Up until now, my connection has been perfect. It rarely goes down, and that's only around midnight every six weeks or so for just a couple of minutes.

This time, however, my connection spontaneously died at 7pm, came back a few minutes later, and missed me off to no end as only half of the web destinations I tried actually worked. I could get to Google, but not Microsoft. This site, but not gmail.

My own standard troubleshooting didn't fix the problem, so I let the connection sit overnight and called tech support in the morning. It roughly went like this:

Phone guy: WelcometofiossupporthisisJustinhowcanIhelpyou?

Me: Hi there, my connection died for a few minutes last night. When it came back, I could only reach about half of my web destinations. For example, I could get to Google, but not Microsoft. I did some basic troubleshooting and didn't have any luck.

Justin: mmhmm. Hang on a second while I check your area ...

waiting for about two minutes listening to each other breathe ...

Justin: alright, it looks like there's an outage in your area that should be fixed by 3:23pm.

Me: An outage that only affects my ability to get to certain sites? That seems kind of weird.

Justin: I don't have any further information, except that you should expect resolution at 3:23pm.

Me: Alright. Is that central or pacific time?

Justin: It doesn't say, so I don't know.

Me: Wow. Okay then. So there's no troubleshooting steps we should go through? You don't want to check my router?

Justin: No that's alright. 3:23pm. Today.

Me: Okay then. Thanks for your ... help.

Justin: Thanks for calling. *click*

Wow. Way to make me feel completely unimportant there, Justin. But, to Justin's credit, not more than 30 seconds after I hung up the phone my connection started working properly! Outage, huh? That's what I thought.

I didn't believe Justin's outage claim, and for good reason. I've done a lot of tech support in my time and claiming an "outage" is standard procedure when you're not supposed to admit something ... like your company fucked something up.

Oh well. My connection is good as new and running smoothly, so I guess this isn't so bad.

Related Links

Related Links

Adventure, 2 hours, PG-13, so unbelievably fucked up I can't grade it.

The problem with this fucking film is that it's really two movies: the first half is by Spielberg, and the second half is by Lucas. It's like going out on a date with the hottest of your old girlfriends you still pine for, only to find out she now has a watersports fetish and she wants to take you back to her place so the two of you can roll around in piss. Fuck you, Lucas. And fuck you, Spielberg, for not warning us. Bastards.

The first thing you notice about this film is that it has a new vibe. And it's good. It sets up a contrast between the Jones you remember and the Jones you're about to meet. Everyone has to grow up, including Indy. He's smarter, a little more grizzly, and a whole lot less fearless. It's all good.

Shia is good. You instantly understand that he's a one trick actor, but fortunyately™ that trick will take him pretty far. Marion is good and gets more useful time here than she did in Raiders. Kate as Spalko is just ... weird. Winstone as Mac is a total throwaway character. I don't know why he was there. Hurt as Oxley is totally misused as a colleague gone utterly mad.

The first half of the film is fun to witness and get into. I laughed out loud four times. Spielberg and Koepp (screenwriter) maintain the humor. Instead of 1930's exotic locations, you get 1950's americana. You might think this is bad but it fits nicely with the Jones contrast theme. It works.

Spoilers from here on down

The second half of the film happens when Spalko tells Jones WTF is going on: the crystal skull is alien, oh and it has psychic powers that reveal themselves to Indy, who is then psychically linked to Oxley and can translate his mad ravings. You heard me fucking right, ladies and gentlemen. Remember From Dusk Till Dawn when it goes from being a cool crime escape caper to a batshit vampire flick? Same thing here. But less lube.

From there, it gets stupid. Unlike the first three films where you're left to ruminate on clues for a time before you have to solve them (out-of-order plot reveals), clues are revealed and instantly solved here. There's no mystery revealed by reason. It's just a bunch of shit happening.

The jungle chase is the leading example of how stupid it gets. Side by side cars that parallel each other perfectly in a rugged jungle at 30mph so that Shia can have a sword fight with Spalko while straddling the cars. Bull. Shit. Then Shia gets caught up in a vine and is left behind by the cars still going 30mph. Yet, somehow, he manages to become an expert vine swinger who's so good he ends up ahead of the cars and they run back into him. BULL. SHIT. Oh, and the little howler monkeys decide to band together and help him by attacking the russians. BULL. FUCKING. SHIT.

Speaking of bullshit, let's talk about the effects for a moment. The physical effects still hold up nicely. The CGI is shit. Absolutely utter shit. And it clashes horribly. Imagine the CGI from Star Wars being used to supplement Raiders or Last Crusade. Especially for animals and bugs. No. Just no. What the goddamn hell were you thinking, guys? 20 years ago you would have bought 10,000 snakes to get the job done. Now you whip up clipshots from the movie Antz? FUCK YOU.

And, let us not ignore the final epic stroke of bullshit in the film: finding the chamber of 13 alien crystal skeletons (sans one missing skull). Seems pretty far fucking fetched, right? Not when you compare it to the scene where the skull, in range of its body, magnetically flies out of Spalko's hands on the skeleton and IT SITS UP.

Seems pretty far fucking fetched, right? Not when you compare it to the scene where the whole room starts to fall apart and rotate to reveal machinery behind the thousands years old stone covering everything while Oxley mentions that they're trans-dimensional beings while looking up into their space portal that's suddenly appeared above them.

Seems pretty far fucking fetched, right? Not when you compare it to the scene where psychic links are flying from the crystal alien skeletons eyes into Spalko's eyes, and she keeps saying "YES NOW I SEE I SEE EVERYTHING I UNDERSTAND!"

Seems pretty far fucking fetched, right? Not when you compare it to the scene where the 13 skeletons merge to form a living Alien who looks like the gimpy CGI version of the reasonably terrifying aliens in Fire In The Sky. This ET on meth gives the full blast to Spalko who can't handle it and gets vaporized into the portal.

Seems pretty far fucking fetched, right? Not when you compare it to the scene where you see Indy & crew escape from the passage up to about 150 feet higher and two football fields further away than where they were two minutes ago so they have a spectacular view of THE GIANT FUCKING FLYING SAUCER EXITING THE STONE MOUNTAIN OFF TO WHATEVER FUCKING DIMENSION LUCAS OBVIOUSLY WENT TO FIRST AND NEVER FUCKING CAME BACK FROM.

Seems pretty far fucking fetched, right? Not when you compare it to the scene where Indy & Marion get married. And get this, he kisses her just like he kissed Leia at the end of Return of the Jedi. You know that lipless, life-affirming, family-friendly smile-politely-afterward kiss where you kind of wonder if Ford isn't gay? He does it again. To Marion.

End of Spoilers

Lucas' half of the film makes no sense. Not in plot, tone, or message. I understand that Lucas wanted to do something different. But did it have to be with the Indy vehicle? Ugh. I'm so depressed. I want to put on Raiders, but seeing that and reflecting on this film will just make me even more depressed.

Something else I just realized: this film and National Treasure 2 (which I also just saw) draw from some of the same Maya/Inca/Aztec legends, although they approach them somewhat differently. While Indiana Jones had more action, National Treasure had more intelligence. Sad, but true.

Related Links

Trailer 2

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

Same Trailer 2 (better color, but blurry)

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

Now available in HD: http://www.whysoserious.com/happytrails/trailer.htm

Related Links

Remember when PayPal used to be really cool before ebay messed them up? RME is hoping to be the next PayPal, and they're offering $25 to anyone who signs up.

The best part about RME is that the $25 really is cash. (Update: RME is no longer offering $25. I still get my $10, though.) You can transfer the amount to your checking account or spend it on sites that accept RME.

After you sign up and log in to your RME account, don't forget to click on your ticket to receive your $25. Then, move the money to your checking account, or go shopping!

Free Jewelry

One of the first places I've found that supports RME is Spotted Octopus Jewelry, makers of the infamous Lightsaber Earrings. Most of the pieces here are well under $25, so it's like getting free jewelry!

I've heard women say this is some of the most elegant and fun jewelry they've seen around. Guys, if you need a gift for your sweetheart, you apparently can't go wrong, here.

What I can tell you right now is that the technology itself is just great. Unlike the myriad of horror tales I've received about Comcast, I have no bad news to report about Verizon.

Of course, avoiding Verizon's customer service at all costs helps. I mean, I'd love to up my speed and give Verizon more money. But, frankly, I'm terrified that Verizon customer service will screw my account up. I don't want them to touch it. At all. Ever. That's how low my regard for Verzion customer service is.

Report: Throughput and Lag (5mbit down / 2mbit up)

The best way I know of to test this is with (legal) P2P file sharing, and test the responsiveness of general web browsing. Now, as you know, Comcast is in hot water for throttling bit-torrent traffic. When I used to be a Comcast customer from 2002 to 2007, all it would take was one or two P2P downloads and my entire connection would choke. No traffic, P2P or otherwise, could get through.

On FIOS, even when I'm P2Ping 600kbit down/200kbit up, I can still check my gmail and use IM just fine. That's right. I can download a 350mb file in under ten minutes, seed it all night, grab four more files, and my internet browsing experience is just fine. In fact, I have yet to find a torrent that fully saturates my line.

Throughput rating: A+

Report: Reliability

Let me put it this way: my Comcast connection was so unreliable that I used to have a ping monitoring service test my IP every hour so that I could clock just how much down time I had: roughly 8%. That number shot up to 30% one week when Comcast was rolling out new equipment and performing the great IP shuffle in my area.

My FIOS connection goes down for up to five minutes around half past midnight every third month or so. That's 0.000003% down time. Over the past year, I can count on my connection to be up and running more than you can count on getting a live person when you call 911.

Reliability rating: A+

Report: Versatility

Well, ok, nobody's perfect. Inbound port 80 is blocked. Fine. I can host a website on Dreamhost with 5TB of transfer for $5.95/mo. Verizon also blocks outbound port 25. Also fine. I host my e-mail on gmail with 25gb of storage per address. If I really wanted to, I could host these things myself with a FIOS business account. But, why bother?

True, Comcast totally left these ports open and I could host whatever I wanted. Of course, the minute you start a blogging shitstorm, and a million users flood your box, you're pretty much screwed.

But, other than that trade-off, I'm very pleased with how I can use my connection. Xbox 360, of course, works great. I streamed a video with VLC player to the public just fine. I can telnet to other boxes, or have other boxes telnet to me on a custom port. So, no real complaints here.

Versatility rating: B+

Report: Overall

While I still harbor an enormous grudge over how my install was handled, and the general state of Verizon's customer service. I'm absolutely thrilled with the performance of the technology itself.

A lot of you have written in with your similar FIOS horror stories, and a few good experiences. From your experiences, I think it's clear that Verizon customer service will continue to be an absolute clusterfuck of the greatest proportion. A few people have reported speed, reliability and other issues. All I can say there is keep troubleshooting and reach out to knowledgable friends for answers.

Overall rating: A-

Related Links