I don't generally have any more anxiety about a dentist visit than I do about, oh, going to the corner coffee shop or out to a movie. That is to say, I always have some anxiety about doing pretty much anything, besides watching TV or sitting here in front of my trusty, silent computing friend. But given the alternatives, I suppose I'd rather do almost anything than sit in the dentist's chair, as comfortable as it is, and have someone else staring into my open gob while wearing magnifiers as they insert surgical steel instruments and... do things to me.

So I can't stare at her, and since there is no wide screen LCD attached to the ceiling showing me my favorite movie or an Xbox game or something equally diverting, I find that I am simply staring at the blank ceiling. My dentist moved into new offices about a year ago and the new ceilings are extraordinarily dull. In the old offices, they had those ugly black-pitted acoustic tiles lining the ceiling and I could amuse myself looking for patterns in the chaos.

I always assumed that the tiles' seemingly random array of dots wasn't random at all, and that possibly there were four or five different sets of tiles and they were set into the grid at different angles and associations based on nothing at all. Did the installers care about the patterns as much as I did? Did they realize and care that a series of patients would be forced for an hour to do nothing but stare up at them? Were they amusing and surprisingly bright ceiling installers, or perhaps they were chaos statisticians on holiday, and that is what chaos statisticians on holiday do. Then they go away and sit by themselves staring at, I don't know, different kinds of flower stamen while smiling inwardly at their own carefully planned chaotic dental jokes, happy in the knowledge that someone, somewhere is stuck in a chair attempting to figure out their patterned jokes.

The new office ceiling has no such amusements. Like God, it simply is. A blank, off-white canvas with occasional creases in the plaster. Still, my eyes searched its surface for some sort of something to latch onto besides the constantly staring reminder that someone is inside my mouth.

Is there anything more intently personal than allowing someone else to stick things inside you? No, there is not. Plus, in this instance, you can't exactly see what's happening but you can certainly hear it and, occasionally and shockingly, you can feel it.

I'm glad that the outsides of teeth don't feel things. I mean, normally they don't. Heat and cold, of course, but the rubbing of rough metal against them, not so much. Yet they transmit every notch, nick, slip and metallic scrape with more power than a Pete Townsend power chord. So here's another thing to try to ignore. All that noise.

I'm also acutely aware of my tongue, and I wonder if other people are like that. I try to relax it so it's not in the way, and I also try to breathe only through my nose, because only God knows what's lodged in the folds of my throat at any given moment that I might exhale into the face of the woman I am trusting with the open exposed flesh of my mouth.

While I am doing all of this, concentrating so hard on not doing things, I will sometimes return to my body's other many parts and discover that while my attention was diverted to everything above the neck, everything below it was going about the business of living.

I had a hard-on. Don't even ask why. I don't know. I certainly didn't feel turned on. And I instantly hoped that I wasn't, because this would be an extremely expensive and potentially dangerous fetish to have. I also hoped that it wasn't as obvious from outward appearances as it felt from my prone position. What, I thought, would this woman think?

Probably the same things I was thinking, namely "what the hell is going on and why the hell do I have a stiffy in my pants?" Though, you know, she would've thought "...in his pants," or at least one hopes that to be the case, because otherwise...

Anyway, now it's time to shift the concentration downstairs and calm the little guy the fuck down without drawing undo attention to it. It's funny that, even as I travel through my 40s and near a half-century of living on this planet, I can still be undone by my penis.

I can't take a deep calming breath because there are sharp, pointy things near my gums. I can't shift myself out of whatever caused this unintentional erection because I don't know why it's there in the first place. I can't distract myself with the ceiling tile game, because there are no ceiling tiles. Just then, she says, "turn your head toward me," because, I assume, she wants to start digging in even deeper, and as I do so my salvation comes into view.

On the wall, mounted near the spit-sink, are a pair of cardboard boxes that look like facial tissue containers, but instead of facial tissues they hold rubber gloves. There is a box of right gloves and a box of left gloves. And down at the corner of each box, a simple phrase causes my brain to discover someplace else to go besides the land of erotic dentistry.

"50 COUNT BY WEIGHT"

And I think, "the hell?" Count by weight. Count by weight? Count is counting, and weight is weighing. How does one count by weight? And 50 gloves by weight. How much does one glove weigh? And how much does the box weigh? Is there a machine that pours the raw gloves into the box and then it thinks, "I wonder if that's 50. Shit, I should have counted instead of wondering about those ceiling tiles. Hmm, I wonder how much one glove weighs. I bet I can figure out how much 50 gloves weigh, and then weigh the box, and then I'd know if I need to add more gloves!"

As that imagery goes through my imagination, and of course the machine is a kind of Rube Goldberg robot with arms and fingers and a blinking light where its brain should be, my eye falls to another piece of information on the glove boxes, and the simple application of the two letters sends my feverish, eroticized brain into another spin.

"XS"

Extra small gloves? Rubber gloves come in sizes? But they're rubber! They stretch! How much bigger is an XL left rubber glove than an XS left rubber glove. How many sizes are there? Is there a weight differential between an XS left rubber glove versus an XL left rubber glove that would need to be compensated for when weighing a box of 50 to be sure that there are at least 50 in there? Would it matter if there were 51? And why are there left and right gloves? Couldn't you just flip a left over and have a right? I look at the dental assistant's rubber-gloved hands. They look like ordinary rubber gloves. Why the big production? Is there a rubber glove conspiracy going on?

My eyes go back to the glove boxes and I notice something else. The left rubber glove box says "50 COUNT BY WEIGHT" but the right rubber glove box says "100 COUNT!" How do they know? Oh my God, they have to count the 100-count boxes but only weigh the 50-count boxes! There are some people in a factory in China being paid 2¢ an hour to count rubber gloves. But only the 100-count rubber gloves. There's not enough profit in a 50-count box to pay anyone to count them! People are brilliant!

Thankfully, my travels down the path of rubber gloves, robots, Chinese labor and the subtle differences between one's left and one's right hand (though remind me to tell you some day about "The Man With Three Thumbs") has allowed my burgeoning manhood to succumb to boredom and I can once again concentrate on the important matters at hand, like where my tongue is and why they still use that same aquarium screen saver on the computer in the waiting room.

I mean, really, what's that about?

Then again, one's opinion of "funny" may different from theirs. And so it goes that the UPS man stopped off today and dropped me my latest T-shirt acquisition:

I loves me some non-sequitur.

But I'd like to offer up to the ether in case someone else wants to do it and feel free.

The name changed between "wishs" and "wishd" and the letters actually stood for something. The goal of the project was to allow people to record three things in simple text boxes.

1. What happened
2. The miscreant
3. What I Should Have Said (Done)

Hence the title. If the end product was What I Should Have Said, it would have been called W.I.S.H.S. and if, instead, it ended up being What I Should Have Done, then W.I.S.H.D.

I mean, how many times do you find yourself in a situation where, only after it's over and the moment is long gone, have you found yourself regretting the things you didn't say or do? So my idea was a site (or sub-site) dedicated to those situations rife with promise. Record what happened, who done it, and what you should have said. Then open that up to comments (or not) and get all the "Me too!"isms and "I would have..." suggestions in there. It would be searchable so if you were preparing for battle, you could be well informed about your alternatives.

But, it was just another idea that never saw fruition. For all I know it's out there already, garnering ad revenue and adding to the overall noise level instead of being really, really funny.

By the way, here's What I Should Have Said:

"Here's the thing, Mr. Self-Involved, Overly-Confident Douche Rag Loser, I know that when you walked up to this store and saw that line of people, you thought to yourself, 'What a bunch of losers. I'm totally going to get in the short line and get inside the store and just sneak into the iPhone line and walk out today with one. Fuck them! I win!' and what is now going through my mind is 'Hey, Mr. Self-Involved, Overly-Confident Douche Rag Loser -- and let me emphasize that you are a douche rag rather than a douche bag, because the douche bag holds the douching water and vinegar and you're actually the rag that cleans up the post douche, you douche rag -- I'm one of those idiots. Hello! And now you find yourself behind me, thinking you're going to get away with it because people are sheep, people besides you, anyway, and I will only stew in my own juices and feel inner rage but I won't do anything because I want to avoid confrontation and I don't mind, really, that you're so special. But in fact, Mr. Rag, I'm going to cause quite the ruckus. I'm going to point at you and scream like Donald Sutherland at the end of the remake of 'Body Snatchers' -- yes, you see? I'm a nerd, too! But unlike some, and by some I mean you, I don't look for ways to fuck over my fellow nerds. I obey the nerd laws. Nerds stand in line for tech bling. They do so gladly. They meet other nerds and nerd-bond and nerd-speak and nerd-fantasize about holding their new nerd-bling. So, yes, Mr. Grinning Fucktard 'I'm more special than everyone else around me and usually park in people's driveways and then walk away and forget about the fact that I'm inconveniencing everyone else because I can', I'm calling you out. I'm naming names. I'm going to get in your face and talk extra loudly and 'tell on you.' And you know what else? I'm going to get a special stiffy in my naughty place at your expense. BECAUSE I CAN!"

See? Fun! Though I suppose that's what blogs are for in the first place, n'est-ce pas?

Friends, I am that dick.

I love my old iPhone, but it was slow as molasses in January, as me old mother used to say. I use it primarily as a hand-held Internet appliance that happens to have a phone in it. The phone piece is probably the part I use least, but the phone part also has the SMS part, and the voicemail part, so from a business perspective it was an important part of the package. And I occasionally called people on it when I wasn't looking at maps, searching Google, listening to music or watching movies I ripped from my extensive DVD collection.

I didn't really want to wait in line. I didn't really need a new one, yet. But I happened to be downtown, I happened (just happened) to pass the Apple flagship store and I happened to note that the line wasn't around the block, it was only a couple hundred people long. So short! And I have some time. Why not?

The woman behind me was a young Asian who, like me, was there to upgrade her iPhone to the latest and greatest. We both stood there for the most part with our phones drawn passing the time with messaging or gaming or musicking until the batteries died and we were forced into the world of personal contact. She was animated and talkative and excited. She had been looking forward to getting the new iPhone ever since Sir Steve announced it and was happy to answer every "is this the line for the iPhone?" question (tinged either with regret or attempted condescension) with a smile and a nod and a "Yeah, we've been here three hours!"

Apple did its best at crowd control, keeping two lines outside the store. One for iPhones, and a much shorter one for "everything else." People in the everything else line were allowed in much more often, obviously, and I'm presuming that every one of the people in the iPhone line with me was thinking the same thing I was thinking: "How are they keeping them separate from us?"

The line moved incredibly slowly. I started imagining all sorts of line-cutters inside the hollowed grounds. There were plenty of Appleites in orange and blue shirts, and even two burly, bulky Apple Security guards trying to enforce the rules, but it's only a store and we're only customers and it's not like we're in line for food in the middle of a plague. We're well-off nerds wanting the newest expensive toy. All in all, it's not such an important thing.

But three hours in, your brain gets skewed and you start bargaining with yourself regarding just how much you're willing to go through to get something that will surely be readily available sans line in a couple of weeks, if not sooner. Maybe the original iPhone was worth this. It was groundbreaking, it had definite panache and the nerd factor of product jealousy was eclipsing anything else you could pull from your messenger bag.

You start getting paranoid and scared. Scared that you're an idiot for not figuring out a way around the line. My comrades and I commiserated about that often. "What about that other line?" "Yeah! How are they policing that?" "Yeah! And what if they go in and like, say, 'I just want an iPod,' and then, like, get to the counter and go, 'Can I throw in an iPhone?' Like, what are they gonna say at that point? 'No, you can't?'" "I've been watching, and I can't tell if the people coming out with iPhones are from this line or that one. I wish they'd give us poker chips or something so they can keep track."

The other pressure cooker adding to the paranoia and defensiveness is an unending litany of jokes at our expense pointing out how stupid we were to be standing in line, "for a phone! It's just a phone! Don't you have better ways to spend your time?"

Well, yes Mr. Overweight biker dude with your earpods stuck in your ears and a Super Gulp hanging from your slack lips. Yes, I do. But I've elected to do this instead, so that I may provide for people like yourself some manner of elevating your little lackluster life, to imagine yourself as someone better than me, because I am wasting my time standing in line for the iPhone (and I even already have an iPhone) and you're not. Better now?

So, the interminable line outside comes at last to an end, the Apple Security guard walks over and counts "One, two, three, four, five," and I am lucky Number Five, allowed access at last to the inside of the store. I have been imagining that I will now walk up to a special glittery counter with spotlights and angelic music and be allowed to touch the object of my desire at last.

Instead, I am now at the end of another line. Much shorter, certainly, but also much crueler, for now I can see others getting their phones (including that fucking couple of Yuppie slackers who joined their friend at the front of the line at the last minute after, no doubt, hanging out at Citizen Cupcake gobbling chocolate frosted baked goods while laughing and pointing at us) and my feet hurt and my shoulders are aching and even now, so near the end, I'm asking myself, why did I do this? Is it all worth it? Am I the idiot, now?

I am contemplating this, sinking into a sudden round of pre-buyer's regret or something like that, when I turn around and find a stranger standing behind me. Certain, he is nothing at all like the young Asian girl I was joking with for precious hours of my life. And the game commences.

"Are you standing in line?"

"Yeah."

"Were you standing in line behind me outside for three and a half hours."

"Yeah, I was." Grin.

He stares at me. I instantly hate him. A lot. I hate everything about his self-congratulatory smart-assed grin and his cheating little heart and his idea of how life should work for him, where he can outsmart us all and get what he wants and get away with it. "No, you weren't."

"Yeah, I was."

I point out to the front of the store. "She was behind me in line. You weren't."

"Are you gonna tell on me?" He asks this while still grinning that grin. I want nothing more than to kill him with something sharp.

"I am." I start looking for someone to tell.

"How does it hurt you?"

I look at him like he's insane. "I waited for hours. You didn't. If you want one, that's what you have to do. You don't wander into the front of the line."

"How does it hurt you?"

He's trying to show that I shouldn't care about anyone else. Like he does. "It hurts her. It hurts everyone behind her. Look at her. Turn around and look at her. She's the one standing outside with her arms folded across her chest."

He doesn't turn around. He's still grinning. I'm feeling adrenaline pumping through me. I feel shaky and hot and angrier than I have in, like, ever. She's standing out in the line frowning as I argue with him. I start waving my arms to get someone's attention. Where are all the blue shirts now? Why does no one see what's happened? My God, this is important! Someone pay attention!

"So, you're really going to tell on me." He says it like I'm the dick. He says it like we're in this together, him and me, like we're suddenly pals and this is like school and he's the cool crowd and I'm the little fat nerd all over again. God, it's infuriating!

"You bet your ass I am."

He shakes his head, grinning still, and turns around and leaves the line. I watch him like a hawk as he saunters across the blonde wood floors and exits the store.

I should feel victorious and redeemed, but I still feel angry. How did he do that? Make me feel like the bad guy. I think about the people outside. Did it make any difference, really? Is the line suddenly moving faster, like he was the only bowel blockage? There's no one, now, to point all this rage at anymore. He's gone.

I message Robert to tell him what happened. He tells me he loves me even more for doing it. I realize it was against type, for me to stand up to someone, but it was also exactly within my demeanor, because I am nothing if not a stickler for rules.

Another 30 minutes and I managed to get my new iPhone 3G. It's black. It's warm in my touch. The Apple employee who helped me was charming and funny and nice and I was surly and tired and just wanted to get the hell out of there. It wasn't fun, it wasn't rewarding, and after all was said and done, the 3G doesn't even work in my own apartment.

But at least I spoiled someone else's fun! Vindication!

Whatever.

Then things slowed down. Then things stopped dead. I could probably enumerate the causes if I chose to dwell on them. I could look backwards, which is what we all do for the most part, look backwards, because it's easier and obvious. But I want to start looking forward, again. Looking forward to something. Looking forward towards something. And to start writing again.

Certainly, I'll make no promises. Why would I? You don't care about them, and neither do I. Promises made online aren't real, and they're made to be broken. Nothing online is very important. It's all so disposable and most of it is horrible. And I mean that in the original sense. Not the more modern one that waters down its meaning, but the one going back centuries.

"Marked by or arousing horror."

It's awful out there, or haven't you noticed? I suppose it was inevitable, the dumbing down of everything. The trivialization and ignorance posing as opinion. The snippets of nothing shot out at lightspeed as if everything, everything, everything has importance, when all that does is illustrate the opposite.

But back to me. And to you. You who found this, however you did. And who knows what you want? Hard to tell when one looks at what's popular. Not that I should use that as a yardstick, of course. And not that I will. No, if I'm going to have any measure of success -- and buy 'success' I simply mean a continued drive to write, rather than the drive to write well -- I must just keep at it. Often, though not necessarily at length.

So here I go again. And to hell with expectation and promises.

I live in a very small 1-bedroom apartment, yet I own a 42" LCD monitor, a Denon 3808ci AVR receiver (weighing in at a more-than-respectable 39.2 lbs.), a Sony DVD jukebox big enough to hold 400 discs, a TiVo Series 3, A panasonic Blu-ray player, and an Xbox 360. On top of that, and in the same space, I have a powered external eSATA drive attached to the TiVo, a MacMini with two more external drives to house the 400 DVDs that I am ever so slowly ripping, an Apple Airport Extreme sharing the cable with the TiVo, another external drive attached to the Airport for network storage, an Apple tv to download hi-def flicks off iTunes as well as play said ripped movies over something that can actually handle hi-def streams, and I've just added a Playstation 3 because I got it for less than retail on eBay and I am anxiously awaiting the releases of Killzone2 and Little Big Planet for hours of useless playtime.

All told, that makes fourteen power-sucking boxes, six ethernet connections, five thick HDMI cords, 7.1 speaker cables, various USB connections and a spider's nest of tangles stuffed behind a rather ugly but serviceable wood and glass stand that looks awful.

I have been looking and looking and looking for someone out there to make a simple, stylish, elegant media console that will allow me to display the electronics I want to display (namely, anything that I want to control via my Logitech Harmony 1 universal remote) and hide the electronic I want to hide, while also being able to somehow manage the tangle of audio, video, networking and power cords sprouting from the back of everything!

Is that such an impossible goal?

Another problem is dealing with everything once it's all set up. I always have to jiggle a cord or replace a network patch or reboot something and getting behind the mess is bad enough, but digging through it all is worse.

There is also not a small amount of danger involved. The Xbox power brick alone puts out enough BTUs to heat a small London flat. When you cram it under a shelf and then pile all kinds of rubberized, insulating cords on top of it, I expect it to be frying eggs.

What I'm looking for is something that will allow me to place my electronics on it, but will also allow me to manage the cords, and particularly the power connections, in a safe, simple, neat manner. But there's nothing out there like that.

Admittedly, I am probably not the typical electronics hobbyist. I now have three ways to download movies, two ways to play Blu-ray disks, a computer with a 100-album, 9,000-song library on it, and an audio-video receiver with an Internet connection so I can play radio stations from Germany in 7.1 digital audio. That's insane.

But is it also insane to expect someone out there, like, just one company, to create a simple stand with shelves, that sits high enough above the carpet that I can easily slide all the extra power components under it, but is also slim enough that it doesn't just so far out from the wall that it's like an iceberg in a swimming pool?

Here's what I want: I want it to be square, I don't want any obscure angles for the sake of design. Only 90º corners will do. I want it to be no more than 32 inches high and 45 inches wide. I want the back to be open, or at least accessible enough so that I can easily manage connections between equipment -- and that means no little hamster holes through which I am expected to snake all the cables. Sliding doors, even, that would work. Make the shelves not quite extend all the way to the back so everything doesn't end up all crammed up in that compartment, either.

On the bottom, I want an area where I can slide the power cords under the console. In my dream, this is a kind of "drawer without a bottom" or a facia or something that will hide the tangle from the front, but not keep it in an area so compressed that fire is a real danger. It needs two shelves that are adjustable, but adjustable in a manner that doesn't leave unsightly peg holes all over the place. You figure that part out.

As for its materials and colors, I'm not that picky. I've seen some nice wood ones, I've seen some nice metal ones. Avoid glass. I don't care about seeing through the shelves at the tops of the equipment. They're all the same and there's nothing to see. It's stupid.

Got it? I'm willing to spend $1200 for a thing like that. $1200!

Now, who's gonna make that for me?

Case in point, last night's "the Supreme Court is a highly-biased institution lately peopled with horrible, narrow-minded Neo-Con underlings." Here, below, Alan Shore argues for a mentally-disabled man on death row by taking the nine to task.

It's over 10 minutes long, but I love it when Alan gets going, and particularly here against one of the United States' more awkward and backwards-progressing (assuming that's even a correct term) institutions.

The older woman had rhumey eyes, at least that was the word that popped into my head when I looked at them. They seemed too large for her face, which was leathery and wrinkled and shiny. Her lips were large, when she spoke in her halting fashion I could not look at anything but them. First her eyes, as you do when speaking to someone, then her lips.

She thanked me for answering the door, which I thought was odd and pitiful but probably not unreasonable, and handed me a small leaflet that I knew I should have just refused because I would be throwing it in the trash almost immediately, but which I accepted out of kindness (in my perception, anyway) and inevitability. I glanced at the back and there it was. "Watch Tower." And I knew I was in for it.

But this morning, as I stood there and listened, I decided to fess up and admit to these literally God-fearing Christians that I not only don't believe that Jesus Christ is anyone's Savior, let alone my own, let alone that anyone actually needs saving, but that I also don't believe there is a God.

The point of contention seemed to be that we are living in desperate and terrible times, and how can I go on another minute without having God to fall back on?

My answer was that there have always been desperate and terrible times, that these times are probably still better than living in a plague-infested London or the Sudan where serial rapists roam the streets, and that none of us are subject to the whims of any God, alive or dead, and that we would probably all get along better without Him.

I said this into the face of a very old woman and a very young woman, both dressed in their Sunday best, out to witness to people such as myself who need saving. And I, for once, refused to be saved.

Though it happens less frequently here in San Francisco than anywhere else I have lived (Baltimore was particularly Christ-y, and New Jersey had more than what I would consider its "fair share" of evangelicals seeking out the heathens), I still am visited, from time to time, by these people who don't actually want anything from me, but are shocked -- Shocked! -- that anyone can somehow live a stand-up, non-murdering life without God.

As I stood there, shivering, with a small leaflet in one hand, I'm not even sure why I decided to tell them that I didn't want or need saving and that I didn't even believe in their God. I wonder now if this will work with other surprise visitors, like people asking for donations (I don't believe in animal sanctuaries!) or busking on behalf of political figures (I don't believe in Barak Obama!) but I doubt it would work. Engaging those sorts in conversation only brings the cultish behavior to the surface, and suddenly they have a clearer goal that must seem easier to reach. At least, it's easier to define.

There was another pair across the street, but so far I was the only resident of my small alleyway to answer the door. I suddenly realized what a grand service I was performing for these two. I was the very reason they had come out in the first place! I mean, why would they need to talk to other Christians? They've already drank the Kool-Ade. I was one of those legendary lost souls in the flesh!

The older woman handed me her Bible and pointed to a passage, the one about the meek inheriting the Earth. I didn't know if she meant for me to read it aloud and perform an oration there on my stoop, but I elected to read it to myself, remarking only "The meek..." with a slim smile. She nodded and smiled back, asking whether or not that promise brought me comfort and hope.

I was about to point out that the Earth, in its current state, probably wasn't what the meek were expecting, and really, how would the meek take over the lease on it? They're the meek. They don't even come out of their apartments to talk to Jehovah's Witnesses. What happens when God comes calling?

Instead, I wished them the best of luck with their inheritance and handed the Bible back, hoping that this was at an end.

But the younger woman, wearing a fetching ensemble of cream-colored dress suit and matching shoes, wanted to offer me her favorite passage, which I must confess I can't even remember now because at that point I was so chilled that I think my faculties started to shut down.

I looked across the street and saw the other pair of women moving to the next doorway. They looked like an exact match for the pair speaking with me, an elderly woman and a younger woman clutching Bibles in their gloved hands. I wanted them to come on over so we could all agree what a loss I was and that when Jesus finally made his return trip, wouldn't I have egg all over my face as it fried to a crisp in the fires of hell? Wouldn't that be a hoot!

But I think they saw that I was not to be moved. I was sticking to my guns. All they had were very old texts that told the same stories as even older texts probably handled by the same types of believers for centuries. Were there always disbelievers like me, standing in their doorways, perfectly content to live in Godless hedonism? Surely they had their own Gods to believe in. Gods of the sea, Gods of the sky, Gods of trees and gophers.

Maybe that's all I need. My own personal God. Not a major deity, more like a very minor one. God of cheese, maybe. Or of designer rugs. Something interesting and snazzy, something I enjoy. God of high definition TV. If I had one of those, I could tell my visitors, "Thanks, but no thanks! Your God gives you sermons and promises. My God gave my LOST at 720p! Beat that!"

Ninja Gaiden 2

Just spent a few minutes rummaging around at Amazon and collected a few pre-release Xbox 360 titles in my shopping cart:

• April 3, 2008: Ninja Gaiden 2
  Bloodiest game ever?
• June 4, 2008: Lego Indiana Jones
  Lego Star Wars was HY-larious!
• July 3, 2008: Fracture
  Weapons-based geographic deformation? I am so there.
• July 3, 2008: Too Human: Part 1
  Or too boring?
• August 28, 2008: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
  Hey, Luke, who's your daddy, now?
• September 10, 2008: Borderlands
  Sci-fi Oblivion?
• October 1, 2008: Alan Wake
  Serious bump in the night.
• October 1, 2008: Fallout 3
  Post-apocalyptic mayhem from the Oblivionators.
• October 2, 2008: Prototype
  Looking seriously sharp.
• October 3, 2008: Resident Evil 5
  Slow zombies? My favorite kind! Oh, wait, those aren't slow!
• December 3, 2008: Fable 2
  December? As if.

Fable 2

I'm assuming that most of those release dates are blue-sky estimates, since anything farther out than April hasn't been actually announced. You might also notice that there's one big title noticeably absent: Grand Theft Auto IV, due out on April 29th. I've played two other GTA titles on the PS2 and that particular genre of game doesn't seem to be my bag. I don't enjoy playing a bad guy, and I usually found the gameplay frustrating since I'm in no way a console controller jockey. The new one looks promising, but I'm withholding judgment until someone I know and trust tells me it's worthwhile.

I just finished playing Fable for the original Xbox and it was enjoyable, if a bit reptitive. I've been hankering for a role-playing game to rival Oblivion and I've got my fingers crossed that this is it. Everything else in that genre so far has sucked big time, and I tried them all. (And, no, I'm not interested in World of Warcraft, thanks very much. I spent enough time at my computer as it is.)

There are some dark horses in the running this year, but if 2007 proved anything at all it's that some old favorites are looking a little long in the tooth, and they're providing ample room for new games (like Bioshock, Crackdown and Mass Effect) to take up the slack.

Fracture

Biggest disappointment of 2007? Easily, it was Assassin's Creed. I had high hopes for that one, which may have nailed the coffin closed before I cracked the case open, but for the most part I found it annoying, frustrating, and sometimes downright stupid. They did so much wrong in the game, from unhelpful cutscenes to really poor voice acting to almost unmanageable fight dynamics, that getting through as much of it as I did was a miracle. Oh, I tried valiantly to muck all the way through every assassination, but in the end I threw in the towel and called it a day. Maybe the next one will fix the problems, but I'm not hopeful.

Last year's biggest surprise was Bioshock. I mean, I knew it was going to be good, because with a concept like that how could they fail? (I'm looking at you, Altier!) But it surpassed my best imagination and provided some very memorable and at times downright scary hours of entertainment. I'm looking forward to what 2K Games comes up with next.

Mass Effect also lived up to expectations -- surpassed them, in fact! From the initial videos and gameplay run-throughs, I really wasn't looking forward to it. It seemed unnecessarily complicated and, well, boring. It ended up being so good that I played through it twice just to see how the different choices played out, and I'm thinking of playing it all over a third time. It's that good.

This year's surprises are hard to predict. Prototype looks like a cross between Crackdown and The Darkness (another of last year's disappointments) with you as the player taking the role of some mutant freak superman who can absorb others and morph into giant creatures, or something like that. Looks fun, but it's all in the playing, isn't it?

Borderlands

I put Borderlands on my list in the hope that it will tide me over until the next chapter of Mass Effect rears its head. There are supposed to be some downloadables coming to Xbox Live for Mass Effect that may add some new chapters or weapons to help pass that time, but an entire game is a lot more satisfying that a few drops of newness, no matter how amazing they are. (See: Oblivion: The Shivering Isles add-on for DLC done right.)

The biggest unknown? Alan Wake. It's been in the pipeline forever and it sounds a bit too Stephen King for my tastes -- frankly, he lost me at Christine, the possessed car. But I'm a sucker for scary gothic shadows and things that jump out at you, so I'm hoping for some deeply satisfying chills, there. If not, there's always an island full of zombies awaiting me in Resident Evil 5, right?

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Anything your game genie needs this year? I'm all ears -- and thumbs!

Halo 3: The ‘Third Wave’ of Destroying the U.S.
by The LaRouche Youth Movement Counter-Intelligence Team

And man oh man, "counter-intelligence" has never had a more apt usage.

My own short but sweet pre-emptive Halo 3 review, having played only the first two chapters and, to be perfectly frank, never having played a Halo game before: "Repetitive and frustrating." Though it does make me appreciate Gears of War and Bioshock a lot more.

LAX, however, was another story. The surly, self-involved, obnoxious security agent there refused to allow Robert to return home with his half-used goods, and made him dump them in the trash or "check them through." Me, given enough time before my flight, I would have left the line and gone back to the check-in counter and handed them those two bottles to check as luggage, just because I am both annoyed at this continual process of stripping away my dignity and the wholesale, baseless rules that stem from singular and unlikely situations involving not-me.

So I think the market is ready for a new airline that caters to people like me, who are more than willing to place their own lives in jeopardy as long as we can get on board our flights without being subjected to shakedowns and feel-ups.

Terror Air will allow anyone to get on board the plane without removing their shoes. They can take the toiletries they need with them without having every bottle weighed and measured. They can bring lighters on board. They can bring bottles of any beverage they want, whether they bought them in the airport terminal or had the audacity to bring them from the outside world. Check-in's are handled quickly and efficiently. No, you don't have to remove your laptop from its case. No, you don't have to take your belt off. No, you don't have to empty your pockets.

Sure, the chances that a terrorist intent on blowing up a plane are likely to multiply if given the option of using an airline whose concern for its passenger's comfort and convenience outweigh its concern for a possible terrorist's seating assignment, but the odds are in your favor!

And wouldn't it be nice to go to the airport and not be treated as a terrorist -- even if you are one?

I have officially made a big change in my life, and I'm glad you're here to listen to my story. I'm sure I'm probably like a lot of you, and my story may be familiar to some of you. It's a sad story, in places, and in some others angry, and by turns both frustrating and annoying (in as much as those can be separate experiences), but in the end I hope my story will help those of you still stuck in the place where I was, and may show you the light at the end of the tunnel.

I am a Mac owner. A double-Mac owner, in fact. And here's how I did it.

A stick gives you more control and you have a certain affinity for your vehicle that automatic transmission can't deliver. At the same time, an automatic transmission does everything for you and you're not required to, in a word, think. You just do. So it's not a perfect analogy, since I'd say that the Mac meets pieces of both descriptions -- I feel a bit like there's a new layer of stuff in the way of the operating system, so in that sense it's like automatic transmission. At the same time, using OS-X feels a lot more like being in a well-tuned German automotive wonder, and Windows now feels like a late 70's Pontiac with leaky breaks.

At the meeting, as I was explaining that the F-keys on my MacBook Pro have different functions depending on what other key I use (in Windows, a function key is a function key and only a function key) and that I am still getting used to the lack of a right-click on my mousepad and the absence of the backspace key and that new and funny Apple-key and so on (all I wanted to do, by the way, was show all my Photoshop comps on a single desktop using Exposé, which is slick and fun and a really nice feature -- when I can figure out how to make it work while a table full of VPs are staring at me) when I found myself, in way of apology and explanation, extolling the virtues of Appleland.

You see, I've not only rid myself of my 3-year-old Sony Vaio tower (a workhorse that I upgraded constantly and from which I decided that Sony makes fine looking hardware but should leave the OS alone) and my 1-year-old Toshiba notebook (whose hard drive died in that one-year period, though suspiciously just after the warranty also died) and the virus-ridden, glitchy, "time to wipe the hard drive again" Windows XP laughingly-referred-to-as operating system, but I also added a MacMini, an AirPort Extreme base station and an AirPort Express network extender to my little home-office, ditching some Linksys boxes and a crate full of Windows system add-ons like Trojan removers and virus innoculators and worm finders in the process.

I've been contemplating this move for over a year, but what finally sealed the deal for me was Parallels and BootCamp. Put simply, as a Web site developer, I cannot ditch Windows altogether. I still need to test my designs in Internet Explorer and on the Windows platform, which treats a lot of important screen functions differently from the Mac OS. And there are a couple of Windows apps I will probably still need to use now and again, though I expect 'a couple' to become 'none' fairly soon.

BootCamp on the Mac allows you to dual-boot (or tri-boot, or whatever-boot) into differing operating environments on the same machine. I've loaded that bloated and shiny and way-too-overchromed Windows Vista onto a small partition on my hard drive so I can boot into Vista natively if I want or need to, mainly for gaming purposes -- because I'm such the gamer, now, you know -- and use DirectX 10 and all my 4GB of RAM and the full processing power of my machine when I want to. Or, I can open a virtual machine on my Mac desktop via Parallels using that same BootCamp partition and use only enough processing power to look at two operating systems at once, testing a new HTML/CSS beauty in every browser conceivable.

Lastly, Parellels will also allow me to share folders between operating systems and update the files in those folders for both systems regardless of which one "owns" that folder. I can even duplicate my Mac desktop in my Windows (ugly) desktop so all the folders I place there are now immediately available in Windows. The time saving and convenience in that operation alone is amazing.

But let's leave Windows aside for a moment and talk a bit about what the Mac is like for someone like me, someone who's been using Windows since Win95 and been a faithful and trustworthy Microsoft devotee the whole while.

One main difference I've been discovering, and the main issue of my discomfort with Mac, is that it is largely a keyboard-driven system, while Windows is largely a mouse-driven affair. If you're more comfortable with your hands on the QWERTY and less with the wrist-pain inducing mouse, you're already set to switch. Knowing what combination of keys will accomplish a certain task on Mac saves you time and energy you otherwise spend hunting for the "Windows Way," which entails pointing your cursor at something and clicking on it.

I'm very mouse-oriented. I sometimes take offense when I have to use my fingers to type something. The Web has only made this worse, since you can navigate around and perform tasks without ever touching a key. And though the Mac doesn't demand that you memorize its keyboard eccentricities, it certainly helps when you do.

Being mouse-oriented, the single-minded single-button mentality of an Apple mouse or an Apple touchpad is nothing short of annoying. Yes, I know I can plug in any other mouse and retrieve my right-clickiness, but it irks me that they won't adopt this one extra button, particularly when high-end mice often have 5, 7 or 9 buttons to do all sorts of crap. Again, the solution comes in the form of a keyboard-combo (press the Control button when clicking the button yields a "right-click") but it just seems silly.

On the plus side, I am absolutely in love with two-finger scrolling. On a MacBook, rather than click the button and scroll with your finger, which often left me carpal tunnelly on a PC notebook, you just use two fingers and suddenly you're not moving the cursor, you're scrolling the page. Brilliant. Love it. Simple and effective. Much better than the whole "look! our dock icons swell!" crap.

Other changes/annoyances I'm getting used to are the ways in which an open window on my Mac desktop works versus how I expect it to work from living with Windows for 12 years. The buttons on the top are now on the opposite corner. There is no option to make an application take over the whole desktop space, and often the application's floating palettes float freely on the desktop. You can only resize from the lower right corner. Closing a window doesn't close the application. Floating windows reveal all the other windows underneath.

There are positives and negatives to both methods, and I suppose it comes down to what one is used to. I have found that I can adapt to Photoshop's open desktop and in some cases it's a boon, since it allows me to see things I am creating and the things they are based on. I do miss having a few of Window's built-in system apps, particularly software removal from the Control Panel and the Character Map, neither of which apparently have a twin in Appleland -- or at least, not a free one.

I'm worried about the cleanliness of my hard drive. Since I'm unfamiliar with the Mac's system of storing application threads around the hard drive, I'm not sure I'm actually deleting everything when I pull it into the trash. I've found a sweet little $10 application called CleanApp that monitors my applications and will fully clean them off if I no longer want them, plus it also strips out all the language packs that often come contained in applications -- about a gig of space reclaimed -- and will clean out the bits of data in the universal binaries (the stuff that allows an application to run on either IBM's or Intel's processors) that my particular computer doesn't need. So far, so good, and $10 isn't much, but it seems like something that should be included in an OS by nature.

So those are some of the day-to-day changes that I'm dealing with in my new environment. What I get in return more than makes up for it all. I guess that keeping total control over the operating system and the hardware that runs it has its advantages. One of my gripes about Windows is that it's necessary for Microsoft to keep so much legacy crap hanging around because they have such a huge range of hardware drivers and software interactions they have to contend with. Owning 90% of the computer market has its disadvantages, and unfortunately it's the end-users that have to pay the price, not to mention years-delayed OS updates with bugs out the wazoo.

Take networking, and particularly home networking. With Windows, it was a hassle and a half. Now, I'm not a networking specialist at all, but I know my way around an IP address and a simple router. I used to have to figure out what was wrong with a set-up by looking at several different things at once. Is it Windows? Is it Sony? Is it the router? The router firmware? The router software? The modem? The cables?

In Appleland, it's really plug and play. I plugged in the AirPort Extreme and the MacMini found it automagically. Then I could tell it how I wanted it configured and what's connected to it and whether to share that with others on the internal net. The APX is in the living room where the Comcast cable comes in and where the cable modem now sits. Out of the ethernet ports sit the MacMini, the TiVo, and the Xbox 360. With the TiVo attached, the MacMini can sync with recorded programs using Toast. With the 360 attached, it can see the music, pictures and videos on the MacMini's additional hard drive using Connect360. Now, supposedly the 360 will automatically connect to any Windows machine in the local network, but I could never manage to get the Windows computer and the 360 to agree on something, so it never worked. Now I can set the background image on my 360 desktop to any photo in my iPhotos, and play any song in iTunes while I slaughter the bad guys. Yes, no more will I have to suffer through some horrible My Chemical Romance crap built-in to a video game. Now I can listen to Kate Bush during the bloody mayhem! Awesome!

Then I plugged in the AirPort Express network extender with AirTunes, and plugged my printer into its USB port, and my speakers into its stereo miniplug port (which also supports digital optical out) and now I can send my iTunes either to my 7.1 set-up in the living room, or my stereo speakers in my bedroom-slash-office, or both! I can keep all my music on my MacMini+ drive, tell the MacMini to share the library and pick it up on my MacBook Pro in my bedroom. The downside? I can't use the 802.11n Etherfast speeds built-in to the AirPort Extreme because the AirPort Express only supports 802.11g speeds, so I have to make due with 54Gb -- but I can also untether my notebook and use it anywhere in my teeny tiny apartment. That makes me happy. I also plugged in my Linksys VoIP router for my Vonage account (hey, how can you beat $9.95 a month for phone service if your cellular signal stinks?) to the Express's Ethernet port so I could keep my landline on my desk, and plug my laptop into an Ethernet connection while I'm at my desk.

The AirPort Express is a true little wonder. I have to hand it to Apple on that one. If I lived in a large, old home that wasn't pre-wired for Ethernet -- like pretty much every home in San Francisco (not that I'll ever be able to afford one, but one can dream in Appleland) -- I could buy a bunch of them and plug them in wherever I wanted to hear my music and have an instant all-over sound system. It's certainly cheaper to get a few little AirPorts than to rewire the whole place, and they're often available in Apple's Refurb Store for $20 off -- plus free shipping!

If I'm starting to sound like an Apple ad, I apologize, but I really am shocked at how easy it is to get my digital life in order using Apple's system of products and software. The elegant and beautiful industrial design doesn't hurt, of course, as well as the new quiet I can enjoy without the usual fans whirring away all the time. I can see how the cultists can bow down at Sir Steven's feet, awaiting every new product launch, and snapping them up as quickly as Apple can make them. If you've been using an iPod, and you appreciate its elegance and simplicity and ease of use, all of that just passes through into Appleland.

There's a price to pay, of course, and it's the lack of openness in the world. It does feel a little like having a tight jacket applied over one's comfy pajamas. It's weird losing complete and simple access to everything in the computer's innards. OS-X may be more simple and elegant, but like some of Apple's ideas about simplicity and elegance (hello, right-click?), sometimes it's too simple.

All in all, and after all my internal trepidation about making the switch and also my weird and somewhat illogical fear of becoming a cult member -- or even to be looked upon by others as a cult member, even by other cult members -- I'm very happy in Appleland. I find that I don't miss Windows at all, and when I start it up in Parellels it looks so... well... shoddy and pimped-out. I mean, why is Windows so... Windowsy? It's trying so hard to be there, and now I realize I don't want it in my way like that. I want it to provide the engine, but I don't want to look at the engine, or sit in the engine. Don't chrome it all up and stick so many cupholders on the dash and make everything just so... y'know... Windowsy. Take it down a notch or seven, Mr. Gates.

Just some advice from someone whose site looks like it was created in some overwrought Ajaxian nightmare. So, grain of salt and all that.

Unlike my life on the web, I don't know anyone who actually gets their hands dirty making video games. I can therefore only imagine what it must be like to sit in front of your screen and meticulously create characters and worlds that must be both interactive for the player but also move the plot forward, in those games requiring a plot (which is nearly every game released today, other than Massively Multiplayer Onlines -- AKA MMOs -- like World of Warcraft or the continual stream of mini-game oddities that Nintendo specializes in). Then there's the whole years-in-development cycle that can doom a game because technology is moving forward at such a rapid pace that a game that you were designing for a platform three years ago has suddenly outlived its intended platform altogether.

Think about the frustration that must cause by itself, and then consider that a game you've devoted years of your life to goes out onto the shelves and no one buys it. That carefully crafted character is lost in a bad, pointless, derivative plotline, or saddled with ordinary weapons and uninteresting facial expressions, or worst of all, does "nothing new" to advance the science and art of video gaming.

Because today, "fun" is rarely enough of a driver in order for someone to plunk down their $50 or $60 to spend a couple dozen hours with your creation. Fun is everywhere. Fun is ordinary. The bar keeps getting raised and the longer you sit on your ideas, the better the chance that someone else is going to beat you to the punch.

Which brings me to "Bioshock," 2K Games latest salvo into the world of First Person Shooters, or FPS. A First Person Shooter is exactly what it sounds like: your main goal is to wield a weapon of insane caliber and unheard of potential destruction value and aim it at a variety of bad guys (or, in some cases, the general and annoying populace) and kill them all before they kill you. You're often a loner, but sometimes you get a team of soldiers to help you out, or hinder you depending on how bad their AI (artificial intelligence) happens to be, and lately each game in this mode is looking for its own particular spin on that fairly simple formula.

"Bioshock" doesn't completely deviate from that formula. It's been necessary for console-based games (i.e. Xbox 360) to behave this way because there are limitations to the amount of data that can be encapsulated on a single disk, or even multiple disks, and to provide too many threads in a plot would make it difficult to string them all back together at the end for the Boss Fight, where the player gets the satisfaction of blowing away the biggest baddest meanie of the whole game, once and for all (or at least until the sequel).

One of the clichés of FPS and of video games in general is the cut scene. This is a place where all the action suddenly stops and you can put down the controller and watch the animated talking heads talk to each other to explain what just happened, and what's expected to happen next. It's kind of like the scenes between Harry and Dumbledore at the end of every Harry Potter book ever written. You read through hundreds of pages of twaddle about owls and spells and evil versus good, but it all comes down to a dozen pages of dialogue between two characters at the denouement to actually be able to understand what the hell all that twaddle was about. So it is in video games, except it happens over and over and over again.

"Bioshock" manages to avoid most of that be providing cut scenes in the form of recordings you find strewn about its world, and you can elect to listen to them as you continue moving forward or simply keep them to listen to later -- or never listen to any of them at all.

And what a world they've created. Rapture, the city you occupy for the duration of the game, is a art deco museum of a world living (or, more accurately, dying) 85 feet under the surface of the Atlantic ocean. It's 1960, and your plane has just suddenly crashed, leaving you stranded in the middle of the ocean with nothing around for miles, except the towering bathesphere station that leads down into Rapture.

On your way down, you get some background about the builder of the city, and your new antagonist, Andrew Ryan. A super-egotist and electronics genius, Mr. Ryan's complete distaste and distrust of humanity has lead him underwater so he could build his own world free of the limitations and prejudices of our world, and by prejudices I'm talking about things like playing with genetics and mutations and taking advantage of and credit for everything your brain can imagine or create.

The hook in "Bioshock" is that the weapons you're given aren't limited to the steel and bullet variety. Sure, you get those, and plenty of them, but you also get to genetically alter your own (player) body to emit Plasmids from your hands. And it's the combination of the two and the seemingly endless variety of destruction that these provide that manage to bring "Bioshock" a step above your average FPS.

Imagine being able to point at someone and set them ablaze, or freeze them, or most creepy of all, emit a hornet's nest of wasps at them that are crawling all over your hand as you wander about. Or maybe you want to do all three! And you can -- assuming you have enough Adam and Eve to accomplish it.

Adam is the biological currency of Rapture, and it allows you to buy more powers and more slots to slip those powers into. The downside is that there is only one way to get Adam, and that provides one of the most interesting moral dilemmas within this game.

That, in itself, would normally be enough. One does not usually suffer moral dilemmas playing any video game. Even in open environment (sandbox) games like "Grand Theft Auto" or "Oblivion," it's rare to feel a twinge of guilt about shooting everyone you come into contact with. Kill or be killed, right? Except for yours truly, because I can't help but feel that karma extends even into these make-believe worlds, and you get what you give, and the random and bloody annihilation of bystanders and the unlucky who happen to get in your way will bite you in the ass no matter what, even if it's just that stupid woman with 14 items in the 12-item or less line at Safeway.

I've learned that games can provide you with a way to explore those feelings of violence and vengeance, and even pointless cruelty, without resorting to acting out in real life. Maybe we're genetically coded to destroy things. War is inevitable and it's easier to build walls than doorways. That kind of thing. So why not blow away that babbling hag who just will not shut up by driving over her in the car you just stole by physically throwing the driver into the street before you capped him with your machine gun? It actually took me a few months of gaming to get to that place, so I can be a little smug about it. Still, here I am now, and virtual killing is just second nature to me now.

Getting Adam in Rapture, though, gives one an interesting choice, because it's held within the bodies of little girls. Cute little girls with glowing red eyes. And their protectors, the Big Daddies.

If you know anything at all about "Bioshock," you're already familiar with the Big Daddies. The little girls call them Mr. Bubbles, which is both cute and annoying since basically you want to kill them. The Big Daddies are hard to kill. Very hard. They're lumbering behemoths encased in iron with drill bits for arms and the ability to suddenly charge at you like a mad bull. They're protective of the little girls but otherwise will leave you alone unless provoked. Only thing is, you have to provoke them, so the challenge becomes how to do so without suddenly finding yourself dead.

Much is being made about this particular aspect of the game, because some members of the media either can't separate fantasy from reality (what we're killing, if we elect to kill anything at all, is an animated collection of pixels, and a rather comically rendered collection at that, and bloodless to boot) or they need something else to grab onto here to start raining on someone else's parade.

For me, what it came down to was "game enjoyment," and the question was never "would I really kill a little girl?" the question was "how much do I need some extra Adam in order to survive the next onslaught and make it to the end." For those keeping track, I killed half the little girls and saved half. So that only makes me half a monster, by my calculations.

It's difficult for me to talk about "Bioshock" without giving away its secrets, and that in itself is its biggest reward. Unlike most games, the plot of "Bioshock" is on a par with its gorgeous environments, its imaginative characters, its superlative voice acting and its fun and fast gameplay. In short, somehow and miraculously, "Bioshock" gets everything right.

One aspect that can redeem or doom a game is its voice acting. "Oblivion," in particular, was marred by the use of the same set of four or five actors doing all the voices in a variety of accents, and after a very short while I learned to ignore how they were saying anything and only pay attention to what they were saying. "Bioshock" is leagues, leagues above almost any other game I've played in this regard. The characters all have that subtle almost-English but not quite elocution that we imagine everyone in the 40's and 50's managed to attain, probably from watching endless hours of theatre-trained actors on the telly. The vocal talent is amazing and varied, and as over the top as everything else in Rapture.

Another amazing piece and one that can't be ignored as one traverses this world in search of the next goal is the world itself. It's gorgeous and detailed and at times disturbing to the point of causing my balls to shrink inside my body cavity. (Too much info?) Like "Gears of War" before it, "Bioshock" glories in the beauty of decay, though where Gears colored everything in earth tones, here 2K painted in candy-coated neon shades and underwater greens and blues. The overall effect is both jarring and calming, so that when something unexpected does happen ("Hey! Who put this corpse in the locker?") it's even more frightening.

If you're a 360 owner, there's no reason not to get this title immediately and kiss goodbye the next few evenings -- because it positively, absolutely must be played in the dark. Also, if you don't have the surround sound hooked up to your 360, go get another optical cable and get that Dolby pumping, the sound design alone in "Bioshock" is worthy of awards.

Excuse me while I get back to the game -- I'd tell you where I am and what I'm doing, but why spoil the surprises?

Where I live, I have one choice for cable access, and it's Comcast. I suppose I could go with one of them there space disk broadcasters like Dish or AT&T or the one owned by Rupert Murdoch, but I elect to stick with good old coax and a screw-in connection because, damn it all, I'm an American! And also, the fog here is something fierce, and who wants to keep moving and mounting a big plastic dish over and over?

I am also an early adopter of cable-modem technology, Way back when I was living in Boston, I subscribed to Roadrunner, as it was called then, and had such great reception that I decided it was the only way to go -- until such time that I was a multi-millionaire and could afford fiber to my doorstep and a T-3 in the basement pool room. So when I moved to San Francisco in 2000, I chucked the lousy DSL from PacBell (before they were SBC (before they were AT&T)) and brought in my reliable and money-saving cable friends to wire me up good and solid.

And so it was until about four weeks ago, when the reliably solid world of cable connectivity came crashing down around my ears and I was forced to deal with the lunacy, idiocy and stupidity of the world of one-size-fits-all cable customer service to please, please, please fix my reception issues.

It started out simply enough, and to such a small degree that I was willing to simple accept the short bursts of failed connectivity and nearly constant break-up of my television signal to the vagaries of life. Shit happens, and all that. How could I expect things to always be perfect, and once in a while things here in the strung-together makeshift city of San Francisco where the infrastructure is as old as our last earthquake and digging around the roofs and cellars of these century-old housing structures can't be fun. Still, I am paying for a servive and now that I am working from home, I sort of need that service to be more reliable that it was being.

So I called in a problem to Comcast. My service was down again. But now it had been down for an hour. I also use Vonage, so when my cable service quits, so does my main phone and business number. So I have to call them on my cell.

Comcast service is apparently keyed off of one's phone number, which I find odd because they're not the phone company, but whatever. When you call customer service from your own phone, you don't have to do anything to tell the automated Comcast service that you're a customer, since your caller ID tells them that. But when you can't use that number, you have to key it in before you're allowed to get through to the service to tell them what's wrong.

I wouldn't even mention that fact accept as it relates to a further annoyance. Once you have identified yourself to their system and managed to get through the menus to actually speak to someone -- they ask you for your number again. A small thing, perhaps, but not when you have to do it every day for four weeks. Really quite annoying. And another really quite annoying thing is that after you provide that number to the representative, they will want to further identify you with not one, not two, but three other types of information: 1) Your name, 2) Your full address including ZIP code and 3) The last four digits of your social security number.

I'm not trying to gain access to my bank account, here, I just want to let them know that they have a problem. Why all this information before I can even tell them what my problem is?

I also want to mention that after you tell their automated system that your problem has to do with High-Speed Internet, the very next message you here is some friendly advice about trying to find an answer to your problem online. Does anyone else see a bit of a problem with calling in a problem with one's high-speed internet connection only to be told by a computer voice that maybe I should hang up and try an online solution?

But enough about their really, really pointless and stupid automated menu system that doesn't actually do anything accept add to one's delay in getting a satisfactory resolution. On to the real fun of Comcast Customer Service -- human interaction!

When you call in to a Comcast representative and you tell them you have no connectivity, the first thing they'll invariably ask you is if you tried unplugging and plugging the modem back in. Now, I never stopped to question this before I was asked to do it every single time, but what kind of cheap-ass fucking modems do they hand out if they go out so often that resetting them will get your signal back? How is that reliability? But I would sigh and roll my eyes and report, yes, I did that already.

The next thing they will ask you is "What lights are on?" So you tell them, and I guess they do something with that information but in my expereince the blinky lights on the front of the modem don't mean squat. I suppose it's just the next thing on their script and they're required to ask that, but no matter what I reported back they never had any advice to give me about it because the next thing they'd say is "Yes, I see your modem isn't responding back," (which, I think I've made clear, is what I called about in the first place) "we'll have to send a technician out."

The scheduling of cable technicians is far from a science, and more like random luck. You get a 4-hour window and, based on my experience of having 4 tech calls in as many weeks, they will show up before and after the window, and not at all. Luckily I'm already home for most of the day, so what else did I have to do but wait? I can't imagine the annoyance of having to drop everything to be there for them and not have them show up at all, or even call you to explain their absence.

Okay, now my connection was not always down, it was going up and down, and staying down in increasing increments. At first it might be down for an hour or two twice a day, so it was usually up. The technicians were always showing up when my connection was online, so guess what their tests showed? That's right, I didn't have any problems. In fact, the first two techs who plugged in their pocket calculators into the cable outlet in my office slash bedroom reported that my signal was really strong! One told me, "It'll be between -4 and +4 and zero is perfect. Yours is at zero, so you have a really good connection."

I started to suspect that maybe it was my router, or one of my routers since I have two. One is for Vonage and has a phone jack, the other is for wireless connectivity so my XBOX 360 and my TiVo and whatever else that needs to speak to the Internet can do so without a bunch of Cat5 all over the place. So I unplugged those and ran the connection straight from the modem into my PC.

No change. Still sucked. More calls. Same runaround. Different tech.

Now that the modem was plugged directly into my PC, however, I could bring up the modem's internal reports and see what it was saying was wrong. I took screen prints of the reports, the status, my IPConfig, and anything else I could get a screen grab of, thinking naïvely that it must mean something to someone else, otherwise why would the modem have these reports. And it was apparent to me that Comcast's own network was useless in these matters, it obviously wasn't seeing anything wrong because every fucking time I called in, I had to report everything all over again, so one must also assume that their system has no means of recording any data about failures or trouble tickets or customer history, either. Because they were more than useless.

The second tech did the same test, saw the same result, but decided to swap out some of the cable inside my apartment and provide a new modem because why the hell not? I showed him the modem screens and he told me, "You need to call customer service when that happens, there's nothing I can do with those." To which I replied, "When I call customer service when that happens, they tell me they can't see the modem and they need to send you out here."

Catch 22! If the modem is failing, customer service can't perform diagnostics to get the very screens I was capturing for that purpose. When they send the technician out, he tells me the screens mean nothing to him, he relies on his trusty little pocket calculator monitor thing. Oh, and also, once again, no problems with the service do he see. I should have been suspicious of this guy, anyway, since he wasn't really from Comcast, his shirt had some fly-by-night electronics service company on it so he had to be a contractor -- but since I, myself, am a contractor and am frequently smarter and better than the company employees I work with, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Three weeks in, and it's getting worse. Now it's down at least three times a day for two hours at a time. Again, I start to doubt my own equipment rather than Comcast's. They're starting to have me convinced that it can't possibly be their fault because no one else in my vicinity is reporting problems, and they can't see anything wrong on the network monitors. Maybe it's because they split the cable at the entry point so I could get one feed to the cable box in the living room and another into the bedroom for the data. But that was their solution! They didn't want to or couldn't drill holes in the wall, and the cable was, believe it or not, coming over the roof and into the window sill by the stairway! Why would that be a problem?

More calls, and another technician. This time I told them I don't want someone who doesn't know what they're doing. This time, I want the real thing. This time, I want it resolved or I am out of here and back to DSL, this is beyond ridiculous. The next tech shows up within the given 4-hour window (?!?) and replaces even more of my internal wiring all the way from the window where it magically swoops into my apartment and gives me his number to call if anything fails.

Within two hours of his departure, everything fails. But it's also 8PM so I elect to give him a break and call the next morning. He tells me he has two other jobs and he'll get there as soon as he can. It is 9AM on a Monday. At 5:30PM I call him to ask his wherabout, having given him an 8½ hour window to appear. He tells me he got caught up in those other jobs, he apologizes (though a phone call at some point would have been convenient) and says he'll be over by 9AM the following day.

Okay, I think to myself. This is it. No more Mr. Nice Guy. This is ridonkulous. They're lying to me, or they're imbeciles, or something. But having to deal repeatedly with that ass-crack phone menu and the know-nothings at the other end of the line, not to mention whomever was answering my email pleadings and my online chat sessions using someone else's borrowed WiFi connection (thank you, "linksys" in Hayes Valley) had me at my wit's end. I was more than patient with them and it was at a point now where I trusted them about as far as I could throw them, and I haven't been to the gym in weeks.

This time, I throw down the gauntlet and he says he's going to go up on the roof and look at the wiring from where it enters the building from their network to where it comes into my apartment. He's going to check every inch to see if there's a breakdown somewhere. And he's not going to leave until I tell him I'm satisfied.

Two hours later, he comes back and tells me he replaced all the wiring on the outside because "whoever installed this was a jackass." It seems that rather than running new cable, they spliced into some existing cable they found on the roof that had been used for an old satellite dish installation. Yes, friends, shear laziness meant that my signal would someday degrade to such an extent that it would fail to connect to the network and, hearing no response, the modem would eventually stop trying and go silent. The problem was not in my apartment, or in my equipment, or due to cable splitters or routers or computers. It was the original Comcast cable installer cutting corners to do just enough work to make it all look like it was working.

Kind of anti-climatic, I agree. But let this be a lesson to you. Make them check everything. Don't let them make you doubt your own equipment, or your own experience. Nothing was wrong with my set-up until everything was. Make them crawl under the basement and climb over the roof and trace every inch of their stuff before they even start to ask you whether you unplugged your modem and plugged it back in.

Ass hats.