Safari hunt

This is just an update to my post from yesterday. After wasting well over 35 hours of troubleshooting time with this damn Zebra printer, I finally isolated and solved the issue with it either not printing or partial printing labels. What was it? Their DRIVER! And not just any driver... the latest version of the driver off their own website. After wasting days upon days talking to tech support, sending this thing back to them twice, and using multiple parallel, USB, and serial cables I came to isolate the problem to their own latest and greatest driver.

Great, right? Well, I figured I should tell them about it. Get this... they already knew about it not working with the .NET Framework. Mind you, I emailed like six people in the company and only one bothered to respond. They are well aware of the issue with their newest driver not working with the .NET framework (the old version worked just fine). Funny, it wasn't mentioned ANYWHERE on their website. It also wasn't mentioned in the "known issues" readme file that came with the download. So I guess it's OK for them to know and distribute CRAP drivers and leave it up to end users to play the "is it my cable? my printer? my program?" game.

The sweet and sour

Sweet! I was surfing around on Digg and found this cool site called Meebo. It's basically an instant messenger interface for Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, and MSN but strictly over the web (no software to install, no special ports). You may be saying "so what, some of those services offer their own web version". The difference is any corporate firewall that blocks IM is going to have those web addresses blocked. I've tested Meebo from at least two secured networks and it got by without a hitch.

I'm really sour on Zebra printers. If you need a thermal printer, find something else... ANYTHING else. I've got one of these pieces of crap (TLP 2844-Z) and suffice it to say its super picky and their tech support is worthless. It's been back to the manufacturer twice. They've told me "don't use USB" (then why the hell does it have a USB port?). On four separate machines now (3 XP SP2, 1 2000) the reliability of whether it'll print or not can best be described as erratic. God I hate this thing.

HA! HA!

I got a laptop in for repair today. Apparently the person was using it in the kitchen and knocked it clear off the counter while it was still running. Defective hard drive! Yah that was boring. However, next time he brings in a machine for repair, something tells me he'll think to check the contents of it first. *points and laughs* HA! HA!. The best part was when he asked if I had accessed then disc in the drive, then non-chalantly attempted to remove it and hide the label side from my view. Hell, given a few more minutes I would've made copies. Mwahahaha!

Falling sand is fun?

So I found a fun new time waster called "The Falling Sand Game". Sounds lame? Yup! But it's addictive as hell. There's basically four "faucets" along the top of the screen dropping salt, water, sand, and oil. You can build walls, grow plants, mix the elements, set fire to the oil or plants amongst other things. Still sounds boring? I thought the same thing. Then I ended up screwing with it for 45 minutes. Check it out (picture to the right is clickable).

In the Quick Links bar on the left I added a link to Digg.com. It's supposed to be a "Slashdot killer". If you don't know what Slashdot is, just move along and pretend you didn't read this. Digg is basically a news submission blog type thing; or, as Digg says "With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

I just got my girlfriend set up with Dragon Naturally Speaking software (speech recognition) and a Plantronics headset for voice recognition. This stuff seems pretty sophisticated and actually works. No more typing? Say it ain't so! I can see it now, me, programming: "public int Get Customer Balance Open Parenthesis int Customer ID close parenthesis open curly brace sequel connection cust db equals new sequel connection..."

If you like pina colada!

Why the hell is this song stuck in my head? I actually had to look it up... it's Escape (The Pina Colada Song) by Rupert Holmes. Whoever the hell that is?
I moved a bunch of older posts off to an archive page because they were slowing down the load time on this page. Thanks for the "kickass" 256k upload and blocked port 80 Cox! I'd host the site at work like I have in the past, but thanks to wonderful Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, it would be considered a breach of proper security policy. Yay.

I just went to register for Tri-C web based courses and was pissed to find that every single damn web course is filled. Sociology. Humanities. History. Archeology. The hell? *sigh* I ended up signing up for English Technical Writing. Another exciting action packed semester ahead for me! I think Junior's reaction (picture on right) about sums up how I'm feeling about things right now.

*yawn*

So I went to Canada for my yearly trip last weekend. Pictures are here (nothing you haven't seen on most postcards). I think this will probably be the last time I go the weekend before Christmas. People were driving like absolute IDIOTS on the QEW. All Canadians were tailgating over 90mph and merging and changing lanes within inches of each other (also above 90mph...). Eaton Center in Toronto was packed ungodly beyond belief, as were the surrounding streets downtown. So much for a relaxing vacation! I must say that my onboard navigation system kicked ass for getting me around Niagara and Toronto without worry. Map? Whats that? Oh yah, my car also really really likes cruising above 70mph :)

The other day I found two pretty decent BitTorrent trackers that replaced the infamous Supernova site that went down awhile back. These are the four best trackers that I know of:

• The Pirate Bay
• Mini Nova
• New Nova
• TV Torrents

Winter Sucks

So I now have a car that I actually want to keep around for awhile, which means not just leaving it the way it is for winter. $110 for four new waterproof floormats. Ching. $20 for new wiper blades/arms. Ching. $540 for four new Bridgestone Blizzak WS-50 tires, including mounting, balance, and installation. Ching. Ever driven a large rear wheel drive car with balding all weather tires in snow? Yah. I have less than a month to buy a 2005 CD set for my navigation system for my yearly trip to Canada. $200. Ching. I hope to sell the regions I'll never drive in (like California, etc) to make some money back on those.

I think in the Spring I'm going to buy new rims and performance tires so that in the future I can do a fall/spring tire swap myself (or at least save money on tire mounting charges). I bought my new tires off of tirerack.com. They were ~$15 a tire cheaper than any place around here (yes, including shipping). Is there anything you CAN'T buy on the Internet anymore?! ;)