Judging from the latest entry on Valve’s RSS feed, it looks as if their upcoming surprise will be a standard deathmatch mode. Even the image is named “HL2DM”. Sweet.
Update: And it’s out! I hope they get their friends network up and running (in a stable fashion) soon now. Bitch bitch bitch, right?
So comment spam sucks. Really bad. And it’s getting so bad lately, that there’s two possible things I can do - force people to register (bad), or just plain block all URLs from being posted in a comment (less bad). Robin came up with the latter idea (at least he’s the first guy I know to suggest it) so it’s now implemented; no more URLs in any of the comments, and no more URL field in the comment form. I hope it works.
Green Room, Sunday anyone? Matt and I are in, so if it’s only him and I then it’ll just be a romantic dinner for two. So come on people, come and vanquish the social awkwardness. You know who you are.
I couldn’t resist stealing this image (from LiquidGrey) and posting it:
A big happy birthday goes out to my wife today! Can’t wait till you visit next month :-)
I got Half Life 2, after pounding away at the Steam servers for over an hour to “authenticate” the game. Which is doubly frustrating considering that it’s a single player game. In that time I cursed Valve and vowed to take vengence upon them. But once the game finally unlocked, I took it all back. So far (at least, a few hours into it) it totally lives up to and surpasses the hype in some ways. The physics-based gameplay is absolutely incredible. I’ll post more someday when I take a break from it.
And it’s absolutely gorgeous. That image is a compressed JPEG, but it’s just stunning to behold. Good job Valve. Now fix Steam and everything will be alright.
The nightmare with Bell Mobility continues. Jesus Christ. So after using my phone for about a month in Toronto, I still get no invoices or bills - either in the mail or electronically through the Royal Bank billing service. So I’ve been calling my wife, who lives in Japan, from my cell phone to hers quite a bit. I was a little scared about the bill and rates, so I call the Bell Mobility customer care center. Apparently, my current bill - even with lots of calls to a Japan mobile phone - is only $68. That’s a little strange, right? Oh, and the call center hung up three times on me in the middle of speaking with reps. Very nice. The best part was the introduction “voice message from the President” explaining how the problems are now resolved.
So now the second nightmare begins. I originally got this phone from work, from a guy there that used it first. I started paying the bills, replaced the handset itself, and transferred the ownership to myself. So I’ve been paying for this account for about four years now, and it probably amounts to on average about $200 a month.
Anyways…. The customer care dude says to me oh - there’s something wrong here. This phone is not registered to you - and then proceeds to read me the information about the first owner of the phone. What. The. Fuck. So then he says he can’t change that - and since they’re having problems, don’t pay anything and call back in a few weeks.
That was last week. Today, my phone stopped working - probably a network issue - when I happened to be in front of the Bell store at Yonge and Eglinton. I freak out and walk into the store, and freak out on the staff there. I pointed out several times that I knew they were not responsible for these horrible problems, but that this was the last straw and I wanted to cancel my account after not having an invoice for almost half a year, and not being considered the “owner” of the phone - even though I’m obligated to pay the bills.
So what do these jerks tell me? Well, because I’m not the registered owner of the phone, I can’t cancel the account. I’m not even kidding. And my parents have been trying to cancel their account for months.
The best part of the whole affair is the Bell Mobility advertisements on the TTC. The byline is something like, “Come to where the happiest mobile customers are.” That’s just great.
I did manage to get a supposed “back door” number to customer service - 1(888) 457-7308. No idea if it works, since nobody anywhere at Bell will talk to me since I’m not the “owner” of my phone. Now I don’t really know what to do; I’m obviously not technically responsible for anything that happens on or to the phone, and they obviously can’t even track my usage. Usually I’m a fairly moral person and would not screw Bell Mobility out of their money - but what the hell do I do? I can’t cancel it, even though they can fuck my credit rating for not paying. Very nice.
Update: The CBC has an article about the problems.
Update Number 2: See my latest tale of being screwed here.
So I just made it through the first day of my new job; it went quite well. Salesdriver seems to have a really good environment to work with, and there’s a ton of technologies involved that I’ve wanted to dig my hands into for quite some time. Good stuff!
