Holy Crud!

It’s June and been a crazy busy month at that. Now that summer is here every weekend has been planned and full of events. I purchased a new MacBook Pro the ones they announced last Monday. It’s a screaming 2.8ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and all kinds of awesomeness. iPhone OS 3.0 comes out on Wednesday which will be all kinds of awesome because I will finally be able to Copy and Paste.

I picked up a Flip Ultra HD video camera so that I can record all kinds of awesome videos in HD.  You can check out my adventure the the grocery store here.

http://gallery.me.com/tristan.pipo#100087

But other then doing the life thing. Started going back to the gym. Nice to get back in the groove after a few years of vacation from it. I haven’t lost that much strength and the belly is slowly going away.

But next week I am on vacation and I won’t have any cell phone or internet access so hopefully the world doesn’t blow up while I am gone. It will be odd turning on that vacation auto responder I haven’t used that ever since I got gMail back in 2004.

Well hope to here from everyone soon drop me a line.

Time For A Drink

It’s May (Well Probably)

Hey Everyone!

I check out the hits on the site and people still come here which is encouraging. I am sometimes shocked I still have people that read this when I never post pictures of myself and I don’t really pimp out my site anymore. Since I finished school and joined the workforce back in 2006 it’s like life has gotten busy. But I am not really any busier then I was back then. It’s just that I work on a computer all day. When I get home I don’t want to touch the computer. Finding time at work to blog is close to impossible these days. So consider yourself lucky.

So it’s May. My birthday is in May. I found out yesterday that my 15 year old step niece gave birth to a baby boy. So now I am a Step Great Uncle. My step sister is married to a guy that is a year younger then me. He is now a grandfather at 24. I am 25 now and I look back at my life. I rewind a decade and look at life. All I can think about is that I was a dumbass compared to now. I hope that kid does okay. I am sure when I am 35 I will look at 25 and think “Man, I was a dumbass at 25″. I think people need to think about that more often. I also think that logic should be applied if you ever think about getting a tattoo. 10 years from now I will probably think this was a stupid idea.

But Birthday’s are never my thing. My girlfriend keeps asking me. “So what do you want for your Birthday?” I have no idea what I want since she told me no DVD’s or Video Games. Well that is all that I really want. I am still wondering where the new wallet I was promised for Christmas is. I ponder just buying it myself but I feel like that’s not the point.

I am the type of person that found out at an early age that you are hardly ever given anything and hand outs should not be expected. You gotta bust your ass for everything. I wanted a Playstation 3 I saved pennies and went out and bought the thing. I remember chopping wood as a child for the neighbors to get $20 to buy a Seattle Mariners hat. I chopped wood over an entire weekend for 6hrs a day for $20. They got a sweet deal and my 9 year old ass thought I was making a ton of cash. When I was 19 I looked back at that moment and thought I was a complete dumbass for getting so little money.

So I have no idea what I want for my birthday. If you would like to pick up a DVD or a Blu Ray you can get that info from my Amazon Wishlist Page. Just search for Tristan Pipo. There are not many. Though some girl on Facebook from the Philippines said I was her cousin. I said no but she has a cousin named Tristan Pipo who lives in San Diego. I recall seeing this info before back in 1996 looking on ICQ people search and there was another Tristan Pipo from San Diego, CA. I hope to one day meet this fellow. But until then I sit casually and lurk as my new facebook friend updates with pictures.

I look at the blog and I really need to get working on the fonts it is pretty hard to read. I will see about working on that sometime. Need to bust out the MacBook Pro and hack it up with some CSS action.

So I have been reading about this whole Swine Flu thing. Seems like another plot to install fear into people and keep them controlled. 13 cases in Washington State at time of this posting. 13,000 people on average die of the Flu every year. So far 1 person in the USA that was from Mexico and 2 years old with no immune system has died. Not like you had much of a life at 2 years old but thanks for fueling the stupid panic machine. Seems like everyone is recovering from the illness here in America. So I am confident that everything will be fine and all the idiots and hypochondriacs will be put in there place eventually.

On that note thanks for reading. I will work on being in touch. =) You can always follow me on twitter. twitter.com/tristanpipo

Comcast and Tivo

Hey Everyone!

So I thought I would give a quick update on what is going on around the Tristan circle of life. Last week I ordered a Tivo. This thing has been a pain in the ass. It took a week to get here. But there have been 2 major causes of frustration.

1. The Cable Card Experience.

So in order for the TivoHD to work you need to get a CableCard from the Cable Company. In the Seattle area we have Comcast. Usually for most of my issues I either hop on the Comcast Chat or get on Twitter and send a note to @ComcastCares. So my first try was with the Chat. I got one guy saying that I could just drive to the local Comcast Office and pickup the cable card. Slide it into the Tivo and drive home and call Comcast. Sounds good to me.

Some time passes…..

Tivo is actually coming now so I hop on Comcast Chat again and get a new person they tell me I need to schedule a tech to come out and install the card for a fee of $25. Previous guy told me I could do it myself.

The process of installing a cable card is basically moving one flap down and sliding in a PCMCIA card into the device. Didn’t seem $25 worthy to me. But I do recall charging people at Best Buy $160 for Hard Drive and OS Install.

Now that I had a conflicting argument from two different people. I hopped on twitter and sent a note to @ComcastCares I got the following reply.

So I have two people saying the same thing. So I decide to shoot an e-mail off to Comcast Cares. we_can_help@comcast.com I get a prompt reply from a Detreon Roberts. He says they need to schedule a tech to come out. So I accept that answer for the time being.

So I get home that night and make a phone call to Comcast. I get to speak to an incredibly seductive sounding woman named Jen or Jenn. I didn’t ask for the spelling but I wanted info about my Cable Card. She said that I can just go down to the Comcast Office and pick it up. I tell her about all of my experiences thus far. She says “They don’t know what they are talking about. I setup a CableCard for a guy today took 3 mins over the phone” So I e-mailed Detreon back and he says. “You should really get an installer out” So on Saturday the girlfriend of awesomeness decided to partake on the adventure of the Comcast store and we got the CableCard. Came home and installed it and it took about 3 minutes and we were golden.

So I guess I would like to thank the first Chat Person and Jen from Comcast in Washington for being the most helpful. Everyone else needs to think about what they are doing.

2. Upgrading the Hard Drive in the Tivo.

So this was a fun process that I did when the girlfriend was out tending to her late kitty cat Indy. So I was home alone which was probably a good thing because I was incredibly frustrated by a few sources. So I was cranky and just wasn’t a pleasant person.

So the scenario is that the Tivo HD comes with a 160GB HDD which gives you about 20hrs of HD recording. This was not enough for me so I bought a 1TB external eSATA drive hoping I could just plug it in and be good to go. This was not the case as Tivo doesn’t like this idea so I had to hack the box to get it working. So I take the TIVO apart and pull the hard drive. I come to find out that it would just be easier to install the external drive into the TIVO. So I have to take apart this external drive which I didn’t want to do but kinda have to.

At this point I haven’t even powered up the Tivo. So I take apart the external drive and then go to my Computer. I have this Pentium 4 3.6ghz machine I use to just screw around with when I am not using my Mac’s. Luckily I had this thing around otherwise I would have been screwed. So I open up the computer and need to free 2 SATA ports. Currently I have all 4 being used so I boot up the machine and find the HDD that I am not using and power it back off and unplug the two drives. Come to find out that I had these in a RAID 0 configuration so the computer won’t boot. So decide to say screw it all I can just reinstall Windows 7 Beta and just use one drive and setup the other drives later.

So I had to install Windows 7 again to just do what I needed to do. After that process completes I go download the TIVO hacking software called WinMFS.

I then shutoff the computer hookup the 160GB tivo drive and the 1TB HDD. Boot up the machine and followed the instructions located here.

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/04/17/how-to-upgrade-your-tivo-hd-with-winmfs/

I am always baffled when people ask me questions on how to do things with their computer. Since I can find every answer by googling. See here is how you can do it to.

http://tinyurl.com/d9obnl

So I followed that process and swapped out the 160GB HDD with the 1TB and the unit would power on and then crash. So I said WTF! I spent over an hour reimaging my PC with Windows 7 and the process didn’t work. So I swapped the 160GB drive back in and powered it on. This worked great. So I went through the setup process and then took the whole thing apart again to reimage the 1TB HDD with the above instructions. This process worked but took a great deal longer I was getting a bit more positive messages.

As a note if you are going to use WinMFS with Windows 7. Be sure you click “Run as Administrator” or this whole process will never work. So now with all of that completed I have 141hrs of HD recording and something like 1500 hrs of Standard Def recording.

So I got home at 8pm last Thursday and I didn’t finish with the Tivo Hacking until 1:30am. I was rather cranky by the end of the experience. The girlfriend doesn’t even appreciate the Tivo yet. Hopefully she will and I will get some good appreciatin back.

So that has been my Tivo experience. I must say after all of that work I am now an expert in the process of expanding the storage of the Series 3 Tivo’s.

I am sure there are more important things in the world to focus on. Anyone have any ideas?

500 Internal Server Errrors

This issue should now be fixed as well with some helpful guidance from the Ramblings of a Bored Geek.

All that’s left on the TristanPipo.com website is to change the font’s around a bit and I will do that when I get home with my trusty CSS editor.

I would like to thank Raleigh and Junniper for being my unoffical blog Quality Assurance Team.

500 Internal Server Errors

Update: Looks like the changes that I was recommended to do didn’t resolve the issue. We shall see what GoDaddy support can do.

Well looks like the fun doesn’t stop around here. I have been getting reports of users getting “500 Internal Server Errors” this seemed to be happening for Firefox, IE, Safari. I did some googling and found out that the error is an issue with the hosting provider I use running out of memory allocated to PHP which is running Wordpress. I have made the changes that the other sites have recommended and next time that the services are restarted for this server that should resolve the issue. So hopefully the GoDaddy Support team gets an easy close for the support ticket I opened.

RSS Downtime

To those that get to read blog posts from this via RSS. I wanted to let you know that RSS will be down for approx 72hrs while all the feeds get moved from Feedburner to Google that has not purchased Feedburner. On a side not that means if you are reading this via RSS this doesn’t really apply as the move has worked as expected. To those reading on the site that are going “RSS? HUH? Did you insult my mama?” Well then it doesn’t really apply to you either. I guess what I am saying is that I have nothing to say. But I am working on updating the look of the site yet again. So stay tuned as this is a work in progress in realtime. So changes could come every day or every couple of days to the design. So not really much to see or say.

Cheers!

Teleflora.com Has Made the Fail List

So Saturday is Valentines Day. I am going to write my experience thus far. I happened to be watching the Super Bowl and saw this rather funny commercial toward the end of the game.

So I got thinking hey this sounds like a good idea. This site looks they do flowers correctly. I think I could make a great impression with flowers like this. So next day I went to Teleflora.com and ordered the.

Deluxe Teleflora’s Rubies & Roses Bouquet

They show the default flower setup to look like this.

I paid an extra $10 for the deluxe set which they show on the Upgrade your Gift Page to add the following.

I also tossed in some balloons and a medium box of chocolates to my order. Which added up in price rather quickly. I placed my order on Feb 2nd and 1:15pm EST according to the site. I requested delivery for today Thursday Feb 2nd.  Well that part goes of fine they delivered them today. But they forgot the Chocolates. They didn’t deliver them at all. I also was sent a picture of what my girlfriend had delivered to her office.

How in the world does that look like a Deluxe Flower Arrangement from what I ordered above. I can go to Safeway and get a better flower arrangenent then that for what I paid.  That doesn’t look deluxe at all.

The description on the site for this arrangement reads as follows.

This elegantly romantic bouquet is a win-win gift of love. You’ll win her heart with lush flowers in a ruby red heart vase she’ll treasure. And she could win gloriously real rubies in Teleflora’s Rubies & Roses Sweepstakes.*

• The radiant arrangement includes pink stargazer lilies, red roses, miniature pink carnations, red carnations and pink waxflower accented with lemon leaf and myrtle.
• Delivered in a stunning clear glass vase decorated with an etched “necklace” bearing a ruby red heart jewel.
• Bouquet is approximately 14.5” W X 17.5” H
• Item number: 09V100B

So according to this I am supposed to have a Clear Vase with a “necklace” on it. They appear to have not been able to construct what they are clearly trying to sell me. Hmm maybe there is some loophole I am missing. Let’s take a look at their fine print.

So they have a “Substitution Policy” that states.

Substitution Policy
Occasionally, substitutions of flowers or containers are necessary due to temporary, regional availability issues. If this is the case with the gift you’ve selected, our experienced florists will ensure that the style, theme and color scheme of your arrangement is preserved and will only substitute items of equal or higher value.

Hmmm this doesn’t appear to be the case. You state a “Clear Glass Vase” It appears I got a dark short vase. It just seems like very little fluff when I was expecting a great deal more. Part of me wonders if I am just suffering from that symptom I had as a child where I saw I got a Tony the Tiger diver on the outside of a Cereal box only to discover it was an Orange Tube. But I feel like I am paying a great deal more then $3 for a cereal box in this case.

So moving on I get a phone call from the girlfriend about how excited she is and thrilled to get the flowers and all of her coworkers were jealous. So I feel on one front mission accomplished. But on the other front I feel like I need to fight this battle. So Battle #1.

The Chocolates.

I ordered a “Medium Box of Chocolates” for $19.99. I could probably order a better set then what they had offered but I was going for the complete package solution. So I wasn’t exactly wanting to coordinate that delivery as well. So I went for this. So I get a phone call around 1:30pm saying “I love you so great my jaw dropped I am told.” I ask about what she got and she said 2 balloons and some flowers. I asked what about Chocolate? She said I didn’t get any. I got rather pissed off about this so I called the company.

Most websites don’t have numbers to call right on the front page. This made it easier so I call them up and press 2 to get to some guy that is hard to understand. I let him know about the situation and he apologizes and says they can refund my account and someone will call me from research. He first tries to refund $9.99. I am like no that’s what I paid for the two balloons you need to refund $19.99 for your “Medium Chocolates” he said no they are $9.99. I went to the site and logged in and I said I paid $74.95 for the flowers and $9.99 for the Balloons and $19.99 for the chocolates on top of all your other fees. He finally agree to refund the $19.99. I would have preferred they just tell their delivery guy. “Hey you screwed up. Go deliver the chocolates.” I would have rather had this and got my service fee refunded. Since that seems like a better deal to me. Because I am still paying for the screw up.

So now I wait for their research department to call me. I will post about that when they call me back. But until then.

Teleflora.com is on my Fail List. I need to bring that page back.

Update 2-13-2009: A day later I still have not heard anything back. I got to see the flowers in person last night and they were even more disappointing then I had expected. I am going to call and complain again today. I feel like I totally got ripped off with this. 

50 Things

I saw this on YouTube where you just post 50 random things about yourself. Since I don’t feel like counting dots these are going to be numbered but are in no particular order.

1. When I was a sophmore in High School me and my best friend got in trouble for spamming the Traffic Education Teacher. Cops were involved and everything.
2. When I was  a child I had a goal to dig to China in my parents side yard. They kept refilling the hole every few months. I learned everything was an uphill battle.
3. I tend to be very incredibly anal.
4. I enjoy doing dishes when I am not being told to do them.
5. I am constantly afraid of getting addicted to something. So I try to moderate everything.
6. I try to keep my DVD’s in alphabetical order.
7. I get a kick of doing things that keep peoples perception of me off balance.
8. I don’t keep many friends just a select group of close ones.
9. I really can’t stand myspace and prefer facebook.
10. I enjoy Thai Food way to much.
11. I drink maybe 2-3 beers a month.
12. I have never tried any drugs or smoked anything.
13. I dug my parents first pond when I was 12 for $20. I didn’t realize that 6hrs of work for $20 was getting shit pay.
14. I really enjoy the MacOS but got tired of pushing it on people.
15. I have this constant feeling that I never successful at anything but I like the fact that it drives me to try harder constantly.
16. Almost every girl I have ever dated I have met online.
17. I listen to podcasts all the time. I hardly ever listen to music.
18. I once gave two underage girls a ride home because they asked me to. I was freaked out the entire time that I would get called a pedophile for just driving someone somewhere.
19. I try as hard as I can to be a great guy.
20. I am fairly quite and don’t say things unless need be. Which usually leads to people thinking I don’t care about them because I tend not to ask questions about people.
21. I tip way to much because I feel bad. I never tip at coffee shops though. I feel $4 for coffee is enough of a tip. But I will tip $20 on a $30 haircut.
22. I used to have this dream about how I was trapped in a Winnie the Pooh Scuba suit. I sometimes still have it and freak out every time.
23. I sometimes get frustrated by people who don’t check their e-mail as often as I do.
24. I really enjoy Amazon Prime.
25. I hardly talk on the phone and try to use most of my communication via e-mail and SMS.
26. When I was 4 years old my family took a trip to Canada and I fell out of a Van in a pancake house parking lot and had to get my head wrapped up like a mummy.
27. I really dislike having to answer peoples questions that could be resolved if they just performed a quick google search.
28. I am never sure how long to hug someone that I am not dating.
29. I have a huge collection of socks that I never wear.
30. I feel pretty good about not having any negative feelings about anyone.
31. Whenever an HBO show comes on and does the little “Awwwww” I always do it to.
32. I get stuck on sayings every now and then. “Delta”, “Pinner” and always feel stupid when people don’t get it.
33. My current girlfriend has played enough Abba to make me never want to hear them ever again for any reason.
34. I was really happy to break it off with an ex via SMS. Made me feel pretty good about getting revenge on the opposite sex for all the crap they have done to me over the years. I feel bad about someone having to face that though and would like to apologize.
35. I update twitter frequently but I always get the feeling nobody cares except when it updates on Facebook and people comment on it.
36. Growing up my house was the most popular place to be on the street. We had Swings, Tree House, The Digging Spot, We built forts on the rockery. Sometimes I miss being the popular kid.
37. I chopped wood for 8hrs a day for 3 days in a row for the neighbors to buy a $10 marines hat when I was 11.
38. I can’t mow the lawn because it will swell me up due to allergies.
39. I am allergic to most pets. Cats at the highly allergic end. I am allergic to most dogs as well. But I like dogs.
40. I caught Mono in the 8th grade and missed 2.5 months of school. I almost failed the 8th grade.
41. I failed Spanish II on purpose because I really didn’t want to take that class.
42. My favorite soda is sprite.
43. People who text in movie theaters are probably some of the most annoying human beings alive.
44. I always enjoy being around people. I am not much of a fan of being alone except when I am feeling burnt out.
45. I have never really traveled that much.
46. I always put the peanut butter and the jelly on the same side of the bread then add the dry side on top of the middle. I developed this habit to annoy the crap out of my ex girlfriend. It doesn’t seem to annoy anybody now.
47. I save everything. Every chat, e-mail everything.
48. I am really good at playing Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo.
49. The sexiest part of a woman tends to be their legs.
50. I am honestly shocked I came up with this many things. That I wanted to write something cliche about how I am shocked I came up with this many.

Hope you enjoyed reading this. Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. If you come up with 50 things let me know in the comments and post a link to your 50 things.

Geekery from Amazon

Today Amazon made a delivery to make my day.

We got the Race for a new Game Machine. A book about the story about the processor in the XBOX 360 and the Playstation 3. Read just a few chapters and must say the book has been great so far.

We also have the Die Hard Collection on Blu Ray. Makes for a great visual experience. I really only care about Die Hard 1 and 4. The other 2 I could care less about. But it was cheaper to buy all 4 then buy two as singles.

Then on the bottom in silver we got a new 320GB Laptop SATA drive to toss in the Playstation 3 to replace the 80GB one that the system came with.

I must say I have been loving Amazon Prime. That is probably greater then my Costco membership. It blows away my Barnes and Noble card I think I maybe use that thing 2-3x a year and mainly for Starbucks discounts. When I switch my grocery shopping over to Amazon Prime I will have become fully intergrated with the internet. Mwa ha ha.

I wish I could have some cool power right now like shooting a lightning bolt out of my hands and a cape like the count from Sesame Street with a huge popped collar. That would be the ultimate badass of badass.