I recently purchased a Weber Smokey Mountain charcoal smoker, and this past weekend I was able to get in my first attempt at cooking on it. I decided I was going to make some pulled pork, so I picked up a 6.5 lb. and a 4.5lb pork butt from the grocery store, mixed up a rub, made some barbeque sauce, and then got up at the crack of dawn on Sunday to get things going. It was the earliest I had been awake in quite some time, but the end result was totally worth it. (more…)

There isn’t much I remember from day two – it was by far the worse day of the show for me. After being up super late for the day one concert, we got up fairly early to get to the show saturday morning. We were all basically in zombie mode all day. Spent some time wandering the show floor, which was ridiculously packed, and attended the Harmonix and PAX 10 panels.
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We So PAX day one is over with, and day two begins. I can’t even begin to say how totally fucking awesome it is. Probably the worst part was waiting in line for 2 hours before the show started to get in – we were all packed into this huge room (thousands and thousands of geeks), and it got pretty warm, which is never a good thing in a room full of geeks. At least I can’t smell.

We headed to the exhibit/showfloor room, and wow. The booths aren’t quite as extravagant as those at E3 ’04, but they are still pretty impressive. We spent about three hours in there playing & watching various games – there is just too much awesome in there to write about, but here are a few highlights:

• Pasty played PMS Missy in a game of quake (The final score: 12 to negative 4), but he at least got a free shirt out of it.
• Free shaves at the Brothers in Arms booth – let them shave and tattoo your head, and get a free copy of the game. We will definitely make pope do this.
• Seeing gabe and tycho walking around – we were standing next to tycho and his kid for a few minutes at the Hothead Games booth, until someone asked him to sign a few books. It was down hill from there, as he got surrounded by people.

We headed out of the show floor a bit after 5pm to head to a panel about writing for games, and on the way, I noticed that Felicia Day was at The Guild’s booth with Sandeep Parikh. I picked up a copy of the guild, chatted with them for a few seconds about stuff (like WoW), and got a picture. Mission accomplished for the weekend.

After that we went to the writing panel which was OK – it was interesting to hear some of the answers from the writer’s perspective. I’ve not much to say about the panel. After the panel, we grabbed dinner at Bayou on First, a cajun / french restaraunt down by the Pike St Market, and it was damn tasty.

We headed back, and got there about 15 minutes before they were going to screen season one of The Guild. We headed to the theater it was in, to see an INSANE line already in place. We figured it was a lost cause, but my adoration for all things felicia day made me get in line anyways. So the line starts moving, and we finally get close and the line stops, and they are only letting people in one or two at a time as they find open seats. Then they say “Only 19 more people are being let in”, and I figured we were doomed. They start counting off people, and its getting up into the teens, and I breathe a sigh of relief – we were #s 17-18-19. Last three people allowed in! Pope however misunderstood his #, and left to go to the concert. It was pretty amusing to watch the guild again, and then the Q&A was entertaining. Felicia Day managed to embarass herself again, much like she did at the Comic-con panel earlier this summer. We also heard about how to get Ron Jeremy to be in your show, the Retarded Policeman, Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, and the Legend of Neil.

We headed off to the concert after that, and got in just in time to see Freezepop. They put on a pretty rocking show, I only knew who they were thanks to Rock Band, but now I guess I could say I am a fan. After that, Jonathan Coulton played, and I wasn’t expecting much – I mean it is just one guy, right. He put on an amazing show, and I am definitely glad we got to check it out. The highlight? A duet of “Still Alive” with FELICIA DAY. Totally fucking awesome. And he rick-rolled us. Twice.

By now it was after 1am (or 4am in real-people time), and we were all exhausted, so we headed back to the hotel to crash. And now we are awake and getting ready for day two. I’ll upload my pictures to flickr laster, but for now enjoy pictures with FELICIA DAY, and a video from pasty’s phone of “Still Alive”. Peace out!

So, for the most part, the flight to Seattle was uneventful.  What provided the most entertainment was the SkyMall catalog.  We found some true gems in there, such as the Big Foot Garden Sculpture, the Rape Ladder, the indoor dog piss mat, and the doggie portal for your fence.  I will add pictures of these at the bottom of the post, as I can’t work them into the article body very well.

So, our flight first took us to Detroit, where we had a three hour layover before continuing on to Seattle, and since it was still pretty early in the morning (9:30) we stopped by one of the cafes to get breakfast.  That is when the first gem of the trip happened – Pope ordered a beer with his breakfast.  Now, I have to make fun of him for drinking beer with breakfast. Consider yourself made fun of.

The flight from Detroit to Seattle was pretty OK, just long.  Sitting in a plane for five hours is not fun.  We got into the hotel, and then went exploring for someplace to eat, since we were closing in on 12 hours since breakfast.  We settled on a place called Von’s Grand City Café, who proudly advertised having something like 24 different draughts.  We soon came to realize that it would likely take someone 24 hours to taste just a few of those beers.  The food was pretty good, but the service was absolutely awful.

Now were back at the hotel, and its just about to hit 9pm fake time, meaning its at or past my bedtime in real time (or eastern standard time, as some may call it).  I wan’t to sleep, but I also don’t want to be up at 5am fake time, when the show doesn’t start until 2pm.  That’s a lot of fake time to kill.  Or real time.  I don’t know.

And now, SkyMall pictures.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my laptop over the past few weeks, and I just got it fixed up at the end of last week. I figured that you all might want to know how a powerful Tiny God such as myself approaches technical issues.

I have two Thinkpads. My R51 is, for the most part, dead. Whenever it is left on for more than a few minutes, I get a BSoD and have to power it down and leave it off for a while. I’m assuming there are cooling issues, but I’m too lazy to do anything about it since I hardly use it.

My other Thinkpad is an X41 Tablet. I like that one. It’s my baby. So I’m sure you can imagine that I was quite upset when the same problem began to occur on that machine. Leaving it running for more than 10 minutes or so was causing blue screens, and the same thing happened when it came out of stand-by mode. As I’d do anytime I encountered a blue screen, I cussed loudly and powered the machine down.

I recently began using my tablet PC more often, so these frequent errors started to get on my nerves. I decided that it was time to reload Windows to see if that would help. I started going through all of my files to see what needed to be backed up to my desktop, and I went through all of my applications to see what I’d need to download and reinstall.

As I was looking through my files, I made a discovery. The solution to my problem became obvious. I opened up my display properties, hit the screen saver tab, and disabled this.

I had installed it many months ago and totally forgotten about it. The best part is that when I installed it, I thought it was the funniest thing ever. I figured people would see my idle laptop on my desk at work and say “Oh no, your laptop crashed,” and I’d be all like, “PSYCH! It’s just a screen saver, dumbass!”

I guess I figured out who the real dumbass is.

So tonight was the first battle at the local game shop for the newest game I’m playing, AT-43, and it ended up being a three way battle between the United Nations of Ava (led by yours truly), the Red Blok, and the Karmans. (more…)

So, about a month and a half ago, I started playing the World of Warcraft trading card game with this site’s newest commenter, crashpost. We’ve bought a silly amount of booster packs, and in this short time, I think I’ve amassed more cards for this game than I ever had over the several years i was playing Magic: The Gathering. So, we found a few other locals to play the game with here in Dublin, and our WoW Wednesdays have been a good break in the middle of the week. Wanting more, I did a quick search on the Upper Deck website (who make the game) and saw that there was a tournament happening right here in Columbus, and it was happening the coming weekend. (more…)

I think it should be pretty obvious by now that I have very little tolerance for shitty service. I like to think that I work hard for my money, and if I don’t feel like I’m getting what I paid for, then I will do my best to make sure I don’t send any more money the same way, and post here to try and influence others to not spend their money with those inducted into the Hall of Shame.

So, we have a dual-inductee post here. First up is Shirt.Woot. Woot, if you don’t know, is a site that posts a deal a day, of a random (usually) tech-oriented item. Earlier this year, they started up a new site, where they put up a shirt for sale every day. I needed some new tshirts, so I was browsing through and picked out a few – four to be exact. This was on October 4th. On the fifth, I get emails with four tracking numbers for each of the four shirts I ordered – there is no way to buy multiple items in one order, so each one is shipped individually.

Finally on the 10th, one of the tracking numbers worked. On the 11th, another one worked – both of these showed the shirts being picked up on 10/9. A few more days go by, and the other two tracking numbers still don’t work. So I email them on 10/14, asking whats up with my other two shirts. This is the ENTIRE response that I received this morning, 10/16:

“I apologize that you received tracking numbers for these 2 shirts. We are out of the XL. We are currently waiting for them to be reprinted so we can get those that ordered both designs in those sized shipped out.”

Now, if the shirts were out of stock, don’t you think you would email your customer to tell them? Why did I have to contact them? How did their system even let them send me a tracking number? What the fuck? If I hadn’t emailed them, would they have ever even known that they didn’t send me the shirts, since they had already given me tracking numbers?
So I get home today, and there are two Shirt.Woot bags sitting outside my door. Twelve days after placing my order, two of my shirts had finally arrived – or had they? I open the first bag, and saw three skulls looking back at me – as expected for shirt number one. I open the second bag, to see a shirt with a car and a clusterfuck of flora, a snake, a woman, and some playing cards. Not even close to the shirt I ordered.

So here I am, with one of the shirts that I ordered. No doubt that it I will hit the 2 week mark since ordering before I hear back about their shipping screwup. So I’ve sent them an email, asking where I can send this brown shirt back to, and how I can get my $45 back for the other three shirts they have been unable to deliver in a timely manner. I can’t wait for the response.

For the record, here is the shirt I was epecting to be in the second bag (titled “Stop Digital Piracy”, get it?), followed by what was actually in the bag:

And here are the other three shirts I ordered – the only one I have received is the first one:

I really liked the Hot Wings shirt, I’m kind of sad that I won’t be getting it (unless woot refuses to cancel/refund my order).

UPDATE – 10/25

So, I emailed woot, asking for a refund for the three shirts they didn’t send me.  Their response?

“We will have the correct shirt shipped out today overnight at no charge.”

Thats it.  That is all they have to say.  That email was on the 17th, and I received the digital piracy shirt on the 18th.  A few days later, I received the Sore Thumbs shirt.  Still no word on the Hot Wings shirt.  They ignored my refund request all together, and have ignored the email I sent them on 10/20 asking why they ignored my refund request.  I sent them another email, if no reply, I guess I file a complaint with the BBB and dispute the charges over the 4th shirt.

Circuit City is the least nefarious of the trio of Hall of Shame inductees I have posted about today. They suffer from nothing more than ignorant, worthless employees. (more…)

The second post in my trio of Hall of Shame posts for the day deals with Timer Warner Cable. If ever there was an argument against government granted monopolies, they are it.

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