Juvenall Wilson

Back in January, just as I started working for my new company, I found myself in the position of needing a new keyboard. My old Logitech desktop set was having some troubles and it was time to check out some new hardware. Since Michelle was sort of in the same boat, we took a trip to Best Buy to see what they had in stock. I swear to God man, we must have spent an hour in that damn store going over every desktop set and mouse they had. Cutting out the details, I opted for bad-ass looking MX5000 set. “This is so cool” I thought to myself as I gazed over the build in LED screen, the touch sensitive media buttons and the MX1000 laser mouse. Oh, how looks can be deceiving.

The very first problem showed up as I tried to install the keyboard and it’s software. First, the software with the Bluetooth drives wouldn’t install on my Media Center 2005 system. Every time I tried to run it, Setpoint would install, then crash out when the driver installer ran. So that left me using the Microsoft defaults (which work just fine, so no biggie). Once I finally got Setpoint installed and my system rebooted to the Windows login, I noticed yet another problem; the keyboard wouldn’t connect. The only way to get the thing to work was an entire system reboot. If I got lucky, I only had to do this once. You know, in retrospect, I think my first mistake was giving this keyboard shot after all of that. Logitech has done me good in the past, so I figured this was a user error thing and I’d figure my way around it in a day or two. These types of problems, however, would have been unacceptable from anyone else.

Shortly after getting the it to work on a little more regular basis, I discovered yet another flaw in this steaming pile. Every so often, the keyboard will double up a letter in something you type. For example, if I were to type in “Juvenall”, I would often get “JJuvenall”. While it’s not a huge deal when typing up emails or a URL, it’s a HUGE problem when you’re working on mission critical code. I believe this has something to do with the keyboard sleeping to conserve battery power and it sending the signal twice when it wakes up. That’s the sort of thing they should product testing should have picked up on. At this point, I was doing quite a bit of research on this product and finding I wasn’t the only with issues. In fact, the Logitech support boards are packed with ignored users demanding answers. Even on NewEgg.com, the reviews all had the same problems listed. Yet again, I kept up with this thinking there must be a good answer.

That’s when I found yet another problem. Remember those awesome touch sensitive media controls I was talking about? Turns out, they’re not very sensitive when you want them to do something. I found myself pounding on the damn things several times before anything would happen. They’re also much, much smaller than they should be, so hitting the stop button when you were trying to turn up the volume on a great song is a common occurrence. Which is all strange to me when a strong breeze is all it takes to fire up Winamp when you’re in the middle of the best round of Counter-Strike you’ve ever done.

I think the final straw was a few days ago when I was trying to size something out in Photoshop and tried to use the calculator button. Turns out, Logitech put a “Smart Calculator” into the keyboard itself and the only way to see your results is to look down at the LCD display. No big deal if you’re in a very well lit room, but since they failed to add a simple backlight that most digital watches have included for the last 15 years, it’s impossible to read. So I tried to change the function of the button back to the Windows calculator, but Setpoint won’t let you. They failed to include that option.

That’s when it was back to Best Buy for the return. Turns out, you need a receipt to take it back there. Since I left my at home (on account of it being past 30 days and all), I was screwed. To keep myself from shooting up a mini-mall, I hit up a national office supply chain that sells it, did the return there and used the store credit for a new 21-inch monitor. Now, because I’m just such a swell guy, I even put a note into the box (under some of the packing) explaining how badly the keyboard sucked and encouraging the next owner to take it back as soon as they can.

On a scale of suckage (with 1 being diabetes, 5 being AIDS and 10 Kevin Federline’s album), this gets a good firm 9. Same on Logitech for putting out this crap. If you’re looking for a good, solid desktop set with a laser mouse, stick with the MX3000/MX3100. You can find either online for about $100.

Oh how good it feels to be home. My logs tell me a good number of readers stuck around in the month and a half it’s been since I last posted. Good for you! Loyalty will keep you alive when giant ticks rule the earth. For those you stopped checking in, you’re not reading this anyhow so die in a fire. How elegant of me, eh?

Anyhow, my job’s been the biggest factor keeping me away. Between working towards the redesign, keep the server up and running, working the email marketing and keeping the office systems from crashing daily, I’ve had my hands full. I think I’ve had two days to myself since I started (weekends included) and I couldn’t be any happier. This is the work I love and a busy schedule helps me keep on top of my game. The only real downside here is the lack of structure. One day I’ll be working on a server, the next the email marketing and a landing page then out of the blue, I’m stuffing envelopes or putting together an in-store flyer. Don’t get me wrong, I like keeping on my toes, but not knowing what I should be working on can take it’s toll.

Other than that, my puppy has been a big distraction. Deven is now 6 months old and demands constant attention. What’s worse is the crazy weather we’ve been having here in Michigan has made it hard to take the little guy out for walks. As if that weren’t bad enough, he’s finally “mature” and is pissing on everything. God I can’t wait to get him fixed.

So with any luck, I’ll be able to make some time to post a little more. Though, I’ll leave you with what I tell myself every day of my life:

The major television networks do a fantastic job at keeping me glued to my computer. It’s not that there isn’t anything on to watch, it’s there too much crap to sift through. So when I find a show I’m willing to take time out of my day to go and watch, that really says a lot. Tonight, there are actually three things on back-to-back that fit that bill.

1. 8pm 24 I’ll be the first to admit I hated the crap out of this show when it first started. You can blame all the hype, really. When a show gets that much press, I tend to believe they’re trying to make up for things like bad actors, shitty plots and ugly writing. It wasn’t until the second half of season two that I started watching when I could. Now that the new season starts tonight, I may become hooked. Viva la Jack?
2. 10pm The Shield This is one of the very few shows I consider great TV. The characters are just amazing and the story is compelling. What’s funny to a lot of my friends is I hate both dramas and cop shows. Anyhow, it looks like the season started this week and the rerun is on tonight at 10pm. It’s about damn time too. The show was AWOL for something like 8 months or more and I was starting to forget about it.
3. 11pm The Boondocks This is a new shows I’ve quickly grown to love. Well written and funny as hell. After a two or three week gap of old episodes, a new one is up tonight about Martin Luther King coming back from the dead or something.

Writing about music is very, very hard. Not that I can’t come up with anything to say, find out everything I need to know about an artist or even dig up new and old music to review, but trying to find anything nice to say about the majority of bands/rappers is tougher than it looks. For example, most groups around today aren’t worth listening too. They’re all self-righteous, pretentious snots who go on about either how bad their life sucks because they parents didn’t let them borrow the family SUV for that big date Saturday night (and now everyone hates them and they want to die) or they claim to have had some hard, thug life in spite of their growing up in the god damn suburbs. They all tend to blend together and sound the same anyhow, so what’s the point of working with them?

On the flip, older music tends to suck for just about the same reason. Lyrically, I can’t name a single artist from the last 30 years who written anything worth listening to, let alone coherent. The only reason groups like The Doors or Nirvana get so much attention is because their idiot fans have all grown up telling their kids “how great music was back in the day”. Kids, anyone who tells you something like “The Doors were one of the most groundbreaking artists ever” is full of shit, on drugs, both or trying to lie to you so you’ll buy more of those stupid Jim Morrison shirts.

Now, over the last month, I’ve written some 20 different articles about music, artists, albums and a few music headlines. For the most part, I think they’re well written and ready to be published. The problem is, they’re all really negative and make me sound like a cantankerous old man yelling at children to get off his lawn. No, that’s not me. I like to think of myself as a wonderful rainbow and sunshine flavored enema pumping joy and child-like glee up that candy ass of yours. This has forced me to rethink the entire focus of my music site. I now need to find another project to put my attention towards while this one is retooled.

The easy solution here is to dig up and idea from the old brain graveyard and work on that webmaster site I’ve been toying with for years. The subject is simple for me and finding others to help supplement it would be a cakewalk. I even own the domains already. All that really needs to be done is write the articles and build the site itself. That puts things in the range of two or three weeks till launch (depending on how the real world goes). Needless to say, I’ll be posting more details once I know them myself.

Ahh, remember the good old days of 1985? Ronald Reagan was sworn in for a second term, Microsoft pops out the first version of Windows, Knight Rider is still kicking ass on TV and a 40MB hard drive could run you $40,000.

Now, I know this wasn’t the base price for all hard drives in 1985, but considering the price difference a 250GB drive can go for today (I’ve seen them between $100 - $1,100), this doesn’t shock me. Then if you further consider the size, nor does the 6GB in the background being listed as $400. After all, those SD cards for my digital camera run about $100 per GB.

What does crack a smile for me are the two facts I put together about this. Math is fun!

1. If you take inflation into account, that $40,000 in 1985 would run you around $70,986.45 today.
2. Doing the math, you’re talking about $1000 per MB. Since a GB is 1024 MB, that puts the 1985 price of of that 6GB drive in the background around $6,144,000. That’s around $10,903,519.35 today

Fun side note about how things work on the internet: I found this from a post on Digg. This pointed to an article on TecheBlog which was crediting OhGizmo! as the source which was crediting tuaw.com with the find. Being an Apple blog, I wouldn’t rule them out as the seed for all this, but it would be fun to see how deep this rabbit hole goes.