I tried to contact Friskies today because they don’t carry a bacon wet food for cats.  9Lives has a Liver & Bacon Dinner that my cat quite likes.  How can you have the option to sell bacon to people and utterly refuse to do so?  The mind boggles.

Anyway, I tried to submit feedback this is what I see:

We are currently updating this site.
Please return later today to enjoy the improvements.

Wow, that was lame.  And after all that “work”!  Name, number, email, address – Friskies needs to know. Really, they can’t listen to my cat food feedback without knowing where I live and how to reach me 24/7.   

So I decided to write this post and I needed the exact error message (authenticity!) so I resubmitted the form.  I put in crap data and it went through fine.  OK, I think, I can submit my comment now.  Not so fast, my naïve self!  The website breaks again when I submit real data.  Fake data works like a charm.

Friskies is a Purina brand, so you can blame the parent company for the website problems, but the Friskies execs need to get on the bacon train.  Here are my original comments, which Purina refuses to accept:

Why don’t you have cat food (canned) with bacon in it?  My cat’s love the 9Lives “Liver & Bacon” and I love feeding it to them because I also love bacon.  Friskies has no bacon food that I can find, and I feel this is a mistake.  I prefer 9Lives to Friskies because of the selection.  And btw, the Indoor Selects line makes my cat throw up.

Update:

I replaced the ampersand above with “and” and substituted K for C in select(ion) and the submission was a success:

Thank you for contacting Nestlé Purina PetCare Company.  Your email has been received by our Consumer Affairs Department.  One of our team members will respond to your email as soon as possible.

This does not make me especially happy, because they have proved their previously theoretical incompetence.  Their SQL injection scrubbers are overzealous to the point of brutal retardation.  And here’s some more bad news, Friskies: I’ve gotten another cat, so now you’re losing DOUBLE the profits.

World of Goo by 2D Boy is a game.  Specifically it’s an independent game that evolved from physics simulations.  In this game you manipulate Goo, which are little blobules of… goo.  You can’t define a word using that same word, but man, what am I supposed to say?  You’ve got these little squeaky, squishy balls of semi-sentient ooze that, somehow, make for a great construction material.  Ostensibly this game is about making your brain explode.  It accomplishes this by employing a creepy art style, adorable and chilling sounds and music, and an ambitious assortment of perplexing puzzles.  Watch the teaser at Amazon‘s page (it’s old timey Tim Burtonesque).

Your guide for the game is the Sign Painter.  Hints for the levels are provided on painted signs throughout the levels, but you’ll want to read them for the humor and wit as much as the puzzle clues.  The goo doesn’t talk, but the Sign Painter doesn’t shut up.  It’s great writing in tiny tidbits.

It’ll take probably 4-8 hours to beat it, depending on how often you fail and how much time you spend screwing around with the physics engine.  Of course you could spend more time in WoG than you did in Liberty City – assuming you want to complete all of the OCD requirements.  OCD = Obsessive Completion Distinction goals.  Whereas you might need to collect 6 goo balls to complete a level, you may need 24 to earn the OCD flag.  Some OCDs are time based, but most require you to perflectly plan and execute a cunning strategy with no mistakes.  Most are fun, almost all are fiendishly difficult.

As you complete levels and collect goo balls you can use them to build a massive tower – competing with players across the globe to see who can make the tallest tower.  Flags, names and heights pepper the sky and you build your tower upward (a la Tower of Goo) so you’ve got some extra stuff to enjoy once the story is done.

I’m being vague about the storyline gameplay because discovering how it works is part of the fun.  They (2D boy) designed it so that you have no idea what’s coming up, which makes it all the more exciting when it arrives.  I may be an anonymous person on the internet, but you can take my word for it: it’ll be thoroughly enjoyable.

I could make a lot of parallels between WoG and Braid, e.g. beautiful and unique visuals, wildly varying gameplay as the levels progress, and a low, low price point!  World of Goo clocks in for $20 at retail and that’s a fair price given the length of the game ($/hr is one way to evaluate).  It’s got all the shine and polish of a mainstream studio game, but with a… stranger story and a lot  more inventiveness. A lot.  The whole thing’s an experiment, which I declare to have been a success.

Official 2D Boy World of Goo site

PreOrder & Buy the game at Amazon (see videos of the goo in action!)

Update: I totally forgot to gift the world with my knowledge of Goo!  2Dboy has already been informed, but I can attest that the ideal input method is the Tablet PC touch screen.  Mice are OK, but you can’t beat the speed of touching the screen itself.  Moving goo is as easy as pointing at it.  Touchpads are horrible.  I have not tested trackballs, sorry.

Many of us are in this situation: our work/school runs a google apps account for us while we maintain a separate, personal account.  This is a problem when I want to check both Gmail-boxes without sharing mail between them – logging into one account will screw up the cookies for the other apps (Reader, Docs, Calendar, etc.).

Try this in Firefox, IE, Opera: log in to your work Gmail account, then open Reader and login with the same account.  No problems so far.  Now open a new tab and login to your personal Gmail account.  Go back to Reader and refresh and you see the problem.  The cookies are fucked!

Now try this in Chrome: log in to your work Gmail account, then open Reader and login with the same account.  Fine fine, now open a new tab in Incognito mode.  Log in to your personal account, Reader, Docs, whatever.  Head back to the non-Incognito window and refresh your mail and Reader.  It’s OK!

Bottom line: keep one account open in normal mode, keep your other account isolated to Incognito windows. There’s room for improvement, but this is a huge improvement over having to use separate browsers to manage your accounts (I used to use Firefox and Opera, now I’m 100% Chrome).

• The “application shortcuts” always default to non-Incognito, and I’ve submitted feedback asking for a command line switch or something to allow Incognito defaulted shortcuts.
• They could implement some kind of domain/namespace feature to precisely manage your Google cookies (ie. which windows or tabs/processes they apply to) so you could keep both accounts open in non-Incognito, or both in Incognito and generally manage the hell out of those fucking cookies.  

This post is focused on the local FOX affiliate (which is also WSYX-TV, ABC 6, for some fucking reason) but I’ve got to fill in the background by discussing the nationwide Superbowl broadcast by NFL on FOX.

NFL football games are scheduled for 3 hours and usually run between 2:30 to 3:30 in length. The Superbowl was scheduled for a 3:30 slot followed by a 0:30 post game show (brought to you by Cadillac, featuring – I shit you not – a Cadillac logo superimposed over a Cadillac logo)

———-

OK, so that’s as far as I got into the post before Rick in the programming department at WTTE/WSYX returned the voicemail rant I left for him. So all the vitriol has been drained and they are out of the Hall of Shame before they were officially inducted – probationarily!

Here’s what happened in short:

• NFL on FOX blasted us with 4 hours of “after the Superbowl, tune in for an All New House Event!”
• We tuned in for House M.D., which was all-new, though more of an Episode than an Event IMO
• roughly 10 seconds before the end of the episode they cut away mid-conversation to the FOX 28 newscast at 11

That pissed me off. I could care less about House, but I only watched because:

1. House is a funny dude
2. Mira Sorvino is sexy
3. FOX told me to so often that I literally could not resist

So after just 4 hours of brainwashing I became one of FOXs herd and was rewarded with a truncated program. Now, if you know me you will be saying to yourself “Oh, he must have gone apeshit over that trivial little nothing!” and you’d be right. Righteous Indignation, thy name is Matt!

Today I called up WTTE and left a message with the programming department telling them what they did and why it pissed me off and also that I would never watch House or their news broadcast again.

Then Rick gave me a call and explained things.  He said we only missed 10 seconds and the next ep preview (no biggie, I don’t like those either) and he seemed to imply that had it been longer than that they would have done something different (or at least been “REALLY sorry”).  He explained the problem as being an automation glitch related to the nationwide affiliate upgrade to all HD broadcasts.  New tools, new problems (same as the old problems).

He sounded genuinely sorry (and encouraged more calls to come in and have it explained as opposed to warding off potential calls) and it really and truly sounds like they are on top of it and are working on fixing the problems.  They have had problems like this recently (due to the HD rollout) but they expect it to get better shortly.

Here’s the kicker that actually got them out of the HoS: they rebroadcast the last 15 seconds of House (sweet!) with an apology (aww, how sweet) and the next episode preview (dolla dolla bill$ y’all!) later in the offending newscast.

Problem not solved, but at least it’s been addressed.

PS fuck you, corporate sponsors! you aren’t as necessary as you think

I hate all current phones. I need a new phone of my own. Please help me! Here are the bare minimum requirements for the phone that I need (which does not, AFAIK, yet exist):

• smartphone (web browsing, emailing, mapping, etc. are supported – no music purchases or games required)
• camera (2MP or greater) that does not suck entirely
• Micro or Mini SD card support (can use adapters to SD and use on Wii, cameras, etc.)
• legitimate MIDP/Java support for Google Maps and Gmail mobile app and Opera Mini
• flip form factor
• Bluetooth w/ A2DP & AVRCP profiles
• GPS (can be skipped as long as compact, quality BT based GPS addon is available)
• QWERTY keyboard && physical numeric keypad (I want both, and I want to feel individual buttons)

I don’t give a damn about the OS – as long as it works well (this means no Palm OS). This is the absolute main requirement: this phone should not drive me into a frenzied rage every time I use it. Is there a name for this feature? Is “not sucking” part of anyone’s business plan anymore?

Also, fuck the price. If you find me a phone that does what I want and doesn’t drive me batshit insane every time I want to write a text message or receive a call then I’ll buy us both one, even if it’s iPhone-ish in cost.

Update: I went with the T-Mobile Wing (unlocked, should work w/ AT&T) and a separate GPS unit.  I also splurged on the memory card and Bluetooth headset.  I blame this spending spree on Snowcrash.