Geek Chic

I try to make it a point not to blog mad, but I am so incredibly pissed right now.

I just got a charge on my credit card for $12 for some crappy-ass service called ‘ReservationRewards’ in Conneticut (specifically: RESERVATION REWARDS 8007327031 CT).

First off, just to be clear these guys are a total scam.  Just ask:

• Rip Off Report
• Substantially Similar
• Pissed Customer
• or just search Google

Apparently I ‘elected’ to ‘sign up for a 30 day free trial’ when I bought some movie tickets though Fandango (who is also about to get an earful from me) by accidentally clicking or not clicking on some checkbox somewhere when I was in a hurry.  And Fandango gave them my credit card #!  Jesus!

These people, in my book, parasites.  They provide zero useful service and only continue to exist because the rest of us are too lazy or inattentive to notice when we become ‘infected’ by them (I would’ve been charged $12/month for who knows how long if I hadn’t picked over my statement more closely than I usually do).

It makes me so mad that businesses like this exist.

MAN NAMES BABY SARAH MCCAIN PALIN — AGAINST WIFE’S WISHES

The Post should really just be recycled as soon as it’s printed.

Dear Apple,

Regarding your recent behavior towards your iPhone Developer Network: please stop being such fascists.

It’s one thing to hold your developers to high standards and reject apps that do not meet those standards (I’m looking at you, AIM).  It’s quite another to reject applications because they are like yours and (heaven forbid) possibly even perform better than your own.

Be nice.

Sit back, relax, and remember just how much you rely on the developers of the open source community — how much of their code you’ve rolled into your own.

What’s wrong with a little competition?  What do you have to be scared of?  People should be challenging you to improve your own applications.  Let us, the users, make the choice.  If we want to have 3 mail applications, 12 versions of Sudoku and 85 different ways to upload our photos to Flickr, we can agree that’s stupid, but that should be our choice to make.  And really, we both know your apps are going to be better in the end anyway.  But let us figure that out for ourselves.

We’re smart.  We bought your iPhone in the first place, didn’t we?  Trust us to put what we want on it.

I don’t want to hear any more crap like this from you.  Really?  A statement of confidentiality to gag your developers, preventing them from venting that they just blew months of dev time on an application you rejected for no reason? Come on.  You’re better than this.  Or at least you used to be.

Shape up!

Until you do, I will scream from the hilltops that Jailbreak is the only way to iPhone.

Sincerely,

Jeff
Lord Geek Supreme
Geek Chic

Round 2 of Microsoft’s “We’re not as lame as you think we are” campaign aired last night during The Office.  Check it:

Ok.  It’s better than the Seinfeld ads.  I’ll give it that.  But that’s not that much.

(more…)

1. McCain has been saying for weeks that the ‘fundamentals of the economy are strong.’
2. Yesterday, Wall Street plunged 500 points in response to the disintegration of Lehman brothers (a 150 year old company) and the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America.
3. Also yesterday, Matt Lauer asked McCain if he still thought the economy was strong.
4. He responded that Wall Street is ‘in crisis’ because of its own ‘greed and corruption,’ but, to clarify, in his mind the ‘fundamentals of the economy’ are the American workers. Just to be clear.

What?  What on earth does that mean?  The fundamentals of the economy are the workers.  In a sense that’s both incredibly obvious and seriously thickheaded… unless I’m missing something.  I’m sure he’s just trying to rescind his statement by simply rephrasing it (oh politics…).  But logically I’m not even sure what he’s trying to say.

A Fundamental of the Economy

1. The workers aren’t the problem!  It’s the system that’s screwed up! (to which we say… nobody thought the workers themselves were the problem)

2. America’s workers are in great shape and they will power the recovery of the economy! (which seems more than a little delusional.  How low is minimum wage?  How high is unemployment? How many jobs get sent overseas each year?  How many workers is Lehman about to lay off?)

3. Capitalist society is awesome! (seems like what that statement means in isolation, right?  The fundamentals of the economy are the workers.  … Except you can apply that statement to communism too, can’t you?  Maybe not that, then.  Republicans have never liked those galdern Reds.)

Any guesses anyone?

And I have to say… can someone please call him on the fact that he’s part of the ‘greed and corruption of Wall Street’ that is, in his view, the actual problem?

First off, he’s part of the same greedmongering system that got us into this in the first place.  Yes?  Maybe a little oversight isn’t such a bad idea after all.  (although, being a republican, McCain cannot call for more oversight.  he instead can only appeal to ‘Wall Street’ to try to be less greedy. good luck with that.)

Second, how is he not greedy himself?  He doesn’t even remember how many freaking houses he owns!  How many of those houses could he possibly need?

Steve Jobs announced a whole mess of new iPods at the Apple Annual Autumn iPod Hoedown.

The iPod Touch. Why?

The new Nanos look pretty sweet.  No argument here.

But can we talk for a second about the iPod Touch?  Seriously.  Why?

Is the Touch’s existence for the sole purpose of making one look stupid for not getting an iPhone?  Why on earth would one pay $400 to get a limited 32GB of disk space and the occasional opportunity to access one of 2 open WiFi points in your general vicinity? (if you’re lucky — thank you “Liberal Media” for scaring everyone into locking their networks… You are all pawns in the ISPs game to make more money.)

So what is the iPhone good for, exactly?  The App store?  Just how many copies of Sudoku do you need?  The Nanos now come with an accelerometer, so that cool feature is no longer exclusive.  It doesn’t come with a camera, so that’s out.  And only the flaky pseudo-GPS.  The touch screen?  Seems cool, but if you can’t do anything on the device it doesn’t really matter what the mode of interaction is.  Silly putty responds to your touch and you don’t have to pay $400 for it.

So I ask again, what good is this expensive little hunk of plastic and metal?  Why does Apple keep it around?

Anyone?

Have you seen the new Microsoft ads?  The first one of the nearly $300 million campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld aired last night (I caught it somewhere in one of the Daily Show’s commercial breaks).

One word: LAME.

Jerry helps Bill Gates buy a pair of shoes.  They mention Microsoft one time.  That’s all that happens.  The whole thing seems like they’re trying to be funny, but it was decidedly not.  No matter how hard Jerry tries, he can’t make the ultimate nerd, Bill Gates, seem anything other than embarrassingly quirky and introverted.

According to an internal memo from Microsoft VP Bill Veghte:

The first phase of this campaign is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity.

So far the conversation my girlfriend and I have had on the subject was, ‘My god that sucked.’  But we talked about it right?  I guess their plan is working.

This whole thing is part of Microsoft’s new strategy (backed by their pseudo-science ‘experiment’ The Mojave Project) to fix Vista not with innovations and patches, but with an ad campaign:

‘Vista: It’s really not as bad it you think it is.’

I don’t think that’s their actual copy, but that’s the idea.  Win the hearts and minds of millions by convincing them that the best you have to offer is not nearly as bad as they thought it was.

It’s kind of like the platform the Republicans are running on.

My response to all of this?  Get a Mac.