Smokey’s House of Paincakes

Just out the Wordpress app for my Blackberry.

Ever go to a website to read an article, just to discover one paragraph on one page? Then you notice it’s not just a small article, but it’s made up of seven pages each containing a paragraph on it’s own; you think “why couldn’t they just put the whole damn thing on one page?”

This is a tactic web sites use to generate more page views for their site. You’re only reading one article, but they’re inflating their stats to make it look like you’re a returning visitor.

I, for one, cannot stand this. In fact, the more I have to click on a page to view things, the more incline I am to click the close button. From now on anytime I get a link and it’s a multi-page article, I’m immediately closing the window. Exceptions can be made for a two-pager, but any more than that it’s hasta la vista!

Long have I despised Rogers Wireless, but not as much as I despised Bell; in this case, Rogers is the lesser of two evils.

After being completely fed up with Rogers, I switched everything off of my phone plan to try and pay as minimum as possible. This means I got rid of my long distance, which I easily replaced with Skype, and also removed the ridiculously overpriced data plan.

Of course you would think that since I have an iPhone, having a data plan would go hand in hand. Well, it turns out, even though I had such plan, I barely even used it.

This is where the bastards step in. Once everything was canceled, I figured I’d get a smaller bill next month. Nope, it was even larger than previous months? Basically, I was “What the hell?!”

After doing some investigation, it turns out that Rogers turned off my data plan, but they didn’t bother to turn off access to the data account, even if it was used by accident. As it turns out, while trying to connect to WiFi, sometimes it would quickly jump on the Edge network to grab some data. For one month, my phone access just over 640kb worth of data. The amount charged against said data: $38.00!

Those retards charged me close to $40.00 for a minuscule amount of data. Now I can’t even decide who the bigger assholes are. Bell and Rogers tied at the moment.

So, this time I take it up to myself to turn of the access to the Edge network. After a little bit of reading, I discovered I make these changes on the phone myself. After following the instructions, I quickly realize that said setting is not on my phone. Thinking I misread, I started snooping around more. Turns out, Apple included a feature that allows a mobile carrier the ability to hide the network settings section. Of course, Rogers takes full advantage of this to try and rip off their customers even more.

I had to search around for a third party tool to allow my settings to be changed and changed them I did. Right after I give the giant middle finger to Rogers.

Maybe I should just go back to having a home phone only. We’ve survived before in the past, why can’t we still do it? If Skype ever allows Canadian phone numbers, I’ll be that much more tempted to do so.

I never want to get another service from a company who screws over their customers so much. Just imagine this happening to someone less tech savvy who wouldn’t know to change their data settings.

I want you out of my life Rogers.

The new Xbox dashboard is out and it’s awesome! Much faster that the previous blades and really well put together!

Also, I don’t care what other people say, but I like the new Mii style avatars. I’m calling them Me60s. As you can see, that’s me on the right.

If you’re wondering how you can get your own avatar to display on your page, you can grab it here: http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/GAMER_TAG/avatar-body.png

I wouldn’t recommend linking directly to it though. The server seems to go down every once in awhile, so just get it and download it.

Update: Now all I need to do is buy a larger hard drive so I can have more than one game copied at a time.

Just to keep this short and simple. I refuse to buy another Sony product ever again.

That is all.

I recently upgraded my phone to the latest firmware and with the beauty of the app store, I can now write posts on the fly. Not that I actually will, but at least now I know I can.

I gave up on the mighty mouse. I tried and tried and tried to convince myself that it was as good mouse. It just looked so cool, but it was awful awful awful. I switched right back to my MX510 without a second thought.

The mighty mouse was plagued with issues: Right clicks would constantly be mistaken with left clicks and for some strange reason, the point would just randomly fly all over the screen before settling down again, making any task that needed precise clicking rather annoying.

Farewell mighty mouse. You need to try again.

Ok, I’m a huuuuge FireFox fan! I absolutely love it and I’ve been using it for years. It was the best experience you can find on the web. Now that Safari has come out with a version 3, it’s been rocking in its own little way.

I’ve been using the FireFox 3 beta for awhile now and am enjoying what it brings to the table, except one thing. Load times. For some crazy reason it just seems to take forever rendering pages. Not all of them, but quite a few. It drives me nuts! Once that happens, I find I can load up Safari and point to that same page and it will be rendered before FireFox is done. Now I know, it’s still in beta, but I’m finding more and more reasons to switch over to Safari.

Sure, it doesn’t have all the security features FireFox has, like anti-phishing, etc. But I’m tech savvy enough to figure out what sites are legit and which aren’t.

I have very few criteria for an excellent browser:
1. Can render all pages properly.
2. Can render extremely fast.
3. Has tabbed browsing (Love that shit!)

That’s all I need. Now I’m not giving up on Firefox; I’m going to wait and see how it performs when fully released, I just may permanently switch over.

Now, this is only for the Mac side, Firefox still rules on my PC. It doesn’t seem to have the same slow rendering problems.

This one bothers me… since the Mac is designed really well, and all mac users boast about how much better their interface looks, why do the top mac related sites look so damned ugly?

So I finally did it. I made the switch from PC user to Mac, and I’ll say is it’s freakin awesome! I’ve been a hardcore PC user for so long now, but the current state of Mac OS X makes the jump quite simple. The interface is awesome and my machine is super fast.

I got the new 24″ iMac with the 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM. The thing is huuuuuuuge! Have a look-see.

The one thing I really love about the new machine is I am able to sync my Google calendar with iCal, then in turn sync my iCal and Address book with my cell phone via blue tooth. Now I’m up to date with everything no matter where I go. Plus, I took it even further and used a proximity detector to automatically sync with my phone when it comes in range. That way, the only work I have to do to sync my phone is walk into the room!!

So far, I’m enjoying the switch, but I think more so cause of the screen size. I walked into Tigerdirect the other day taking a look at their pc displays and kept thinking “What’s with all the small screens?” ;)

There is one issue so far though, I can’t get my all in one printer to work with my iMac. It’s a Lexmark x2350 and I can’t find any driver support for it :( Anyone have any ideas? I really don’t want to have to buy a printer (although, this one was free!)