Hijinks Inc.

Category: Fred Smith

  • Apple customer service sets the bar, Kahuna burger raises it.

    Yesterday Aaron and I made hour drive up to our nearest Apple store. I had heard about these so-called Apple “geniuses”, but my experience with them was limited to that chick in the Mac vs. PC commercials. Come to find out, there’s only two requirements for working at the Apple store.

    1. A stocking cap and/or yuppie haircut.
    2. An iPod to hang around your neck.

    One can only wonder how many young and aspiring geniuses they’ve turned away for not wearing the correct headgear.

    But I digress. As previously mentioned, my iPod Nano was exhibiting some rather…strange tendencies where the click wheel was concerned. I thought it might have something to do with the cold weather and leaving it out in my car in said weather, but once it warmed up the problem persisted, albeit completely randomly. Because of the unpredictability of my problem I walked into the Apple store I knowing that I probably couldn’t reproduce my problem in front of them. From my experience with any form of customer service, this means that they can’t help you. But what the heck, might as well try. And try I did.

    After all was said and done, I walked out of the store with a brand new 8g iPod Nano, completely free of charge. He couldn’t reproduce my problem, but he said he’d give it to me on good faith. I didn’t know there was such a thing as good faith in the customer service business. Apparently there is at Apple though, and that is pretty much awesome. Kudos indeed.

    We walked out of the Apple store happy, but unfulfilled. The inner man needed sustenance. We continued walking down the broad avanue of stores, most of which were advertizing the latest spring fashions (did you know that flirty was the word for spring dresses? I had no idea). At the end of this street we saw two restaurants. Johnny’s Italian Steakhouse, and Kona Grill. Out of the two, we figured we’d stand a better chance of paying less then 20 bucks for a meal at Kona Grill. We sat down, looked at the menu, and mutually decided the best course of action was the Kahuna Burger. 12 oz of meat topped with three thick slices of chedder cheese on a woefully undersized bun. It was heavenly. Altogether, it was a great trip.

  • Handheld Gaming Fevor, Part 2

    Last time I diatribed about the DS and it’s awesome (yet limited) library of games. That thought motivated me a few weeks ago to pick up a used PSP from my local used game store. First game I played was Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony. My first impression was, “Holy crap, these are amazing graphics for a handheld!”

    I played the original Dungeon Siege on the PC years ago, and it’s claim to fame was a beautifully rendered 3D environment with no load times. The PSP iteration of the series met the graphical bar and even looked a little better then the PC experience I had back in 2002. Now granted, DS:ToA was released four years later, but lest we forget, it’s a freakin’ hand held game!

    I’m echoing the sentiments of just about every writer that’s played good games on the PSP when I say that this is the closest thing to a console experience I’ve ever seen on a 2×4 inch screen. I’ve since picked up a trio of new and old games to try out on my new toy. Such as… (more…)

  • Handheld Gaming Fevor, Part 1

    My fascination with hand held game systems stems from my childhood, when the very first video game system I ever owned–in all its monochromatic glory–was the original Gameboy. I treasured the two hours a day that my parents allowed me to spend on it, and my adoration clouded my judgment of the mostly crappy games I played on it.

    Fast forward eight years, and now I have enough disposable income to actually buy these things on my own.

    DSPSPBWDSPSPDSPSPstacked

    Insightful commentary after the jump! (more…)

  • Upgrading to the Touch

    So the other day my girlfriend offered up an interesting proposal to me. She would use her birthday money to buy my iPod Nano (at a slight discount) and I would spend an extra 50-70 bucks to upgrade to an iPod touch. Brilliant! But here’s the catch.

    My iPod has been exhibiting…interesting tendencies since a couple weeks after I bought it. At random times the scroll wheel won’t respond to my delicate stroking. It will still move, but it randomly jumps around instead of smoothly scrolling. For example, if I’m trying to adjust the volume (and it starts out at max volume) touching it will cause the volume to jump down to the halfway mark, and then ‘scrolling’ the wheel will make the volume skip back and forth between the halfway mark and about the 3/4 mark. If I continue trying to move the volume up, the volume will continue to skip up and down the bar, slowly moving farther and farther down the bar with every jump until it mutes the sound.

    Weird huh? The same thing occurs if I’m trying to navigate through the menu system. If the top menu choice is highlighted (i.e. ‘Music’ on the main menu), trying to scroll down to ‘Podcasts’ is nearly impossible. I have to scroll to the option, keep my finger on the scroll wheel at the desired position, then with another finger push the center button to go into the sub-menu. If at any time during the process I let up on the scroll wheel, the selection jumps back up to the top of the menu column.

    Confusing enough? Yeah, if I could just get it to perform when I had my computer handy I’d take a video. In fact, I might just make that my mission this week. Anyway, if any of you guys have had, heard of, or even understand the problem I just described, let me know in the comments. Aaron suggests (and I agree) that I should just take it back to the store and see if I can exchange it. Hopefully that will go as smoothly as it does in my head.

  • Another New Toy!

    So I bought another toy the other day. A Sony PSP. Yes, now I own two portable gaming systems. Why? So now I can review games from BOTH systems. Yay! (Truthfully, it was an impulse buy…and I had a gift card to my local used game store).

    Like I inferred, I bought the PSP used. I got out to my car, popped a game in (Dungeon Seige, Throne of Agony), and started playing. As soon as the opening cinematic ended and I entered the playable game, my half-giant barbarian runs to the bottom of the screen of his own free will and keeps on running even after he gets stopped by a tree stump. I started pushing buttons and toggling the analog stick…and he still kept running straight into the bottom of the screen. Suddenly, he stopped his suicidal marathon and started doing what I was telling him to do. “Weird”, I thought. I played a little further into the game, and again my character started randomly running to the top of the screen of his own volition. I mashed buttons, twirled the analog stick around, and after about 20 seconds the controls started working again. I figured I was just unlucky, and kept on playing. Unfortunately, this pattern of random sprints to the top and bottom of the screen continued for the next hour that I played.

    Finally I decided to go back to the store and see if I was just crazy, or if something was wrong with the PSP. The salesdude was very cooperative and after a minute of playing the game and watching Ed the Half-Giant merrily running off into the environment he apologized for my trouble and went and got me another PSP. This one was in better shape, and came complete with a Superman Returns adhesive skin. A handful of paper towels and some Goo-Gone cleaned the likeness of Brandon Routh off my PSP, and I was good to go.

    First Impressions

    After getting used to the blinding light that is the Nintendo DS screen, I had to bend over and squint to see the PSP’s screen in some of the darker environments of my game when I was playing in the daytime. That was really the only annoying part about the system. Well, that and the fact that you have to dish out more money to buy a memory card if you actually want to save your games. I didn’t realize that fact and inadvertently lost about three hours of playtime the day I bought it. I got a 2 gig memory card for thirty bucks used (new they go for around fifty dollars).

    A neat feature that I don’t think I’ll hardly ever use is the built in WiFi and internet browser. Again, you need a memory card to use the internet (you can save images, music, and video to your card for later viewing), and it acts pretty much like a cellphone browser when it comes to viewing websites. After I bought my memory card I went over to a local restaurant and borrowed some wireless internet. I quickly realized that the previous owner of my card had been male, between 13 and 16, and emo. His internet history consisted of porn sites and “emo hair styles for guys”, while his musical tastes included Yellowcard and two other bands I hadn’t heard of. I won’t even get into the videos he had on there. Anyway, none of that’s relevant, it’s just further proof that we’re degenerating as a society.

    The PSP game library is what attracted me in the first place. When I heard that a prequel to Final Fantasy VII (FF VII Crisis Core) was coming out for PSP, I got excited. When I found out I could play GTA, MGS, Burnout, and other more console-centric titles on this thing, I got even more excited. I’ll save my Nintendo DS/PSP comparison for another post, but the distinction between the two systems is never more evident then when you look at the game selections. MarioKart and Pokemon on the DS, Madden, Splinter Cell, and Burnout on the PSP.

    While I’m still not sure it was the smartest purchase within the bounds of my budget (tsk tsk, I know), I’m having a ton of fun playing it and I’m looking forward to trying out some more games.