Saturday, January 29

More Annoyances With Telemarketers

Got a call from Direct TV today, and I was feeling gracious, so I started nice. Explained to the girl that I had requested multiple times, but nicely, and very not nicely that they not call me anymore, and I wanted a good reason why they were still calling me with special offers.

She proceeded to tell me that they have three call centers, and it can take up to thirty days to remove me from the call list, then just becuase I have been removed from one call center, does not mean that I am removed from another call center, and that after some arbitrary period of time, they will start calling me again.

I said, "Ok, then fuck off. Bye-bye." Then I hung up.

What a bunch of assholes. Guess I'll be freqently telling them to fuck off for a while till they get the point.

Thursday, January 27

Texas Burger Guy

Now, this I like, an entire blog dedicated to cheeseburgers.

Texas Burger Guy

Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy!

Big, good news in Houston!

Rock & Roll is coming back to the Radio.

At Noon today, KIOL (I think that's the new call letters) went on the air on 97.5 FM, replacing an Urban/Hip-Hop format station that was slowly going away.

Rumor has it that Outlaw Dave, Jim Pruett and Radio Gawds Walton and Johnson are going to all be affiliated with the new stataion.

I heard more than a dozen songs that I haven't heard since KLOL went off the air last year driving around today.

Wohoo! Got to get the new car stereo system installed so I can destroy my eardrums!

ABC13.com: New rock station hits Houston airwaves

Tuesday, January 25

Why I will be pirating more music:

Ok, I tried my first LEGAL music download on Sunday morning at They Might Be Giants online store. I wanted to get the live album, "Almanac" from last summer's tour, plus they are giving away the songs they wrote for each venue if you buy it now.

Don't know how I managed to do this, but I managed to order one of their early albums, "They Might Be Giants", instead of "Almanac". I didn't notice this till after I had downloaded things and looked at the Album Art file, and found it to be wrong. Only then did I look at the track names to discover what I had done.

So I sent their customer service a message, explaining my mistake, and wanting to download the album I really intended to purchase.

However, their tech support has told me that I am Shit Outta Luck since I already downloaded the music.

I have to pay another $9.99 to get what I actually wanted to buy, and now I've paid $9.99 to get an album that I already have.

I know Giants is using another company to host this service, but I'm not impressed. I could have just pirated the whole thing off the Usenet. I'd already have the tracks, I wouldn't be out $9.99, and I wouldn't feel like I got ripped off by some oddity of downloading music.

Yo, ho, ho, it's the Pirate's life for me!

They Might Be Giants - Artist Owned and Operated

Wednesday, January 19

Dell Digital Jukebox Series One

Just a short little instruction on how to reach the "Service Menu".

Press and hold down the Play/Pause button.

Now while holding that down, press in the Reset button for three seconds.

Release the Reset button.

Release the Play/Pause button.

You should see the Dell startup screen, then it will boot to Rescue Mode.

Be careful the on the reformat option, it takes about 2 seconds, and all your data will be gone.

Tuesday, January 18

Ok, strangest thing I've found on the net yet...

I'm not afraid to admit I go to Byowtimus Maximus for the sheer entertainment value of a free freak show.

And while I can't swear to it, and I don't know who the guy in this picture happens to be, I swear the chick is my EX WIFE.

Freaky.

I'm going to bed.

Thursday, January 13

Removing binnet.exe spyware

Had to get rid of some nasty spyware yesterday.

The program BINNET.EXE was causing the CPU load to go to 100% shortly after user started Internet Explorer.

Found a reference to BINNET.EXE in the Run key of the registry, *BINNET.EXE in C:\WINDOWS\MICROSOFT.NET
However, checking this directory, it appeared to be empty. Searching for the file on the PC also yielded no files. Then I had an idea, I went into the View settings and unchecked the box to “Hide System Files”. All of the sudden, binnet.exe and four tennib files were visible in that directory. I could also find references to the tennib files in the registry.

Deleting the registry keys was fruitless, they just regen a second later.

Could not delete the files because they were system files.

Tried using pskill.exe to kill the binnet.exe process, but it would just come back with a new process id number.

Finally, I used a Windows XP OEM Preinstallation Kit CD ROM to boot to the Windows XP Preinstallation environment. This puts you at a D: prompt in a DOS window.

From there I went to the C:\WINDOWS\MICROSOFT.NET directory. Run the command, “attrib –h –s *.*”, this will make the files visible. Then delete all the tenet and tennib files.

Reboot the system and you can clear the entries from the registry now.

If I find the person that wrote this hunk of crap, I will kill them and hide the body.

Wednesday, January 12

A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys

Saw this over at Utterly Boring. Too funny.

A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys

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