Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

My Domain

Random Thoughts

The truth is, I chose Probablynot.com after a couple of hours of randomly picking cool sounding words and phrases and finding them all to be taken already.  In the end, it came down to Probablynot.com and Definitelymaybe.com.  I went with this one, obviously.

When I picked it, I never considered the side effects of having this domain name.  The first is that I constantly have to assure people that it is a real domain when I give out my email address.  The second is that tons of other people in the world use this domain as a fake domain name for email addresses.

The second effect is really the more interesting one.  I’m sure it is partly the reason why my domain gets some of the spam that it does, and why I’ve found my domain blocked on more than one corporate network.  But a weird facet of this is that occasionally, randomly, I get people’s passwords.  For example, a few of my more recent ones were logins and passwords for photobucket accounts.  Unfortunately these are never people with cool pictures, just guys selling stuff on eBay who want to host some photos of their crap.

Its a minor ethical dilemma.  They use an email address on my domain as their address… the system emails me a copy of the login and password… does that make it alright for me to log in to their accounts?  I didn’t hack it.  I didn’t steal it.  In fact, the person out there specifically designated me to get email from the website.

Ultimately, it makes me really appreciate sites that require email validation, since they’ll never present me with this problem.

The Unintended Take Away

Random Thoughts

In the business world, be it advertising, marketing or any facet of business, the “take away” is what sticks with you when a meeting, product, or whatever is done.  With advertising and marketing, the take away they usually want the consumer to have is “I want that”, or better yet “I need that”, though sometimes they just want you to leave with “That’s a good product or company.”  While the immediate punch might be dealt with humor, they want you to remember the product and not the joke, unless the joke reminds you directly and fondly of the product.

I’ve always been a fan of the unintended take away.  This is usually some idea that either they didn’t think of or even one that they expressly did not want to show, but wound up embedding it in the audience’s minds anyway.

Take a look at these two commercials for Liberty Mutual:

Now, the idea they want you to take away from this is that Liberty Mutual looks out for people and is a good company.  They aren’t selling you anything in particular, but they are trying to sell you the brand, the general positive attitude toward the business practices of the company.

The other night, the wife and I saw the second commercial and the conversation went like this:

Her: I especially like how the end is the beginning, like time travel.
Me: Yeah.
Her: Its as if doing good deeds…
Me: … get you trapped in a Groundhog Day time loop?
Her: Yeah.
Me: Better stop doing good deeds then.
Her: Maybe that’s why people are mean to each other, fear of getting caught in a time loop.

The unintended take away.

Yeah, we are weird people.

Malton Cinema Patrol

Random Thoughts

After the failure that was the Munford Cinema, I decided to head for safer areas and trying a new location for my group, Malton Cinema Patrol.  We’ve settled in the neighborhood of Osmondville at the Pickford Cinema.  I keep saying we because shortly after securing the Pickford Cinema and a couple of its surrounding buildings, a man by the name of Yee Chan began helping out and joined up.  So we officially have two members.

The zombies are not plentiful around this area, but there are a few, enough that I have to make runs up to the Mitchem Mall in Vinetown for ammo and first-aid kits about once a week.

If you wind up in Malton and decide to defend a movie theater, we’re on radio frequency 27.70.  Not much we can do if the zed start beating down your barricades, but we can chat over the airwaves to keep the nights from being so lonely.

It`s Comcastic!

Random Thoughts

For a number of years, I was a customer of Charter Communications, and it blew. I know that’s a bit crass, but then their service was terrible. Outages and other issues made it so that I couldn’t get through a single day without wanting to call customer support. I rarely did though, because the customer support for as awful as the service. Nine times out of ten when I did call, I got an automated message stating they were aware of an issue and were working on it. The times I got through, I wound up speaking to someone who was only qualified to answer the phone, not actually know anything about the problems of the callers. There is this story that I like to tell, mostly because its true, about a time when I called in to Charter and explained that my connection was fine, but the current outage was because one of their routers was misconfigured. They didn’t believe me, even after I explained that the reason I know was because I had been able to telnet into the router using the default login and password. I went to my parents’ house that night, downloaded a manual, went home and fixed the router myself.

All in all, my experience with Charter was why I was happy to learn my new house was in a Comcast service area.

I really shouldn’t have been happy. While overall Comcast provides better service than Charter, being better than the worst doesn’t make you good. From day one I had connection issues, but the people at Comcast were happy to help me, after three weeks of calls, to discover that they did not support my cable modem anymore. So I bought a new one. I started having connection issues again and we found that my “signal” was too low. A technician came to the house and “fixed” it. About three months later I called in again… “low signal”, another technician visit and it was “fixed” again. Another three months, another “low signal”, another “fix”.

I should break here to explain what “fixed” means. See, they tell me that I have low signal. The technician comes out, verifies the low signal and then puts in an order to have the signal at my house increased. One time they did replace the cable buried in the yard, and one time they replaced a splitter, but mostly they just run tests and call in to have the signal increased. I suspect that someone back at the home base performs an audit every three months, sees the higher than normal signal for my leg or node of the network and resets it.

So, its been three months again, and I’m waiting for Comcast’s Comcastic service to kick in… I really wish there was an alternative that didn’t involve Comcast and didn’t involve switching to some sort of DSL/Satellite service for Internet and TV. Oh well, maybe this time the “fix” will stick.

Abandoning Munford

Random Thoughts

It has only been a week since I decided to make a concerted effort to hold the Munford Cinema in Urban Dead, and I am ditching that location. The rotter revive center just proved to attract far too much attention. So, I’m now on the prowl for another theater to take.

At the moment I’m hiding in the Hildebrand Mall gathering supplies and checking my city maps… and recovering from being dead three times in a week.

This experience, to me, really illustrates the one major design flaw in Urban Dead. In most games, death might have a penalty, but you always get back on your feet. In this game, dying actually makes you the enemy. If you and ten of your friends are hiding out in a building and a couple of zombies break in and kill some of your friends, your friends are now zombies. Reviving them costs 10 action points each. The net sum of the game is that you will lose. No questions, at some point you’ll die and have to either play zed or just wandering around looking for places where people might revive you. I don’t want to play a zombie, its boring. I want to be a survivor running from building to building looking for supplies and hiding for my life.

Anyway, I’m still playing and still going to be trying to build up the MCP, but its absolutely going to need to be somewhere safer.

The Neverending Flood

Random Thoughts

It has been a while since I posted about my efforts to reduce junk and go a bit green. So, here is an update…

Despite my best efforts to make it known that I do not want to receive direct mailings, it seems that there is no way to get them to stop outside of becoming a hermit. The problem appears to be that no matter how many lists I get myself removed from, old lists will always exist and get resold. The post office also seems completely uninterested in my plight. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to convince them that my wife and I are the only residents, all previous owners don’t live here anymore, and we do not desire to have any mail addressed to “Resident” delivered here. Despite this, they continue delivering mail here for people who have not lived here for over two years. Sometimes I’m tempted to get a P.O. Box and move all the mail I want to it and then just ignore the mailbox until they can’t fit any more junk into it.

One by one, as lights in my house burn out, I’m replacing them with lower wattage bulbs. Most of them go from being a 40, 60 or 100 watt bulb down to a 7, 11 or 15 watt bulb. It takes some getting used to as depending on the bulb type and manufacturer, some low watt bulbs start dim and “warm up” to their full brightness. Also, all my outdoor lights are properly shaded so that light from the bulbs goes downward, and I’m still refraining from reporting the street light that is out. I really dislike light pollution, and now I have the benefit of when I walk outside at night I can actually see the stars.

Winter came, and to try to lower my own costs and whatnot, the wife and I have been keeping the house at 66 or 68 degrees. That’s new for us as we (I) usually like to keep the house warmer so that I can be comfortable wearing shorts and t-shirts, but I’ve switched over to sweats and long pj’s. Now I just need us both to get into better shape so that when summer comes we won’t feel the need to combat the heat of our out of shape bodies with blasting the air conditioning.

All in all, I’m spending less money, lowering my footprint, but still losing the war against junkmail. Here’s to hoping I can turn the tide eventually…

Boxoffice Insanity

Random Thoughts

For the sake of argument, lets assume that I go see a movie every single Friday night. I take my wife and we buy popcorn and sodas. Now, to give the theaters a break, we’ll even be a tad frugal and say that down at the AMC, the wife and I stick to the “Clip’s Picks” special: a 16 oz. soda, 32 oz. popcorn and a regular candy for $7.50. The local AMC just pushed their ticket price for a regular adult evening show to $10. One night at the theater, not including gas, will run me $35.00. Expand that out to a year and you get $1,820. Next year, prices are likely to be higher, not lower.

Last year, I bought an HD projector for the house for under $900, I think it was $832 or close to that. Grouped with the $150 sound system we picked up a few years ago on a Black Friday super deal, our $95 5 disc DVD changer (that upscales content), and the 102″ screen we built for under $25 (wood, white sheets and a staple gun), it makes for a fairly nice experience of watching films. Of course, I didn’t buy this just to watch DVDs on, we also watch TV and play Xbox 360 on it (really freaking sweet by the way). Trying to figure out how much to charge to what activity gets a tad complex. For now, I’m actually going to lump it all together and say $1,200 to make a home theater. Of course, some people don’t like projectors, and that is their choice, but it’ll run them a whole lot more and net them a smaller screen.

Buying in bulk down at the BJ’s, the cost of popcorn runs maybe $0.50 and candy around the same, sodas too. For both of us, at home, the movie snacks cost under $3.00 for both of us. $156 for the year.

As for movies, lets take a Netflix membership. The lowest plan they have that would allow us to see a movie a week is the “1 DVD at a time – Unlimited” plan for $8.99 a month. $8.99 * 12 = $107.88 / 52 = $2.08 a week. So, for us to rent a movie from Netflix and watch it together costs us $1.04 each.

Total cost for 1 year of watching movies at home in a theater I built myself: $1,200 + $156 + $107.88 = $1,463.88.

Now, for the second year, I won’t need to rebuild the theater, but I might upgrade to an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player, so I can subtract the $1,200 for initial investment and add back in a $200 cushion for improvements, if I desire them, making the second year cost me only $463.88.

But wait… what if I bought DVDs instead of rented them? One advantage to buying a DVD is that thanks to places like Amazon and eBay, no movie is every really unavailable, while if a movie you want to see doesn’t open well at the boxoffice it may be gone before it gets a second weekend. If I were really going to abandon the multiplex for the home uniplex, you can bet I’d pre-order movies. Again, thanks to Amazon, a pre-ordered movie will run $16.99, less sometimes. If I wait for the release day, I can usually find a store selling a new movie for $14.99. Even if I was generous and set the price at $19.99, the movie tickets were the same price. Except we get to own the movie and watch it as many times as we want, and if the movie sucks it didn’t cost us any more than going to the theater, but we can give it away or sell it to someone who would enjoy it.

From a purely monetary aspect, the home theater is the wiser investment, so lets put money aside. What makes the traditional movie house better than watching the movie at home?

For one, sometimes I do just like being in a large audience. However, these days that is being severely overshadowed by my desire to avoid people who text message, leave their ringers on, and talk. In addition to this, I’ve noticed that to combat noisy audiences some theaters turn up the volume of the movies, couple that with the not-quite-soundproofed walls and all the sudden my quiet drama is being invaded by the action film next door.

Seeing movies sooner. A movie tends to be in the theaters anywhere from 3 to 18 months before it comes out on DVD, though very few go longer than a year anymore, and for others it is entirely dependent on holiday shopping seasons. But, on the other hand, in general, a movie that fails to do well at the boxoffice tends to get to DVD sooner. So the seeing movies sooner reason really only applies to movies that are going to do well, or movies that are going to get held for some reason (Christmas movies that open at Christmas tend to go to DVD the following Christmas regardless of their boxoffice take). Really though, the only reason I desire to see a movie sooner in the theater is so that I don’t have to spend the next six months trying to avoid spoilers on the internet and elsewhere until I see it.

So where does all this leave us?

The wife and I like the AMC theater chain. The main reason for this is that they run a special, see a movie on Friday, Saturday or Sunday before noon and its cheap. It was $5, now up to $6 with recent price increases. At $6 and generally being less hungry or apt to snack before noon, a $12 showing of a movie is worth it. Even if we snacked the usual nighttime snacks it would be just $27.00 if we both went for the full Clip’s Picks deal, and that is much closer to the approximate $23 we’d spend buying the DVD and making our own snacks. Close enough that it doesn’t bother me… much.

Overall though, except for the occasional “must see” movie, I just don’t envision myself going to the movies much anymore. Hollywood and movie theaters have priced themselves right out of my casual budget and wedged themselves nicely into the “once in a while” budget. If they raise the prices any more, they’ll shift into the “almost never” budget, and beyond that is the realm of “when I win the lottery” and “not on your life”. If they want my money on opening weekend, something has to change…

Hello 2008!

Random Thoughts

Last night we said goodbye to 2007, and good riddance. Not that 2007 did anything wrong, but come on, who wants some old year hanging around when we’ve got a nice shiny new year sitting right here!

Looking back 365 days at the welcoming of 2007, lets examine how my predictions and premonitions worked out…

First, I’m still using electronic billing for everything but my garbage collection, so I can look forward to another smooth date transition as again I won’t be writing enough checks to accidentally keep writing the wrong year on.

Next, I said I’d eat better… and I have… a little… I get salads when we eat out sometimes, and I’m eating more fruits and veggies. Overall, I’ve shed ten pounds that I’ve managed to keep off in the last year. Yeah, I’m still pushing the needle on the scale over to the “hefty” side, but it doesn’t go as far as it used to. Another few years of this and I’ll be positively svelte!

Onward… MMOs and computers… I did actually cave and got new PCs for the wife and I. I did buy the WoW expansion, and messed around with it. I played the Vanguard beta, and it sucked. I bought a Wii. I bought a 360. And I am, in fact, pretty much done with the PC as a gaming platform, sort of. I canceled all my MMO subscriptions and nothing on the horizon is blowing my skirt up. I apply to every beta that I can and I participate in those trying to help them make a better game, but in the end they all end up not interesting me enough for me to make the buy. The MMO I’m most playing right now is actually Urban Dead which is about as far from WoW as you can get without actually dialing up a BBS to play TradeWars 2002 (which is officially 6 years ago now… where is my intergalactic trade federation? huh? when I see a Presidential candidate address that issue, I’ll know who to vote for). For my fantasy gaming fix, my bi-weekly group has continued to meet and our campaigns progress quite nicely. They may not be massively multiplayer, but they sure are more fun than the current slate of MMOs.

Lots of superhero books did come out, almost all of them for established comic book characters, and I didn’t finish any of my own projects.

I said that the business front was “looking pretty good”, my exact words. The key word here turned out to be “looking”. I’ve come to realize that a person whom I have always believed was only smoke and mirrors is in fact only smoke and mirrors, in a manner of speaking, his machinations and manipulations in the end are much ado about nothing. I keep pressing the Escape key, but I’m still here.

So… what does 2008 look like from here, the first day of the year?

S.O.S.

Same Old Shit, ladies and gentlemen. I suspect in 2008 I will write even less checks (garbage company might start taking credit soon), I will manage to drop another ten pounds (at least), I will continue to play betas but not buy MMOs (I’m pretty sure all the games I might buy will get delayed to 2009 anyway), I will play console games (the ones I already play and new ones coming out all the time, why, the Christmas season alone has produced a good eight or nine games I don’t own that I want to play), there will be more superhero books and business will continue to “look good” while actually being anything but (although, this year as new budgets are approved and hiring goes into higher gears I’m actually working with a recruiter, the only one recently to actually get me interviews).

New resolutions? I resolve to actually rake the yard (provided Georgia lifts its burn ban so I can dispose of the leaves myself, bagging sucks). I resolve to finish building the bar (we have the cabinets, now we just need to put them in and make the counter tops). And I resolve to stop buying crap I don’t need (seriously, I spend too much money on stuff when I should focus on convincing other people to buy it and then lend it to me). I’d make more resolutions, but then I will feel worse when I fail to do them all.

Oh, and if somehow Fred Thompson actually becomes President, I’ll eat my hat… and then I’ll begin weekly posts about how he should just round up Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell, Jack Ryan, Ray Levoi, John McClane, and the Law & Order guys and go straighten out all this Middle East stuff. But that is the extent of my campaign promises…

So, welcome 2008! Please don’t hit me in the junk!

Goodbye 2007

Random Thoughts

This is where we look back at the year and see how we did…

… or not.

In the grand scheme of things, unless I have set in motion unseen events that will lead to the destruction of mankind or its salvation, not much of anything important happened to me personally in 2007. Although, I dare say, this year, this blog has taken on a more cohesive shape, and I hope to continue that and expand that to the root website in the coming year.

All in all, in my corner of the world, things have been smooth sailing.

Goodbye 2007…