Fuck Charter

So I come home to no Internet and a very weird orange blinking light on my cable modem. After speaking with India on 2 calls, I wandered outside to see if something was up with that junction box where the coaxial cables go into. Low and behold there is a tag on my doorknob that said that there was some audit and some asshole Charter tech came by and shut off my service because he was under the impression that I was getting TV service unpaid. Well...I've never had Charter TV service, only Internet so I don't know what gave them that idea. I then had to call India back again and yell at one bitch so that she could transfer me to her manager who had some accent from somewhere but spoke English well enough. I explained the issue to him and yeah now I get to waste tomorrow's lunchtime to come back home and camp out to make sure the Charter tech fuck can set my shit back up. I really don't know how some people have self control when they find out about these things because I am quite sure that if there was a Charter tech somewhere in the vicinity, there would've been an altercation involving sticks, rocks, and his car. Either way...fuck Charter...fuck them to hell and back...but I'm not going to downgrade to DSL or Clearwire either so yeah...no choice right?

Update: So a tech arrived on time today and was very cool in setting me back up. He stated that there was a roaming band of audit peeps who screw with peoples' connections all the time. Sometimes they grab baddies who are stealing cable but other times, like in my situation, they fuck over paying customers. Either way I'm more calm now that I'm using real Internet and not some slow-ass USB Verizon data card that I had to borrow from work last night...

Predators (Action 2010)

Although some may disagree, I got to say that this wasn't a half-bad Predator movie. It was hella better than Aliens vs Predator - Requiem, that's for damn sure.

The movie was a lot like the original movie, and while some peeps might be hawking about that, I thought it was a nice compliment to the series of sorts. Action was good, guns were good, story was fair, and yeah what's not to like? Adrien Brody was an interesting lead...not the best choice but not too bad either. He had that same odd, deep voice that Christian Bale had in The Dark Knight, so that seemed artificial but other than that nothing to complain about. It's definitely worth a rent.

Rating - B

Lebanon (War Drama 2009)

What is up with all these shitty movies lately? I think I've had 3 or 4 in a row now. This movie adds to the crap pile. It all takes place within an Israeli tank during some war in the early 80s. From the drama shown all I could make out was that: war sucks, collateral damage is high against the local population, some soldiers are pussies, sometimes you got to fight for yourself to save your own life instead of following orders.

Yeah other than those few things I don't really know what the purpose of this film was. I've seen much better war dramas in my day; foreign ones too.
Rating - D

Windows 7

So after having a few months to mess around with this OS at work, I'd have to say that Microsoft actually pulled through with this product. After this dismal failure of Vista it was hard to see that they could recover, but they did. Unfortunately the new file structure of Vista is also apparent in 7. I still don't like it but it seems as though nothing can be done about that.

Pros

The good parts are that x64 version + 4GB of memory + a good video card = a great gaming experience. DX10 is pretty nice even though I barely game anymore. The OS seems more responsive. Even with a sick machine with XP SP3 there would be places that were still slow even though there was no reason why it should be. Deleting recently opened items via the start menu is one case and point. 7 also has a snipping program that totally does what this program called Snag-It does. It allows you to highlight an area and make it into a jpg. It also has a better version of Paint where you can do everything you really need to like lower res, rotate, select & crop, etc. Those two programs were like extra bonuses.

Cons

It is much harder to pir@te it. I guess these days it's probably more cost-efficient to just get a laptop with 7 on it, but for system builders it is certainly a downer. There were 2 programs out there that removed the whole authentication portion of 7 but of course MS caught up with it and the notifications of activation kept on appearing and spitting out errors. I'm not sure what patch caused this but it was not the service pack. Another downer is hijackthis does not work properly on it. That or spyware and viruses use a different avenue to install itself. I haven't had to fix a system with 7 that has been compromised yet but yeah...some dumbass will figure out a way to get their laptop hosed.

If you get a Dell laptop, OS installations are pie since the OEM license is integrated and the media only looks to see if the BIOS is a Dell one. Bad thing is that I haven't seen a model that has an equivalently kick-ass keyboard as a Lenovo T-series. Yeah even though I still like my current Asus lappy, the keyboard still annoys me to death. That is why I'm typing on an external at the moment.

So yeah...7 is good to go. It'll definitely be mass replacing XP soon enough. I haven't run into any compatibility or stability issues at all and in a Domain network environment it humms along just fine. It will be annoying to go through the Firewall and all of the new security to figure out a definite approach to disabling all of that and sharing files but yeah I'm sure we all have a good number of years before MS decides to pull another flagship changer on us.

Eclipse (Drama 2010)

Well this one went downhill; not the it ever began uphill either though... Yeah this movie was odd it had a bunch of misplaced scenes where the vamp guy was all talking about love and marriage and not fucking prior to getting married and such. It was very out of place...but the worst part of it all was that it wan't just one scene with this crappy dialog in it...I counted at least three. Very odd.

The whole fight scene that they showed in the trailers was quite anticlimactic, as was the story. If this series ever had a head start on anything, they sure as hell lost it with this one. The only welcoming thing was that the audience wasn't forced to watch Kristen Stewart standing there with her mouth half-open.

Rating - D

Robin Hood (War Drama 2010)

Yeah how about no. This movie started out with a nice Gladiator feel to it...in that everything was dark and muddy in terms of scenery. After a bit longer it kept on feeling as if I saw this before. Even though I can't say that it was a copy of another film, it definitely brought nothing new to the table at all.

In all honesty it was a very boring flick. Story-wise they had enough of a plot but I dunno...perhaps it was the pace that everything flowed which was way too slow. I almost fell asleep, seriously.

Rating - D

Salt (Action 2010)

This movie wasn't half bad for an action flick. You only really had one character throughout the whole thing, Jolie; but even with that, it didn't seem to be too mundane.

Yeah this movie was all about moving action. There wasn't a lot of dialog, it had some plot, and little by little more about the main character's past came to light. I thought it was a decent ride.

Rating - B

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Action 2010)

Well this movie was "as expected". It has all the traits of a Disney action movie which equals pretty ass acting, lots of special effects, a quick plot, and a chick.

I'm sure I'm not the first to say that Gyllenhaal was totally the wrong guy for the job. He's white, he's white, oh yeah..and he's white. The setting and story was supposed to be in Persia so that just added to the odd placement of our main actor. He also had this horrible British accent which further pushed the believability off a cliff.

The story was very quick and I barely got to know any of the other characters other than Gyllenhaal and the main chick, Gemma Arterton. She was ok but yeah...nothing great in terms of acting. Not the prettiest girl either.

I'm glad I didn't pay money for this, so let's just leave it at that.

Rating - C