The MacBook Caper

This, folks, is why the eBay business I work for simply will not ship outside North America. I realize that it's not necessarily a problem with overseas shipping itself, but the fact remains that any package that leaves these borders is as good as lost, even if the package successfully arrives. PayPal offers no Seller Protection on items shipped outside the United States.

This means that even if the package arrives safely and on schedule, the buyer, if he feels particularly criminal that day, can decide to tell PayPal that the package did NOT arrive, and to return his money. PayPal can't/won't verify the package was successfully shipped, and will comply with the buyer's wishes and there's not a single thing the seller can do.

In short, you must assume that the packages you shipped overseas will always be unrecoverable and you will never get your money back if it turns up missing, whether it really has or not. The risk is far too great to take that chance.

Sooo!

You think you know Nintendo Wii's system specifications, do ya?

You think you know Nintendo Wii's operating system, do ya?

Well, guess what? You don't know! Seriously, folks, if there's one thing you've learned about Nintendo all these years, it's the fact that they love hiding features from you until the last possible moment. In my opinion, that's an amazing marketing strategy. People are kept in a constant state of anticipation, waiting for the next official news bit about your console, and you announce the features you're only absolutely sure you're able to put on the console!

People who try to get the jump and release statistics about Nintendo consoles? Innaccurate and ultimately useless. Never, ever believe a feature about a Nintendo console until it comes straight from Nintendo. Rumors like these are potentially damaging, creating needless hype and/or bad feelings toward Nintendo when they haven't even confirmed the features.

Anyway, point being: Never trust articles about Nintendo features unless it's from Nintendo!

WordPress has been upgraded!

If you haven't done it, yet... do it!

Ahh, it's beginning.

You know how it goes. Two similar devices come out... Intel vs AMD, Nintendo vs Sony, etc and so forth. You start comparing! "Well, Intel is faster than AMD!" ... "No! AMD is faster than Intel!" Nobody had any problem when AMD was faster than Intel... everyone would pull benchmarks out their hind-end to "prove" it, too. But when Intel woke up and said "oh, hey... AMD's getting competitive... we need to get to work" and made a processor faster than AMD, suddenly, all the AMD fanboys were crying "apples and oranges! apples and oranges! you can't compare Intel to AMD!"

Right... hypocrasy at it's finest.

Anyway, to the point. People have JUST now, after how many months, started to say "you know, you really can't compare the Nintendo Wii to the Playstation 3"... and I'm like, errrrr, why not? You've been doing just that since before E3!!

It's like Intel vs AMD. Nintendo was the first powerhouse of videogames. They kind of slipped back into the sidelines and let the other companies take over. Not really on purpose, but maybe just because they got smug and lazy and didn't think anyone could compete with them. Nintendo Gamecube was heralded as a failure (even though Nintendo make massive profits off the console alone) and the Playstation was king of the hill. Everyone said Playstation was better than the 64 and the Gamecube. What's that? Oh, yeah... that's comparing!

Nintendo wakes up, like Intel, and makes a killer console. Publicity skyrockets... everyone wants one. PS3 has horrible public relations... there's problems with assembly... there's problems with Blu-Ray. Nintendo is at an all-time high... NES era, as a matter of fact. Nintendo is setting themselves up to be king of the hill again. What do the Sony fanboys say? "apples and oranges! apples and oranges! you can't compare Nintendo to Sony!"

Why not? Because Nintendo is winning? Right... hypocrasy at it's finest.

This happened with Microsoft, too. The great Interer Browser Wars! Internet Explorer was the browser to use at one time, believe it or not. Then Netscape came up while Microsoft was napping and took a fair share of users. Then Microsoft woke up and said "aah! there's someone competitive here!" and proceeded to bury Netscape Navigator with newer and better versions of Internet Explorer.

Yes, I know, IE isn't so hot now... but it's happening again. IE6 was pretty bad. But then Mozilla Firefox comes out and says "hi, everyone! look here! we can do it better!" and they did. Everyone starts heading to Firefox. Microsoft wakes up and says "uh-oh, more competition!" and then they set around to making IE7, which is still in beta. We all know history loves to repeat itself... did Microsoft recognize the competition and make IE7 to kill Firefox? Maybe. Maybe not. But they did wake up and they ARE fixing bugs that people have complained about for years.

We shall see...

In the meantime, feel free to compare Nintendo to Sony all you want.

We know Wii'll win.

Never begin your sentence with "uh", "uhm", "er", or anything similar.

Example:

User: I just ran a Spybot scan a few days ago so it's up to date.

Support: Uh, no, not necessarily. Scanning doesn't update the definitions. Unless you're saying you got reminded to update them before scanning.

What this conveys is that you consider what you're about to say to be common knowledge, and while that may be the case, it also conveys the message that the person you are correcting is a complete and total moron for suggesting something to contrary. It would be much more respectful and just plain good manners and grammar to simply say: "Not necessarily..."

This isn't necessarily a technical support rule, but a rule you should follow when dealing with anyone, actually. Friends, family, eBay buyers, people who are asking for computer help. It really helps the mood of the conversation when you don't constantly give subtle hints that who you're talking to is an idiot. Unless you're trying to make them feel stupid... then by all means, continue!

This coming from someone who was studying to be computer technical support and is currently an eBay customer support representative.

Have you ever wondered what a ninja thinks about this whole deal with net neutrality? Have you ever wondered what net neutrality even IS? Well, wonder no more... Ask A Ninja has your answers.

Welp... I'm not sure if this weekend was fun or not. I think it was at least refreshing. Well, as refreshing as it can be with little kiddies running amok and Dads NOT WATCHING THEM!! *ahem* I'm waiting for Stargate Atlantis to, erm... be watchable. So I'll recap some stuffs.

iPods are life savers. While everyone was listening to silly little tapes in the van, I was listening to my 133 highest rated music tracks. The silly tapes were supposed to be distraction to keep them from going nuts in the back seat. This proved incorrect, as they started going ballistic about halfway through the road trip. No more silly tapes for them when I'm riding in the same vehicle for more than 2 hours!

Grandma's VCR was broken with a tape still inside. Being the geeky grandson I am, I offered to take a look at it and see what was wrong. Being over 10 years old, the VCR's play/eject motor was just too old to do anything anymore. When I manually ejected the tape, my hand slipped and I found out what it was like to have your finger sliced across ejection gears. Not that I wanted to find out...

Internet access proved impossible on my laptop. Grandparents have MSN dialup... with that funky MSN Explorer 9. No way am I installing that ugly piece of software, so I tried to connect using regular Dial Up Networking. Didn't work. Ever. I tried everything... I looked up tutorials and everything. I think their password changed, but they told me it was the same as last time... so I don't know. Even tried using a password recovery program to see, but that didn't work.

So then I decided to catch up on my movie watching. We'd brought a few movies, so I finally saw Gladiator. I think everyone kept telling me how awesome it was, and I was expecting too much... but it was still good, and I found myself mentally rooting for a couple characters and actually had doubts as to whether or not they'd reach their goals. So, without spoiling, yes... it was a good movie. I bought Stargate Atlantis Season 1 and watched a bunch of those... always fun to watch, Atlantis is.

Went swimming. (Grandparents live on a lake.) It was okay. Not wanting to stay at the beach all day, brother and I drove separately. Which turned out to be nice, in my eyes, since we left after it started to get cloudy. That meant no having to use that cancer-cream sunblock stuff. But then the wind picked up and started blowing creepy, dark clouds in... so we left after about an hour of floating around in the water.

Then Saturday night, I got one of my world-famous stomach aches. Well... famous to me, since I get them. But nobody else really notices (I like to make sure of that) so I guess it's not world-famous. Er... anyway. I've noticed, in the last year or so, that sometimes I'll get some really painful stomach aches after eating certain stuff. I'm not sure exactly what causes it, but at first, it simply feels like I've eaten enough... even though I haven't eaten much, which is usually what gives it away. It usually stays that way until night time, where it then starts progressively getting worse. I don't know if it's like... gas... or cramps... or both... or what... but it eventually makes me sick and... well, yeah. After my stomach's empty again, I start feeling perfectly normal pretty quickly.

Not sure what causes it, yet. It's almost always caused by junk food, mostly flavored chips and various other foods I probably shouldn't be eating anyway. I think what caused it lastnight was some pizza we had for supper. Doesn't really surprise me, I guess, that it's this stuff that causes it... but once, some of the organic corn chips we get caused it, so I'm not sure what it is, exactly. It's not like the precursor to some cold or flu or something... because I'm perfectly fine afterwards.

I thought it might be white bread that does it, too, because sometimes it'll happen with garlic bread... and then with that icky pizza. But we have microwave pizza here at home, and it has never caused it. I don't know... Maybe I should start making a list of stuff I eat on what days, but sometimes I'll go for months without it happening. (...and then it's usually when I go somewhere and don't get good, healthy food like I'm used to.) It's probably something with all those nasty chemicals they dump in foods to make them last for eternity, even when you leave them the car trunk...

Another thing... Grandparents' house has no water! Well, technically, it does, but it's more chlorine with water added to flavor... and, most likely, flouride. Liquid poison that's somehow supposed to be good for the coating your teeth. Yeah... it's good for tooth enamel, but they make us digest the junk for some stupid reason. But anyway... they don't have good water. They have milk (skim), orange juice, and carbonated beverages. Nothing that'll actually quench your thirst. If you drink the water that's available, you'll likely get thirstier the more you drink.

So yeah... kids running amok, cutting hand on broken VCR guts, swimming in the cold wind, getting sick off the pizza (and, consequently, am still hurting, albeit not so much, from the ordeal, as usual, as I just told you, by the way, in a sentence seperated, of course, by many, many commas), dehydrating to the theme of Stargate Atlantis, and then riding back home to the tunes of random sounds that people call "irish music"... I at least got a two-day break from eBay. Tomorrow (or today), of course, will be insane with people going insane over the delay in emailing them about where their junk is, but you know what? They can DEAL WITH IT!

New Stargate Atlantis is watchable now! I'm gonna see that, then sleep!

So... there's a bit of useless trivia for ya'.