https://vine.co/v/M7EFVViLWpA
I hope my kid ends up being as awesome as his cousin is … because I could seriously watch this video all day long! 😉
This seems like it deserves its own blog post…
So yeah, this happened last night!!! 😀
I JUST FELT MY BABY BOY KICK FOR THE FIRST TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
— Scott Sevener (@ssevener) February 16, 2014
It was kind of wild because we were just driving along and suddenly Sara made a comment about him kicking. She does this a lot, and then I hold my hand there for like 10 minutes, and absolutely nothing happens, and to be honest it’s gotten a little disheartening because I hear about Cleo having kicking matches with him when they’re laying in bed and she’s curled up against Sara’s belly, and yet I’ve yet to feel even the slightest tremor.
Until last night…
It was just the softest tap in the middle of my hand, whereas she mentioned feeling it across her whole abdomen … which I suppose probably makes a little more sense when one considers that he’s actually living inside of her and all!
But it was just a single, tiny kick, and yet it was enough to make my night after a very tiring afternoon of trying to convince myself that I was in shape enough to carry boxes to help my sister-in-law move.
Just one little, itty-bitty kick… 😉
Why I won’t be switching back to Brighthouse Networks…
So admittedly I’ve kind of been bitching about Verizon FiOS a lot lately, between their latest interactive guide update being way too full of ads considering how much I pay for the service, or even simply how their prices always seem to be creeping up in general and how it really frustrates me that they’re not nearly as liberal as Brighthouse ever was about giving out promotions to help keep existing customer pricing in line with new customers…
And yet all of that dirty laundry aside, tonight I was reminded why I can’t bring myself to switch back to my old provider.
Today my sister-in-law moved out on her own, and ultimately she decided to go with Brighthouse for cable/phone/internet. As far as the tech that came out to install her service, though … I’m not sure if they hired him at random off the street an hour before the job or if in fact he was just plain incompetent, but what I do know is that I spent an hour and a half cleaning up his mess tonight so that she would have actual service before we left. 😕
1. He installed her router under the bed.
That’s not an exaggeration – when I came in, it was literally setup underneath the new bed that had also just been delivered that day. Apparently his claim was that because she got the phone, too, that was the only place where he had both a phone jack and a cable jack on the same wall.…and yet he couldn’t have used a slightly longer phone cord so that at least the router could maybe be underneath the nightstand with plenty of wiggle room for when it needed to be pulled out, because not for nothing but my first comment when I saw that joke of an install was, “Wow – that’s going to be a pain in the ass when maintenance is required…”
2. He didn’t write down her wifi network name right … or the password, either.
I thought it seemed a little weird when I saw another network that looked almost the same as hers, but off by one digit … and in fact, it was actually hers all the time. Didn’t matter, though, because he had screwed up the password, too, so even when I tried to login to that similar network, the password we were given got rejected.For future reference, 5 and 6 are different numbers, and F and f are not the same thing when it comes to case-sensitive passwords, like 99.9999999% of passwords are!
3. He didn’t leave the admin credentials for the router itself.
So my saving grace through all of this was the idea of finally just plugging her computer directly into the router, then logging into the router via wired connection to verify what wireless settings it was actually expecting. This proved to be a little more complicated because although there was a printed sticker on the side with an SSID, passphrase, etc…, of course none of those worked, either!I kind of figured that that was going to be the point where I’d need to call customer support, and they’d say that they can’t do anything over the phone and would need to send their idiot tech back out … but before I did that, I basically just started guessing passwords for the router! The login was locked down to admin, so I tried the same for the password, and all of the different values listed on everything that he gave her … and then on a whim, I did a quick search on my phone for Arris Modem Password.
Yeah … the password was password, and Brighthouse never changed it. 😯
At least at that point I was able to login and verify that the SSID and password were both wrong, and then I took 5 minutes with her doing what the tech should’ve done that afternoon by helping her to create a new personalized SSID and password that she can actually remember, and of course, I also locked down her router, too, and gave her the password to put in a safe place.
It’s bad enough that they charged her an extra $50 to setup the wifi, but to not even test it prior to walking out the door?! The guy’s handwriting as atrocious as it was, he should’ve connected her computer for her – it got brought out separately that morning just so that it would be there when he was – or even just testing it on his phone real quick would’ve pointed out the written errors. How do you install something if you don’t take a minute to stop and make sure that it actually works???
Way to kick things off on the right foot with a new customer, huh?! Woof. 🙄
Nevermind – I like not knowing…
So this was an interesting finding that popped up a couple of days ago! 😯
Apparently there was an update to the Login Failure Daemon (lfd) earlier this week that played with the settings for when you get notifications for brute force attacks and whatnot. Mind you, these are happening all the time and no doubt still took place in troves before the update … and yet it still doesn’t make it any creepier to see these things flying through by the dozens, even though they’re all just automated scripts poking around randomly for exploits wherever they can find them.
It kind of reminds me of hearing about a decade-ish ago when the service packs for Windows XP started coming out, and were really important because it was said that an un-patched Windows XP machine could get exploited within a matter of about 45 seconds after placing it online without a router or anything in between to act as a buffer!
I need to go figure out how to turn these stupid notifications back off… 😛
Everything happens for a reason…
![1794604_709531812467858_1916803100_n[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1794604_709531812467858_1916803100_n1.jpg)
I kind of like this one!
Oh no! I feel middle-aged, too…
John Green kind of nailed it in today’s video, and by nailed it, I mean that he managed to stencil out in about 90 seconds the exact same realm that I’m facing right now, too!
Well, very very close, anyways…
If you triple my current age, I would be 99 years old, which although technically feasible if science gets its act in gear in the next couple of decades, lets just say that given my current diet and exercise regiment of not doing either of those things, hitting the brink of triple digits may not be as likely as my immortal younger self would’ve liked to believe.
Also, I kind of don’t know shit for pop culture these days, either. It’s why I have a Super Nintendo hooked up in my office and I haven’t bought a complete album of songs since, like, 2004? The ’80s and ’90s are pretty much it for me and now I’ve got to milk those two decades for the next 40-50 years…
Sure, I could go through the list of stuff that makes it not that bad – actually having money to pay for stuff, driving a car that consists of more metal than rust, not getting carded for drinks anymore (wait, is that a good thing???), and I suppose that I just did make said list, or at least a small subset of it. I’ve also got a wife, and a mortgage, and a child on the way in only 79 days, so those things are all pretty cool, too!
And yet I still can’t help but look in the mirror at my rapidly receding hairline and just ponder the question for, like, 20 minutes every morning – where did it all go??? 😯
Security Images, a la Carte
So the Rooms to Go billpay website made me setup one of those stupid image authentication thingys today for our account. I typically just pick whatever random one my mouse lands on, but low and behold what icon jumped out at me this time in the lower left-hand corner…
Is that the LiveJournal icon – the logo for my beloved blogging home of yesteryear???
Now I know what you’re thinking – what kind of lazy programmer would just lift a company’s logo to toss in with their catalog of security images?
But it’s cool – flip the page and they actually did the same thing with Reddit and MySpace and a bunch of others, too!
Spoiler: I didn’t actually pick that great white shark, but in hindsight I kind of wish I would have – he sure looks like he could keep a phishing scammer at bay! 😛
An Utterly Shameless Fox News Attacks The Lego Movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rprB_VNm3L8
I just can’t even… How do they…
Fox News is a spoof of actual news programming – that’s the only explanation that makes any sense in the world anymore.
…because this is a kids movie that they’re targeting for being anti-business THAT WAS SOLELY CREATED FOR THE PURPOSE OF SELLING KIDS TOYS…
Seriously – the name of the product being sold is in the title of the movie.
*facepalm times infinity*
They did it two years ago with the Muppets, now they’ve done it again with Legos…
Fox News is dead to me.
“You don’t have a home. It was taken from you…”
Best piece of dialogue in the movie.
I suppose you can guess which option I chose tonight, eh? 🙄
Rocket Ranger Takes Flight on iOS!
…he just can’t steer worth a damn once you get him in the air…
…or have him on the ground…
…grrrrrr…
I was playing a rather frustrating game of Defender of the Crown earlier this morning and on a whim, I thought that maybe I’d check to see if Cinemaware has ever said anything new about possibly re-releasing this other childhood favorite of mine to iOS, and despite some initial issues with getting it to come up in the App Store, it turns out that they did!
The soundtrack is still identical to that iconic music from yesteryear. And the graphics still look just as great as they did in 320×200 when they were kind of revolutionary for their time. Admittedly the audio did jitter a little from time to time, but it’s hard to tell if that was the game’s fault or the device’s fault, seeing as my iPhone is pretty well packed to the gills these days…
…but sadly, the only real problem with this game is the same thing that plagues its last port of Defender, too – the controls are pretty much abysmal and they make the game almost impossible to play. Although I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of Defender – at least when it’s not being buggy and forcing me to retreat when it hangs on a 40-to-8 siege in my favor, I couldn’t even get through a full game of Rocket Ranger because I just got so frustrated trying to manage the controls.
- Something as simple as moving lunarium into the rocket pack to fly to the initial battle with the zeppelin over the Atlantic took upwards of 5 minutes just to get right … and when I finally got out there, I blew up the zeppelin with my first shot on the last screen because I could barely dodge the missiles, let alone actually aim at the gondola.
- The War Room drove me absolutely nuts with the way that they let the cursor loop around from one side to another (did it really do that in the original game?!), and the individual countries were so tough to click on that I could actually place them and then check in later because that’s how long it would take me to center in on the others to hear from each of them.
- Takeoff … I won’t really comment on because I tended to suck at it using a joystick, too. In this version I nailed my very first one, then failed horribly at each subsequent takeoff.
- Dogfights … I didn’t realize that you could trigger these other than in Germany, but I ended up doing like three of them on accident and each one got a little worse as I actually tried to maneuver instead of simply hiding out at the bottom of the screen. At the end of the day, the controls are super sensitive and a simple tap sent Rocket Ranger flying across the screen, all too often right into enemy fire…
I really wanted this game to be awesome and I was pretty excited when I actually saw that it was available for download, and only $1.99 is a hell of a bargain! But these guys have got to put more effort into their controls because right now it feels like they’re just pooping nostalgia onto the iPhone because they own the IP, and it kind of takes the piss out of your nostalgia when you sit down to play and it looks and sounds just like the real thing, but the feel is so out of whack that it leaves you wanting to send my phone flying through the air because at least you have some control of the direction that it will take!
I suppose at least they got rid of the terrible top and bottom banners that clogged the screen in Defender.
And it seems like they’ve added a save state, in that if you close the app, you’re prompted to resume your game when you open it again.
And I’ll even hand it to them for a clever way to handle the decoder wheel, although it would’ve been more efficient if they made the button only appear at times when you actually need the codes instead of hovering over the screen literally all the time…
But regardless, as much as the controls in Defender were a pain in the ass to learn how to direct the mouse, at least the bulk of that game is all menus and planning, so it’s not really a huge deal if it takes an extra few seconds to get where you need to be. Rocket Ranger’s controls, on the other hand, between being far too sensitive and also just plain inaccurate make this a port where I’m kind of glad that I don’t have anymore Cinemaware titles to look forward to because at this rate, they’re all just going to end up being shit anyways… 😥
It’s really a shame because they have the potential to be so much more.