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Ruin Romo

Here’s hoping people actually follow through with this. I’d love to see a nice collection of Jessica Simpson heads in the stands this weekend.

Help your team to victory by letting
Tony Romo know the love of his life
is in the stands!!!

Follow these simple steps:

1) Buy Tickets to the next
Dallas Game.
2) Print out this picture in
Full Color.
3) Cut out eyes and head.
4) Paste or tape to a heavy piece of paper or cardboard.
5) Paste popsicle stick to bottom for easy handling.
6) Bring it to the game and let Tony know Jessica is there for him!
7) Celebrate after your team wins!

and here it is:

MQISM - Official Site of Graffiti Artist MQ (aka MQUE, MKUE)

And while I have your attention, here’s a cool spot from MQ in San Francisco circa 2001

My machine is freshly returned from HP, working, and filled with all sorts of upgraded goodness (Office 2007, CS3, etc.) so I’m in the middle of a computer geek marathon. I’m cleaning up and reorganizing my music, photos and my inbox and starting on a few enhancements to the site that I’ve wanted to get to for a few months now. As always, when there’s anything interesting technically, I’ll be writing up the results here

1st on the agenda?

Upgrading wordpress.

Oh snap!
edited to add: I just noticed that WP has dropped the Technorati incoming links report
in favor of Google Blog Search. Why did I not hear of this before? Am I the only one that cares?

24 Hour Party People A funny, vibrant look at the Manchester music scene and Factory records from 1976 through the 90s. Covering bands like Joy Division and The Happy Mondays, 24 Hour Party People offers up a glimpse at a wildly influential slice of space and time and does so in a creative, infectious way. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s got a lot going for it, especially if you’re a fan of one of the bands at the heart of the film (Joy Division, the Happy Mondays and to a lesser extent New Order.)

Here’s the trailer:

I’m wicked busy. Occupy yourselves with mc chris

I took this photo:

Pete LePage and the rest of the Comic Book club crew get the treatment in the NYT:

Comic Book Club

I went down last year and did a night. It was a lot of fun. If you’re in the city and like comics it’s a no-brainer…

Get in the Christmas spirit HP Lovecraft style

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fish-Men

Based on the classic:

The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft

They still suck, and I’m never buying another HP, but at least I’m getting my machine back tonight.

After speaking to 9 different customer service reps over two separate days for a total of two and a half hours I finally:

• Spoke to someone who was helpful (he was setting me up for a complete rebuild)
• Found out that my machine was in the process of being fixed and would be shipped back to me yesterday!

It’s insane how poor the front end service reps are and how poor the interdepartmental communication is. All that time and frustration could have been saved if they just had a way to keep the account up to date. So lame.

Or was it just me, tonight?

My five month old machine which died 13 days ago and was supposed to be shipped back to me today, is now scheduled to ship back to me on 12/28/2007. Yes, it’s true. An estimate of 7-10 days for the repair has now turned into 4 weeks.

Thank you for lying to me HP customer support!

I called to see what the story was and instead of getting some relief (or even some good information,) I was passed between 4 script reading, off-shored zombies- none of whom could deviate one iota from the predetermined, completely useless, HP customer service pathway.

And then I was disconnected.

To say I’m frustrated is a grand understatement. I’m going to call back tomorrow or Sunday and am going to immediately ask to speak to a supervisor- if just to get someone savvy enough to understand that a frustrated customer needs a little more than the standard question/response pattern they train these guys on. I understand that these things happen- parts can be tough to get, whatever (although I’m still pissed it will take a month.) What I want is someone to actually work at trying to make me a happy customer. The poor folks* I talked to tonight just weren’t doing that. I felt like I was talking to a series of buck-passing robots.

At this point? My first HP laptop purchase will be my last. We’ll see how things go from here on in. Right now, I miss my old Dell and will tell anyone that asks that Hewlett-Packard (HP) computers are to be avoided.

Can they come back from the brink?

*I honestly feel bad for them. Dealing with angry customers all day can’t be fun.

Flickr added stats to pro packages yesterday. If you’ve got a pro account there are all sorts of handy stats you can now get about your photos, including referrers. It’s mostly the expected sources (Google, Yahoo, drunkenfist.com), but one interesting referrer I saw was this page, showing a handy summary of my flickr activities: Flickr DNA: Rob React

Cool stuff.