Dave Lachapelle

So, its been a long time coming, but I think I’ve finally got my fill of WoW (World of Warcraft). A few weeks ago I decided that I was finished and that I’d just let my account run out. As of today, it has now expired and I believe I’m now free of an addiction. I recently came to a realization that there is absolutely no reason to play anymore.

For the past 3 years, I have paid Blizzard approximately $700, and spent literally days of my life on their game. And really all I have to show for it is a few characters on their servers that aren’t really worth anything. Now, thats not to say I didn’t enjoy it while it lasted, it was a lot of fun and I definitely enjoyed the times I had with my friends. Unfortunately, they’ve moved on for the most part, and so I feel I have to move on as well.

Anyway, not much else to say about it, other than I’ve had a lot more time to spend on other games, I’m still working through Metroid, and I just picked up Mario Galaxy last night. I’ll have my opinions on Mario Galaxy up once I get a little further into it.

Okay, just came across this, this morning and had to share it with everyone. Its about 5 min long, but freaking hilarious. Make sure you have audio.

Okay, just came across this hint this morning…

You can make Time Machine work on any network volume simply by opening a Terminal Window and typing:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

I’m not at home or else I’d start doing a full backup, but it appears to at least let me select my network drive mounted over the interwebs. If anyone tries it, let me know how it works.

Further to the article I wrote yesterday, which has garnered a lot of traffic for my site I might add. Thank you to MacSurfer for linking that to me. I happened across a story in the Globe and Mail today regarding Rogers’ pricing practices and the iPhone (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071106.RIPHONE06/TPStory/Business). As we all know by now, Rogers is out to physically maim their customers with bills. Not a cool thing to do, but when you’re a monopoly, you can kinda do what you want. This led me to think about my recent experiences with Rogers Billing department and note that they really need to be fixing a lot before they can carry any kind of Apple products.

*Incoming Rogers Billing Rant

I believe the billing issue is the only real reason why Rogers already doesn’t carry the iPhone. The very large corporation seems to be well aware of their own price gouging and isn’t going to be doing anything about it anytime soon. At the end of every month, without fail, I get a Rogers bill in the mail, most of the time its relatively accurate, and by most of the time I mean about 50% of the time, and by accurate I mean not getting charged $100 extra for random stuff. My most recent experience with Rogers involves their billing department “misplacing” my bill payment.

After I recently moved, it would seem that Rogers somehow managed to create multiple “accounts” for me. And so, about a month ago, when I got my bill, I paid it as I always do. About a week after it was due, I started getting phone calls, every day at 11am on my cell phone from a blocked number. I typically don’t answer blocked calls, but the frequency and accuracy of the time every day caused me to become curious and answer the phone. Lo-and-behold, its Rogers automated billing system reminding me to pay my overdue bill that I already paid. So, okay, sometimes things don’t go well, I check my online statements, and the money is definitely (note, I spelled it right this time) missing from my checking account.

I then proceed to call Rogers Billing Department, who say they probably just haven’t processed payment yet and to disregard the calls. So, about 3 days pass, I’m still getting the calls, wasting my cell phone minutes they charge me for I might add. So, every day I start calling Rogers, complaining that they’re harassing me, yet they can do nothing about it (or so they say). After about 4 days straight of calling them at different times of the day, I finally get through to someone at Rogers Billing who speaks english and not engrish and can understand my problem. He calls around to the other departments for me to try and figure out what was going on (left me on hold for half an hour, but occasionally came back to let me know he was still working on it). Turns out, they were crediting my money to an account that is no longer active or even tied to my account.

In the end, they agreed to waive the overage fee and apologized, but this is just an example of the things that they’ll have to fix in order to be able to actually successfully host the iPhone on their network. Not many people would actually put up with the crap and chase after them to fix their billing mistakes.

* End of rant

So, I’ve been waiting a good long time for the iPhone to make it up here, and the fairly small amount of advertising Apple has done, leading up to the iPhone launch in Canada is fairly dismal. This morning, however, I was pointed to the Apple website, only to find that they have an iPhone workshop scheduled for Saturday, November 10th. It could still be a mistake, but if its true, I’ll definately (edit: definitely) be keeping my eye out on both the Rogers and Apple websites to find out.

http://www.apple.com/ca/retail/eatoncentre/week/20071104.html

Okay, so there’s a Torjan out there in the wild now for the Mac… and everyone’s up in arms about it. All the anti-mac people out there are complaining saying ouuu, look, mac’s aren’t secure anymore. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten to mention that you have to be an idiot to actually get the Trojan.

So, here’s what you have to do to get infected:

• Start browsing for free porn.
• Land on a malicious site.
• Get prompted to install software to watch said porn.
• Choose to install the software package that you know nothing about.
• Put in your admin password when it asks for it.
• Realize you can’t watch your porn and move on.

Now, I don’t know about you, but how many mac users out there actually will install something they don’t want, and then enter their admin password to install a program they know nothing about, that they downloaded so they could watch porn. Granted, this probably doesn’t only exist on porn sites, but from the various digg articles I’ve read about it, that seems to be mostly where the trojan is popping up.

For anyone wanting more information, hit up macworld.com (http://www.macworld.com/2007/10/firstlooks/trojanhorse/index.php) for instructions on how to remove it.