Countdown to Rogers-Liberation Day!

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I am abso-freaking-lutely sick and tired of Rogers (I’ve been accumulating an article detailing their problems for a while now, and it has grown quite massive). They are quite literally, and provably the worst provider in the world! They continually raise their prices every single, bloody month, and constantly cut and reduce the service. On top of that, their customer service is horrendous (the have absolutely no respect for customers who they feel are not always right; quite the contrary, they believe the customer is always wrong). And to add insult to injury, they constantly make mistakes and frequently add fraudulent charges to the bill, and their web site never works so that you cannot even check your account.

Rogers is trash, plain and simple. They are worthless and completely useless. We are leaving Rogers.

The problem is that there is almost zero choice in Canada. While there are a few mobile-phone providers, there are next to no TV/Internet/landline providers in the country, and the selection gets even worse if you don’t live in one of the larger metropolitan cities. As such, there is no competition (which is what allows Rogers to continue their abusive rape of customers).

I have heard plenty of bad things about Bell, but at this point, the abuse we have received from Rogers has been so egregious, that we can’t help but welcome abuse from someone else because they simply cannot be as bad as Rogers.

Unfortunately, Bell cannot provide us with cable television. We have to use satellite which means no choice but to go digital. Digital television is just awful and replete with downsides as compared to analog. I intend to write an article expounding on this later, but leaving Rogers leaves us with no choice but to switch to digital television.

Fortunately, Bell has been installing FTTH in our area this summer. They say that it should be ready by the fall, so once it is done, we will dump Rogers like the syphilitic whore it is and switch to Bell Fibe TV. It will be only slightly cheaper, but will provide a lot better service.

As for Internet and home-phone, we will not be going with Bell, they are just too expensive for no reason. Instead, we will be using Teksavvy because they offer a home phone with a free calling feature (Rogers offers none) for less than half the price. They also offer a fast Internet connection with 5x the monthly bandwidth cap that Rogers does, but for less money. In addition, they don’t even count bandwidth during the night; that’s unlimited!

We would have to be stark raving mad to stay with Rogers even one second longer than necessary. In fact, we should have dumped them a long time ago, but there is just no choice or selection here.

The only concern is that Rogers might (read probably will) try to hit us with an early cancellation fee because the two or three-year contract we made for a bundle package with them over the phone has not expired yet. This is not really a concern though because they can take their contract and shove deep in the bowels of their hellish nether regions. They have absolutely no legal grounds to sue us over breach of contract. First of all, they cannot produce a contract because it was over the phone and even if they do actually record the phone calls, they can’t produce anything because they cannot keep their “crap” straight, hence the constant errors in the bills. I highly doubt that their phone records are proper and consistent enough for them to be able to pull a specific call from a couple of years ago. More importantly, they breached the contract first. We made a deal over the phone that we would pay a specific price for a specific level of service for a specific price. That is a contract. However they have on countless occasions raised the price and reduced the service. That is a breach. We are by no means obligated to continue to honor the contract after they have voided it. If anything, we should be able to sue Rogers for breach of contract (and anyone who is in a similar position and has the legal resources to do so should). We don’t mind if Rogers takes us to small-claims court to sue over early cancellation; they most definitely won’t win. Therefore, the only real concern is that they might file some complaint with credit agencies to hurt our credit rating. Of course if they do that, we will take them to court, sue them for damages and have the credit reverted. It would be a slightly inconvenient, but would also be an interesting experience (hey, it might even be easy enough that we can sue the other people who have wronged us but ignored because suing seemed like a big deal).

So here we are. We are now counting down to when we can leave Rogers once and for all. Of course even when we are finally Rogers-free, I suspect that we will continue to see their damn commercials and ads all over the place. They are inescapable. Canadians really need to stand up and start an “Arab Spring” against providers here to take down Rogers and force the creation of competition and good, proper, fair telecommunications providers.

Donkey Kong 64

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Abstract

I don’t usually write reviews—though my strong opinions and OCD really compel me to do so more often—but I feel like Donkey Kong 64 really needs one.

Donkey Kong 64 is the main Donkey Kong game for the Nintendo 64 and follows the SNES line of Donkey Kong Country games, albeit in 3D. It’s a pretty good game, but it has it’s issues.

Pros

DK64 has some really good parts:

  • A lot of gameplay.

    DK64 has a lot of gameplay in various ways. Unlike some games, you definitely feel like you get your money’s worth. It has the main storyline with the overarching theme (beat K.Rool by running around and reaching goals), but it also has quite a lot of other sub-goals and mini-games. There’s also a lot of stuff to collect, weapons to use, and places to explore as well as different characters along with their special abilities, and even two animals to play as. If you are a 100%-gamer, there is definitely a lot of game available. You definitely do not feel ripped off with this game. (Actually, while I thought it would take a really long time to play through, I was surprised to achieve—near—100% in just two weeks, totaling ~65 hours of in-game time. Of course by then, I was already tired of it anyway.)

  • Familiarity

    Being a Donkey Kong game, it has a lot of similarity to other Donkey Kong games, so long-time fans will be able to jump right in and enjoy the things they liked about past games (though personally, I have not yet played the DKC games :-|). It is also very similar to Super Mario Bros. 64, so if you enjoyed that, then you get more like it. (It is also similar to the GameCube game Super Mario Sunshine, so if you have already played that, like I have, then you get that bonus as well.) In addition, it has a couple of levels of the original Donkey Kong arcade game as well as Jetpac, so you get a blast from the past in that way too.

  • Environment

    The tropical island environment is just lovely. The beautiful sun, sand, plants, and water is so alluring and inviting, it really makes me want to move to a tropical island. The same applies to Super Mario Sunshine which has a similar island with intoxicating beaches.

Cons

Unfortunately DK64 also has some really annoying problems (some of which are actually pros that are poorly implemented and result in aggravation):

  • Overwhelming

    While the amount of gameplay is a good thing, there is just so much of it, that it gets to be feel very cluttered. There are several characters, a bunch of locations, and countless items. Between the weapons (shooters and instruments), the regular and golden bananas, the regular and special coins, several types of mini-games, orange bombs and crystal coconuts, fairies, blueprints, numerous moves and combos, and so on and so on, it really feels overwhelming. This is made worse for those of us who want/need to get 100% completion in games. To some degree, you do become accustomed to most of it, but it still feels uncomfortable cluttered, constantly wondering if you got everything or missed anything.

  • Rip-off

    Similarity to other games can be a good thing, but DK64 takes it to a problematic extreme. There are (too) many places where it feels exactly like other games, especially Mario 64. There are several places like the slide races, the island, moves, etc. that are so similar to Mario 64, that it is almost as though they just copy-pasted them from the other game and merely changed the textures. The similarities are so strong, that several different walkthroughs have called them out. (In turn, Mario Sunshine may have been influenced DK64.)

  • Unwieldy

    Like many of the other early 3D games of the time (particularly Mario 64), the controls for both the character and the camera are frustratingly difficult to use and poorly implemented. Moving the character around is often a real chore due to the way the controls work. This is really annoying, especially when it makes it difficult if not impossible to accomplish some tasks. The camera certainly does not help either because whether it is automatic or “manual”, it is often in the wrong place, making things like flying through rings likewise difficult or impossible. The awkward camera also makes it difficult to see some things like balloons that would be easy to see in real life (just tilt your head), but require a concerted effort to see in the game (which of course requires your knowing it is there in the first place). The controls are bad enough that players may throw their controllers in frustration.

  • Bizarre Goals

    Most of the game was pretty straight-forward and there wasn’t too much confusion on what needed to be done. However, there were several places where something that needed to be done (like some of the gold-banana games) were absolutely not intuitive and would not occur to a player. Likewise, it was not obvious howto use the dirt-piles because the move required to expose them seemed like a generic attack move that had nothing to do with the dirt patches. Another example is how in one of the Splish Splash Salvage mini-games, the vines swing down in so that you can reach the coin above water only after you get the underwater ones. The second fight with Army-Dillo was frustrating because it was not clear that you should just keep pounding on him towards the end, rather it seemed more like you had to do something else like jump on him to fly out or something; this happens several times in the game where you end up over-thinking a task, expecting it to be more complicated and clever than it actually is.

  • Lanky

    Lanky Kong was just annoying. From his goofy persona to his, literally, lanky gait and awkward movements, he was annoying to use and provided no significant benefit and had no real point. At least Chunky was big and strong. 🙁

  • Too Hard

    Most of the game isn’t too bad. There are a few parts that are really challenging like the DK arcade (especially the second time), the double-car Minecart Mayhem mini-game, or some of the races. However, most of these are doable with a little (or a lot) of practice. Unfortunately at least one of the tasks is nigh on impossible, the aptly named “Beaver Bother!”. This mini-game requires herding a small group of Gnawty Beavers and getting them to fall down the hole in the center. Unfortunately this is effectively impossible because no amount of snapping at a single beaver will get them to fall in the hole; getting them to fall in requires getting them in a position where one is next to the hole and cannot move away because it is blocked by another beaver. Since there are only four beavers in the arena (five in the “Creepy Castle” versions), it is difficult to get them in the right position. Worse, if you fall in the hole, the game is over and you have to start over. With enough practice, it is possible to get four or five down there, but the game requires 12, and with a 60 second time limit (45 in the “Creepy Castle” versions), it is flat out impossible to do. Having even one of this mini-game is bad enough, but Rare actually put it in the game three times! What were they thinking‽ Did they do any playtesting at all‽ 😮

  • DK Rap

    The DK Rap that is performed in the opening sequence is almost, almost amusing, but it is painfully clear that it was written by non-rappers. Throughout the song, there are several places where it keeps pausing for a beat, resulting in a stuttering effect, as though they could not think of a longer word to use to have enough syllables to keep the rhythm smooth.

Summary

Overally, Donkey Kong 64 is a fun, engaging game but has a few issues that make it frustrating. You feel like you get your money’s worth, and if you play it fast enough, you should be able to get through it before the novelty wears off and the problems take over.

In just a couple of weeks, I got up to 98% (198 gold bananas, all regular bananas (and medals), both special coins, all crowns, all fairies, all keys, all blueprints, and all but 29 banana coins). The only thing left other than the final fight with K.Rool, is to get the remaining three gold bananas, but unfortunately they are the three “Beaver Bother!” bananas which means that I will likely be unable to get 100% in the foreseeable future—maybe it can be left as a quick “casual game” for later on. 🙁

I broke my freakin’ tooth!

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Stupid Bulk Barn. My mother made a coffee-bundt cake last week. I cut off a slice and took a bite and bam! I bit into what seems to be a walnut shell. My front tooth twisted and broke. It hurt like hell! Stupid Bulk Barn; why the hell didn’t they properly clear out the shells from their crushed walnuts? It’s not even one little piece that slipped through; we checked some more and found lots of these shell pieces, some small, some large. Obviously they crushed a whole walnut and let it go through, shell and all. Dammit!

I Think I Tore My Shoulder

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The tail-end of this television week is light. Last night had almost nothing on and tonight is equally light. I had big plans for these two nights and was hoping to catch up on some other things to reduce my large work-load.

Unfortunately something happened last night. I still have no idea what, but the result was a massive, horrible, shooting, throbbing pain in my right shoulder. At first, I barely noticed it and thought it was just a bit of momentary pain from sitting badly (for example, a pinched nerve in my arm caused by pressing it against the chair’s arm-“rest”). However the pain continued to shoot and throb and eventually I came to the realization that this was not a regular, fleeting pain, but something new, something serious.

Having no other choice, I just ignored it (as best I could). However, this quickly turned out to be nigh on impossible. The pain increased to the point that I could not ignore and became the overarching feature of the night. It eventually plateaued and leveled out (I guess it had reached the maximum possible), so again, having no recourse, I chose to just continue working and watching.

After a while, having a continuous ache in my shoulder was too much to bear and I could not concentrate on what I was doing anymore. I gave in and took the laptop up so that I could continue watching my Supernatural marathon in bed. However even that soon proved too much and I could not concentrate on the show. I noticed that every time I would doze off for a moment, I didn’t feel the pain (as much), so I shut down and tried to just sleep.

Sadly, sleep would not come. This is painfully typical; I doze off when trying to stay awake to watch something, but when I give up and turn it off, as the Persian saying says, “the sleep/drowsiness jumps from my head”. Sleep was made all the more elusive due to the pain.

I tried tossing and turning, pulling my arm, pushing it, twisting it, and generally looking for a position in which it would not hurt so that I could just hold it like that from then on. Unfortunately there was no such position; my shoulder always hurt. I found that moving it was the closest thing to a restful position; that is, whenever I moved it into a new position, it wouldn’t hurt as much during the move, but once it came to a stop, the pain would resurge. I even tried sleeping on my arm in an attempt to cut off the circulation and put it to sleep, but even that didn’t help (mostly because the pain was in my shoulder, not my arm).

Then I tried something else. (This part gets a little wonky because trying to describe such abstract things for which humans generally have no words is a Herculean task, even for wordsmiths.) I figured I would give mind-over-matter a shot and attempted to just think the pain away. Whenever it would shoot, I would try to mentally absorb the pain. This actually, nearly worked. It’s hard to describe it, but the normal pain had a sort of texture/color/vibration/feel to it. Whenever I would “meditate the pain”, it would change in a way and the closest that I can come to describing it is to say that it “turned blue”.

It really did dull the pain a little, but like trying to trim your waistline by holding in your stomach or strengthening the groin by doing Kegle excercises, it only works if you continually do it without stopping. This requires constantly focusing on the task and that is just impossible, especially when you are trying to sleep. I quickly found that it was untenable and I could not keep doing it for every throb every few seconds.

I did manage to fall asleep, but I kept waking up every 30 or so minutes. Over the seven hours, I woke up in pain at least a dozen times. They say that you don’t feel pain when you are asleep, but then why did I keep dreaming that I was in pain and had a broken arm and such? Every time I woke up, I would wish to fall asleep and stay asleep until the morning and for the night to be over so that I can go to the hospital.

The last time that I woke up was at 4:26am. The next time I dozed off, I stayed asleep until 7am when I had to get up to give my cat her insulin. At that point, I was afraid of getting up and moving my arm because it didn’t seem to be hurting. I hesitatingly got up and went about the day. While my shoulder did throb a slight bit and I could feel the pain gurgling under the surface, it never actually flared up again.

I always thought that I could take pain if I had to and could use my mind to ignore it if I had no other choice. I still think that if it is a pain due to external damage like a cut or stab, then I could. However an internal pain like this one is the kind that “aches to your bones” like nausea from a cold or “withdrawl pain”; and that is a pain that nobody can tolerate.

I still don’t know what happened or what caused it. My best guess is that it happened after taking the garbage out that night (about an hour before the pain started). This makes sense because I held the 20LB+ bag of used kitty-litter in my right hand, so it could have stretched my arm and torn a muscle or pinched a nerve or something. Of course I have taken out the garbage and carried heavy things countless times before (including last week), so why it would all of a sudden do so much damage is a mystery. I’m just glad that it got better so fast.

No Sick-Free Year this Year

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I was hoping to go a year without ever getting sick in the winter. This winter is not exactly over, but I had not yet gotten a cold, so I was hopeful. Unfortunately the streak came to an end last night. Even though because of my SAD, I almost never go out and avoid people when I do, my mother not only goes out several times per week, but she is around lots of old people when she does, so she can easily bring home some bugs.

I was fine yesterday morning, but by the afternoon I was feeling nauseous, stiff, and chilly. I immediately recognized these as the symptoms I always get from the common cold. There’s lost of treatments for the cold that people recommend, so I combined a bunch of them:

  • I made myself a cup of noodle soup (mostly just warm water).
  • I had a small piece of bread with it so that I could eat a bunch of onion and garlic (antibiotics).
  • I had an orange and popped a vitamin-C tablet.
  • I wrapped myself in sweaters, a robe, and piled up the hot-water bottles.
  • I went to bed early to get as much sleep as possible.

It worked. The next morning I was feeling fine and have been all day.

I’ll have to try again next year. At least I haven’t (yet?) had a runny nose this winter.

TV Schedule

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I hate television. Not only are most of the shows on TV not good (in fact a large portion are outright garbage), but there are just so many shows; so many that there is just not enough time for them all.

I am going to find a way to somehow suffer through the rest of this season, then from next season on, I am going to stop watching all of the bad shows. It won’t be easy because I have OCD, but forcing myself to watch them all is even more painful than not watching them (even if it means stopping in the middle of a show).

Here’s what’s left to watch this week followed by the full week’s schedule:

Clone Wars – Watch Out!

Synetech 6 Comments

Well, I have recently finished watching season four of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and am about to start watching the first half of season five. This is making me really nervous. Every time that I start watching a show that others have already been watching for years, I start after season four, and catch up so that I can watch (most of) season five live with everybody. The problem is that whenever this happens, the show always seems to get cancelled, so season five is the last season. This has happened several times now, so I am worried that it will happen to Clone Wars as well. Here is a list of shows that got cancelled once I finally started watching them (I’ll add the ones I can remember off the top of my head and add more when I look them up):

  • Angel (This was the first time I noticed “the curse”.)
  • Alias (I started watching just before the last season.)
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003) (After season three, I watched the original 1978 and 1980 versions, then 2003; it was cancelled the next season).
  • Primeval (It was cancelled in season five, just before I started watching.)
  • Merlin (The library has the first four seasons, so I decided to start watching it, then I heard that season five is the last.

Unfortunately, I don’t actually have the “power to cancel shows” by just starting late because there are some shows that don’t/wouldn’t stop: Californication, Boardwalk Empire, Lost, Jersey Shore, Gossip Girl, The Hills, Secret Life of the American Teenager, Shameless (both), Spartacus, True Blood

Some other shows that I began watching late have fortunately survived my curse: Game of Thrones, Borgias, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dexter, Face Off, MythBusters, Pawn Stars, Ricky Gervais Show, The Office (UK), Stargate SG1, Breaking Bad, Being Human (UK), The Shield. And of course Star Wars; I had heard people rabidly love it for decades. I finally watched the films and they were okay. I then watched Clone Wars which made me like it even more. (If I have to choose, I’m still a Star Trek guy though.)

Saying “Grace”

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A lot of people say “grace” or other form of prayer before eating. This usually takes the form as a thank-you to God for providing them with food to eat.

I grew up with the simple Persian prayer Besmelah which means in the name of God. It’s mostly just a way of keeping God in mind. When eating, I generally say one of those for each animal that I’m eating as a way of acknowledging that an animal is dead so that I can eat and hoping that there is an afterlife and the animal is in heaven. There’s only a few simple rules I use:

  • I say it once for each animal. (I’m having roastbeef, I’ll say one for the cow.)
  • I repeat it for each meal regardless of the content (If I have more of the same roast the next night, I’ll say it again for the same cow.)
  • If I have something with multiple animals, then I’ll say one for each identifiable animal.
  • If it’s something like chicken wings, then there isn’t a way to know exactly how many birds died (some of the wings could be from the same bird), but I’ll assume each is from a different bird and say one for each wing.
  • If there is no way to know how many animals there are, like with processed meats like sausage or cold-cuts (a single piece of these sorts of meats can evidently contain meat from upwards of 1,000 different animals!), then I’ll usually just say a few (~3~5) as a best-attempt to cover them all.

Some religious people may be offended that I don’t specifically thank God, but I think that thanking, apologizing to, and hoping for the best for the animals who died makes more sense. It’s the least we can do. Also, because the grace I say is a single word (the meaning and intent matter more than the syntax), it is efficient to do it this way. It’s only fair.

Good-for-something

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I’m sick and tired of my mother always nagging that she works so hard (much of the work she does is her own making) and I never do anything (despite the fact that she calls me every 5-8 minutes). I’m constantly doing stuff for her, but can never remember them later. I’m going to start keeping a list so that I can throw some examples in her face when she nags. 😛 (Of course, she’ll probably just end up saying “You’re still using that example?”, but it’s better than nothing.)

  • Fixed her washing machine!

FML; Murphy was an Optimist!

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I have decided to start keeping (I suspect using a gerund is unlikely to be accurate) a list of examples of why my life sucks. Some will be obviously bad or hurtful or damaging, others not so much bad as inconvenient, annoying, irritating, frustrating (I have a huge problem with frustration and don’t handle it well).

Now don’t get me wrong, I have no delusions of having the worst life; quite the contrary, I freely admit that some aspects are actually fairly good and nice, but there is no way it can be considered a great, comfortable, happy life either. The cumulation of all the difference circumstances in my life (financial, social, physical, mental, geographic, etc.) somehow create a convergence that makes me quite miserable overall (i.e., on average).

Whenever bad things happen to me or my (immediate) family, I can’t help but think that I/we are cursed because bad things not only happen a lot (far too frequently to be typical), but they usually happen in just the right way to maximize the hurt. Some people will say that bad stuff happens to everybody and things like these are coincidence, but even a die-hard skeptic has to admit that coincidence can only stretch so far. How many coincidences does it take before it becomes a statistical aberration? 10? 100? 1,000,000? Yes, a perfectly balanced coin, when flipped an infinite number of times will have runs of 1,000 heads in a row or 1,000,000 tails in a row, and so on, but that’s just theoretical since nothing in real life is infinite nor perfect. If you flip a coin 10 times and it comes up heads nine of those, then you just have to question if it’s coincidence or something else…

  • Last week I put a hold on volumes one, two, and three (of three) of something at the library.

    I checked on my holds two days later and saw that volumes two and three were already transfered to my home branch, but the third one (volume one) was listed as “Missing + 1 Hold”. What the‽ Why did the system not transfer my hold to one of the other copies if the one it was assigned to could not be found‽ There were four or five copies, two or three of which were in. I canceled the hold and put it again, this time it was assigned to one of the copies marked as “In Library”.

    Another two days later, it was Saturday, the day I go out to pick up my holds from the library. I checked again, and there was no change; it was marked as “In Library + 1 Hold”.

    I said “screw it” and decided to go to the library and pick up the copy of volume one in person because we were going to be in the area to run some errands anyway. A few minutes later, I arrived at the library and checked the catalog to determine where to find it, but when I did, it said it was, finally, after a week, “In Transit”. WTF‽

    They didn’t bother sending it for a week, and the moment (literally down to a few minutes) I decided they can suck it and I’d get it myself, they send it out! We ran our errands and a couple of hours later, I went to my home branch (with ~5% hope) and picked up my holds. Not surprisingly, volume one had not arrived yet.

    That meant that I had to wait for a whole week before I could volume one. If it were volume three, or even two, that would be one thing, but volume one‽ That ruins the whole set. (Actually, in this case, the books were really small, so I could get through the whole thing in a week, so any of them would block the whole thing.)

    This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but for someone with OCD like myself, having them split up like this, with different due dates, is quite painful.