Computers, bills, ads: they all suck.

July 12, 2004

It’s absolutely astounding to me when I have computer problems, because I’m so confident of my own computer abilities that I expect to be able to solve nearly any problem. At least to identify it. I was faced with two separate computer problems yesterday and only managed to emerge victorious on one. The first was my sister’s printer that I knew I could make work with enough brute force, but I wasn’t interested in troubleshooting so just gave it a once-over and didn’t bother doing much more on. When my sister came home, she essentially just jiggled the cables, and voila, everything worked just fine.

The second problem was a bit more complex, and it involved flashing my motherboard’s BIOS. There have been two new versions of the BIOS for my particular motherboard since the one I’m using now came out, but I was hesitant to apply them given the trouble I had the last time. I couldn’t remember exactly what it was, just this vague feeling. Probably the same feeling the porr little rat has when presented with the two levers, one that gives him a shock and the other that gives him a peanut.

“Now,” thinks the rat, “I have this awful, bad feeling about the lever on the right…something about pain, suffering, and mind-blowing frustration. I don’t remember why, but my gut’s telling me to press the lever of the left instead.”

I didn’t get the peanut for awhile.

You see, my motherboard has this nasty feature that’s enabled by default where it announces in a faintly feminine computerized voice what the problem with your computer is. Sounds like a great idea, gives you audible feedback, aids in troubleshooting, except that it does so at a full 108 dB through my nice speakers and scares the beejeezus out of me every time it does it. That’s why I normally have it disabled, but when you flash the BIOS, settings tend to get set back to the defaults. I won’t bore you with the details, but as it turns out both the problem I had last night and the one the prevented me from using the previous BIOS revision could have been solved by me actually plugging in my keyboard. Oh it was plugged in already, don’t get me wrong, but it needed to use the other plug on the keyboard in order for it to work properly after the flash. I’m always looking for big things, but I guess I couldn’t really see the forest through the trees. Hmmm…or is that the other way around?

Yesterday I spent much of my day organizing papers and paying bills. Well, it didn’t take me all day, but I did it in shifts. I opened all my mail I’d been putting off opening, filed stuff away that I didn’t immediately need, that sort of thing. I found a letter AT&T sent me recently begging me to sign up with them again for cell phone service, and despite my feelings that AT&T’s customer service department is the worst on the face of the planet and month after month gives me nothing but grief, it’s not worth the effort to transition to another company. They’re offering me an additional 100 anytime minutes per month for the same price, so I’ll be getting 400 anytime minutes and unlimited nights and weekends for $30. Not a bad deal. And since AT&T’s service is shifting over to Cingular starting at the end of the year, maybe I’ll get better service (both customer and cellular) starting then. It’s worth a shot. Plus I like Cingular’s rollover plan where unused minutes one month can be saved until the next month. I could use that. Sometimes I don’t use a lot of minutes, other times I use close to my limit. That’s a nice feature.

There’s a miniseries on USA this week called “The 4400″ that’s sort of like an unauthorized sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, specifically about the people who came back on the spaceship. Well “The 4400″ follows the story of people who mysteriously return to Earth on a comet, some gone for days or week, others for months, years, even decades, but none have aged a day. Sounds interesting to me, it’s getting decent reviews, but I refuse to watch it. Why? Because USA advertised the hell out of it. I mean the horse was dead. If I watched a coupel of episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” one night, I was guaranteed to get at least one commercial for “The 4400″ every commercial break. Sometimes two. Plus I also watch “Monk”. That’s a high-rated show, you bet they had two commercials every break. And they’ve been doing this for a couple of months. Same thing with a miniseries that’s coming out on TNT in a week or so called “The Grid”. They’ve been running commericials for it since before I started working. I was watching TNT a lot before I started working here because I was watching “ER” and “Law & Order” daily, and there was a commercial for “The Grid” on every single break. I kid you not. So now, in their infinite wisdom to shove the ads down our throat, I refuse to watch both miniseries, no matter how good they might be. I won’t support something that advertises that heavily. I suspect I’m not alone in this, either.

Reading through the comment thread on Fark.com about an article that I submitted that you can read here, I saw many similar sentiments. I don’t think that advertisers are going to learn anytime soon. It’s one of those things where they think that by throwing more ad money at something, more people will go see it. One of the primary rules of Economics, however, is the rule of diminishing returns: the more you do something, the less you get out of it after awhile. So while there’s a huge difference between a $1 advertising budget and a $1 million advertising budget, between $400 million and $401 million there won’t be nearly as great an increase. In fact, advertisers just don’t seem to understand about market saturation of ads. Many radio stations have dropped down to only 35-40 minutes of music every hour now. Wow. Maybe ten songs in an hour.

My web browser, Mozilla Firefox has a plugin that allows you to block ads from sites in different ways, and so much of my web browsing time is happily done ad-free, but I still have to put up with ads elsewhere. Oh for a TiVo to get rid of TV ads.

By the way, donations to the “Buy Andrew a Tivo” charity can be made on this site.

It’s mostly just those two miniseries that I object to right now. Once late July rolls around and both are done, I’ll be much happier. Even if a new ad campaign for another duo of miniseries starts up, I’ll be OK for awhile because I won’t be sick of them…yet. It’ll happen, though. Mark my words.

My boss is now back in town, so we’re all back in work mode around the office. Our projects will definitely go a lot more smoothly, becase even though those of us working on various projects are definitely able enough to do what we need to do, we’re never really sure what our boss wants us to do until he explicitly tells us. But at least that means I’ll have more to do.

My plan for this week includes finally getting AT&T to change my mailing address after four months of trying, finally getting them to sign me up with automatic payments after two months of trying, and seeing if my dealership will fix my alarm after two months of struggling with it. In other words, it’s a week of doing things I should have done long ago. In many ways, I think that’s how I lead my life anyway. But that’s another story. Ciao.

Posted in Geekery, General