One Month In…

Entry 09/04/2025 10:53:33: Mentat 2572

Jeez, where do I begin… 

In just over 6 weeks, as I’ve been here for the complete conversion of Linux to both my deskside and my laptop, and let’s quickly review the changes I’ve seen in that time. 

• 2 Kernel Updates (3 for the laptop because I was running it on Linux Mint for two and a half weeks prior).
  • Did I mention that the automation program for removing previous kernels stopped working in 6.8.0-72.72? I’m still not sure whether it’s working, but I will check it on next Kernel Update. 
• 1 version updates (“Xia” or 22.1, to “Zara” or 22.2). 
• 1 drive (Media) being converted from NFTS to EXT4, and then causing it to auto-mount on login. 
• I can’t even count how many updates I’ve seen for the central libs for the OS… Gnome, Mesa, core stuff… the lists are endless even though it only see the information for the last 7 days as it’s auto deleted before that. 

However one of the things that I find myself in conflict with — particularly given some of the communities that I’ve either flittered through or are involved with is the level of almost abusive attitudes that come from people that have gotten themselves situated and nested into the community for a number of years. 

If anything I routinely catch from them the complete over-simplification of the reasoning, the complete lack of empathy in explaining that this has been going on for any amount of time, and more often times than naught get the impression that have completely forgotten what the changes were, so they stick to “it just works” attitudes and “don’t worry about it”… 

Unfortunately these veterans forget that there’s routine influxes into Linux and the particular distro from Windows and Apple/Mac, are coming from a completely different mindset and quietly asking user to “research it themselves” as they often silently assume usually annoys the younger people off more and more the longer this attitude continues to be propagated. And they will either distrohop, or simply go back to their original OS, complaints and all. 

That’s also the other problem. People are in such a rush to helping they don’t realize that their copy-paste go read this (URL inserted here) while it might be a gem that might have either worked on or found — without any interaction, let alone empathy — it doesn’t feel like helping. It often feels like I’m just a number in the deli queue, got my order and I should move the hell to checkout, and on out of the store. 

No thanks. I’m here for the duration and I’ll be damned if I’m going to not become part of the group-think mindset clique bullshit of not being there to explain things. And I know what it’s like to be dealing with people that don’t have the expertise, the experience, or the mindset to want to research everything through AI or through URL when they got hold of a human being. 

How am I feeling with the conversion? 

Surprisingly well. While it seems odd that that I typically reboot every 2 days instead of 4 (or more thanks to it being Linux); reboots are surprisingly fast — even after a MESA (nVidia) update, and all the graphics caches need to be rebuilt. Otherwise when it comes to the near firehose level of of updates to be downloaded and install, a surprising few of them require system reboots (unlike Fedora which required it more times than I cared to count). 

I did a timing for it the other week and I recall for a Windows Reboot (which was intentionally made slower and slower with all the updates), it took 10 minutes to get to login, and another 15 – 20 to get everything normalized, including the sysadmin server for disc-caching. And for Linux, to get to login (from the system reboot request put int), I can do so in about 5 minutes, and once it gets to the desktop after login and the disk-caching and services finalized another 3 – 4 minutes (6 minutes if it’s a GPU caching going on). 

On my laptop which I had to update it with all the firehose updates on the laptop for the last month, it took all the updates and the Zara Update to complete in 100 minutes. As opposed to the monthly updates being between 90 to almost 160 minutes EACH. And I only had to reboot once (instead of some that could make the machine reboot 2 – 4 times). 

Although I have two things that come readily to mind. The first is that I often find myself trying to fight against the “…well it works for me…” mindset that I used to have done on me in the Ubuntu Forums 17 years ago. I know I do it just to be spiteful. So instead I have to take a moment and explain something like, this is what I did and this is why I experience no problems running it. 

The second is the fight for distro-hopping. Yeah, it’s beginning to become an itch sometimes. Part of the reason has to do to that spiteful feeling I get for not getting Fedora KDE to work properly. Part of the reason has to do with the thought of trying something different… But both of these feelings are easy to overcome when you realize I still have way too much to learn before I remotely think of distro-hopping. Not to mention that it’s going to take way too much to move the saved stuff to the media drive and I quickly get over all of it and like the fact that it’s Linux, it’s Mint, and it’s not insane with rolling updates. 

It’s good, I’m good, my PC behaves, and I don’t have to deal with the bullshit anymore that came with Windows. 

Until the next time.

T-Minus 23 days & counting

Entry 07/18/2025 08:36:58: Mentat 2525

It’s time for me to start talking about the major gripes that I have not for the Linux Operating system, but instead with the community at large.   This is going to be the breaking point for me to wanting to work not only with the operating system but also with getting the answers that I need for anything that’s going on with my system(s). 

The first is that a good majority of the more experienced parts of the community lacks any rapport to the questions they encountered on the forums.  You are either dealing with the experienced people that demonstrate a complete uncaring attitude to being nice to people — new, intermediate and veterans — in the forums.  They copy-paste their answers which they have done ad infinitum (which is actually a sure bloody sign that if it’s **so** good, you’d think there would be a pin for it somewhere on the community boards).  They don’t work on anything remotely demonstrating interpersonal experience.  It’s like a race to get the most amount of answered like it’s an e-peen flex that they’re the ones with the most massive endowment for experience in the community. 

Or…  And these are my personal favorites.  In order to prove their experience as they’re trying to prove their massive e-peens, they will use ad hominem build straw men against another posters comment in order to prove their superiority.  They’re not helping either the poster or the contributors, and all they’re doing is creating a form of toxic environment that is neither supporting nor helpful to new users trying to get used to the culture they’re coming into. 

Finally and my personal favorite are the worst of the community.  They come in, drop a single comment like "well if works for me" (and yes.  17 years later I’m still seeing this scattered through more than just the Canonical community) and were positively no fucking help solving the problem.  These people are in my opinion, the worst examples of last word attitudes that aren’t useful and create a more negative environment than humanly possible.

**THIS IS NOTHING** like the experience that I’ve dealt with from any Microsoft or Windows community where people answer the question, explain a little of their experience with it, and move on. 

I often attribute this to the most negative parts of human qualities:  arrogance, condescension, elitism/turpitude (at worst case), and the sort of community negativity that I often didn’t have to encounter with problems in the Windows or Apple Communities.  In fact, they came in, answered the question, posted third party information and did what they could to create a positive experience before moving on.  

The last thing I would expect from people that were outcasts, misfits, out-of-box thinkers, and the generally independent thinkers that often take abuses from others for being different.  No instead they seem to be shoveling out the abuses they experienced  onto people in the world.  It’s the cycle of abuse that doesn’t seem to end. 

The second gripe I have comes from the people that don’t remotely answer the question posed about a piece of software and instead foist another piece of software that has **nothing** to do with the question posed.   Case in point, I was looking for answers to the questions I had when it came to KIO-drive (when I was trying out Fedora Plasma).  Did they answer the problems posed about KIO-Drive and Dolphin?  Nope!  They ignored the OP’s question, and would then insist to the OP to install RClone, OCAMLFUSE. OverGrive, or InSync instead. 

What the people insisting on alternatives didn’t explain is that RClone required excessive additional steps in order to operate properly…  And it’s use is much slower than what Windows users are used to with Google Drive (which was also not explained).   OCAMLFUSE has a small chance of working, yet more strongly on the not working at all (ending with a 403 "not authorized" issue and falls back on RClone’s part for setting up the cloud console to make it work).  Oh and I forgot to mention, three sites that supported OCAMLFUSE did an extremely poor job explaining that you had to include another repository from the creator of the program to make it part of the auto-update feature.  Bad move there, believe me.  To continue, OverGrive can cost $5.00 for a license to make it work "conveniently" (read: set and forget), and InSync costs a whopping $39.99 – $49.99 (depending on whether it’s on sale or not) to use it past the try-and-buy time. 

This neither answered nor remotely explained all the details of the alternatives leaving the person high and dry having to make decisions as to whether ANY of it is worth the effort. 

By the way, I did find my solution:  FreeFileSync.  It works like SysInternal’s tool: SyncToy from days gone by, and with the necessary tarball only requires a minor check with Google turning the 15 GiB Drive/Cloud into a thumb-drive.  The total time I had to take on this was 6 hours of going through..  Yes, RClone, GIO-Drive, OCAMLFUSE, OverGrive, all of them ending in either lack of proper documentation frustration or simply took too long to troubleshoot. 

And this is one example of the way the community completely derails a question on software by pointing to another piece of software they personally like instead.  If you can’t answer the questions — shut the fuck up and let other people answer it instead.  If no one answers it — believe me — you’ll be given the opportunity when the person comes back and asks, "are there alternative to …" 

The funny thing is that people laughed at me when someone asked the question, "what is one of your red flags when dealing with the Linux Community?" and I pointed this out first and enthusiastically.  Yet they all knew from experience how often they encountered this in their wanderings. 

With these two attitudes alone, it’s completely antithetical to the Windows and Apple experiences and with some of the people leaving both (Windows and Apple) because of being tired of all the bloat, the needless security that has nothing to do with the actual operating system and the needless levels kernel level securities (and security holes), that can leave the OS in an even more vulnerable state than being fixed. 

The third gripe I have has to be the extreme cliquishness I catch from the community at large.  Never in my life have I see so much elitism, cliquishness and insular attitudes from people using an operating system and finding programs to make the OS a user’s experience in free, alternative, and even productive software that meets the person’s needs.  In the three weeks I have moved from Fedora to Mint, I have never seen to much ageism, CIS/Trans/Non-Binary disdain, accusing gamers of not being anything of the sort (yeah, I still remember that one because PVP has been excluded from my repertoire).  I have seen elitism coming from people because they don’t run Arch, Endeavor, Plasma, whatever and even seen condescension from the e-peen flexers because of this.

People, this is an Operating System…  People from 12 years old to 80 years old are using it.  They are white, black, yellow, green, pink, orange…  They are  straight, gay, pan, trans, questioning, demi, polyamorous, whatever.  They can be using any one of 600 distros and yes underneath the whatever UI you currently have, they still use the same basic core that relies on knowing the command structure. 

When you’re having a conversation — be it with the OS, or outside of it — you’re going to be dealing with attitudes, understandings, perspectives and experiences that go well outside of your own.  Don’t make them feel bad if it doesn’t match exactly what the fuck you’re looking for.  Because more often times than naught you can learn something that makes your experience bigger than it was yesterday. 

My fourth and final gripe sort of wraps up with the impression I get from the communities that I’ve dealt with since 2008 when is started all of this during my dual booting experience between Windows and Ubuntu (and later distro hopped to my dissatisfaction).  The complete lack of help when it came to system maintenance and file trimming.  I have seen so many complaints from users running out of space for their discs where logs have gotten to whoppingly huge and unmanageable sizes.  Instead of explaining this to the OP, too often even the experience will tell them to **NEVER DELETE THESE FILES**. 

Umm…  excuse me this is unhelpful and doesn’t address the problems.  How precisely does this hoarding fix anything? 

It’s extremely rare to encounter someone trying to explain it’s time to look at your files to see what the errors are before deleting them.  And ALMOST no one will explain to the person how to delete them/trim them/clean up the rotated files to make it more manageable.   What’s worse is that they reinforce never deleting them — like it’s absolutely forbidden or something. 

This is gamer hoarding:  keeping things "just in case".  Not to mention extremely detrimental when it comes to system operations and system monitoring as it clutters the hard drive with excessive amounts of files that do nothing but take up space.  And it reminds me of this WTF  I often encounter when watching other players collecting new items. 

All I can ask is…  Why? and What’s the point?!  This isn’t remotely helpful, people!  This isn’t remotely a free user experience.  This is the sort of bullshit, secular and even parochial attitudes that we have to deal with constantly from the narrow-minded people in our day to day lives that put us down because we’re different from the pack, the clique, the social circles .  Why bring it to an operating system that — depending on the distro in question — REQUIRES the end-user understand not only how to make it work for them, but also can end up going tits-up because of a system update.  This is a system that REQUIRES the user be proficient and capable of tweaking and optimizing through routine maintenance and understanding. 

This goes diametrically against my first concept about being human.  I goes directly against my second concept of helping.  

At this point, I’m realizing, I like the alternative for Windows 10 which is sunsetting in October.  So far, Mint’s the way for me to go as it’s not causing me the anxiety and headaches Fedora Plasma did when I installed it on the laptop.  It doesn’t feel like Arch, which gave me the distinct impression of not being ready for prime-time.  Nor is it the most cancerous bunch in Ubuntu which is far too busy trying to be "cool".  Or Debian which is more plodding about OS security and features than even I’m capable of being when it comes to slow moving and methodical. 

Mint/Cinnamon does its best to not firehose me with updates, but instead updates based on improvements and code problems that weren’t worked out during the initial release.  So far *fingers crossed* core fixes aren’t breaking things.  And *knocking on wood* requiring me to roll back. 

But the whole of the Linux Community?  As Chris said in The Ritz, Screw you, honey.  Boy, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a queen without a sense of humour.  You can die with your secret…  Miserable piss-elegant fairy.  if you can’t get over yourself or your ego-centric attitudes, die in a ditch.  That social cancer is tiring and drags people down. 

I’m going to be staying as far away from them as humanly possible. 

Until the next time.

Feedback after playing almost 3 months of Destiny 2

TL;DR For those on the forums not interested in read a long, drawn out and meandering missive.

• Laundry Lists. So many laundry lists.
• Audio Tracks for the lore.
• Lore doesn’t feel like immersion, if feels like an Easter Egg Hunt that doesn’t make a new player to the Destiny Universe feel like he’s learning anything, and the references to D1 are just simple nods to players that played the previous version and came to their own conclusions as to what’s going on. For new Players it’s just reading points to add to the confusion.
• Payouts evenly distributed for both PvP and PvE players instead of forcing PvE players into a PvP environment.
• An improved Single Source location for information – including bugs.
• The prevalence of Piracy in PvP and the game.

Videos to watch as inspiration for the points being made, both from Extra Credits:

Skinner Box & Grinding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c

MMO and Engaging Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otAkP5VjIv8

Now, the missive…

I know better than to start with the most daunting, but damn if I won’t go into it as it’s also the most detracting.

This doesn’t so much feel like a game, but given the approach to a money for a disposable season every 90 days, this is feeling like a set of laundry lists to do before the end of the season out of the typical and personal FOMO limits that this game seems to generate for new and intermediate players. I know I can take my time – I did this with Warframe for more than 6.5 years – and will probably return to this attitude as I find myself extremely dissatisfied with working on artifact leveling up for mods¹ that seem appealing only to have them ripped out of my inventory when the season ends.

If you’re going to run a game on grind and laundry lists, don’t limit the picking & choosing list to just three. In fact, it should be indexed in such a way that those chosen quests and bounties should be at the top when selected instead of willy-nilly as they currently are (I know it’s ordered based on pick up, but damn if it’s not annoying when looking at 2 – 4 pages of quests to have to burn through). When in the Tab UI can be limited to three, that’s understandable as you have limited UI geography in the world maps and missions and need to pay attention to the adds and champions instead of what to do next. As it currently stands, it becomes a micro-managing nightmare to have to find your list is done and have to return to the Quests Menu to add 3 more. Wash, rinse, repeat is most probably why most players don’t even use them to begin with.

Keep in mind this isn’t a second job and shouldn’t be the inane sort of grind fest of assembly line work as some of us actually have to do that for a living (yes, even tech support centers can actually be set up this way which is soul crushing) nor I do get the impression from the physics engine it’s not set up like Microsoft Project Dynamics (otherwise known as MS Project) that is stuck in its ways since 1984.

¹Yes, as a Warframe player I have 98% of the now just over 986 mods available to the playerbase, many of which I have duplicates to assist other players in obtaining if their RNG is lackluster to just plain bad. Making them this disposable doesn’t make them sought after, they make them ignored even by the meta players as they would prefer to stick to stable mods instead of mods that are flashes-in-the-pan.

Next up, Lore.

The entire lore section of the game continues to feel bolt-on and not only lacks immersion, it comes off like a bloody Easter Egg Hunt making references to Destiny that only Destiny players that have stuck around will understand. You’re not just catering to those players exclusively anymore, you’re attempting to garner new players to the game in the hopes of it sticking around. Further you’re talking about making this game the current one for the next 5 – 7 years. Yet as it stands it continues to feel as disposable as Destiny was after a couple.

Further reading in a game for all the lore is as immersive as giving a duck a bicycle. I’m sure that it’s quite informative and might even give a player the feeling that they have just awoken into an on-going story, except – because of the RNG – isn’t even collected in order – nor does it show order until you have between 50% – 75% collected. In some cases – like the Forsaken Lore book – “The Lawless Frontier” seems to have an arbitrary code glitch where “By Thy Tongue Be Damned” only seems to spawn under special conditions as stated in this thread: https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/254023432?showBanned=0&path=0 even though The Rifleman was killed in order to further the story quest for the DLC.

By the way Bungie – shame on you for requesting screenshots when there’s been numerous complaints all over the net and forums (Reddit and so on) and then having a mentor explain to the player how to remedy it instead of knowing there was a potential problem that continues to exist since October of this year. It’s even more shameful when you provide access to your game’s APIs to third party sites that can easily determine that the user has it, and you can’t seem to so without screenshots. Here’s my proof that the Forsaken campaign has been completed and yet I’m still waiting for another flashpoint on Tangled Shores for the lore point: https://i.imgur.com/EObdXyi.png and https://i.imgur.com/fJEUwwY.png. Nowhere is it indicated that this is required to be collected from a Flashpoint and gameplay for Forsaken demonstrated getting each lore point after killing the various Scorn Barons.

To continue… I’m rather surprised – not to mention mystified – how a game only 2 years old (and an engine about 5 – 7 years old when you include its predecessor Destiny) doesn’t have these set with audio tracks reading these out. Older and more limited gaming engines found both in Cryptic’s Star Trek Online and Sony/Daybreak’s DC Universe Online (both more than 10 – 11 years old) have both increased and revamped their reading only system to having audio tracks. Many people aren’t expecting you to get big names like Oded Fehr (Osiris), Gina Torres (Ikora Rey) or even Nathan Fillion (Cayde-6) to sign on again (though it doesn’t hurt to ask sometimes as some actors will do it pro bono), but there are also voice actors that are significantly less expensive than the A-List choices.

I understand that Destiny suffered a mid-production shake up and the out-of-game lore cards were the only way this lore was going to be incorporated. Carrying it over to Destiny 2 doesn’t feel like “tradition”, it in fact comes off cheap and lazy.

Putting it to audio not only with even D-list actors/actresses, developers, volunteer or even raffle winners will assist people that often play this game with forms of dyslexia or reading disabilities (not to mention some players waiting for strikes, crucible or even gambit missions to pop when in their orbiter to listen to an otherwise rich story collecting proverbial dust in their triumphs. And if that isn’t incentive, I don’t know what will.

Next up… Mission payouts. Good lord, George Orwell’s Animal Farm with its saying, “Four legs good, two legs better” comes readily to mind when I’m seeing the payouts during events and even standard gameplay between PvP and PvE players. Not only grossly uneven, it’s even downright insulting to non-PvP players. I understand that you want to to give the best rewards to PvP in order to motivate them to continue to play against each other, but relagating PvE’ers to the salt, potential rage and the grind of Crucible and Gambit reminds me of another quote said by Robert Heinlein, “Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.”

Quan Li did a rather interesting bit of research in his page available on ResearchGate. Not to mention there are some rather extensive information as to the mindsets, provided in his extensive paper. However these charts http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/07_01/image001.gif and http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/07_01/image005.gif demonstrate the percentages of PvE vs PvP. While this chart, demonstrates there are more older players to the realm of PvE and younger to PvP http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/07_01/image007.gif. So perhaps trying to make it less uneven on the RNG payouts, given the older are more likely to spend money themselves than younger who have to rely on the whims of someone else’s income to satisfy their needs.

Next up, Unified information on the game.

As a Teacherframe Player (someone that volunteers to show players the ropes of Warframe and provide information on the various bugs, glitches and temporary work-arounds to new players) that I am find myself often frustrated while I figure out the game before helping others with: Gameplay that does not rely on in-game explanations and pointers on what to do and where to do it. Or better a single source site – like your own forums (not that Charlie-Foxtrot of a PHP forum that’s incredibly difficult to get any information from and seems to have been coded in the mid-90s when it comes to search functions) instead of going to multiple third parties like Reddit, Forbes (seriously a business magazine has a dedicated section just for Destiny? This is a sure sign of a good part of the age demographic you’re catering to), and some extremely dedicated sites for anything that is anything.

With in-game explanations and guides and a single-source location you’ll find your players more likely to want to be in the game and get immersed, rather than running through multiple sources in the hopes of finding an answer to the issues they might be facing getting frustrated with the mixed signals and going off to finding better games to play than yours.

I can assure you other smaller developers – such as Digital Extremes (Warframe) and Frontier Developments (Elite: Dangerous) – have learned this and continue to systematically improve a way for single-source information be provided to their gameplayers both in game and with less heads on the hydra for third parties.

Perhaps it’s something you should be considering instead of creating more heads in the process.

Finally I would like to wrap up with the clear increase in Piracy I’ve been hearing from the community of content creators on Twitch and YouTube.

Gabe Newell once said, “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”

The question I ask you – Bungie – is this: Are you really giving them a service that’s better? Or are you making the glitches, the grind and the RNG so bad, it’s driving them to piracy to do so?

Old Blood. Insane Grind. Older Issues. And above all sadistic DMs still screwing with the playerbase abound.

I’m posting this here because I am not going to be dictated by immature adults and tumblrinas to be civil based on some bizarrely strict or wonky rules and guidelines. If I choose to use words like, “Fuck You” and “Motherfucker” I am going to use them to display my extreme displeasure at something and no amount of beating around the bush by being civil or diplomatic is going to fix it. Even diplomats can lose their shit to be civil when dealing with overwhelming bullshittery and fucknuttery…

…And this update takes the motherfucking cake for bullshitery and fucknuttery.

I know the issues and the bugs and the code breaking will be addressed. I know that I have to wait patiently. I am not going to temper my anger or my frustration with kind and gentle words because certain people need a handhold and a pat on the back for their apparent laziness (and hoarding through REM’ing) at not cleaning up 6+ years of code. And I’m certainly more-than-over mincing words with folk that don’t know how to take the responsibility of bad decisions after bad decisions after bad decisions. Suck it in, suck it up and cherry pick if my extremely blunt and crude words hurt any sensibilities. Adults learn how to fair through the positive, the constructive and the negative.

So buckle in, and be prepared for me to teeter between being civil and channeling a DI dressing down surly and undisciplined recruits… Some of the shit I’ve seen in this update have tripped up my sensibilities and I will pay back based on how they have been tripped.

I have so many mixed feelings about the melee system that the only thing that I could possibly say about it is a combination between it feels good to be back to something that felt like the game I used to play last year and there’s still a long road ahead to fixing the cluster-fuck of changes to the weapons with the current update.

Swords and Hammers are buffed (like mad) and for a player like me that’s a good thing. However I’m not the only player in the game and would occasionally look forward to seeing Sarpa and Redeemer players to fight alongside. What I’ve heard of the Sarpa and Redeemer (Prime) players is their despair as they turned into Monkeys doing somersaults for treats with High Noon and damage nerfs happening instead of maintaining (or even increasing) damage based on base stats.

The insanity of stance mods making player fly across the map (often to their deaths) has been taken into consideration and control — but some of the choices for which ones move you and which ones keep you in a standing position leave a lot to be desired. Threshing Grain is an action done by movement — yet the player is standing still unless they’re moving with the W key. It’s pretty damned clear someone didn’t do manual labour when they named and coded some of these stances and should get out of the office more to learn and observe what sort of attacks require movement and which ones are meant to be standing still.

It’s a step forward, but two steps back.. Sometimes it seems to be because of bad decisions, sometimes random decisions and sometimes old code rearing its ugly head because it wasn’t properly removed from the game.

Just like the changes to sounds and flash going into the arsenal and choosing melee weapons. Players get to experience a momentary lens flare and the sound like someone is picking a melee weapon of power. While this might give the player a sense of pride for picking a weapon, this is quickly shattered going into battle when swinging the Tatsu has the sounds associated to fighting at the dinner table with butter knives.

Just like the fact that Grineer Scorpions are pulling players across the floor at every chance when a player is not prepared. Or in my case in spite of being prepared by casting a Nidus Larva. Out of a simulacrum of 8 level 50 Grineer Scorpions, 4 of them were still able to hook Nidus from the larva (as opposed to simply 1).

Next, Grendel farming…

I only have 2 words for that cluster-fuck grind: FUCK and NO.

First you need to pay the price for Vitus¹ Essence to get the coordinates for the standard parts (Chassis, Systems and Neuroptics). 25 EACH according to the Arbitrations NPC. This means a metric fuck ton of farming of end game Arbitration Farming. Then you need to go to the mission coordinates without mods, without operator nor arcanes. Which is long, painful and goes against the synergies and lessons taught since Vor’s Prize that were set up with beginner player for the last 7 years?

Then there’s the standard 12 hours build requirements for each part and 72 hours build requirements for the warframe itself. All to have a warframe at looks like a Steel Meridian Meatball (Roller) had sex with the Great Pumpkin (of Charlie Brown fame) and has all the manners of an American Streamer burping and belching down the mic during a stream.

No thanks.. And fuck that noise because no amount of platinum I have is going to buy it. (more on this later on).w

¹ Still amusing (in that sardonic sort of way) that I can’t call my Raplak amp the Cocktail Fork because Fork can be misconstrued as slang for Fuck, but DE has wonky double-standard rules that Vitas can be left alone in spite of the fact that it’s Estonian slang for fuck. Excuse the fuck me, are we adults or are we children to be scolded for interesting uses of words because Tumblrina feelings are easily butthurt.

Vauban and Ember

I’ll admit I didn’t test Ember — a min-maxer friend did — so I’ll have to glaze over this… I do remember he did know how to build her based on her ability requirements and will need to revisit her in the near future. However all I can think about the Vauban Rework is, what a bag of wank. I smiled when I saw that many of his aerial movements for casting his abilities came straight out of the Vauban Prime Trailer.

However, the results of his ability are still very much the shitshow they were before the Parkour 2.0 rework. Here’s the results of my disappointment.

At near 200% strength and higher than average efficiency, I should be looking at some serious damage for an Ultimate ability for a Warframe. What I saw however, was nothing more than a spark that needs further work:

These are level 1 Grineer Lancers. Against Higher level Grineer and Corrupted it does even less damage due to armour reductions. Sure they might all get sucked in to kill, but I can do infinitely more damage and stack returns with Nidus’ Larva and Virulence combinations than… this².

Vauban still remains a Warframe meant for the closet and I can’t wait to see what someone like Rahetalius — who is a Vauban main — would say about this.

² Before anyone says anything about this, I tested this against level 1 MOAs. I got no more than 37 points/sec. this is not even remotely close 99.5 points/sec as reported in the abilities.

And finally….

Kuva Liches

I have three words for that new grind: FUCK… YO… COUCH…

You need to do a grineer mission with enemies of mid-to-high level. Then you need to kill off the maggot that spawns the Lich much like the Helminth Cyst. Then you go back to your orbiter get to see what… oh fuck this, I’m not even going to describe it. Brozime did and I’m sitting here demanding the option to get the fuck out.

1. I don’t want to do this grind
2. I do not want to put up with a clapped out Kingpin system that will continue to grow every time I mess up the right mod combination.
3. I don’t want to listen to the fucknut taunting me like a 9 year old on an elementary school playground every fucking time I go into the game. Oh this isn’t Lotus saying, “You have a new quest in your codex.” This is the sort of shit 9 year old bullies say to piss off the nerd in the class. (and yes, I was that nerd in elementary school. I’ll be damned at 55 I’m going to go back to the very shit I have been attempting to remove working with GLSEN).
4. I don’t want to grind for another relic to crack open to get a mod card that only has 3 uses and is destroyed.
5. I am not spending 835 plat for temporary cards and cosmetics and colour palettes that I **BARELY** use the ones I do own (and that’s 525 Plat of that total colour palette cost and 85 plat for the relics and 105’ish credits for cosmetics I don’t remotely use)…. Boo DE! BOO!! This is extremely bad taste and comes off as the sort of cash grab I’ve come to expect from EA or Ubisoft.
6. The weapons are random, and I can tell based on the bullshit with Rivens and the RNG in this game some will end up being god-rolled. This is the Power Creep that DE routinely waffles on and will end up being nerfed. Sure, they’re not tradeable but that doesn’t matter.. Like the exilus mod slots in weapons — it’s continued power creep that DE speaks in dev-streams against and continues to feed because they’re too scared of mobs making their lives miserable.

I know that DE is notorious for adding things to the game assuming people want to do everything that they dole out.. But in this case? Nope! Fuck yo’ couch and give an option to have it removed. I want out.

There is so much more I can cover, but you know what.. This is enough and now I have to wait until DE comes back from the weekend, looks at the numbers and realizes, not all of this has been a good idea.

A Couch Potato’s Review of Destiny 2

Now that Bungie has been released from the claws of one of the AAAs that have systematically ruining the gaming industry from making fun games to making games that pad the bottom line, they have decided to make the game Free-To-Play.

Sort of.

A couple of acquaintances have been singing the praise of the game doing this as it allows players not otherwise familiar to the gaming title. This new system of Bungie allows players that don’t want to sink the $35 – $65 dollars into some season pass and get a good taste of what this franchise has to offer.  And while this might be true, as lore collector (for the immersion)  and a non-founder to Warframe (6 1/2 years at the time of this article), I’m just not feeling it.  And this is why…

One, this is a sequel to another game (in this case Destiny) and because of it, it’s relying on the user to having played the first version of the game in order to continue to collect information to piece together the world around the player.  Except that in the first game, all the lore that the game had was collected in cards and information outside of the game itself.  According to a couple of other acquaintances, the lore is also being stored outside the game — either in book form or in digital format in order to make sense of the world around the character.

This is NOT immersion building, this is immersion breaking.  If I wanted to understand the world based on reading a book, I would be reading a book, not playing a game.  While it’s true that //Warframe// has been doing this in the form of the codex library on one’s orbiter as of the last couple of years, at least I can look at it, read it and even listen to it in audio format at my leisure when I’m either waiting between missions, or better waiting while friends get their things together before the next mission.

As it stands however, I can’t really immerse into the game or the world around me, because I either don’t have all the bits and pieces from the first game — or worse — the NPCs rattle off things going on in the game working on either the assumption that I’ve collected the information from Destiny or smile and nod as I haven’t a bloody clue what is going on.

I did however take a look into the Triumphs (and collections) and while there’s something there to show off e-peen cred in the game, it’s not quite lore, it’s more like a laundry list of things to do, kill, find, etc.  Much like the Mastery Rank in Warframe but has as much credibility to one’s proficiency in the game as a monkey that can pass a test.  This might simply be a me problem — but those really don’t mean anything much to me other than something to collect to check off the list.

Two, while it’s good that the mission requirements for each of the planets are nothing more than a laundry list of things to do before moving onto the next planet — in free to play — if one gets enough experience the next (and next and next) stop is opened up.  As it stands after playing the game 17 hours, I have Earth, Titan, Nessus (had to look that one up — it’s a moon of Uranus), and Io by the time I reached Level 4 on my Warlock.  However, as it stands I have finished off the checklists for Earth (EDZ) and Titan; yet I can assure you I have more to do on both of those planets.  I’ll keep at it though just to see if I can’t say I’ve done it all…

The battle system has much to be desired.  While I understand that this is a gun play game and I went into it with the assumption, it has nothing on the other games I’ve played.  Aiming does more damage sure, but there’s no feel of visceral victory from aiming.  Hit the target in the knee, the target’s head blows off.  Hit the chest area, there goes the head.  Hit the arm, you know the drill.  There’s no real success in killing something if everything is going to cause the heads to blow off when they die.  I’m sure that it was explained somewhere that this is going to happen given how the Fallen, the Cabal and the Hive (and I’m sure it’ll apply Vex but I haven’t seen them yet), yet after a while I don’t get the same feel of success that I killed.  It’s just another dead enemy that I can forage through for ammo for my weapons and whatever currency (Glimmer) that I can collect.

Melee is NOT melee in this game.  Melee as defined by the dictionary is a confused fight, skirmish or scuffle.  And a melee weapon is a martial weapon used in such a scuffle.  It’s the sort of thing that says one is fighting for their life before having to die and subsequently spawn again.  Calling this melee is like saying Emperor Palpatine using force lightning is considered melee.  While there’s a sense of accomplishment when it comes to watching the first enemy disintegrate, the lack of energy that follows afterwards makes the melee attack less and less effective until it feels like nothing better than a girlie-slap and hair pulling battle against some pretty powerful enemies in close quarters.  Still haven’t had the ability to run finishers, but then again, it’s not the sort of thing one can do with a stealth-backstabbing either…  It’s still not melee, no matter how you slice it.

Any swords in the game are actually weapons I don’t want to use because — like Shotguns — goes against my want to be in close quarter combat against enemies as it becomes a charlie-foxtrot I want nothing to do with.

The perks of it have to be the Ultimate ability and Grenades of the class.  There’s something really gratifying about quickly finishing up mission bosses at the end of the run with one’s ultimate (which can do some pretty wicked area of effect damage when detonating the ultimate prior to hitting the target), or getting rid the rabble with a well placed grenade throw.  And thanks to my experience both in real life as well as projectile weapons in several other games, I’m rather successful at hitting the area I target.

Another detractor is the betterment system and the way you’re constantly having to scramble to the inventory screen to clean up all the dross lower-powered items collected from missions, bounties, patrols, etc.  While I know that there’s a system to it and it works based on going from Common (White border) to Uncommon (Green), to Rare (Blue), to Legendary (Purple) to Exotic (Gold)…  Earning Exotic Legendary equipment seems to come from the part of the game I positively and absolutely abhor:  Player-vs-Player.  At least that’s what I’ve seen so far from streams where I’m trying to learn the game by vicariously learning over the shoulder of others (hopefully, I’ll learn otherwise as I stay to it).

While it’s good that I don’t have to rely on the wikis to explain the perks of the weapon as the in-game descriptions make a hell of a lot of sense explaining it on the details screen.  Further, the details screen even allows you to customize based on playstyle, based on in-item options and additional mods that can be collected by breaking down items for vendor reputations.

By far, the biggest detractor I’ve seen second to the battle system has to be the paywalls.  And this game makes sure you know you’re free-to-play by the amount of paywalls you have to see every time you go visit a contact on a planet to the vendors in the tower.  Hell, I remember getting a mission unlock for a bow from Banshee-44 (weaponsmith in the Tower) only to find out that in order to unlock it — I have to buy the Season Pass.  Other than actually spending cash to get it, there’s currently no other way to work around the paywalls in the game.  And that’s not really free-to-play as I’ve come to appreciate from Digital Extremes.  This is Pay-to-Play more was the sort of thing that caused Trion Worlds’ Rift to drop from one – two thousand players in game six years ago to less than two-hundred now (as seen here: https://steamcharts.com/app/39120).

The bottom line is that this game is better than the mouse-click movement and RNG madness of GGG’s Path of Exile — not to mention the RNG in Destiny 2 is more progressive through the planets than the pure dross dropping in PoE — Destiny 2 lacks the immersive quality necessary for a lore collector.  It relies too much on information collected outside the game, as in-game seems to be more laundry lists than lore telling.  The battle system is extremely vanilla, and coupled with a paywall reminding the Free-to-Players that they’re in there without all the bells and whistles necessary for the full game it’s the sort of game that I would play when I have nothing else better to do with my time.  But in it’s current iteration D2 won’t ever pull me away from games like Star Trek Online or Warframe if only because with the former, I knew the lore since watching Star Trek more than 50 years ago.  And with the latter it has in-game lore, it has stories, it has development in one package, and it has the ability to rip the heads off of enemies along with ripping them into kibble depending on where you aim on the target and the weapon you use.

There’s talk to Bungie having a 5-year plan for D2.  Hopefully in that time, they’ll get out of the paywall attitudes the current version currently has.

After the Humidity Madness

Entry 06/19/2014 09:35:12 AM – Mentat 704

Finally!!!! After several days of warmer than average weather and unbearable amounts of humidity; it’s finally started raining here this morning. While the humidity is still up there (more than 80% the last time I checked a couple of hours ago), at least it’s not the oppressive BS that I’ve put up the last couple of days. Good thing too, given that I’m getting rather tired of being completely drained out come sundown then the temperatures drop to where I expect them for this time of year… Well that and I don’t have to suffer through one sinus or the other shutting down and blocking up when I move my head one way or the other. So, hopefully over the next couple of days it’ll be more bearable than it has been and I can enjoy Emancipation Day without it feeling quite so like August here in the Tundras of New England.

Of course the amusing thing in all this is that I’m currently over my mother’s house watching her Monster Child — Jack. The amusing thing was that my mother sent up to my Aunt’s house to wash her car in spite of it raining even up there in Woonsocket. She went up there out of sheer stubbornness because she canceled out last week for washing the car on threat of rain. Last week we almost brought Jack along so that he could get a bath (he’s smelling particularly dog at the moment), but the more my mother thought about it — the more she decided it was best he stayed at home and went to a groomer for a washing instead. Not that I blame my mother in her decision — Jack is too easily riled by other dogs, and my aunt’s little hyper mutt would set him off… So while my mother’s off; I’m treated to looks (and attitude) like this:

I get looks like that because I’m not my mother and I’m not one to give him treats whenever he wants or needs. Yeah, she spoils him rotten and because I’m not high on the pecking order/pack order in the house, he often mopes when I’m over making sure he doesn’t wreck the house during any abandonment issues he might go through. At least he’s not begging to go out in his boredom before his usual walk time.

Now that it’s getting into summer, I’m trying to discipline Jack a little bit more and not be completely spazzed out during this walks. Also trying to curb his hyper attitude at barking at faeries. It seems that I’ve come to learn that he’s pretty myopic (near-sighted) as he’s gone crazy barking at smaller people (children and in one case a rather short Latino mowing the lawn at the apartment complex on the path we normally walk). Even at inanimate objects like lawn bags on the sidewalk if they’re the right distance from him. When he gets closer, Jack stops when he realizes what he’s barking at is not a dog at all.

Surprisingly, Jack does really well when he’s short leashed: he walks at the same speed I do, doesn’t do a lot of doubling back to check various scents from other dog-owners that walk the same path. Even maintains a sense of calm when dealing with Starlings, and faeries… But the instant he’s given more leash — off he goes spazzing out more. I suspect it’s going to take months for him to calm down given I don’t think the Summer Heat’s going to calm him down any.

On the flip side, Moe’s even more sedate with the summer heat and humidity. While he might not get up on me at the desk when the ambient temperature’s over 75 F/23 C, he’s still just as determined to lay on me when I take an afternoon cat nap. Which in itself is “fun” because it’s like having more than 101.5 F/38.6 C laying down on my crotch area. Worse when he’s happy and sprawls out like a napping toddler. He doesn’t seem to have much issue hanging off me head upside and purring to his heart’s content as he sleep as well.

In fact, today was the first day he was in the front window and didn’t freak out and hide when said “hello” when she walked by. Unlike the last time when she did that and he hid under the covers in the bedroom for hours. Of course, he’ll still hide whenever anyone else is over… but at least I think he’s figured out if whoever it is that talks to him is on the street, then he’s safe.

The level of stupidity is going up now that the weather’s getting warmer. For example, my neighbors across the street now rent the whole house, one of them made the “brilliant” decision of putting their two little dogs on the first floor… While this might not sound like a fail as I imply, it is when you realize these two dogs are easily stressed out and start barking at anything and everything that walks by or barks in the neighborhood. Worse, when someone walks by — they fly to the front windows wrecking the blinds in the process. I walked by, and one of their two dogs, just flew at the window and through the blinds. Heard them a couple of more times after that when I was in my kitchen and cooking my lunch. It hasn’t happened today as I didn’t see them in the window, so hopefully they’ve learned their lesson.

Then there’s the second floor neighbors in the house across the parking lot (in the back of my house). Seems that they went away on vacation or something and one of their two cats ended up on the fire escape of their apartment for the last three days according to one eye-witness that was waiting by the house. When I talked with the witness, I told them someone would come home in a couple of hours (late morning/early afternoon) and I’ll let them know… but he wouldn’t have anything of the sort. Not only did he continue to wait and watch but also called Animal Rescue about the cat. Sure enough, the third floor tenants came back and were able to rescue the cat from the fire escape, but the witness didn’t stick around to catch Animal Rescue to tell them that the cat’s all right.

That was left to me when I came out of my mother’s house and saw them there looking about the wrong side of the street. So after 10 minutes of explaining to the woman what happened and who had done the good deed, she was off.

Then yesterday, the neighbors across the street had a friend over in some monster pick up truck that I didn’t think twice about, until that friend decided to leave and it sounded like the transmission on the truck was about to fall out. Did that warning screech stop them? Well sort of. They stopped their truck in the middle of the intersection to the side road (Adams St) where they left it there blocking (non-existent) traffic for about an hour. Oh they moved it. In fact, the owner started his truck and apparently drove away with it sounding like the transmission would drop out at any time. It was a hell of a din given that the owner drove away at no more than 5 MPH even onto Atwells Avenue.

Thanks to that, my ears were ringing about 5 minutes after they had gone. Not to mention gave Moe quite the fright too as he couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from.

Then there was the din a couple of days ago in the parking lot with someone that sounded like was setting off some sort of fireworks. Either that or had to break into their car as it sounded more like a window being broken the more I think about it. My cat completely freaked out with that and tried his best to hide under the bureau in the process. When I checked in the morning, there was broken glass, or any sort of fireworks refuse in the parking lot either.

And finally the highlight of the week had to be my neighbor downstairs. Now keep in mind this woman rarely if ever opens up her windows even with the impending summer weather. She’s rarely seen other than perhaps in glimpses when she throws her trash or recycles. My mother says during July and August she has an air conditioner in her bedroom window, but her windows are never opened otherwise.

She opened her windows the other day. For what appeared to be “spring cleaning”. Windows were opened and it looked like she had her curtains out on the fence drying. Since then though? Closed again. 89 F/32 C with 95% humidity and the windows have remained closed.

How she can do that is beyond me.

As for me…

I’m sore. Not entirely sure why. Old age, probably. Well that and the amount of humidity in the air. Sleep as once again swung back to “normal”. So much so that I seem to be making up with bizarre dreams in overtime. While I can’t remember them as much as I should, I remember enough to know that it’s been a sort of powder keg dredging up memories old and not so from my past. Some of these recurrences I know I caused by thinking about them at the right time before I fell asleep. Other seems to be off-shoots of those memories.

[Last Edited: 6/20/2014 6:26:42 PM]

To continue…

I’m finding myself modestly cautious about what I remember and when given that I’m finding myself highly self-suggestible because of it. It’s not just being the right frame of tired for this suggestible state to happen, but also just being… well, impressionable on the whole. I found one of the dreams that I had last night had been triggered by a set of thoughts that I had while re-watching an episode of Heroic Age yesterday afternoon.

For entertainment, I’ve given up (again) on Andromeda at near precisely the same place I did before (when it was first run too). Why? Well because by season 3 this show was seriously, seriously dumbed down when they ejected Robert Hewitt Wolfe from the production team and gave [Kevin] Sorbo more authority. I tried also to get back into the remake of Battlestar Galactica and realized it’s too depressive for the summer. So it’s back to anime for me for the time being. Namely Samurai 7 and Heroic Age for the time being. I might go digging for others, but these two work for the time being.

Finally I would like to throw a great big, screw you to the team at FourSquare. Seems that for the last couple of weeks they had left their app alone but was pushing a new social app called “Swarm”. Didn’t like the looks of Swarm and it wasn’t really in the queue for loading it up on the phone. Then today when I was out doing a bit of shopping with my mother, tried to check in using FourSquare only to find it disabled until I installed and downloaded the new Swarm app to my phone….

So checking out the reviews on the store and see people are not happy with it at all. A quick download and install I found out why… What made the Foursquare app fun (and sort of unique) was all the features that it used to have had been disables. Gone was the ability to maintain and gaining “Mayorships” at locations. Gone were the point tally acquired during a week of check-ins. In it’s place is a buggy program that leaves the GPS portion of the phone always on and draining power, and organizing through text and messaging — friends to join you here or there.

It’s a good idea if you’re a social butterfly or collect friends like tchotchke.. but for me? Not really. With the exclusion of one acquaintance in the Rhode Island area, most of my friends and acquaintances are nation and world wide. So that organizing feature Swarm offers is very useless to me. Add to the fact that you can’t check in with just Foursquare, I wrote some disparaging reviews for both apps, and deleted my account with FourSquare in the process with the same note that when they remove Swarm, I might come back. Probably not, I’m not a fan of any company that makes draconian decisions that demand their user base install more apps to test out their new ideas by destroying what’s already working.

So bye-bye and screw you FourSquare for betraying a loyal fan and destroying a fun app.

That’s about it for the time being. Until the next time.

The Mobile is dead, long live the Mobile

Entry 5/22/2014 10:41:33 AM – Mentat 700

Oh it has certainly been a week to remember and to forget.

For starters, the middle front fan on the PC tower for the hulking monster of a desktop had finally given up the necessary lubrication and needed to be re-oiled. So confirming that the same method of fixing the issue was valid for newer fans as they used to be for the older ones, off we went a couple of days ago to Wal*Mart to pick up some sewing machine oil. And after getting home and applying the oil to the rumbling fan, the fan is once again humming quietly as it should A sound I have to admit wasn’t something I have heard in quite some time. Oh don’t get me wrong… it wasn’t as though it was whining and rumbling too loudly the last year or so. But now that it’s purring like a kitten — it’s like a sound I’m not quite familiar with. It makes me wonder if the fan had been needing a quick oiling since the time I got the replacement case.

So going back a couple of more days. It’s Saturday early afternoon. The coffee I had in the morning is completely out of my system, I’ve had lunch and my brain crashed. Naptime for me that doesn’t normally last longer than ½ hour. I woke up when Moe got tired of laying on me and crawled off to sleep next to me instead.

I grabbed my phone and hit the power button to check to see if I received any message.

The display didn’t come on.

I unplugged it and noticed that the charge light didn’t shut off.

Not good, I thought, this is the sign of a problem.

Deducing that some time between when I last used it and my checking on it at that moment, one of the apps that I had on it might have auto-updated and FUBAR’d the OS, I was able to get to the settings and perform a factory reset on the phone. It went through the usual screens for it and then one came up that I really didn’t recognize… It looked like it was having problems performing the factory reset and that the screen that came up was indicating a problem with the Micro-memory Card. It sort of came up again after that — but really wasn’t acting properly then either.

I dialed into AT&T Technical Support Chat on the website, I spoke with Kathryn who walked me through a boot level reset. This went moderately better… I was going through the new user set up but then when I got to the part about the wireless set up, it simply stopped. Ground to a halt. Tried it a second time, and I couldn’t even get to the lock screen. At this point the phone was clearly bricked.. Wasn’t even a “fun” paperweight either because I couldn’t access any of the standard operating system functions.

Kathryn was more than happy to oblige me with the information between going the route of filing a claim for a replacement phone or going the upgrade route. Insurance which I’ve had, is a great piece of work if you have the phone within the warranty period. They will take a credit card number to ship out the replacement phone and pay for everything else when they receive the broken phone. Outside of the warranty period, it’s a bit uglier and involves a $125.00 deducible. And as mentioned to Kathryn while she was discussing this option, I had this sort of plan with Sprint when I used to have the Angry Cricket and they shipped the “equivalent” as a replacement. If by equivalent, Sprint’s Insurance Company meant same price depreciated at the time of the theft but not same quality at all. I ended up with a POS phone that didn’t have a tenth of the features as the Angry Cricket. I bitched up a storm at them for, for which both Sprint and the Insurance Company said, “Oh well, you should’ve gotten a smartphone instead.

The other option was to go the upgrade route and for $36.00 (and any additional costs for the purchase of the phone), and re-establishing a 2-year contract, I could have a new phone. That in itself has a different set of pitfalls. I have a minute plan (with rollover) that is no longer provided. Which is amusing given that the current mobile calling plan involves 450 anytime minutes with rollover and my current rollover minutes is more than 8 days of talk time. I also have a grandfathered unlimited data plan that cannot be throttled quite like the newer plans due to a Lawsuit against AT&T years ago.

I thought about it for the next day and a half as to what option I was going to take, shopping through the AT&T website for the cheapest method for replacing my bricked phone.

Sunday mid-morning, I was able to contact the Insurance Company through their chat interface and they were able to confirm that to replace my Inspire would be with whatever phone they had available at the time. They couldn’t even confirm it would be even an HTC equivalent.

on Monday morning, I decided that the upgrade route was going to be the best (and cheapest) choice. Going back to the AT&T website, I tried to see if I could order the thing through their website and was faced with the problem I had some years back when I tried to upgrade my older Samsung phone. Because the data plan is grandfathered, it prevents me to keeping/replacing the data plan without human intervention. I contacted a sales support person through the online service and see if they could solve the problem by pushing the order through. I didn’t get quite as far as I hoped. While the technician was checking with their supervisor, my laptop had locked up to the point where the only option was to shut down Chrome altogether.

Fine, I’ll make a call into their sales department and start from scratch…

I got in touch with Sarah explaining the situation and like all sales people says that she’ll more than happily help. At the point where my mother had offered as a birthday present to pay the grand total of $1.06 for the item (I got Sarah to waive the shipping costs), She explains that there might be a problem given that her name and mine aren’t the same. So Sarah makes a call down to the shipping department to ensure.

A couple of minutes later and two attempts to getting back to me to ensure that she’s trying to get such an issue resolved, on the third attempt she puts me on hold, I was greeted with the fast busy that her phone glitched the call.

Taking a deep breath and calling back in the hopes I would get her again, I ended up getting Cody from the Texas area. Explaining the situation to him for the second time, including all the information I had gone through with Sarah. He got a chuckle out of it when I was repeating back to him the Terms & Conditions part of the script he was supposed to read to me. At the end of the call (that Cody didn’t disconnect), the order was placed, I was given the order number and informed that I would be receiving an e-mail for accepting the new terms and conditions and another when the order was shipped including tracking number.

The Terms & Conditions e-mail was received and I accepted it within 15 minutes of the call.

One day passed without the second e-mail.

Two days…

On the morning of the third day and not receiving the e-mail, I went to check my orders on the AT&T Website.

Cancelled!

It’s 6:30 in the morning and I’m seeing that on my screen. I haven’t even started getting cleaned up or ready. I haven’t had my breakfast or morning coffee. The good ol’ ADD his screaming into overtime with barrages of thoughts I wanted answered and strings of cussing that would make a sailor blush. Forcing myself to calm down by going through my morning habits, by just after 7 AM, I was washed, dressed, the house was in semi-order and had a cup of coffee on the desk while I started the chat with AT&T…

LaShanna’s the winner of this aggravation this morning… And she didn’t help matters any. She gave generic answers, she did not seem to want to take responsibility for handling the situation trying to hand it off to anyone she could. She couldn’t answer the questions as to why the order was cancelled. When asked if I could place the order through her and have the unit picked up at the store, she said to me that the retail stores only had “new phones” and not the one that I was wanting. I got pretty vicious in my use of words telling her that the site I’m connected through is telling me the particular store had them. She tried to say it was refurbished. Told her that perhaps if she researched it on her own site, she’d see it’s new.

What’s worse is that near the beginning of the discussion she copy & pasted a scripted answer that clearly sounded like she was closing the call when she shouldn’t have. I put the fear of god into her a moment when I requested to know which call center she was working in and what her supervisor was. While in the end I felt like I was going nowhere with her, I stopped the conversation before I lectured her at the lack of responsibility for handling the situation — even transferring it to someone that could handle it. Although I will looking be looking for a method for me to write to AT&T about such customer service, the story did however continue…

I went out with my mother yesterday to do my part as a mule while she picked up water (for the house and the dog) as well as various sundries that I forgot to pick up Monday when I went shopping for groceries.

I vented out my frustrations on this while at the same time came to the conclusion that I would make one more try through with the local store and if that didn’t work, my relationship with AT&T was going to end right there.

Calling down to the Providence Place Retail Store, I asked whether they had the phone I was looking for — and they said they did. I explained the situation I had experienced online and after being transferred to another sales associate the man told me I could come into the store and they would match the price and keep the plans that I had established. I warned him that I didn’t want to have any of my plan changed, that I didn’t want to have any sort of bait and switch, and I most certainly didn’t want any up-sell.

The man chuckled, told me that he hears that quite often from New Englanders and assured me he would get my order fulfilled with the littlest of inconvenience.

Thirty minutes later (15 minutes to the retail store as it’s a 1 mile/1.6 km walk from the house) I was walking out of the store with the phone I tried ordering two days earlier and paying the exact same price I was promised to owe when I spoke with Cody: $1.06.

The Inspire is dead, long live the iPhone 4S.

Honestly as I explained a couple of times over the course of the last 5 days, the only other phones that matched what I was looking for in the Droid Market (and for the same price) had an entirely different set of software: Samsung. I have enough software on my system (and HTC’s is currently on the chopping block for removal as that phone is now a handy paperweight). I already had iTunes loaded up on my machine, so with the price it became the next choice for phones. Not to mention that a majority of programs that I use are also available for free on the store. Well, save one… KeePass. Apparently that comes with a price tag (I refuse to pay) not to mention it’s next to impossible to sync up the KeePass file without using something like Google Drive or… ugh, Dropbox. I was aware that it’s a hell of a walled garden, but it’s something I can live with for as long as I don’t need to load up more software in the process.

Heh, then there’s the inconvenience and annoyances this morning. Thirty minutes after getting the phone fully charged yesterday, hooked up the phone to iTunes, get the programs that I used to use a lot on my Inspire into the Apps queue, the next thing I see in iTunes is that the iOS needs to be updated to 7.1.1.

All right, it’s in the queue for tomorrow (today). And I might as well update iTunes as it’s been bugging me the last time I’ve loaded it up.

This morning I did iTunes first and it went without a hitch. Did the software upgrade with the phone shortly after that. Took a bit longer to restart once the download and install had been verified, but I kept busy doing other things while I waited to see the icons of the Welcome Screen.

Ten minutes after that, I remember that iTunes also loads up the Bonjour file sharing tool and go about what I normally do about uninstalling that (it’s a useless service for Windows and as iTunes is loaded up on a desktop without Wi-Fi it’s bloat). Went about finishing what I started around the house. When I come to sit down to write this journal entry, I load up OneNote… I load up iTunes. I take a deep breath…

And iTunes crashes without me doing anything with it. I was able to re-create this crash more times than I wanted.

So, off to the forums to find fixes and ended up unsuccessful on all but one solution: uninstalling everything associated to iTunes, the folders within the \Program Files and \Program Files (x86) folders, restarting and reinstalling. While I’m fortunate that the music is stored within the \Users folder(s) and the configuration files (including the acceptance of the licensing agreement and configuration files) for iTunes are stored in the \AppData\Roaming folders I was back to up and running in about 20 minutes.

Looking back at all this for the last 5 days, I have to say that in spite of the occasional flare-ups I had handled my anger remarkably well. And even when I was angry, it was more a matter of frustration than actual anger. I did have an almost-rage moment this morning in the shower when I had a flash back to the time when I lived with douchebag #1 and had one of those moments of savage glee that comes from the thought of flattening his nose with my fist. Repeatedly… Though I’ll admit it wasn’t as strong as it was 6 months ago, and certainly was something I could easily handle.

It makes me wonder if that’s actually improvement. It certainly feels like improvement as I’ve noticed I’m not prone to being too angry… Loud? Sure.. I’ve always been loud. But not raging… And certainly not stewing as I used to for hours at a time.

I’ll be back in a bit to wrap this up. Right now it’s supper with the family and that means tonight. Homemade Spaghetti with Meatballs and Sausages… Until then.

[Last Edited: 05/22/2014 6:24:43 PM]

After getting thoroughly stuffed, I remembered the final thing I wanted to talk about: The Legend of Hercules (2014). What an absolute abomination of a film that was. I was only able to get to about an 1 hour 18 minutes (which incidentally was somewhere around the time Lutz gave his pep-talk speech to the forces that joined him) and even then it wasn’t to actually watch Lutz’ rippling pecs and 6-pack abs either. No sir, I was more interested in his side-kick that played Sotiris (played by Liam McIntyre) and even then I was writing slash in my head about him and Hercules as entertainment more than the movie I was trying to watch. Because in spite of the award Lutz got from People Magazine about being one of the “50 Most Amazing Bodies”, there was just something off-putting about him being shirtless. It was like his head was too round and his eyes weren’t quite in the right place making his face look… piggy. Listening to him give his speech, I got three impressions… 1. Lutz struck me of someone that was a fat kid in school that worked out to get over his fat. 2. The way he talked struck me that as a toddler, he was the kind of child to chew on those thick toddler Crayola Crayons… and 3. he licked chalk.

It was at that point, I gave up on that atrocity. Gone were the 10 Labors and in its place was a re-told story of Cain & Abel that had no place in this Greek Myth.

Well that’s about it for the time being. Off to watch an episode of Doctor Who and then perhaps play a game or two. Until the next time.

My Drive through Linux Hell

Entry Monday, 11/25/2013 12:59:59 PM – Mentat 687

Sometime last week while I was over my mother’s house babysitting her dog Jack, I had gotten completely fed up with my rather long in the tooth notebook. I had purchased the thing about 4 years ago (with it being already 1 year old by the time I had purchased it) and with Windows XP taking upward to 20 minutes to normalize coupled with the support for XP coming to a close soon… I thought it a good time to extend the life of the notebook by installing Linux instead of Microsoft. After all, I have moderate experience in Linux from years ago when I was experimenting with dual boot systems on my desk-side and while the tips and tricks I had learned from the UI might have been a bit rusty, at the time I was pretty confident that I could slosh through an installation and getting a few more years from the notebook.

Heh, I couldn’t be more misplaced with this confidence, let me tell you.

First off, I decided that choosing the xfce UI would be best mainly because I’m running a Notebook with a 1 GHz Atom Processor with 1 GB of RAM. Xfce has a low overhead memory requirements and lower need for processor. But then again I only learned this when I loaded up the LTS version of Ubuntu and ended up breaking Unity within an hour of installation… That and Mint Cinnamon which while being faster than Ubuntu 12.04 LTS seemed to lag in weird places and at arbitrary times.

Testing was sort of a strange combination of a standard and capriciousness. The standards I tried to use when reviewing each of the distros that I had tried out of speed of load up/programs once at the desktop, familiarity with the guts of the OS, ease of finding solutions to problems (using a standard Google Search), and familiarity with the installed hardware just to name a couple off the top of my head. The capriciousness was more along the lines of prejudiced dislike of experience I’ve had from working with Ubuntu from years ago… This included:

1. My inherent disgust and repulsion to the Ubuntu community at large. Saying “it worked for me” when someone posted a question for troubleshooting is not helping the original poster nor giving a solution to the problem posed. An attitude I see is still propagating the Forums even to this day.

2. The draconian method that Canonical did for changing the operating system by adding features that the community at large didn’t want in the first place. A move that I often described as the best cock-sucker or ass-kisser getting what he wanted. The “Software Manager” being the prime candidate for proof to this given the amount of heat that generated when it was added in the one of the October releases. Or better still changing the ALSA sound drivers to PulseAudio; a move that even the developers in Dev Tracking forums said “…was not ready for release at the present time…”

3. My personal favorite, how close the distro was to forking from Ubuntu. The closer the fork, the more suspicious I was of it.

So with this in mind, anything Canonical was off the slate to testing on the notebook. Oh, but even then don’t let that fool you… I tried them anyway — like the masochist that I can be. As I said a couple of moments ago, I downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and broke Unity within an hour. Pretty awesome too given the community gave instructions for how to recover it and they only made things worse. Xubuntu 12.04 LTS while being the xfce UI was still stalling in places that it shouldn’t, and 13.10… HA HA HA.. Let’s just say that it didn’t like my laptop hardware and shouldn’t, and 13.10… Let’s just say that it didn’t like my laptop hardware and seemed to think that dimming the screen constantly was good for it. So good for it in fact, my laptop was overheating from it constantly being on.

Following is the list of Distros I worked with, and my initial responses to them:

Fedora: I actually considered this one for a short time, in spite of the fact that it would be like learning new commands (YUM instead of APT-GET, etc.)… Plopping in the live “CD” (this notebook is capable of booting off a thumb drive like my desktop) I realized that the Live couldn’t and wouldn’t find the wireless even after trying to check through the web on my desk-side, so I continued to try to install it anyway… When it got to formatting the drive and demanding not only should I encrypt the HDD but also to install LVM and encrypt the drive in spite of the fact that no other Gnome/KDE/XFCE that I’ve dabbled with needed it… I stopped right there and then. Too much learning, and couple this with what they say about the cons for Fedora on Distrowatch that “…occasionally alienate some desktop users…” was a major turn off. The thumb-drive was formatted as quick as you can say, “…the hell with that…”

SolydX: At first I thought that this was going to be an all right installation. Sure it’s a fork off of Ubuntu and contains within it the dreaded “Software Manager”, but unlike Xubuntu, it didn’t have the wretched push for Steam — something that this computer definitely doesn’t need. I went through the installation the first time, choosing to install their proprietary “Plymouth” (which is basically the black screen that blocks seeing all the tty commands running prior to the X UI loading up), which was broke in the distro (Yes, I checked the MD5 and it was all right). Rebooted and tried again, this time un-checking Plymouth. Loaded up like a charm. So I began to check for which programs I wanted to load up. 10 minutes into that, I get a notification from the “Update Manager” that a whopping 460 MiB needed to be patched in for the update. Not good. Did it and upon reboot, saw that the GRUB-loader had added two more lines to choose from. Basically like Ubuntu used to, whenever a major patching was done, it gave the user the choice between the new version and the old to boot up from. Definitely not good. So, I chose the newer version and what do my eyes see when it’s loading up… Debian screens from a previous attempt at the program. Then at desktop instead of seeing SolydX’s info, it was a Debian desktop before it swapped over to SolydX. Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone!

Debian Live CD: what a love/hate I have for this Distro. I attempted installing it several times. The Live CD looked good.. While the windows were a bit chunky and looking more than a bit out-dated (compared to Mint, Xubuntu (in LTS and cutting-edge distros), even SolydX it had the speed even booting from USB that made it appealing. I knew from friends that Debian can be more than a little bit puritanical about software to load up on its Operating System… It’s sources.list only tends to point to Debian software that the team believes should be run on it. The live CD seemed to have worked up until it got to the GRUB loader and then stopped working. GRUB wouldn’t load no matter what instructions I found on the Internet. 45 minutes of trying to trudge through fixing this, I gave up and moved on.

Mint: Another Ubuntu fork. The masochist that I am tried to use the “Software Manager” to run the installs, hoping — perhaps even praying — that since it was first introduced, things would work out for the best for it. Nope. Didn’t. Not at all.. I watched it tick through some of the programs that said it had successfully installed: only ended up being partially to not at all installed. Sometimes it even stopped and didn’t install anything else. When I went checking on the packages that only half-loaded in Synaptic I marked for re-installation and only then did they get fixed. Not a promising start, but at least I was able to fix things. The clincher though was loading up Chrome. Slogged down the system to the point of unusable. I understand how Chrome works in Linux and Windows 7 – it checks for updates upon first load up. That’s part of the reason why I stopped using XP because it took a full 10 minutes for Chrome to finish checking (which only made disk-writing take all that much longer to stop). With Linux? It seemed to check for updates longer than it should and trying to use it seemed to have put a burden on the system itself. Gave that up and said, screw it… It’s on the back burner unless I can find the system itself. Gave that up and said, screw it… something better.

ZenWalk: Started off not too promising right from the start when it told me that it couldn’t recognize the resolution of the monitor. Giving me a list to choose from all of the options were standard 4:3 monitors (squares, not widescreens). I didn’t like that at all, but I continued with the installation. Got to the part where I had to choose what sort of installation I wanted to perform with it — and in spite of choosing the guided/complete install for ZenWalk it still kicked into fdisk for formatting the drive. Didn’t like that as it was more occult and menu driven (really 100+ choices for format times is too much) so I decided to abort the installation. The thing about Linux installations that I’ve experienced so far is that when you reach the disc formatting, unless you say “yes” to commit to these changes, the drive is basically left the way it was prior to boot up from USB/CD/DVD. Not with ZenWalk. No, it made changes to the disk and did so removing 6 GiB of the total 120 GiB for its own installation in spite of aborting.

Because of ZenWalk I was up against a wall trying to get this to work because I prefer using Windows’ FDISK to fix the problem (it’s far easier to use than any Linux command prompt program… I gave up and hoped that one of the other Linux distros would fix what this horrible Distro did.

Debian Install DVD: this is where the love (turns to anger) came in. Debian ignored the partitions that ZenWalk had laid out and put everything back to normal: 118 GiB to the main partition. 1 GiB to the Swap and 1 GiB to extended (basically the catalog for ext4). Grub loaded up from the installation USB without a hitch and things were running the way I had expected and seen from the Live CD. I began going through adding more sources to the sources.list and then installing programs that I wanted installed to make my notebook “workable”. So just when I was done the first round of installs, I reached the point where I had installed KeePass and needed to get to my passwords to load up my mail accounts… Popped in the Thumb-drive.. Nothing. Didn’t auto-mount. Checked the settings in the Desktop Settings, checked them on. Did a restart just to be on the safe side. Still nothing. An hour and a half later of troubleshooting a half-dozen alternatives, all the while watching in fdisk Debian changing the drive assignment from /dev/sdb1, sdc1, sdd1 and on and on and on… I gave up.

And the winner is…

Mint… At least for the moment. After doing everything from command line (and sometimes from Synaptic Package Manager), not loading up Chrome (at all), and generally taking my time working with Firefox, this time it seems to be doing rather well. Got a strange start-up and shut-down splash showing Ubuntu 15, but according to this forum thread I realize it might have been my own doing given that I was hellbent on installing the latest version of Red Notebook (which uses Ubuntu PPAs)… At the time of this entry, I went with shutting down the splash screen and that makes me happier. Not to mention it gives the illusion as though it’s working faster given that it’s flying through the daemon launches and shut downs. If I have to reinstall… eh.. It’ll be another distro.. Just not sure which.

Anyway, that’s the reason why I haven’t been around for a bit making my fractals. Now that everything’s back to working on the notebook, I’ll be back to my usual dailies.. Off to make supper. Until the next time.

A moment of disillusionment from an old Gaymer

Entry 04/06/2013 07:21:28 AM – Mentat 684

“In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.” – J. William Fulbright

While yesterday was one of those sort of days where I was up and about more than sitting down and calm, I had an incident that gave me a bit of humor and a lot of pause. During one of those interludes while C was off with friends, I decided to play a bit of Star Trek Online because I needed to grind a bit of Dilithium and it’s a fairly good way of adding a bit of routine (and order) to an otherwise jittery day. Here is a bit of the back story to this to understand where I’m coming from in this.

I had left the Fleet that I had been part of because of a difference of opinion on what can and cannot be talked about and me having a problem with anyone censoring individuals or a group, took exception when one particularly conversation (that wasn’t in the least bit offensive) was being censored by some rather loud detractors. So, I went on the market to find another Fleet that I could dump my excess materials, equipment, monies and what have you… and went in search of other gaymers. The largest of the LGBT fleets that I had come across was Stonewall Fleet, so much so that they had their own chat channel within the game that I could configure and join. I remember doing so (configuring and joining the chat channel and perhaps later on, the fleet) with the intent of getting a feel of the people before. Sort of a try before you buy, as the saying goes.

About a week or two into watching and then later interacting with the chat, I got into my first scuffle with a bunch of the more uptight folk in the group. I made a comment about leaving for Star Wars: The Old Republic to troll the kids there, and they got offensive about it. Sure, I know I worded it wrong and made the mistake of assuming that people would understand my nature given I often snarked folk in the week I had been actively chatting, but they went on the attack saying it’s wrong. After 30 minutes of my explaining why I do what I do (I only troll kids that are being tits. After all, I work on the belief, if you’re going to be a tit, you’re going to be treated as such). Only one of the more aggressive understood why I was the way I was (even if he didn’t condone it), while the rest were remaining on the offensive. Basically doing precisely what I do for the reasons why I do it, and denying their nature in the process.

At that point, I decided I was going to remain a free agent and not join their fleet and waited out for better offers.

I did get that better offer from a good acquaintance in Ireland (no, not you Glenn) who had also left the fleet we had been part of because of differences in play styles with the management there and ended up joining a rather nice bunch of folk from the fleet of LaFamilia (otherwise known as “The Family”). I tagged along because I have a good rapport with the smarmy git and the fact that he generally knows how to pick them even if things fall through at a later time. Though I kept Stonewall Fleet Chat active because I wasn’t sure what the mix was with the Fleet, and admittedly it’s nice to be able to chat, be camp, and generally light with folk that can understand some of the humor I’ve come to appreciate (and am familiar with).

Then comes last night. I was in a fairly good mood, I wanted to grind a bit. The queerfolk where in their usual sort of high spirits mood. There was a bit of camp, and a bit of heckling going on. I sort of made a couple of comments, but paid more attention to the grinding for Dilithium that I was doing. And then it hit me while I was heading towards the Asteroid Mine that there was something happening on Bajor. Some sort of gathering. Several of the folk were making cutesy comments that the “speechifier” was going to be speechifying.

I was mining on the Asteroid, and there it was in it’s full and vomitus glory… The leader of the Stonewall Fleet was prattling on like a politician running for a term in office.

I said something about being a politician’s son and that the last thing that should be going on is any sort of aggrandizing grandstanding in a public chat. That it’s better to get to the point.

The leader of the fleet send a scathing whisper to me accusing me of being disrespectful and that he would mute me if I continued.

For one brief moment, I thought about copying & pasting that comment to the Public chat calling out that I must’ve hit a nerve if this “speechifier” is making threats in private. But then I thought twice about it, knowing full well of doing such a thing would cause instantaneous flaming both from the leader as well as whatever quiet spectators were sitting there watching.

In the meantime, several of the fleet called me a “d-bag” for being so “disrespectful”.

I shot back quickly that I’m not a douchebag, and clarified that I generally am good to get along with except when someone is being a grandstanding blow-hard. I went on further to say that he should get to the point as this is a game, not a platform for a political campaign.

The leader went on to say something about “welcoming diversity to the fleet.”

To which I countered, “except when that opinion is dissenting” and got myself banned from their happy little chat.

Admittedly I didn’t realize that I was banned. It had simply gone quiet and I had assumed that the lot of them had moved whatever long-winded speech that was going on to Ventrilo. But after a brief respite from the game, going to chat with C for a bit before he headed to bed and coming back to finish off the grinding and the Duty Officer Missions that I wanted to queue up, realized that it had been too quiet for that Stonewall Fleet’s chat channel. So when I went to look for the channel information, my access to it had been removed. When I tried to re-join I had been denied.

I laughed in LaFamilia’s fleet chat and told them the story, including the banning. There was a bit of chat, and a bit of explaining, but overall at the time before I headed to bed I found it sardonically funny. So did the members of my fleet (though they were a bit confused about how I pulled of being part of 2 different fleet chats).

This morning though? I’m finding it sad. I mean here we are in the 21st century, and what I saw of the leader of this group and the repercussions of my actions to be antiquated. This is something I would’ve expect in the 80s and not now. After all, diversity as it has been taught to me is to accept the good and the bad of the community. It means that sometimes, we’re going to encounter people of an opinion that is completely counter to our own.

I had learned through my years of wandering the planet that a good leader (not to mention a strong one), will be able to roll not only with those of like mind, but also those of an opinion completely counter to their own. To be able to address the group as well as the hecklers, in a way that can bring them all together. Well, sometimes anyway. There are just some that are impossible to please.

This leader of this group however, isn’t one of those that could be qualified as a good leader. If anything, he’s one of the most common of the “leaders” I’ve seen since my days on IRC.

So as I continue to write this entry, I recalled a lot of the familiar patterns of seeing this in the 23 years of being online. The cliquishness of gay men’s (and sometimes even lesbian) groups. The hair-trigger attitude of dissenting voices to whatever the head of the group encounters them. The banning/removing/ostracizing of whatever dissenting voice that comes up — automatically assuming that dissention is equivalent to “the enemy”. That this was typical of someone that has been bullied and picked on that created a power base of being their own Queen of Hearts in their own little kingdom.

Sitting here now, it raises the question: Have we as the abused (from years of being put down for being gay) become the very thing we hated? The abuser? That in our striving for equality, have we lost our ability to understand the very tolerances we’re demanding from others?

I hope not. Because if we have, this is going to be a very dark day in the future when (and if) we get those equalities we’ve been fighting for, all these years.

Anyway, I’m off for the time being. Time to watch a bit of television, make lunch and have a moment or two of peace. Until the next time.

A First Impressions Review of Firefox 4

Let’s face it… When it comes to software upgrades, there are some that I’m rather hesitant about and others that I rush out the instant that they’ve been announced. There are others that it’s a mixed bag of love and hate when it comes to upgrading as the way it behaves between versions can come off feeling arbitrary or draconian and the hoops I feel I have to jump through both to getting used to the “improved” interface as well as the changes of what’s working and what’s not working. The newest version of Firefox is a prime example of the sort of upgrade I have a love/hate relationship with since I started playing with it back in version 2.0

Released a day before the anticipated announced release date and after almost a year delay in the beta testing process, 4.0 is the most recent release of this popular web browser currently available for download. While I haven’t actually put the program through it’s routine tests, there have been some niggling issues that I would like to talk about as the impression I’m getting from this is, “why did it take so bleeding long to get released?” as there is nothing about this particular product truly new or revolutionary.

Pros:

A good majority of the add-ons that I have installed on Firefox 3.6.x seemed to have transitioned smoothly to 4.0. AdBlock Plus, NoScript, Echofon (for Twitter), IE Tabs 2 all continued working without notification of them being “incompatible with the current version”. This is a good way of sorting out the add-ons that developers have stopped supporting as well as nudging other developers it’s time to recheck the code for their add-ons for the current version.

This is a way for me to delete the old/obsolete add-ons and replace with the new. Or in at least one case, phase out . Of which I found myself actually mostly happy about with only one exclusion (below).

The Gecko engine has only gone through some more tweaking, pages render much faster thanks to access/controls involving hardware acceleration. Blink and a page will be rendered. Blink again and you’re off to a new page. While not as fast as Chrome (in my uninformed and untested opinion only), it’s certainly faster than my experience with Firefox 3.x and IE 8.

The memory footprint that Firefox 4 takes up when it loads is a bit less than it did in the past, as at the time of writing this review — my currently running 1 tab for dAmn Chat currently showing ~183,000 K memory for firefox.exe and another 6,600 K for plugin-container.exe. However it’s still more than a bit large when compared to IE 8 (keep in mind I haven’t loaded up 9 yet) at 25,628 K and Chrome at 45,394 K between 4 separate chrome.exe executables and 2 Console Host Emulations (conhost.exe). While granted Internet Explorer doesn’t have any add-ons, Chrome has the same (now) of which I’m left puzzling out why Firefox continues to remain the heaviest when it comes to memory.

Fixed — finally — is the ability to print to PDF and it actually looking like a page printed in English. Bug 454532 indicates just how long this problem had been in Mozilla’s bug tracker and while I had done everything in my power to follow the various fixes work-arounds and what not — Firefox continued to print garbage text to PDF. I recall reading sometime in the past, several news sources reported several times that Mozilla simply gave up trying to fix it in 3.x with the no promise of resolution any time in the near future. Seems with 4.0 it had been fixed and printing to PDF is showing English (or in the case of my machine, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean as well) instead of garbage. This means I don’t have to rely Internet Explorer for invoice/receipt printing.

Cons:

While I understand the need that some add-ons might use code that is optimized for a specific version of the program, Mozilla seems to be both arbitrary and draconian when it comes to whether they’ll allow an add-on to continue working. Case in point: ISOC’s Policy Audit Plugin. The coding on this one simply relies on a accessing a gateway to check a URL and notify the user of whether or not the privacy policy for that particular site had changed or not.

This add-on was a boon when dealing with Gmail and Google, as I’ve noticed since the add-on was installed, they had changed their privacy policies at least three times; and while twice have been a simple issue of semantics, there was one where the policy did in fact change, and glad to have caught it with the use of this tool. Sure it’s a tool in progress, though I suspect that it will always have a niche for folk concerned about changes in privacy since the debacles with Facebook occurring.

I’ve noticed that if you have proxy set to follow the default System Proxy settings, resolving the IP for a URL is much slower than I had expected. I had seen/experienced up to a 1 – 2 second delay between hitting the <enter> key once I had finished typing in the URL and the web browser actually begin rendering the page. Seems that this speed is significantly improved by going into Tools –> Options –> selecting the Advanced tab –> clicking the Advanced button setting, changing the Configure Proxies to Access the Internet to No Proxy. I’m sure this might be resolved in a future release, although seeing this happening was rather surprising given that all three browsers have been touting “speed” for some months now. Particularly given that when I checked the proxy settings for Chrome, Chrome opened up Internet Explorer’s Proxy Settings tab and window.

Neutral/Annoyances:

More of the same interface as I’ve seen from Chrome, Opera and even Internet Explorer transforming their old browsers to something new, and completely unimpressed with the fact that it took this long for them to transform. I admit that I had been a bit snarky about it on Twitter, commenting that it seems that Mozilla and Firefox seem to be following everyone else on the interface of which I had received a @mention from @limi (as it seems he was trending Firefox comments):

No one remembers who came in last, least of all in a competition for faster, lighter and easier to use software/web browsing with a slick interface. Those that do remember often use this to sow the seeds of discontent, disappointment, doubt and perhaps even doom for a corporation or brand.

While I am no power user by any stretch of the imagination — when it comes to browsing the web the most amount of tabs I have had opened was at maximum of 10. And in those 10, I have noticed on more than one occasion that the memory footprint in previous versions of Firefox reach upward to 750,000+ K. On my system and a couple of systems I’ve used for work have more than enough memory for such leaks, the fact is that leaks shouldn’t be happening at all. Blaming it on add-ons doesn’t really address the problem as it’s been demonstrated that clean installations (of Firefox) have the same problems.

As of the Firefox 4 release candidate forum posts indicate that the memory leak still continues to plague this web browser and while I haven’t personally seen anything too out of the ordinary so far (knock on wood), I did at one point see memory get up to about the same amount of KB as I would working 10 hours at a job with those 10 tabs open. And this occurred yesterday while I was in about 6 tabs. This does in fact raise quite a bit of question, given that the same 6 tabs in Chrome and IE continue to show a seriously small RAM footprints. I will continue to monitor this, and see if it’s actually been addressed or continues to plague some of the users of Firefox.

Bing was put into my customized Search Engines Drop-Down. While it was good that it didn’t mess with my customized list as I have a rather eclectic array of them; seeing Bing at the bottom I felt more than a little dirty… As though Mozilla was saying “Hi! Thank you for the upgrade. Here’s Bing. We want you to know we’re in bed with them!”

A rather large annoyance that I had to track down was something that caught my attention and left me with this uneasy feeling that something was just not quite right. So after about 5 minutes of research was able to spot. You see, one of the joys of running Aero on Windows 7 is the way that I can sort my windows one on top of the other (along with overlapping them around the screens) and if something flashes underneath another window, the visual queue will get me to swap to it to see what’s going on. The thing is, with Firefox 4, I caught arbitrary changes in the aero-window frame as I clicked on drop-downs within the web page I was viewing at the time as well as on clicking menus within Firefox itself. This changing of lights/darks on the UI window frame gave me the impression that the window underneath it had momentarily changed focus/blinked and I needed to see what was going on.

While this can be a quirk of code that can easily be rectified, people oriented to visual cues of changed states of windows can find that a distraction when trying to work as efficiently as possible when they’re multitasking. And while I was able to accommodate/adjust against that quirk, the fact that Firefox was the only one that I caught that happening with is enough for me to want to avoid using it until it’s been rectified.

Font display on web pages is annoyingly different from 3.x to 4.0, enough so that I find off-putting. While none of my font settings have changed (including Windows Clear Type text for the display) rendering on the pages is enough to be a put off for using Firefox. Following is a screen cap of Firefox 4.0

With what it used to look like in 3.6.x

I’m sure that there’s a setting somewhere that controls this within about:config but at the moment I admit to being too lazy to do more than a cursory inspection between the two versions of the program. Particularly given that when Chrome went from 9 to 10 on my system, I hadn’t even realized it had been updated until I had to look under the hood. Further, I’m finding my eyes strained more looking at the web pages in 4.0 than in 3.x, IE and even Chrome.

Another of the niggling annoyances that has come to my attention has been the way that Firefox is now showing up in the Windows Menu under most common used program in spite of the fact that it’s also in my taskbar.

I rather liked the fact that it had never recorded itself as recently opened in version 3.x. I put it there in the taskbar for a reason and don’t need it telling me I opened it recently. This one’s really minor, though as you can tell, I’m not a fan of seeing many programs in that recently used list especially if it’s something I use a lot.

Finally, the last niggling point that I have for the update is that they had removed the Add-On Bar from the bottom of the screen. Unlike previous versions which can be turned off and on, with the same key-command (CTRL+/), with this one, it adds an x to remove it. Further, when the Add-On Bar is active, mouse over on links won’t show in it (like they used to) and are relegate to still showing Chrome-style in the window thereby taking up more screen landscape. Granted it’s 10 pixels (or so) tall, and however long, I would think if the add-on bar is active, I don’t need them showing up where they used to have a place to go instead.

Bottom Line: While the pros in this case outweigh the cons, I fear it’s going to be the petty annoyances that do in my long-standing loyalty to Firefox. If anything since the upgrade I’ve been finding myself using Chrome more because of it’s speed, lightness and the fact that upgrades went transparently and without any such attention to the changes.

While the jury’s still out on a handful of features I’ve yet to see/experience improvement on I believe in about a month, I’ll have made the cut away from Firefox.