Rants & Such On The Sheedy Matrix
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Well folks, wonder of wonders, today's post isn't a rant. Its actually major kudos to a company to which I've always been loyal. Today, dear friends, that loyalty was rewarded and deeply re-affirmed. The company of which I speak is Creative Labs, makers of the SoundBlaster. I started on my path of corporate worship in my early years, realizing it was too much of a pain to try to emulate a SoundBlaster in dos games when you could just get the card and it would work. Back then games pretty much only worked 100% of the time on a SoundBlaster card. Well a week or so ago I got a hankerin' for nostalgia and decided to assemble my random collection of archaic computer parts into a vintage gaming machine. The most prized of these random parts (and by far the most important) was my SoundBlaster 16 card (circa 1994). I was worried about being able to procure some retro dos/win95 drivers for this puppy. On a whim I went to Creative's site and shockingly they have drivers for every card they ever made. Including my precious SB-16. This is a shinning example of product support. If its their product they support it, no matter how unlikely the need for that support will be. It's sad to think that this is not anywhere close to the standard. Not only did they have the driver, but they also hosted it on their site and downloading it was an experience somewhat akin to nirvana. Thank you Creative Labs. Thank you... I'm gunna cry... I need a minute... Its just too beautiful...
Monday, April 12, 2004
What is it with chain mail emails? Whats the draw? Why do you feel the need to send it to me? I for one am slightly too intelligent to believe that forwarding anything anywhere will result in anything but pissed friends and a slight bandwidth draw on the inter-web. Look people I know you can't all be that stupid. In fact some of the people sending them to me are friends of mine. Good friends. Who I know are capable of cognitive thought. First of all you will not:
or
by forwarding an email. Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING will result from forwarding this garbage. If you need more than my infallible word on this then visit this site. I Just don't get it. I've never forwarded anything like that. EVER. And another thing, you people and your "send to all" button. Knock it off. Sometimes your crappy messages don't apply to everyone in your address book! And if I get another email yelling at me about something I don't do... Those emails that have ">>>" all over the place in them are an insult. Honestly am I not worth the 3.5 seconds it takes to pull that email into wordpad and do a find/replace on the ">" character?? ugh, I need to count to 3...
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Well here we go. Lets get started with some good ole fashioned rage. What is up with downloads these days!? 5-7 years ago there was a link on the site that said "download" and that's exactly what it did. The next screen you saw was the "open or save as" dialog box. Nowadays you'll have to pick from a rediculus number of mirror sites as if it actually is really worth the time you spend looking for the closest mirror when you downloading a 1MB file. Even worse way over half of the mirrors are sites that want your personal information before letting you have a file that, in the case of a game patch, you have a right to anyhow. Why do they need me to register? What possible good could that do me? I'll give you a lil' hint....NONE! ABSOLUTELY NONE! ZIP! ZILCH! The only thing they could do with that info is spam the hell out of me. Some sites go a step worse. That right, it gets worse. They force you to download their piece of crap download manager to get the "secure download". WTF? Why do I need a "secure download" for a publicly available file? I don't want your crap I just want the file you have that the makers of the game should be hosting themselves! Its called:
"<a href="www.site.com/dir/filename.ext">download</a>".
That's how you do it! You hear that Blizzard!!! That's how you do it! AGH! I gotta count to 3 now....
