account of getting surgery done). I would not have been able to read it until Thursday. When I came in on Thursday, I had over 700 e-mails I had to catch up on, anyway.

But, it doesn't matter. It's too late, and they just deducted $257 from my paycheck to pay the fuckers at the Franchise Tax Board in California. Now, I'll have to see what ridiculous hoops I'll have to jump through to get my money back from them.

Sons of bitches.

Here's the bitchy e-mail that I sent to the payroll department:

I mean really, would it have been too hard to leave a voice mail? I can't imagine that there is such a high workload for the payroll department that somebody couldn't have at least done that.

It's just like California, hitting me up for money that they don't deserve and doesn't belong to them. Case in point.

On Saturday, I get the mail, and there's a hand addressed letter from Microsoft Business Solutions (in Fargo, ND, no less). In it is a letter sent to them from California's Vehicle Registration Collections office. It's an earnings withholding order.

Basically, they say that I owe them $257.00 for 2004 registration for one of my cars. The thing is, the car was up for re-registration in March of 2004. I left the state, got my Washington drivers license, and registered my cars in Washington on September of 2003! Not to mention when my taxes were filed, they were under the new address, and the box checked to noting that I moved to a different state. NOT LIKE I WAS HARD TO FIND. I never got any notice from the California DMV saying that I owed registration. In addition, my other car whose registration expired a couple of days before I moved apparently slipped past their radar because I didn't get a hate mail from them about that car.

If anything, they should owe me a credit $128.5 for the 6 months that I didn't live in the state that my registration covered for roads I didn't use. How about that? I'll be super pissed if they do manage to garnish any of my wages, because knowing California bureaucracy, it'll take 6 months to get any money back.

Anyway, I don't know what to do. I contacted my payroll rep (who is indeed in Fargo, ND) today and am waiting to hear back from her. I can't call the state because it's a bullshit federal holiday (Christopher Colombus or Indigenous Peoples day depending on how politically correct you are) today, so that will have to wait tomorrow.

What a bunch of crap.

So, I'd been hearing for weeks about T-Mobile offering an upgrade for owners of the Sidekick to the Sidekick II. I patiently waited for an e-mail with the special 800 # that you had to call. I registered on the SKII site. I checked my spam filters daily to make sure I wasn't rejecting anything from T-Mobile. Nothing.

I come to read that the SK II is NOW OUT. I'm pissed because I never received the e-mail with the upgrade offer but figure it's no big deal, I'll work it out with customer service. Leslie and I had to go to the mall anyway to pick up the Star Wars Trilogy DVD set, so we stop by the T-Mobile store. The person there said that they don't do the offer in-store and that I'd have to call customer service and they can hook me up, "threaten to cancel if you have to," is what we were told by the guy.

Leslie called them yesterday while I was at work to find the scoop. They basically said the offer was finished and they wouldn't be able to upgrade me, I'd have to pay the full retail price of $300 instead of the $200 'upgrade' price. Despite the fact that "every Sidekick customer received an e-mail," I didn't. A friend of mine who did receive the e-mail (multiple times) said that they received it directly on their phone -- which means that in my case spam filters or anything shouldn't have been an issue. But, nope, I didn't get it. Threatening to cancel was met with a non-caring response of, "ok, you have a $200 early termination fee." Gee, way to want to retain your customer base, you fuckers.

So, I'm really pissed off. I'm certainly not going to pay $300 to upgrade my phone. As much as I love my Sidekick, T-Mobile's complete assholishness and inability to even try to help has pissed me off so much I really don't want to do business with them anymore or with Danger, who makes the Sidekick. This whole lack of communication and caring really sucks a lot, and I'd almost rather pay $200 to cancel my contract with T-Mobile than pay $200 to upgrade my phone at this point.

So, yeah, fuck you, T-Mobile. Fuck you in the ass with a spiked and splintered wooden dong. I was perfectly willing to put up with your shitty service in my area, constant dropped calls and dead zones just because I love my Sidekick so much. But this really pissed me off. I don't even know what I want to do now, but the whole experience with this has been lousy. I mean, Christ, how hard is it to send an e-mail, or even a snail-mail talking about an upgrade offer. But, somehow, they completely forgot about me. I wonder how many others got screwed out of this offer.

Nasty letters to Danger and T-Mobile are forthcoming.

Why do you need... KONAMI ORIGINALS?: If you're considering buying a Linksys BEFCMU10 cable modem...

Just an update, I finally received the new V3 version of the BEFCMU10 modem, and it works brilliantly. I was able to initiate a dozen FTP transfers to my web server (a situation where a single one peaking at about 100Kb/s would cause a crash) and it's been rock solid. In fact, it hasn't had to be power-cycled once.

So, to revise my original post, stay far, far away from the BEFCMU10 V2 (it says on the side of the box what version it is), but the V3 is good. I hear the V1 is good, too, but I haven't used it.