Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.

[Spectere]

The two month old hard drive in my laptop is failing.  Oh joy.

Better yet, I can't afford the cost of advance replacement, and hard drive manufacturers are so damned anal about the packaging that you use for RMAs most of the time that I pretty much have to use what they give me.  Not to mention that they almost always give you a refurbished drive instead of giving you a proper replacement.

Yeah, I have a feeling this is going to be a pain in the dick.

Oh well.  On the bright side, it was just a S.M.A.R.T. alert, albeit a fairly important one.  At least I didn't lose any data...yet.

[Bobbias]

I wonder how long it'll last now...

[Spectere]

I actually had one RMA replacement that I did through work where the replacement was dead out of the box.  I think it was a Seagate.

I do plan to run this through a nice drive test before committing any of my data to it.  I actually did that to the drive that's in the lappy now, so it was just early failure in this case.  This is only the first or second time that's happened to me in years and years, so I can't complain much, I guess.

[Bobbias]

Yeah, but drive failure always sucks. Replacing a drive is money that could easily have been put to use somewhere else.

[Spectere]

Nah, it's not going to cost anything.  Western Digital covers their drives for five years against failures like this.  It doesn't really cost anything for the advanced replacement, but they do put a hold for the value of the drive on a charge account just in case you don't send the old drive back.

Fortunately, my dad was kind enough to let me borrow his credit card, so I should be sorted within a week.

[Bobbias]

Oh, that's cool, I've never gone through the replacement stuff for a drive before.

[MortifiedocAlot]

Was supposed to be at class, but I fell asleep sometime at 9 in the morning and evidently turned off my alarm half asleep and continued sleeping until 4.

[Bobbias]

Was supposed to be at class, but I fell asleep sometime at 9 in the morning and evidently turned off my alarm half asleep and continued sleeping until 4.

That's never good :/ I've done stuff like that before too. Never slept in that late though.

[Spectere]

What makes me angry?  AT&T buying T-Mobile.  To quote Mr. Horse, "No sir, I don't like it."

Hmm, let me count the ways.  First of all, I rather enjoy having stable service, almost zero dropped calls after spending the better half of a decade with their service, blistering fast data (faster than my DSL connection which, amusingly enough, is provided by AT&T...and we're planning to dump it because after AT&T bought SBC it turned into an increasingly unreliable piece of fucking garbage), amazing customer support, and extremely affordable plans.  AT&T literally offers none of that.  Not a single fucking thing that I listed is offered by AT&T.  That's not speculation nor is it heresay; my work phone is on AT&T's network, and I've experienced no shortage of data stalls and dropped calls.  A quick glance on their web site shows that their high prices are rivaled only by Verizon, and the experiences that my boss and I had with their customer "support" shows that they don't give a flying fuck about their customers.  To add to that: AT&T happily outsources.  I have yet to encounter a Canadian accent when calling T-Mobile.  About the only thing that AT&T had T-Mobile clearly beat on is North American 3G coverage, and AT&T's service actually becomes increasingly reliable the further away you go from a populated area.

The higher-ups at AT&T also gleefully stated that T-Mobile users will have to buy a new phone to use AT&T's "network."  On the bright side, he admitted that the changeover would take several years, implying that T-Mobile's frequencies would stay active (though he did not say to which degree that they would -- expect a vitriol-laced rant if my phone suddenly won't connect to anything but EDGE).  Gee, thanks.  I just bought a fucking phone and I'm actually happy with it, you miserable twat; I don't want to already have to consider my next upgrade!

Fuck AT&T.

[Bobbias]

The moment I heard about that online, I absolutely knew there was gonna be an angry rant showing up here sooner or later. I don't even live in the states and I know about that. Then again, being canadian, we have no shortage of complaints about our cellular service (as in, everything is fucking expensive, there are huge swaths of the country which have absolutely NO reception, even in fairly populated areas, bell's customer service is rather pathetic, and rogers fucks up everyone's billing every single time...), but I can certainly understand when something is a bad idea, and that merger is definitely one of those.

[Spectere]

Oh man, I've heard horror stories about both Bell and Rogers.  You guys have my sincerest condolences.

The best part about the T-Mo buyout is AT&T's reasoning behind it: T-Mobile has the strongest 4G LTE network in the states and AT&T doesn't feel like putting their own 4G network together.  Kinda like how their voice and data is still crippled by rabid iPhone users, almost four years after the handset's release.  All they're going to do is take a great network and let it devolve into pure shit.

The exact same thing happened when they bought out SBC.  DSL service in my area used to kick ass.  It stayed consistently good, the speeds were nice, they delivered rates close to the ones that you were paying for (which tends to be a big problem with DSL due to how it works), and their uptimes were amazing.  Now, I'm getting a 1 Mbps deviation between the actual downstream speed and what we're paying for, 256 kbps deviation on upstream, and higher latencies.  One night, the network was running so poorly that WoW was unplayable.  And you know as well as I how little bandwidth games use.  128 kbps downstream is generally more than enough as long as your latency is okay.

Jumping briefly back to T-Mobile, I'm not joking when I say that it's a viable broadband replacement in areas with good 3G reception.  I tethered my phone and managed to get over 6 Mbps down (which is faster than my DSL's theoretical maximum speed), 512 kbps up, and was able to play WoW (not just play, but tank effectively), watch streaming videos, and chat on Skype at the same time.  That's incredible.

[MortifiedocAlot]

People who cannot argue properly, and believe that throwing lines of insults at you is a proper way for them to defend something.

Also the pedophile hunt that has been going on for a while, and he been perpetrated by shows like LAw and Order SVU. It just makes people assume the worst of others and makes them that much more likely to toss labels on people who are completely innocent.

[annon]

...Which can discourage people from doing genuinely nice things because they think other people will assume they've got ulterior motives. Shit really sucks. Yeah, there are pedophiles, but they're a small minority of people.

[MortifiedocAlot]

That's a part of it, but once an innocent person gets the label of Pedophile they are basically fucked. It's basically irremovable and people are willing to toss it at anyone with reckless regard.

When people insist they are right despite having no knowledge of what they are talking about. I cannot tell you how many times I've said a CSS server had a lot of choke, only to get "BUY A BETTER CONNECTION" as a response (basically every sing time I mention it, also because everyone knows CSS has amazing hitboxes).

Also when I think about/about to do something and then I instantly cannot remember what it was I was doing/thinking. Drives me mad.

[Spectere]

I cannot tell you how many times I've said a CSS server had a lot of choke, only to get "BUY A BETTER CONNECTION" as a response (basically every sing time I mention it, also because everyone knows CSS has amazing hitboxes).

I especially love that, because modern games don't even come close to utilizing a modern broadband connection.  You can have the lowest tier DSL plan and the only way it's going to affect you is if you were to try and run a server.

But no, try telling people that bandwidth doesn't result in lower latency in and of itself and they try to use their computer "knowledge" (which generally consists of knowing how to log in) on you.