Jared’s Blog

I make a lot of purchases online so I know the difference between a good experience and a bad one. One may argue regardless of your online buying experience, you’d still know the difference.

Exhibit A: I go to Victory Records‘ webstore to buy a t-shirt and a zip up hoodie. My order was placed on Nov 25th really late (or early, like 3AM) at night. I expected to get a confirmation email right away. I didn’t see one within a few minutes so I just figured it’d show up the next day. Turns out it was in my spam folder, no big deal. My order was still in place.

Now normally at online retailors they make you sign up for an account with the place which I find to be kind of lame. I understand why though so it usually doesn’t bother me too much. The plus side is they usually have a way to track your order through processing and to find out a tracking number on shipping too. Victory has neither.

A few days later, Nov 29th to be exact, I recieved an email saying because my items were out of stock, my order was cancelled. OK, so they’re out. It is the holiday season and I bet people are ordering as gifts. I checked the site anyway and I found both items in the sizes that I ordered to be in stock.

Thankfully there have been no charges to my credit card as indicated by the email. I’m glad for that as disputing charges can be a real pain from what I hear. I decided not to place an order again since I will be seeing Between the Buried and Me tonight and I’ll likely be able to buy what I was looking for there. At least I didn’t end up like this guy

“I will make sure you will never be able to place an order on the internet again.” “I’m an attorney, I will sue you.” “I’m going to call your local police and have two officers come over and arrest you.” Just a few of the fun things I got to hear today from someone who said his name was Steve Phillips over at PriceRitePhoto.
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Let me first preface this by saying I had a nice long blog entry written up and accidentally closed the tab in Firefox. My bad, maybe Wordpress should implement an auto-save like Gmail’s. So if this is a little short, that’s why

Listening to one of my favorite podcasts, TWIT an interesting topic came up. With the proliferation of (insert your favorite lossy codec here: MP3, AAC, Ogg, WMA, etc.) are we becoming less concerned with audio quality?

In the opinions of the TWIT’s, yes. I would agree with them. Thinking about my own habits, I realized I listen almost exclusively to music that was compressed with a lossy codec. The only instance I don’t is when I’m in my car and I pop in a CD’s I’ve bought. What I do most often is burn an MP3 data CD because my CD deck in my car supports them. It gives me more of a jukebox feel like having my entire collection at home in QCD player. It’s nice not to have to switch CD’s so often. Hopefully after the holidays, I’ll have my iPod box to connect my iPod to my car and I won’t need CD’s at all.

It’s an ironic situation because since college, I’ve been becoming more and more of an audiophile. Over the last year or so I’ve purchased premium studio headphones, 5.1 surround speakers for my computer, a good quality sound card to support the surround sound, and a CD deck for my car. I’ve got plans and wishes to buy some nicer earbuds for my iPod too.

I would say my generation is responsible for starting this trend as we were some of the early adopters of the MP3 format. Someone just a few years younger, such as my 13 year old sister would listen to this format of music exclusivly if it was available to her. Right now obviously she doesn’t have the buying power to purchase songs from the iTunes music store, but she would if she could. I remember at her age recording songs from MTV or the radio on my tape deck. I’d take that walkman with $5 headphones and bounce along to my music. I didn’t really care all that much how good it sounded and I’m sure that’s the attitude she has right now. As I got older, my tastes changed probably most due to my purchasing power.

I realized while typing this that I’m actually more lenient than I had once been when it comes to downloading music samples online. A lot of times I’ll grab some 128kbps files from MySpace or Purevolume and be OK with the quality listening to it on my computer, on my iPod, or in my car. I’m not sure why. I think it has to do with encoders getting better. It used to be MP3’s encoded at 128kbps or lower sounded terrible. They were tinny and washed out; it sounds like the cymbols are trash can lids and it was recorded underwater.

The scary thing, as Patrick Norton mentioned, is that a lot of artists record with this in mind. Instead of mixing the audio to sound best on high end equipment, they’re limiting it closer to ranges that work best with lossy audio compression. That’s just wrong. If I go buy a CD, I want the best audio I can get. I’ll compress it however I want. With better recording technology, you’d think things would move the other way towards more clarity. This whole idea is an interesting one and I’ll be curious to see where it ends up.

An email from my grandma spurred this post. I’ll post part of the email as reference. Some things to consider are my grandma lives in Ocean Springs, MS which is just east of Biloxi. If you had watched the news coverage about this back in August and Septemeber, you know these were some of the worst hit areas. The second thing is my grandma’s house is on a hill. She only had minimal damage to her house and yard. Most of her fence blew down and some shingles on her roof blew off. The only other casualty was her fridge which she had to replace because she wasn’t expecting to be gone for 3 weeks.

The situation down here is terrible. Your grandmother was indeed blessed. There are tons, and I mean tons of people without homes. In the first place FEMA and the insurance companies cannot make up their mind about where people should live. If you rebuild or reconstruct where you were living, they will not give you a dime and probably won’t insure you, until they decide what the flood level is, etc. So people are out of work as this applies to businesses also. Their kids have to go to school. Very few have the RV’s that FEMA furnished and the people who were lucky enough to stay in a hotel or motel have to be out by Dec, 1. Consequently people have either permanently relocated, are living in shelters, in tents(has been 35 degrees at night),or with family and friends. The roads are a mess.Ocean Springs was very lucky compared to the other communities. It is unbelievable! The storm surge came in at 35 feet and did massive damage. What really saved my house was the “hill”.

Believe me, this is one Thanksgiving I am very thankful!

It seems that the nation, including myself, has completely forgotten about these people. I guess I just figured that they’d rebuild and life would go on. Apparently not so for some. The same insurance companies who were all proud of having agents on the scene and being so helpful are the ones who are the problem now.

I wonder why it is taking them so long to figure out this “flood level.” I don’t know if they are talking about a future level or if they are talking about where the water actually reached. I could see them saying we won’t insure you if you build your home below a certain elevation. On one hand, this makes sense. You wouldn’t go build a house in the middle of a lake (all building restrictions aside). But this is different. I’d be willing to bet most of the people didn’t choose where the house was, they moved into it. They just moved in. I’m sure the last thing they were thinking was, “Boy, if a hurricane came through here, we won’t be able to rebuild.”

Now you might say these people can move on and build elsewhere. Well what if you have kids who go to school. Maybe you can’t find anywhere to build in the same school district and now your kid has to change schools. I’m guessing the land in these areas is devalued now so even selling it you aren’t going to get much. In that case, people rely on insurance to help them out. As my grandma said, this applies to businesses as well so many are unemployed.

I could go on for quite awhile about all the bad situations this puts people in, but I’ll hold my tounge (or fingers in this case). I plead with insurance companies to just get through the red tape and bullshit and help people out. It’s not about the $$$ all the time.

For some reason I never grew out of liking snow. When you’re a kid, you think snow is the coolest. You can do all kinds of fun things you couldn’t normally do. You can build things out of snow. Like snowmen. No matter how much I rolled a ball of snow around it was never big enough for a snowman. I always felt like I should make mine bigger. It always got too heavy for me to lift.

Another thing you can do with snow is have a snowball fight. We’d build forts on opposite ends of the yard and try to nail each other. It really doesn’t matter how many times you hit each other. The fun part is just throwing it.

Then there’s snow forts. One year my friend and I started building a mini ski hill in my back yard on top of the picnic table. It worked great and after awhile we got bored and hollowed it out under the picnic table. It was a sweet fort.

Sledding appeals to me even to this day. There’s nothing better than sliding down a hill as fast as you can. I guess I always was a speed addict.

For those who don’t know I was a ski racer in high school. I think a big part of why I enjoyed snow is because it brings back memories of skiing. In my earlier years it was just weekends goofing around away from home. When I got older, I got more serious and raced. 5 days a week I would be on the hill skiing or practicing. Saturday practices were awesome because we could go out for practice in the morning and spend the rest of the day there.

Over the last few days I’ve watched 3 movies now. Saturday afternoon I popped in Donnie Darko (the Director’s Cut). It was just as good as I remembered. What I forgot was the music. They use all this cheesy 80’s music since it’s set in the 80’s. It’s been ages since I originally watched Donnie Darko, so I couldn’t tell you what’s new in the director’s cut and I didn’t bother to watch any of the extras

Sunday the roommate, Laura, sat me down to watch the new version of Amityville Horror. Can’t say I liked it. It wasn’t really scary except for the really-quiet-then-all-of-a-sudden-something-makes-a-loud-noise gimmick. That and I kept thinking to myself, “That’s Van Wilder.” I think the only reason I’d want to see the old school version would be to see if it’s actually scary.

Last on the list was Ong-bak. This one sorta just dropped on me too. Hank got it on Netflix and I had nothing better to do while I ate dinner tonight. I wasn’t really enthused about it at first. I figured it’d pretty much be another Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It wasn’t. The fighting was really sweet. One of the main characters, Ting, had this crazy style. He’d come in like he was going to kick and then throw a punch or an elbow at the last second. He used his knees a lot too. It was really acrobatic, kind of like Jackie Chan’s style, but not as corny. This guy kicked some ass. Some of the fighting and action stuff was just overdone. I prefer this type of movie to be more believable. At one point Ting fights this burly dude named “Mad Dog.” He was throwing chairs and tables at him like they weighed nothing and Ting was pulverizing them by blocking with only his arm and leg. The physics where a little off too. Stuff like that just makes me groan. I forget that I should be watching an actual fight scene and remember I’m only watching actors.

How’s the saying go? “Two out of three ain’t bad?”

I use Trillian for my messenger client. It’s great because I don’t have to have 4 different messenging programs installed and running on my computer at the same time. I really do recommend trying out some kind of multi-IM client if you’re on more than 1 service which I’d guess 95% of people are. Hell, I didn’t even use Yahoo’s messanger before getting Trillian because I didn’t want a 3rd IM app running next to MSN and AIM. It was just too much. But if they’re all integrated, why not.

My problem is that I’m not always on the same computer. I go to work, sometimes I use my laptop, while most of the time I’m at home. But all these IM services have online contact lists right? Problem solved. Wrong! When you delete a contact from Trillian at home it’s all fine and dandy, but it doesn’t send any message to my IM service to remove that person from my list. I think it just hides them from me or something. When I log in at work I usually am not messing around with my list (for a couple of reasons I’ll leave out). I come home to find any clearing out of contacts I’d previously done to be wiped out. What happens is my work instance of Trillian knows nothing of my now updated list and goes along like it always had.

I suppose this is considered a “feature” so you don’t ever have to worry about missing any contacts. I find it annoying. Sorry to the people I delete, but if I don’t EVER talk to you, what’s the point of having you on my list.

P.S. I realized while typing this “Life” sucks as a category as it can pertain to anything. I was just lazy when I moved to Wordpress and didn’t feel like making a bunch of categories to retrocategorize (new word?) my blog. Since then I’ve made a number of groups which seem to sort things out sufficiently. Until I get unlazy and make some other groups, I’ll just have to deal. As will you: faithful reader. Goodbye.