Jumping on the Bed!

So far, so bad. Sabrina and I paid $41.50 for our “early registration” weekend badges back in the middle of March. That’s almost two months ago. We paid an extra $1.50 to have them mailed to us before the convention so we wouldn’t have to wait in hours of lines to get our badges. Great idea, but in true ACen fashion, they completely fuck it up.

Sabrina was lucky and got her badge yesterday. Me? No such luck. We waited to leave town until the mail showed up today thinking that my badge would be here. Not at all. So we’ve waisted time in town for essentially nothing.

What is ACen’s solution? Raping us for another $5.00 when we get there to wait in line with all of the other people who didn’t get their badges in time. Wait. So we get to pay extra for something they screwed up? Glee! ;( “Oh, but the $5.00 is refundable when you return the envelope with your badge in it if it ever shows up.”

One question. How the FUCK does that make ANY FUCKING SENSE?!! So they’re charging us extra money just to refund it later? Doesn’t that seem like an ass-load of extra work? What The Fuck?!

Since the website (www.acen.org) Has veritably NO useful contact information, I did some research for anybody who wants to try and get a hold of them.

Midwest Anime Promotion Society: 1-847-268-4589

I sent an email to regsupport@acen.org three days ago, but did not receive any sort of response.

There is a line specifically for people who didn’t get their badge in time. Problem is it’s only open until 9:00 tonight, and we’re not going to make it to Chicago by then. So I have to get there at 7 fucking 30 in the morning to fight it out.

I get the sinking feeling that there are going to be hundreds (if not thousands) of people who are going to get screwed from this deal. I don’t know what they had in mind, but they are losing people.

This person at least. ;(

Pretty simply, I really like this album and nearly as much as I liked In Abstentia. IGN has a much more eloquently written review of it than I could. My brain is still a bit fried after the drive from Kalamazoo back home.

Sabrina gifted me the DTS version of Deadwing and I loved the 5.1 surround mix. Fear of a Blank Planet was also released in two versions, the normal CD, and a Special edition that has the CD, a DVD with 5.1 and enhanced 24bit Stereo recordings, and a booklet. It’s times like these I wish I could plunk myself on the couch, turn up the receiver and zone out for a couple of hours without bothering the people living below me.

I think there are three basic PT camps. Pre-In Abstentia fans, Post-In Abstentia fans, and the one where I set my tent up, All-of-the-above. I love damn near everything PT has released. I enjoy the psychedelic rock segments and find them absolutely grand to program to, rockin’ with my headphones on, coding away. And I really enjoy their more modern progressive rock tracks that sneak into the mix as well.

If you get a chance to sample them at all (not just 30sec clips, but whole albums), I would really recommend giving them a shot. They could be the greatest band you never knew about. I’d never heard about them until I picked up a demo for In Abstentia from work, and I was immediately hooked. Imagine my surprise when I found out they’ve been releasing music since for the past 20 years. So if you like what you hear, there’s quite the library to dig into.

Ubuntu released 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on the 19th of April, and after waiting hours in queue to download the installation disc I gave up and went with my usual practice of obtaining it through various sources. After installing it fresh on my development machine at work (a 2.8Ghz P4 with 512mb ram), an HP Compaq NX9010, and upgraded by Edgy at home on my home built Athlon 2600+, I have to say that I am very impressed.

Of the more important features that were added I am geeked most about quad-core cpu support, built in 3D Desktop which in most cases just works but I prefer the Beryl Project myself, a much improved codec support, and all of the fun bells and whistles you would expect such as no viruses, no spyware, Firefox 2.0.0.3, OpenOffice 2.2, media players, etc.

Now for the kicker. Dell has announced they will soon be offering Ubuntu 7.04 on a select line of its Desktop and Laptop machines. So you have the world’s fastest growing Linux community, and the world’s largest PC hardware retailer joining forces. There is a news post here, and the official Dell statement with video interview with Mark Shuttleworth himself here.

My two cents… I am optimistic that this could be huge. When more people have Ubuntu on their machines, it is much more likely that the hardware manufacturers (Ati, nVidia, Creative, etc) will release linux drivers for their products. The best scenario would be those manufacturers releasing their source code and allowing open-source drivers to be created. That aside, when more hardware is supported, the software is not far behind. I am, of course, referring to games.

Transgaming is doing an alright job of enabling Windows based games to run on Linux with varying degrees of success, but it just isn’t quite right. Valve, iD, Bethesda, etc will need to start making games to install natively on Windows and Linux. I personally can’t wait to be running Elder Scrolls V and Guildwars 2 on my dual 16-core xeon rig in five years.

Until then, I will very gladly share my hard drive with my two operating systems. My gaming OS (WindowsXP), and my do everything else under the sun OS (Ubuntu).