Dear Neighbors,

When I moved into this house I was really looking forward to the neighborhood. It was a quiet, middle class section of New Orleans. Low crime, good people, a few passable roads and a sense of city pride.

Before my wife and I plunked down well over $150,000 on the house, we did everything right. We checked the crime maps, looked at the flood elevations and, most importantly, shook hands with every single one of our future neighbors.

If I had known that two of you were going to turn out to be such craven douchebags I would have run away as fast as I could and gotten kept renting my life away where I was. Landlords suck, but bad neighbors suck worse.

No, you were able to fake being decent human beings for about five minutes and it was only after I signed the mortgage papers and moved in my stuff that your true colors showed. The result, now I’m stuck in purgatory with two sets of neighbors that even Satan himself wouldn’t want to live next to.

“Why?” You ask. Well, I’ll tell you why.

Neighbors #1

How many people do you have living in your house? Seriously. I want to know. I’ve met at least five there (though only two introduced themselves to me before the move) and I know of at least one new addition. I figure there has to be at least seven adult humans in that house, not counting one big dog and probably a few annoying cats.

My gripe with you guys isn’t the people who own the house, you know, the parents, but rather their children, cousins, friends and strangers that share the roof. The couple that owns the place is a nice, quiet couple that works hard. Their offspring, however, obtained none of those qualities. They do nothing but drink beer, stand out in their yard and make noise all day.

What’s worse is that, even though none of these morons seem to be capable of living on their own, they all have a vehicle. Every fucking one of them. There are two good parking spaces in their driveway, two on the street in front of their house and everyone else just parks where the Hell they feel like it. The spill-over affects the neighbor across the street from them, the one across from me, my house and the house on the other side of them.

To make matters worse, though they are all adults my age or older, they act like they are still in high school. They still routinely use words such as “pimpin’” and “hos” while flashing fake gang signs. It’s all a pathetic attempt to emulate the rappers that they blare out their car windows at ungodly hours of the night.

Listen guys, you’re the wrong race and that crap sounds really stupid when it comes from a southern twang. You dress, talk and act like total jackasses. The only girl who hangs out with you is a prostitute (literally) and one of you has already been to jail. I didn’t call the cops the first time but, trust me, my trigger finger is itching to be the second.

It might be the only way to get some of you morons to move out of your parent’s garage. I’m sure that will make your parents very happy.

Neighbor #2

Once again, how many people live in your fucking house? Seriously. You moved in across the street after I had settled in but I know I haven’t met everyone over there and since there isn’t any obvious family connections I really can’t count. I see at least three small children, two teenage daughters, one being the aforementioned hooker, two moms and two dads. All of this in a house no bigger than my own.

Of course, I don’t have to worry too much about cars with your house. There’s only one. The other one in the driveway is for sale and doesn’t even start. I only know that because I happened to be getting the paper out of my yard when one of the men was trying in desperation to start it. A few minutes later I went back out to help, no one was around but the car had a “For Sale” sign in the windshield.

Classy.

I don’t have kids of my own but I’ve learned a great deal about how not to raise them by watching you and nearly running over two of yours at least six times. Good thing I drive slow, though I think my speed still exceeds the IQ of any of the young ones or their parents.

It never ceases to amaze me how you can stand on your porch, watch your kids play in the middle of the street with oncoming traffic and not say a word. I’m going to need new brakes at this pace because Jr. seems to think leaping out in front of a car is fun.

He’ll be glad to know that brain damage is a true joy as well.

Of course, the reason that they don’t play in the yard is because they’d get lost in your uncut grass. That yard was in better shape when no one lived there. Now it’s a jungle. On the upside, it means I don’t have to cut mine that often, I do it just because I’m nice.

Neighbors like you make me pine for the “For Sale” sign in the front yard. It at least didn’t leap into traffic on a whim.

Neighbor #3

I don’t have any real complaints about you. You’re a nice couple with a beautiful baby girl. You’re friendly, your house is well-kept and you make the whole neighborhood better. Hell, you’re probably a better neighbor than I am.

My only complaint about you is that your dog seems to think it’s a rooster and starts barking at sunrise every morning at sunup. Annoying, yes, but given the surroundings I can forgive it.

Just be warned though, next time I have a late night, I might be tempted to slip some tranquilizer in your dog’s water.

Conclusions

I love my house but I really wish I could move it the Hell away from the people I’m living next to. When I’m within the confines of my home, I’m the happiest person in the world. On my front porch, I’m immediately scrambling for real estate ads.

Of course, with neighbors number one, I have barely scratched the surface. I completely let out how the elderly mom is forced to cut the grass most times or how their dog nearly attacked trick or treaters on Halloween.

Stories for another day.

In the meantime, if someone has a spare bedroom. I’d like to crash there tonight, and the next night a few nights after that.

It’s only temporary, just until my neighbors move away.

It was Friday night. I had some friends coming from out of town and I wanted to show them a good night out. I had heard that Clockwork Elvis and the Billion Dollar Baby Dolls Burlesque troupe were going to be on the same bill, performing at was one of my favorite clubs before Katrina. Yours.

It was going to be a night to remember, one of the best local bands playing a gig with one of our city’s best burlesque troupes (my wife and I are friends with at least three of the girls in the group) at one of the greatest music halls in the New Orleans area. I couldn’t wait.

When I first arrived there, everything was fine. We were about thirty minutes early, meaning we showed up when the band was supposed to take the stage, and the place was empty. But after standing around for a few moments, we noticed something, it was dead hot in there.

We brushed it aside though, got some drinks and took our place for the show. However, our decision to stay was one we’d quickly regret. As bodies packed into the room, thing went from uncomfortable, to dangerous.

It’s Called Air Conditioning

It’s New Orleans, in the middle of a head wave. Even at 10:30 at night the temperature is still in the eighties with a head index well into the nineties. Yet, in these conditions, you decide to crowd a small music hall with over a hundred patrons knowing that the only air conditioning you have is from a few small ceiling fans.

That’s not only stupid and inconsiderate, but outright dangerous.

The four of us, me, my wife and our two friends, made it through Clockwork Elvis’ set with no problems and through most of the Burlesque acts. However, just before the two groups were going to do their joint program, I looked down and noticed that my shirt was soaked with sweat.

I tapped my wife, who was standing in front of me and asked her if he was alright. I knew she had a history of overheating and grew very worried about her. She said she was fine but, when she spun around to watch the show, the room spun around her. We had to get out. Our friends were, by this point, equally eager to leave, so we made our way through the crowd and out the front door.

There, we found a very large crowd of people all experiencing the same problem. I could hear them whispering about how they “almost passed out” or “felt sick”. My wife, for her part, could barely stand, she went around the side of the building and dropped to her knees, almost ready to throw up, pass out or both. She looked physically ill. She had only been drinking Diet Coke and water all evening, not a drop of alcohol was in her system, yet she was falling down like a drunk on Bourbon St.

We all rushed to her and, fortunately, she quickly recovered enough to walk. We rushed her to our car and turned the A/C on full blast, she slowly began to come around and feel better. We immediately sped off, everyone was fine, but the evening had been nearly ruined.

A Damn Shame

What makes this so frustrating is that both of the acts were able to pull through the temperature extremes and put on a Hell of a show. Both the band and the troupe were impeccable. We would have loved to have stuck around after the show and talked with the band, the girls, tipped, drank more and had a lot more fun, but no, we had to beat a hasty retreat due to your lack of temperature control.

Thanks a bunch.

Running an event under these conditions, without at least taking some precautions, is not just unkind, but dangerous and shows a flagrant disregard for the safety of your visitors. If your A/C was working, it wasn’t working well enough, you could have brought in more fans or a backup cooling system, but instead you let us sweat and some of us almost passed out due to heat exhaustion.

Think for a second what would have happened if my wife had gotten hurt? What if she had passed out and hit her head or something else had happened to her? I wouldn’t be hashing this out on a blog, I’d be letting my attorney handle it. You’re lucky that this is nothing more an open letter of complaint and not a lawsuit.

And think about my friends for a moment. They came from out of town to see how things were going in New Orleans. Your screw up not only caused both of them great physical discomfort, making one of them feel ill, but also made the whole city look bad, at least until we were able to rectify that later in the weekend by showing them a good time elsewhere.

If we, as a city, are going to recover, we’re going to need establishments like yours to pull your thumbs out of your asses and treat your customers right or, at the very least, not try to kill them. If you couldn’t get the A/C fixed or provide an alternative, you could have at least posted warnings at the door so someone like my wife, who is prone to overheating without warning, would be able to avoid it.

You screwed up bad, you nearly hurt my wife, you embarrassed me and I am mad as Hell about it.

Making things Right

If you want to make things right with me, here’s the deal. First, apologize for what happened and explain exactly what went wrong. My wife was not an isolated case and there are others wondering the same thing so I suggest you do this on your own site as well as on this one.

Second, refund our money. I won’t bother with the amount we paid for drinks because it was only four Diet Cokes, (besides, I’m nice like that and the bartender was cute) but we did pay ten dollars in cover for a show we couldn’t enjoy, couldn’t see all the way through and put at least one of us in a bad spot health-wise. I think a refund is more than reasonable.

Finally, fix the damn problem and prove to me that it is fixed. I’m not setting foot in that place until I know it’s safe. The neighborhood around it is bad enough, but to think I might be in danger of being hurt inside the club is truly a stunning realization for me.

If you do those things, I might head back out there for the next concert you have that I want to see, otherwise, I’ll wait for the video to appear on YouTube.

Bottom Line

In the end, it’s going to be a long-ass time before I go back to your club, barring some severe effort to make things right. I remember watching Local H perform there years ago and loving the place, Now, I can’t even stand the thought of driving by it.

You screwed up and you screwed up bad. It’s time to own up and make things right.

Otherwise, in the immortal words of Local H, “That’s it, I quit, I don’t give a shit!”

Words to live by, especially when someone screws you over.

I love your computers I’m sitting here right now hammering out this post on OS X Tiger with Safari, checking my email in Mail.app and generally lapping up the entire Mac experience. I love you guys.

I also recommend you to my friends, at least the ones I like. My friends and family all get wonderful tales of how great my Mac is, so much so that I’ve been banned from giving any toasts at get-togethers and endured an intervention from my parents two weeks ago.

But my recommendations to them are not just because I love Macs, but because I’m a selfish bastard. Among most of my friends and family, I’m the computer guy. They have a question about computers, they come to me. They get viruses, spyware, a hard drive crash or leprosy of the motherboard, I’m the guy they call.

And they call a lot.

From my father who can’t understand the intricacies of broadband to my coworkers that don’t grasp that an out of date virus definition is bad, I get a lot of calls.

I figure that my Mac has given me the least trouble of any system, it comes with great support, if I can shovel these otherwise intelligent people over to Mac, I’ll get less calls and that gives me more time for Desktop Tower Defense.

However, despite my speeches, praise and those snappy Mac ads, I haven’t been able to convince one damn person to switch. Why? Well, they’re just too damn expensive.

Need proof of the problem? Let me see if I can shed some light on the situation.

Dude… They Got a Dell

Right now, in your Apple store, you are selling a 20-inch iMac for a little under $1,200. It comes with a 2Ghz duo core Intel processor, one gig of ram and a 250 gig hard drive. It is a sweet machine and I want one (I do accept bribes by the way).

However, if you slide on over to Dell’s site (after switching to Firefox due to Dell sucking in Safari), you can build a desktop system with the exact same specs, including speakers and Firewire, for just $819.

That’s about $400 cheaper.

That might not be a lot of money to Steve Jobs and Co., but those of us here in the real world who are living paycheck to paycheck, that is a big fucking deal and it doesn’t get any better on the laptop side.

A 13-inch Macbook with similar specs and an 80 gig hard drive will eat up about $1,100. Meanwhile, a comparable laptop on Dell’s site will set you back a mere. $714, once again about a $400 difference in price and the Dell laptop had a bigger monitor, 15.4 inches instead of 13.

The problem isn’t “Is Mac Better?” it’s “How do I convince my grandfather to spend $400 more on a computer that does the same damn thing?”

It’s easy, I can’t, and that’s why Mac hasn’t blown Microsoft out of the market, they’re just too costly.

Value Added

When I bought my Mac, I knew that I could get a more powerful system for less money if I just walked forty feet to the PC section of the store. I did it anyway, going deeper into debt and farther down the rabbit hole.

The reason I did that is because I knew that Macs were more stable, could do more with less powerful hardware and were great for the type of work I do. However, that’s not exactly the kind of explanation one gives to their parents.

When your average consumer goes computer shopping, they look at the specs, knowing roughly that more=better, and try to get the best deal they can based upon what they understand. Justifying a whopping 50% price jump for the same hardware is very difficult.

Right now, budget consumers are priced clean out of the Mac market, even Mac Minis are way more expensive than other monitorless budget PCs, consumers seeking a mid-range computer can find drastically cheaper computers on the PC side of the aisle and high-end consumers can get more horsepower by avoiding Macs.

To sell these damn computers, you need to do one of two things, lower the price or add some kind of real value to them. You could package iWork with every Mac the way you do iLife, but there are already free office suites out there.

You could offer free .Mac service, but most of us seem to agree it would suck even then. No, you need to do something significant to justify a price hike of $400. Outside of access to paid porn sites on the Web, I can’t fathom many things that will actually garter enough attention from the average Web user to make them think buying a Mac is a good idea.

No, you’re going to have to lower your price. I’m sad to say. Because most of us will not win the lottery, we can’t afford to blow $400 on a whim and we can’t, seriously, justify the expense. The reasons to buy a Mac aren’t tangible to most computers buyers and they aren’t going to spend money they don’t think will give them real benefit.

As I’m looking at my credit card bills, I am struck with a twinge of buyer’s remorse. I needed a machine, but did I really have to spend $1000 when $500 would have gotten me by? I love my Mac, but I hate paying it off.

That’s why, no matter how much I push Macs on those I know, I have to nod and understand when they go with PC (no matter how much of square he is).

Bottom Line

Your business is good, you’re selling a lot of Macs, I’m happy for you. But there’s more to this than just increasing business. It’s about standing up to Microsoft (you remember them, right?) and freeing us from their tyranny and getting revenge for the screw job they did you all of those years ago.

You’re selling a lot of computers now, but how many more could you be selling if your prices were actually competitive? You have the better product, you can charge a premium for it, but 50% is not a premium, especially with computers, its an anal violation.

The way things are now, my granfather will never own a Mac, neither will my mom, my dad or friends (my brother, however, might). Sadly though, users like my parents out number people like me and my brother, in my immediate circle, by about 10 to 1.

You can’t win a war without winning over the people, see Iraq if you need proof, and you’ll never win the people without a fair pricing scheme.

It’s time to come out of the clouds and join the rest of us. iPhones and iPods are cool, but the desktop war is still a one-sided ass kicking.

I am a man. Since I don’t want to look like a Scottish bagpipe player, I have to shave at least somewhat regularly.

However, like most men, shaving remains one of my least favorite morning rituals, ranked somewhere between bathing in scalding hot water and drinking burnt coffee in the list of things I’d like to be doing after I wake up.

Yet, the other day, as I was taking a Bic razor to my freshly prepared face, a thought flashed across my mind. In the past fifty years, man has been to the moon, we’ve turned the “supercomputer” into a “personal computer” and built this whole newfangled Internet thing, why the Hell do I still bleed after every shave?

Then it dawned on me, it’s YOUR fault shaving companies. You, the purveyors of foams, gels, razors, lotions and more, you are the reason shaving still sucks. Your laziness and/or incompetence has kept this ritual of manhood every bit as painful and violent as it was hundreds of years ago and, dammit, I want that to change.

It’s time you got off your collective asses and brought real change to this industry. If you need some advice, I’ve got a few suggestions.

So-Called Advancements

This disposable razor blade was invented in 1901 by King Camp Gillette and patented in 1904. In the 106 years that have followed not a damn thing has really changed other than making the actual razor, not just the blade, disposable.

When I look at the “progress” in shaving over the last half century it seems to me that it is largely a numbers game. First you had one blade, then two, then three, then four and finally, five. Big fucking deal. The next logical step is to let you drag a Ginsu Knife collection (now available at closeout prices) over your face.

Even patents don’t mean progress in your business. What does 62 patents and years of development get you in this industry? A vibrator hooked up to a Mach3. Women will go crazy over this, but I’m not too keep on paying $15 for something that produces “micropulses”.

As far as I am concerned, this game of oneupmanship is nothing more than you guys playing “whose dick is bigger” while I bleed every time I shave.

Thanks a bunch.

I hope you sell a lot of razors because a lot of us aren’t too thrilled with what we’re getting.

It doesn’t matter if the damn thing has 12 razors, dances on your skin and sings a song, we’re still dragging a blade over our face and tearing flesh away from our skin.

If you can’t improve that, then we have a real problem.

It’s Electric

I can already hear the catcalls, “But John, what about electric razors?”

What about them?

They’re battery-powered miniature lawnmowers for your face, that’s what they are. They come with a screen to keep you from nicking bone and yet, somehow, manage to never actually take any hair off of my face.

I must have bought dozens of these damn things and they’ve all done the same thing, given a great shave… exactly once.

Seriously, every time one of you guys advertises your electric as being “close as a blade’ I bust out in laughter. You might make a shave that looks good, but it feels like gravel. Also, God help me if I skipped a day and my hairs are a little bit longer. Then the blades don’t so much cut the hair as pluck them one at a time from my face. Not pleasant.

It doesn’t matter if I buy a $100 “advanced shaving system” that cleans and charges the damn thing nightly or a ten dollar Chinese knockoff, the results are the same. My skin feels like crap, my arm gets tired and I’m late for work.

Does it beat bleeding? Yes. But so does getting shot in the ass with a pellet gun and you don’t see me doing that voluntarily.

Money Trap

Shaving is nothing but a giant money trap. I mean, you guys make sure razors go obsolete faster than computers and video games put together. Yet, nothing changes. You tick a number up one, name this version “power” or “ultra” and rake in the cash.

Your whole industry is about making money and not about actually making shaving tolerable. If shaving ever stopped sucking, you wouldn’t be able to sell a new product. You have to keep all of us just miserable enough that we are completely desperate to try the next thing.

Well, great job. It worked.

But I’m not having it, I’m rebelling. I can see clearly that the whole blade across the face thing isn’t going so great and I’m looking for alternatives. Don’t like it, well, maybe it’s time you got to work making the alternative I’ll actually want to use.

To give you a heads up, I’ll tell you where I’m starting.

Viva La Revolution!

Like I said, the whole blade/face thing isn’t doing it for me. I trained in martial arts to keep knives away from me so bringing one to my face every morning just seems wrong.

So where do we go from there? Well, our wives and sisters might have had an answer. For decades they’ve used chemicals to dissolve hair. The experiences have been mixed, some good, some bad, and a few similar products have been created for men but have failed.

Why? I don’t know. Maybe some men think it’s sissy to use a chemical on their face, maybe the burning was just too bad. I don’t know. If you think something is sissy just because a woman uses, remember that you don’t have a right to call them weak until you can crap a watermelon. If it doesn’t work, well, it wouldn’t be the most expensive dead end I’ve tried.

Either way, I’m not going to walk away from this idea without at least trying it. It might work, it might not, but the bar is pretty low on this one. If it gets rid of the hair, keeps it gone for longer than a shave and doesn’t put me in intensive care, I’m not going to be too upset.

The worst that can happen is an allergic reaction. I don’t know if I am allergic to these chemicals but I know I’m allergic to sharp things going across my skin. At least I have a chance at happiness by putting chemicals on my face and, besides, when I use a razor I already have shave lotion, shave gel and alcoholic after-shave, at least this way I’m only dealing with one foreign substance.

If that fails, it is back to the drawing board, looking for solutions to a complicated problem.

But that’s where you, the shaving companies, fit in. Why the Hell am I trying to figure this out? You have the millions of dollars, the scientists and the laboratories, you figure it out.

This is your fucking job and I’m going to be doing it for you, making myself a human guinea pig because your solutions suck so bad that medical experimentation on myself can’t be any worse. That is a shame to your entire industry.

Bottom Line

Reading this, I hope all of you are hanging your heads in shame because you owe me and all of your customers and apology for over 100 years of mediocrity.

And men, it’s time we saw this bullshit for just what it is, a marketing scam.

We’ve been duped for too long, kept in line by a false sense of machismo, constant misery and a need to have the latest and greatest in everything.

It’s time we joined forced with the fairer sex and demanded a better solution for all of us. The quest is on and, shaving industry, you need to get scared and get to work.

Vibrators with blades on the end isn’t going to cut it anymore. We demand real solutions.

You can take your patents and shove them, I want answers, not marketing.

And that, as they say, is that.

Sincerely,

John Black

I leave a LOT of comments. Outside of my charm and good looks, of which I have none, comments are probably my favorite means of promoting my various sites and blogs.

However, keeping track of all of those comments is a huge pain. I don’t want to leave a comment on a site only to have some troll take a snipe at me unscathed. No, I want to return and bring down upon him the wrath of a nuclear flamewar using language that would make the Angry Video Game Nerd blush with shame.

Actually, I’m just usually just saying thank you for the help, but it was nice to pretend I’m some kind of comment warrior.

Anyway, as I was saying, keeping track of those comments is a major pain. So many sites, so little time. In that quest though, your service is, or at least was, a complete Godsend. It was like a little inbox for all of my comments. It was great and it beat getting an email from every comment follow up I got.

However, your “V2″ of the comment system shares a lot in common with the famous V-2 Rocket, a tactical failure that never should have left the launchpad. You’ve taken what was one of my favorite Web services and squandered that goodwill, sending me, and others like me, running to the competition.

But since I’m such a nice guy, I’ll give you my thoughts on it and a second chance, but first, I want these issues fixed.

What I Wanted

When I first read about coComment V2, I was actually very excited. It looked slick in your video and seemed to address some of my pet peeves about the first system.

For one, I was excited you were making it easier to actually comment on the original blog. Your old system tried to internalize everything and made it hard to get to the original site. I was in love with the sidebar idea and the new extension looked slick, though perhaps a bit intrusive.

Second, though I didn’t see much use for it, I thought that the ability to leave comments on pages without a comment form was cool. Sure, it would have been just for other coComments users to see, but it would have been pretty neat.

Finally, the groups feature was going to be incredible. I was looking forward to starting my own, private, group and getting my friends to submit their conversations. We could have been like a gang, patrolling the commentosphere and doing absolutely nothing productive.

It was going to be great, it was going to be awesome. But then, but then the rollout came and it all went to Hell.

Rollout and Backlash

If we want to be technical about it, the rollout actually came twice. The first rollout, on July 31st, was such a klusterfuck that it had to be halted and undone. Of course some people, like myself, had already upgraded their coComment Firefox extension, thus putting us in a pretty bad bind for a few days.

The second one, on August 2nd, didn’t go much better. However, there would be no rollback this time and you seem pretty dedicated to the new V2 system. While I’m glad to see a Web company stick to their guns, it’d be wise to at least make sure you’re not firing blanks.

Your system is almost entirely unusable. It seems that the blogging world is universal about this, V2 is a disaster. When all-around-nice-guy and Mozilla Community Coordinator is calling you out on this, you know things are bad.

However, it can be fixed. You’re just going to have to buck up, take this one on the chin and get your hands dirty (along with any other appropriate cliches). You messed up and fixing it is going to take some serious work. But, if you’re willing to listen, I’m going to give you my thoughts on what needs to happen.

The Five-Step Recovery Program

If you want to get coComments back on the right track, here’s my five-step program to success (or at least mediocrity):

1. FIx the Bugs: None of the items work consistently. The bookmarklet, the extension, the sidebar, none of it. Half of the time I can’t post comments, when I can, much of the time, the comment doesn’t make it into my inbox and, when it does actually get posted, I don’t see updates. The system is totally broken. Too broken for me to even isolate things that don’t work right.
2. Rethink Usability: I know there are a lot of new features to V2, but the usability of it, quite frankly, stinks. All I want is a list of comments I need to follow up on. That’s it. But getting that list requires more than a few clicks and, even then, which comments are new isn’t easily evident. Compare your current system to either Commentful or V1 and you’ll see what I mean.
3. Speed: coComment, before the upgrade, was slick. Now it feels as if it is on life support. Even the home page loads slowly. This is not acceptable, especially since coComment loads up elements on every single page you load if you use the Firefox extension. If you have to back off on features to make this happen, I think your users will be behind you, probably blowing their horn all the while.
4. The Blacklist: Ok, I admit, I don’t have much use for this but it seems to me that every damn post about this problem wants a blacklist. I say give it to them. How hard can it be? You can even be funny with it and call it the noComment List. Get it? noComment. Tough crowd tonight. (Note: They seem to have added a basic blacklist, still, I propose it be called noComment.)
5. Repair Relations: You’re doing a lot of great commenting and such (I’m taking bets on whether or not you’ll comment here) but you need to take some material steps to repair broken relationships. My advice is offer a rollback to anyone severely aggrieved. Yes, I know the challenges in running two systems. But it is a lot easier than running from a torch-carrying mob. Trust me, I have experience here.

If you can do those things, coComment will probably be back in (John) black in short order. However, in the meantime, users such as myself have been jumping ship like the rats we are. Me, I switched to Commentful. I love its quiet, simple interface and easy to understand layout. It’s great stuff. But I would really love to use the horsepower of coComment. I hope that I’ll be able to take you back.

A Two-Week Challenge

So here’s the deal coComments. You have two weeks. I am going to use Commentful for the next fourteen days and then I’ll load up Firefox, install your extension again and give you a fresh chance. I even have this marked down on my iCal (because I’m a dork).

If you’ve made serious progress. I’ll embrace you once again and let you gobble up all of my comment goodness (that sounded wrong). If not, then it is goodbye for good.

Now please note that I’m not saying everything has to be fixed by then. Just that progress has to be made. I know that you’re working on it, but this will test your effectiveness like nothing else.

That’s two weeks coComment, you up for it?

I hope so.

Bottom Line

In the end, I sympathize with you coComment. I really do. I’m not trying to bash you (though I definitely poke fun) and I don’t want to be just another dog on the rabbit. I know how hard a major upgrade like this is and I realize that Murphy’s law is a real bitch at times.

Furthermore, I do love your service and I want to see it shine. But if I can’t use it, I can’t use it and, well, we both suffer. You don’t get me as a most wonderful and gracious user and I don’t get your power and cute little ghosts.

We are in a rough patch in our relationship but I will take you back coComment, I am easy like that. Just say your sorry, promise me you’ll change and buy me some flowers. I’ll be there for you.

Of course, that mentality probably explains a lot about my love life.

I love you, or rather, I used to love you. However, lately I’ve been having an affair.

You knew that I’d been keeping Windows around, He’s like my drinking buddy. He plays all my games and we like to hang out on the weekends. It was never a “love” thing between us, just a way to escape. Besides, he’s one of the guys.

But no, lately I’ve had a new fling. I met Mac.

Actually, we’re old friends, I knew her all the way as a baby Apple II and we practically grew up together. She’s always been dependable, stable and competent, but she also grew up into something quite beautiful. We started dating a few months ago and, well, it’s getting serious between us.

Sure, she’s not perfect and I can’t say if I really love her or not, but we have to face it, things aren’t the same between us anymore and, well, she and I have been enjoying each other’s company a lot more these days.

Still, I am a gentleman and, as such, I have to be honest with you. Perhaps you can grow from this and, perhaps, some day, we can get back together again.

But first you have to listen to me.

When the Problems Began

Things began to go bad for us earlier this year. You had politely asked me to install a kernel upgrade and, the obedient user, I complied. However, once you booted back up you shut yourself down almost immediately, complaining of overheating. Once I cracked the case, I saw the problem almost immediately, the CPU fan wasn’t coming on.

I refused believe it was your fault, I just couldn’t bring myself to that. I ordered a new CPU fan off the Web and waited for it to arrive. After I installed it, I encountered the same problems again. I then researched more and learned that you had updated your ACPI and, for whatever reason, it wasn’t working with my motherboard right then.

I then struggled to disable ACPI. Booting up the system and rushing to edit the needed files before it came crashing down again. I eventually got it to work, but only after wasting several hours and a few cans of compressed air trying to keep the CPU cool.

But when I got you back up, I have to admit that the love wasn’t there. I’d already been using Windows while you were down and seeing you again didn’t bring much joy to my heart. The truth is, things were already changing between us and I think we both knew that.

You nearly destroying my computer, well, that was just the final straw.

What I Hate About You

We had been together over three years that fateful day. I admit, I hadn’t paid you enough attention. Windows got all of the new hardware, the best RAM upgrades and the most powerful video cards. It was the gaming PC, it needed them.

You got hand-me downs but you always had a respectable home and still do, even today. But yet, in the time that I’ve known you, you’ve become so slow, it is as if you drag your feet with every step.

I didn’t matter if I was opening mail, viewing Web pages, chatting on IM or something else altogether, you were always a step behind. You just couldn’t keep up with me.

Sure, I loved the fact that I could change you into whatever I wanted, it gave me a kinky thrill like when my wife wears a wig to bed, but it did me no good. Whenever I made you pretty, relatively speaking, you moved slow. If I made you ugly, you moved faster but it still felt sluggish.

They talk about how you can live anywhere but even with a decent processor, over a gig of ram and a good video card, it still felt like you were moving through water.

I couldn’t deal with it, so I developed a wondering eye and decided to have a fling. I called up my old girlfriend and gave her a try. It was an expensive date, but I think something great may have come out of it.

There may not be wedding bells in our future, but I already gave her your parking spot.

Hard Questions

I’ve had a chance these past few weeks to try you both side by side using my KVM switch and. I have to say, it doesn’t look good for you.

On paper, you have the better computer. A faster processor, twice the memory, a better video card, etc. However, switching back and forth, the Mac just moves so much more smoothly. It responds to my touch, listens to what I have to say and moves when I tell it to.

On the other hand, you seem to have a mind of your own.

I don’t know where you are half of the time, what you’re working on or where your brain is going. Every time I’ve updated you I’ve watched your performance drop a bit while new problems crop up and my experience get just a little bit worse.

I liked you bettwen when you were Mandrake 8. But now, after seven upgrades and three distro changes, you’re Kubuntu 7 and I don’t recognize you at all. You used to be peppy and light, now you’re just sluggish and difficult to work with.

With every upgrade you talked about “performance improvements” and, like a fool, I believed you every time only to watch more seconds of my life tick away with the spinning hourglass. It was a brutal string of heartbreaks and I’m not falling for it again.

No, this Mac, with its inferior specs and modern decor can run rings around you dear Linux. It has obliterated you at every turn. I just can’t deny it anymore, she’s better than you.

She’s more stable, faster, easier to use, and better supported. Yes, she’s not cheap like you and I miss a lot of your software and I really loved your application install system, but I can’t overlook your shortcommings, no matter how cool it is to love you.

So Long… But Not Goodbye

Our relationship is over now Linux. Mac is my main squeeze now. It handles all of my work and even some of my play. However, I’ll still visit you, see how you’re doing, stop by to feed the plants, etc. However, until you make a change for the better, I have to take my workload elsewhere.

I want to love you. I almost need to love you. But I can not turn a blind eye to what you’ve become. You’re a monster. A gloated pig. The enterprise developers have corrupted you, bent you to their will and made your presense on my desktop nothing but a rarity.

I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I hope that I can take you back some day.

But right now, it is best that we stay apart. I want to remember you for what you were, for the good times we had, not for what you’ve become.

I just hope that you’ll remember me as fondly as I remember you.

Sincerely,

John Black

I have a bone to pick with you. Sunday morning I had a podcast to record and, well, Gizmo Project is my main VOIP tool. Your built in call recording and overall good audio quality makes it a logical choice for these P2P calls.

However, Sunday morning, your entire service was down. Not only was it down, but had been down for at least about an hour remained down a two hours afterward. We tried to jerry-rig something using Skype but we ran out of time before we could get everything completely in place.

However, what bothered me about the whole ordeal wasn’t that Gizmo Project and your SIP server went down at an inopportune time, but that no one at Gizmo Project was doing a damn thing about it. Sure, there was a forum posting about the outage, one started by a user and maintained by other users, but no one from Gizmo Project itself posted on it until today, over 24 hours AFTER the outage was resolved.

Still worse is that there is no system status indicator. Skype has one. even Cox Communications, the bane of my customer service existence, has one. Why don’t you?

However, the ultimate slap in the face is what happens when you Google for “Gizmo Project” and “System Status”. You find this forum post where an admin tells a user requesting a system status feature that “We are NOT going to create a public status page any time in the near future.”

That, my friends, is bullshit and I’ll tell you why.

My Problem With You Gizmo

To show why that admin, who uses the name “Claw” is full of it. I’ll take a look at his arguments one at a time, though not in any logical order.

“The vast majority of users would never check the status page. ONLY extreme power users would ever look at it.”

I’m not an “extreme power user”, I’m not even a power user. I only have about ten dollars in my Gizmo account (for emergencies) and only use it once a week. Yet, when the service went down, my FIRST thought was to check the system status. Perhaps “only” was too harsh of a word.

But more important is this: Shouldn’t power users be the exact group you should be serving the most anyway? They spend the most money, rely on the service the most and are the backbone of the community. Just because power users would be the target of a service is not a reason to kill it, it is an argument in favor of creating it.

It would do you little good anyway…. when “obvious” things happen, like a server dying, we generally know right away, and fix it quickly.

Yeah, so your entire service being offline for three hours wasn’t “obvious” to you guys. That’s very discouraging and speaks very lowly about your backend. Frankly, I worry about the viability of Gizmo now that I know this.

Besides, I agree with the user named kieranmullen. Obvious is a relative term. While it might be head-smackingly clear to you that such and such server is down, all I see is my Gizmo client hanging up when it says “starting agent”. That doesn’t help me at all and it lead me to think the problem was on my end.

So yeah, thanks for the update after I spent nearly an hour adjusting proxies checking my own connection. If my podcast colleague hadn’t reported the same problems, who knows what I could have done or how long I could have spent? Great service guys.

“We already have internal monitoring to check our systems. We would NOT expose that level of detail to the public.”

Yes, it’s such a great security risk that even the IRS has one. Boy, exposing this information must be a horrible risk.

The worst outages occur when more subtle problems occur that we don’t notice right away… (which logically means that a public status page wouldn’t display those problems either).

Yeah, because your SIP server going down is so “subtle”. I grant that it was at a bad time, but if a podunk Web host in nowhere Alabama can provide 24/7 monitoring, certainly you can too. You run a phone service for God’s take, people rely on this. Treat it accordingly.

It would be a LOT of work to create a system that properly filters that information (about outages), and makes it generic enough for the public to see….

Wah. Cry me a fucking river. Seriously, this is just pathetic.

I don’t know how to set up a system status page, but then again, I don’t run an Internet telephone company either. However, at least this is an honest excuse, it is hard to do and would take a lot of work.

But here’s the deal, your competition has it and if they can provide better service than you, which they are, they are going to eat your lunch.

Which brings my to my next point. The real purpose behind this letter.

Dear John

You see, in reality, this is a Dear John letter to you Gizmo Project. I’m done with you. It’s not your reliability that did me in, it’s not the lack of a system status page either, it is the callous way you treat users that had the gall to ask for it.

I had two reasons for joining Gizmo over Skype. The first was that I wanted to support open protocols and the second was that I loved your record call feature.

However, in our scramble to get a podcast done, we discovered a way to record podcasts for free over Skype. In fact, we can record straight into GarageBand now. This is great for my colleague as he actually creates the audio files and it means that the “call record” feature is meaningless as recording works the same on both services now.

Though I love to support open protocols and open source software, it is not worth putting up with an obviously inferior service. I do not use Linux as my main computer, not anymore. However, I do use Adium, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and many other open source applications because they are as good, or better, than the alternatives.

I want to love Linux, the same as I want to love GIzmo Project, but I will not put up with an inferior product just because it is “free”. It’s an open market to me and I will use whoever has the best solution. Most of the time, open source and open protocols win. Sometimes, the proprietary guys come out on top.

I won’t stand on morals alone because morals don’t get work done. If you want my business back, you have to win it back the hard way.

Bottom Line

What it all comes down to is this Gizmo Project, you’ve lost me, a paying customer, to a superior competitors. You didn’t lose me because of an outage, but of your handling of it and your relationship with your customers.

Sure, I wasn’t a big customer by any stretch and I doubt that you could care any less, but I am the kind of technophile that is watching the VOIP marketplace to find the right time to make the jump completely.

Unless something changes between now and then, I can promise you that you won’t be the company I make the jump with.

I’m sorry Gizmo, this relationship is over. I’m with Skype now. It was fun while it lasted.

Sincerely,

John Black

PS: To answer Claw’s question in the forum posting: “Would you be satisfied with a forum section dedicated to announcements? That’s much more feasible than a standalone page.”

The answer: Sure, if you made it a standalone forum and actually posted to it promptly, not 24 hours AFTER the fact. This is why most companies go through the trouble of automating their status page.

You called me on my hone phone today, we were off on the wrong foot already. My home phone is something of a backup, a handy tool for when the Sprint network takes a swan dive into the Mississippi River or my older relatives want to call without using the newfangled cellurar technology.

I never use it so, when it rang, it was a surprise. But then, when I found out it was you, it almost made sense. You run the phone line, along with my Internet, and its how you contact me when you have questions.

“Is this Mr. or Mrs. Blue?” a sweet female voice rang out from the other end.

“No, this is Mr. Black, I am her significant other and the gentleman of the household, how can I help you?”

The woman on the other end balked. Since my wife and I never did the whole marriage ceremony thing, we have different last names. It’s never been a big deal for us, but I still get some amusement watching morons trip over it like it’s a great sin.

“Are you authorized on the account?” she asked.

“Yes, yes I am,” I answered honestly, thinking that, as usual, you simply needed information or it was a stupid survey.

“Then sir, I have a special offer for you,” she responded.

I knew then I had screwed up.

Used Car Salesman Tactics

Your pitch was a pretty simple one and, quite frankly, not all that bad. You were offering higher-speed Internet access, up to 16 mbps, for no additional charge for three months.

Now, I’ve never had any real complaints about the speed of my cable modem, the porn downloads move just fine thank you, but I’m always up for faster and better.

But after a three-minute speech about how much better the new service was, there was no mention of the cost after three months. So, being the smart guy I sometimes am, I asked.

The woman, like a monkey staring at a calculus problem, acted as if she’d never heard that question before. She acted shocked, confused and even offended.

“That is actually a very good question sir,” she said breathlessly.

Then, with her lips moving as fast as the wind leaving her body, she explained the price increase. It wasn’t much, a trivial amount of about ten dollars, but it was clear that the “free” rate was just an introductory one.

Now I’m being sold something and now John is a very unhappy man.

How We Roll

In my relationship, we have a strict policy of respect. We don’t spend each other’s money, even a small amount, without the other’s permission. It’s a rule.

Ten dollars might seem trivial, and it is, but money is what leads to divorce, almost every time, and its the small stuff that sinks you. We even have strict spending limits for birthday presents. We respect one another’s hard work and treat each other as equals. That is how we’ve spent seven years without sleeping apart.

You might laugh at us, but you have to respect what we’ve built.

“I’m going to need to confer with my wife on this one,” I said.

“I’m sorry sir, this is a phone-only offer. You might be able to call customer service and get a similar deal but I can’t promise you they’ll have the same on.”

Now let’s pause here for a moment. Am I supposed to believe that this magic genie that just randomly called me up has a deal that no one else in the company can offer? Either I’m being lied to, you’re not serious about this offer or you’re the most incompetent idiots I’ve ever heard from. This would redefine the left hand not knowing what the right one is doing because they probably share a cubicle wall.

Bear in mind that my wife’s name is on the dammed account. Even if I agreed to it, I’m not the person who’s name is actually on the account itself. I have permission and access to if needed, like in the event of one your wonderful outages, but I sure as Hell don’t have unilateral authority here and that should be painfully obvious.

“I am going to have to confer I said, there is no way around that,” I said, keeping my cool.

“How about this, I can set it up for you and if you don’t want it you can cancel it,” she replied.

Pausing here again, that is bullshit. I’ve tried canceling Cox services before and it requires a kind of patience not seen outside of martial arts movies. You’d have a better chance canceling an AOL account while your hair was on fire and you were balancing on a ten foot pole.

I’m not about to set up an account so that i can be forced to spend hours canceling it. I do not play that game and now I am really mad because I know, without a doubt, that I am being screwed here. They are trying to corner one half of a financial team into making a deal without the other’s permission.

That is wrong.

“No, I am going to have to talk with my wife,” I said, trying to be succinct.

She then repeated something about it being a phone-only deal but I had had enough, I hung up on her and I hate hanging up on people. It goes against my very being.

I hate hanging up on people because, if I am at that point, I’m going to try and take the extra sixty seconds to tell you off properly. But I was in a hurry here. My IM chime was going off and I had work to do. You got lucky because that tape recording you were making for “my protection” was about to be filled with some very ugly words.

Remember that.

Bottom Line

What would I have said if I had had the time? Simple.

I would have calmly said that I am no longer interested in your service and that I would like to be transferred to another representative. Why? So I can cancel my phone account to prevent you morons from calling me on it again.

Sixteen mbps Internet sounds pretty good, maybe I’ll take you up on it after I calm down some. But, in the meantime, I don’t want to hear you on my phone ever again.

You call me up, in the middle of my workday, and try to bully me into a deal that I have no authority to make.

If you’re not sleeping in the backyard for me, you can go to Hell.

I pay for my phone and I don’t want to hear you on the other end of that line again unless I am calling you and you’d better have my number on an alert system because, when it calls, it will not be pretty.

Remember that and remember this, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy.

Sincerely,

John Black

It was a week ago today that I got the call. You had received my application for employment and wanted to see me for an interview.

“Great news!” I thought. I had been looking for some part time, evening work to supplement my income and your position was one of the few available.

“The interview will be at 6:30 on the 25th,” said the man on the other line, his deep voice making it seem more like a spy mission than a job interview.

Now I’ve been on dozens of job interviews, but none began like this. I’ve spent hours of my life scheduling these things but never have I been given a “take it or leave it” time and place. Yet, the date and time were good, it was a Wednesday, the wife gets home early, no scheduling problems. I could make it easily.

I accepted.

Little did I know that your interview was going to literally fuck me out of two hours of my life and that you would showcase a level of incompetence that is generally only reserved for people in Government here in New Orleans.

If you had thought about what you were doing for three seconds or given an ounce of care for the people you called in, you wouldn’t have pissed off myself and a dozen other people, most of them educators.

You screwed this one up and, because I’m such a nice, caring guy, I’ll tell you where you went wrong.

The Story

The klusterfuck began, for me, at a few minutes before six. That’s when I left my house and headed to the college. I had forty minutes to make a twenty minute drive but ended up arriving at exactly 6:30 due to three accidents on the way. Proof that New Orleans residents can’t fucking drive.

However, that is not your fault and I digress.

When I got there, at exactly six thirty, there was no one there to greet me. I had to stammer my way into the receptionist office and then wait ten minutes for her to stop yacking with her damn friend on the phone and talk to me.

While I was waiting for her lips to stop moving another woman showed up asking about the same interview. Now I was really confused. I’ve been to many interviews, but none were gangbangs. I suddenly got this image of a reality show where we were voted out of the college or something. It felt funny and I almost left right then. I wish that I had.

Finally, after the receptionist shuts up, I think she forgot to breathe, she directed the two of us to the room where everyone was meeting. It was upstairs, on the second floor, in a random classroom.

In that classroom was about forty people. The problem is that the damn room could only seat 25. It was standing room only with fifteen of us or so crammed along a side wall.

Then it gets worse, the guy starts talking. He goes over the “illustrious” history of your fake-ass massage school and all about your “exponential” growth. Proof he needs a dictionary since there was nothing illustrious about the college nor exponential about the growth. Merely not as fake as you think and growing kind of fast.

Still, it takes him nearly an hour, a fucking hour, to get to actually talking about the positions.

Halfway through his presentation, he asks if there is anyone from the Carolinas. Me, like a moron, raise my hand. He asks where I’m from, I tell him Columbia, South Carolina, where I was born and raised. We exchange a few pleasantries and jokes before he tells the room that “Columbia is the worst city he has ever lived in,” and that “It has no right to be there.”

Then, after insulting me in front of the room, he drops the bombshell on everyone else. They’re only looking for three positions. Three. Forty people in the room, three positions. The math doesn’t look good folks. Worse still, he rambles off the positions, none of them are one I applied for, none are part time and, worse yet, I’m not even qualified for any of them unless I can shit out a CPA license in the next thirty seconds.

Finally, after all of that, he allows anyone who is not interested to leave. At that point myself, along with half of the room, start to mob the door. The rest of the room, I guess, showed up for the right position and stayed. Downstairs, a melee ensued, people mobbing the receptionists wondering about other positions, most quite angry.

I left though, I had a wife to go home to and two hours of my life to make up for.

Some questions

Now that I’ve gone through and told the story, I want to go back through it and point out all of the stuff that could be improved.

First, staring when I arrived, why the fuck weren’t there any signs to this meeting room? If you have a lot of people going to a room, shouldn’t you prepare for them a bit? A few signs? A greeter? Anything other than a receptionist with a severe case of restless lip syndrome? I guess I could have roamed the building playing Marco Polo, at least that would have been fun but I doubt I would have gotten there on time.

Second, looking at the room itself, if you’re going to invite forty people to a room, shouldn’t you make sure that the room can actually seat forty fucking people? Couldn’t you find a larger classroom or meet somewhere off-site? Were half of us supposed to sit in each others laps? If that’s the case, I nominate the brunette girl in the black dress and big boobs. she can sit on my lap any time she wants. Outside of her, that room was a leper colony (to borrow from Seinfeld).

Third, don’t insult my hometown you motherfucking asshole. I know my language with this letter is a bit more harsh than usual but I am sorry. Summer’s Eve isn’t as big of a douche as you are. I don’t really give two flying fucks what you think about Columbia, it’s no New Orleans, that is why I moved here, but I like it a lot better than the shithole you’re from in North Carolina.

Oh yeah, and go Duke you UNC-loving bastard. I never liked Duke before but I just became a huge Blue Devils fan knowing how much you love UNC. I’ll sure as Hell be rooting for them now.

Fourth, don’t make us sit around for an hour talking about the school when you know most of us won’t care the second you tell us about the jobs. Not only did you not offer the position many of us applied for, but your hours suck (11-8 my aching ass) your benefits suck and I don’t think anyone in that room wants to work for you. I know I sure as Hell didn’t.

Finally though, if you bring people in to interview for a job, make damn well certain you’re offering the job they applied for. Not only were myself and others that applied for my position upset but you also cheesed off half a dozen candidates for the Education Director position you apparently advertised for. Yeah, not a great way to treat potential high-level employees.

Seriously, how would you feel if you made an appointment to go to an appliance store and look at microwaves. You got there and, after an hour-long speech about how great the store was, you found out they only had refrigerators right then. You’d be pretty ticked off. That’s exactly how I feel.

Put yourself in my shoes, my wife’s shoes, my dog’s shoes, anyone’s shoes but your own you rich, greedy, inconsiderate douchebag.

Bottom Line

I’ve redacted your name from this open letter. Why? Because you have my resume in your greasy hands and have enough of my personal information to make my life miserable. I’m sure even you can figure out who the Hell I am it’s not like I’m fucking hard to track down or anything.

Even though everything I’ve said is true and was witnessed by forty of my peers, I don’t want a call from you, even if it is just to apologize. I don’t fear you but I have better things to do than be annoyed by you some more. You’ve already robbed me of two hours of my life I’ll never get back, I’m not letting your ass take more.

I don’t care if your college is as great as you say it is, I will never, ever consider working there again. I wouldn’t consider going there as a student, especially since real college is actually cheaper, and I will never, ever will set foot on your campus again.

You and your entire school can go to Hell and if I get in a position to hire people, I won’t even accept a degree from your school.

It’s all a crock of shit, I know it and now I’ve seen it first hand. My advice to anyone thinking about your school, get a real fucking degree.

Don’t call me again.

Lots of love,

John Black

There are only a few greater joys in my life than popping in an old favorite computer game and making it new again. Whether I’m enjoying a rousing round of Age of the Empires 2 or Max Payne, there’s a lot to be said about playing a (slightly) older computer game.

First, the games work, the first time, every time (unless it’s made by SEGA). There’s no worries about RAM requirements, bad performance or hangups. Your modern system can play these games flawlessly at the same time its downloading recipes from Argentina and cataloging your ten gigabyte porn collection.

Second, they’re still fun. If you enjoyed a game five years ago, you’ll probably enjoy it today. You can’t tell me that Half-Life 1 isn’t more fun than Doom 3 (of course, gluing your finger up your ass is more fun than the latter). Weaker graphics aside, everyone still gets giddy about the gameplay of older games, even if they won’t admit it.

Finally, they’re free or dirt cheap. If you don’t have them already, you can pick them up from the bargain bin in a flea market for a quarter and a can of Raid (I usually throw in deodorant to sweeten the deal). You don’t have to blow fifty bucks on a game that might not work or will probably suck. You can get a good, working game for a fraction of the cost.

So imagine my joy as I sit upon a literal mountain of old computer games. Classics from all genres and all walks of life. Now imagine my frustration since I can’t install half of them. Their CD keys have long since gone the way of the dodo and they are on their way to becoming Christmas tree decorations, and I don’t even celebrate Christmas.

Arrgh Matey.

I have to come clean. I hate pirates. I hate the kind that were in the Caribbean and I hate the ones roaming the net. The first are boring as Hell, the second are hypocrites. I’m no fan of the RIAA and the MPAA, but come on, this isn’t about free speech, it’s about not having to pay for that Metallica album, no one is fooled. Beat whatever war drum you want, most pirates are just too damn cheap to actually pay for the CD.

But no matter how much I hate pirates, I hate these stupid counter-measures even have more. An FBI warning is annoying but harmless, but a CD key is the fastest way I know to turn a treasured game into a skeet.

The idea is pretty ridiculous from the outset. Supposedly, if you put a lengthy key in the jewel case of booklet of a game, no one will be able to copy the disk because they won’t have the key. So, let me guess, we don’t have pens or pencils anymore? Is Windows shipping without a clipboard feature? Did every copy machine just suffer a fatal paper jam?

The damn CD key is easier to copy than the disk. In the time my computer burns one copy of a game I can hand write out a dozen copies of the key. I’m sorry. It’s not a deterrent, at least not one that can’t be beaten with a permanent market and a CD label.

You know who those do hurt? People like me. People that buy the damn games, spending our money to line your pockets. We’re the ones losing the jewel cases, having the flimsy things break or watch your cheap shit ink fade over the years. It is us, the good guys, we’re the ones you’re punishing.

I have an entire binder filled with over 40 CDs, most of which I can’t even play. Should I have taken better care of my jewel cases? Probably. But you move four times in five years and see how many of your jewel cases you have. I’m lucky I have a desk at this point. Hell, I’m lucky my wife hasn’t left me behind yet.

Those CDs are fucking useless. They aren’t even good for anything else. They make terrible Frisbees, they scratch up the table too much to be coasters and pets hate them. I guess I could try the old CD in the microwave trick, but that just doesn’t seem satisfying.

Why, because I want to play my fucking games, not see a spark show.

Another Crack in the Wall

So let me get this straight. I bought the CD, paid for it, and now to play it I have to crack it. That doesn’t sit well with me for two reasons.

• It’s Illegal: I’m not against breaking the law when needed, but this is a violation of the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. Given the pissed-off mood some copyright holders have been in lately, I don’t want to get a nastygram because some idiot in Silicon Valley thought a CD Key was a great idea.
• It’s Dangerous: Have you been by these cracks sites? They are loaded with spyware, viruses and popup porn ads. You need a fucking hazmat suit just to log in. Forget the file sharing police, its those spambot networks that really scare the Hell out of me. If I wanted to be constantly assaulted by viruses and backdoors, I’d jump in a sewer.

Yet, it’s the only option other than buying another copy, if I can find it, or getting some good shooting practice with my bright, shiny new targets.

Bottom Line

Do you know what I’m going to start this weekend? A database. That’s right, a fucking database. I am going to create a database of all my games and their CD keys. I’m going to back it up in a dozen different places and I’m going to add to it as I gain new titles.

This is going to take me hours just to add the ones I have at the ready. It could take me weeks to find all of the ones I do have and I’ll probably never find all of them.

But why is this my responsibility? Because some douchebag thinks it’s OK to distribute a copy of the game to whoever they want? Yeah, that’s fair. But at least the CDs you download off the Web or get from friends have the CD key on them. You know, unlike the legal ones.

If you insist on putting CD keys on everything, at least have the decency, and the common sense, to put a fucking copy on the CD itself. If you’re going to give me the joy of typing in 20 random characters the least you can do is copy it down in two places. One off the CD so I can install it easy and one on the disk itself so I don’t fantasize about taking a baseball bat to your car when I lose the first copy.

So please, developers, use your fucking heads. Think this through all of the way and quick ruining my favorite games.

If I have to buy one more copy of Diablo II, I might have to hurt someone…

Sincerely,

John Black