Category: Internets

Oh, dear, dear Netflix, ye of gentle customer service and awesome Web site that works right. Netflix is launching a streaming movie service for its customers. That’s the good part. The bad part is that it requires MS Windows, which is not going to happen in this house except over my cold, dead body. So, [...]

The queue for the World of Warcraft expansion outside HMV this evening… Originally uploaded by Tom Coates. Am I irreparably lame because I sometimes like to play a bit of the ol’ Warcraft? I have to admit a certain delicious anticipation for the expansion. Mine should arrive in the mail in the next day or [...]

It’s no secret how much I hate, hate, hate Myspace (flames…on the side of my face…burning, heaving flames), but I find the site (well, RSS feed, technically, in my case) MyDeathSpace interesting, if a bit of a downer. MyDeathSpace collects information about myspace users who have died. It gives an account of what killed them [...]

No one else I’ve shared this with seems to be laughing quite as loud, but I think it’s rockin’. See more xkcd masterpieces

I wouldn’t. From local craigslist post: I AM LOOKING FOR A PYGMY GOAT TO BE A COMPANION FOR THE ONE I ALREADY HAVE HE IS LONELY. NOT LOOKING FOR A REGISTERED ONE WITH PAPERS JUST A REGULAR PYGMY GOAT WILL PAY A ADOPTION FEE. PLEASE EMAIL ME IF YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW HAS ONE. [...]

5. I got pretty close to dying of hypothermia when I was 16 years old. I had a penchant then, then as now, for the high desert of Oregon, but also less sense, less fear and more headlong idiocy. It was winter, February, I think, and I had been spurned by a boy, the back [...]

4. I was an ugly child. Really, really ugly. From the time I was 8 until I was 14 or so. The worst ages to be ugly. So I have grown up with the understanding that I am not fun to look at. Bad skin, braces, horrible glasses, unbelievable hair (permed bangs, anyone?), teeth that [...]

3. Right after I turned 15, I stopped attending high school. It was never my considered plan to stop going to school in general–hell, I loved school, I’d been a straight-A, problem-free student until the year before. I couldn’t stand my high school. So I stopped going. One day just became two and six and [...]

I often bellyache about how customer service has mostly gone the way of the dodo over the past several decades, with megacorps becoming increasingly nonchalant about losing individual customers because of their snide or uniformed representatives. They have, what, five million other customers? Who cares if I stop paying Comcast half my paycheck–they’re still getting [...]

2. I traveled from here (Portland, Oregon) as far east as Estonia and Lithuania without leaving the ground. Unless you count water as leaving the ground. This is a side effect of my rapacious fear of flying, something that might make my 5-things list if it weren’t so well-known already. Specifically, I took an Amtrak [...]