The Hurricane Drinking Game

June 30, 2010

mrsnarkypants Life Leave a comment

It's that time of year again.

With Hurricane Alex hungry for some Tex-Mex, it’s time for the 2010 Hurricane Drinking Game. All you need is cable TV, a bottle or two, and a day off of work. Preferably you’ll need several days off of work, because if there’s one thing that TV news is good at during hurricane coverage, it’s bad clichés. 

I take no responsibility for your hangover. 

Here we go! 

  • If you see someone putting up plywood: drink
  • If the plywood has a spraypainted “go home” message to the storm: drink again
  • If there’s at least one misspelled word: chug.
  • If someone is surfing in advance of the storm: drink
  • If you’re told to “hunker down”: drink
  • If the reporter mentions “contraflow”: drink
  • If Gov. Goodhair (Perry) tries to blame Obama for something: chug
  • If the anchor admonishes the stand-up reporter to be safe: drink

I need to come up with something for Jim Cantore. Ideas?

UPDATE 7/1/2010: After watching Cantore last night, here’s the winners for the 2010 season. Drink when you hear:

  • “Dodged a Bullet”
  • “(Tropical Storm) Allison”

Chug if Allsion is mis-identified as a Hurricane.

Bringing up Allison is a hack play to try to scare the public. Every time a storm fizzles below the media’s expectations, they’ll start to speculate that the system will come back and stall over the area and flood, even when the forecast doesn’t call for it. Cantore was so intent on comparing Alex to Allison last night that he mistakenly called Allison a hurricane and then claimed that Allison was the second to last major storm to hit Texas. Perhaps he’s forgotten about 2005′s Rita hitting Beaumont, or 2008′s Dolly which hit the city he was reporting from last night… and that little storm called Ike. Wanker.

Please weather guys, if you’re going to try to scare the pants off of the public, could you please wait until it’s warranted? If you keep crying wolf, we’ll ignore you when we need you later.

Cheap Geek: Can You Live On 4G Wireless Alone?

June 13, 2010

mrsnarkypants Cheap Geek 2 Comments

UPDATE: I saw a billboard today for Comcast “4G on the go” internet. Comcast is a minority partner in Clearwire, and they’re selling access to Clear’s “4G” network under their own brand. That makes three different brands all using the same crappy network. (6/22/20)

Now that Clear/Sprint has started rolling out WiMAX here in Houston, Clear is aiming at the DSL/Cable Modem market as well as phone service.

Is it worth cutting the cord and going wireless? I’m not sold yet.

Some background: I refer to Clearwire as Clear/Sprint because Sprint owns a 51% stake in the company and the two companies essentially share networks. Sprint 4G customers are using Clear’s WiMAX network and Clear customers who purchase the 3G option for fallback service are using Sprint’s 3G network.

Clear’s mobile WiMAX service at $40 is cheaper than buying 4G from Sprint ($59.99), but (and this is a huge BUT) that doesn’t give you access to the Sprint 3G network. That really limits your ability to go online, as the WiMAX network as built right now in Houston is pretty weak. If you’re lucky enough to live or work somewhere close to a tower, you’ll get online as long as you don’t go too far from the window. The folks I know in Dallas with the service don’t sound too impressed either, and if I could get a WiMAX signal at all in Las Vegas it would drop before I could download my e-mail. With the exception of the office where we’re seemingly right under a tower, I find myself in 3G territory more than 4G. [There's absolutely no 4G service that I can find in Missouri City, but that's not stopping the cell phone store down the road from trying to sell Clear anyway.] The price to add the 3G service to Clear’s mobile service is an additional $15, making the price difference between Sprint & Clear $4.99.

Clear sells home service for $30, which is a desktop modem that can also do VoIP. At least you can stick that on a windowsill permanently. Having seen the performance hit that VoIP can cause on a wired connection, I’m not sure if I really want to run VoIP on a service where the maximum upload speed is half a meg.

And that’s why I’m not that bullish on Clear. For home internet, cable and DSL speeds are roughly double that of Clear. For mobile internet, the HSDPA 3G networks of AT&T and T-Mobile exceed the download speeds of Clear’s WiMAX network. Of course, as with Clear, the chances that you’ll actually obtain the “up to” speeds is a crapshoot. (If you think that AT&T’s 3G rollout has been slow, try being a T-Mobile customer…)

Clear has potential, but in my opinion it’s just not ready for prime time.

MyTunes: 90′s Shuffle

June 13, 2010

mrsnarkypants MyTunes Leave a comment

Sometimes some great stuff comes up randomly on Shuffle. The first song took me back to San Diego, back when 92.5 was a scrappy little alternative station in Chula Vista (licensed to Tijuana) showing up the homgenized 91X (also a TJ signal, programmed at the time by Clear Channel.

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USC Gets Spanked

June 10, 2010

mrsnarkypants College Football Leave a comment

The LA Times reports this morning that the NCAA will yank 20 scholarships from USC and ban it from post-season play for two years. Apparently, the NCAA doesn’t look kindly upon Scandalous Savings on a new Land Rover. Listen to these deals!

Thanks to Phil Steiner for sending me the parody spot and Paul Talbot for writing it.

Well, that lasted about a month

June 9, 2010

mrsnarkypants Cheap Geek Leave a comment

A few months after my ginormous CRT TV downstairs bit the dust, I turned off the U-Verse that fed it because I needed to put the funds to replace it elsewhere.

I’m not kidding about ginormous. In an age of 60″ LCD screens that hang on your wall, a 34″ TV set doesn’t sound that big, but this is a big sucker:

This sucker is heavy.

The Before Picture

You see, a CRT has a *lot* of glass, and it’s all on the front of the box. That makes this difficult to lift without dropping. Which is exactly what we did the day we brought it home from the store. After that, we always used three people to lift it, and it still wasn’t fun. (When it was dropped, it cracked the front bezel along the bottom edge of the screen, and it broke the coffee table it landed upon.) Despite all of that the TV, which had been one of the first HDTV’s on the market, gave me several years of flawless service, just not the 20+ that I expected out of a Sony CRT.

So why have I joined the rest of civilization? Happy birthday to me. More