Archives

Sep202010

Let Off Some Steam, Bennett

I happen to harboring some angst this weekend and decided to get this one out of the way while I am still feeling edgy.  So I’ve been dealing with the BMW issue (see last post), yesterday an estimator for a concrete company failed to show up as promised for some work I am looking to get done and then I have the topic of today’s post.  To set the background, keep in mind I have a satellite based Internet service due to a decision to live out in the country.  Trust me, I’d make that decision again in a heartbeat.  The downside of this is a) I can no longer game with my friends across the net, b) the best performance I can get is 1.5M on nice sunny days and lastly c) my usage cap is 300M every 24 hrs with unlimited between the hours of 1 and 5AM.  This is Hughes Net in case you were wondering, which far exceeds what we were getting with Wild Blue.  With all this, I can still enjoy local gaming and tend to gravitate to the war or fantasy based games.  These are all played in solo mode of course which means the cost of any multiplayer game far exceeds my usage.

At some point I acquired Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (either Xmas or Bday gift, can’t remember).  Finding some extra time one night in my schedule, I decided to install it and play a little to relax and let of some stress.  I Made it through the packaging and dropped the disk into the drive.  Next thing I see is it needs to install Steam.  For those not familiar with this product, it is an Internet service that provides patches, friend status and in some cases copyright control.  You could have heard my groan half way into town.  This was a pain when I had cable service and now my connectivity was severely limited.  A quick check of the back packaging did reveal a small warning (at the bottom of the package) that it required Internet access TO ACTIVATE the product.  Well, activation can’t be that bad can it?  Wrong!  So first I have to install Steam which immediately goes out and DOWNLOADS the latest version of the product which takes over 35 minutes to complete with no indication of how big it is in order to keep tabs on my download limit.

I lucked out and remembered an old account when I was still on a better network.  The program eventually loads and the actual game program loads from the local disk – for emphasis, loaded from the manufacturer’s disk which was legally purchased by someone’s hard earned money.  With eager anticipation, the solo campaign icon was hit and the game…. wait.. the Steam window comes up and logs into my account.  Fine, it is probably just a quick validation and on to the ga…. wait… apparently in order to configure Steam to play offline, I have to make sure the latest version of the game is installed.  Anger has now replaced all anticipation to play.  It is 10PM and now the game needs to download patches.  Just how long might this take on the satellite connection?

That’s right folks, 1 hour and 5 minutes and again, absolutely no indication of the amount of data it is downloading so I do not even know if I can get it all in under the cap.  How cute, a little toggle to automatically start the game as soon as it is ready.  I hope the bats enjoy the game because I’ve given up waiting on it.  The dogs decided they needed to go out later that night.  Since it was after 1AM, I dropped by the computer and kicked off the download.

The next night I decide to see if the game was worth the wait.  Immediately, those plans were ripped to shreds.

The iTouch alerts and mail checks were all successful so the problem is likely on Steam’s side.  Let’s summarize, the game was legally purchased, I have no plans to play the game on the Internet, assumed the game was thoroughly tested before packing it in the first place and have zero use for Steam beyond the copy protection capabilities it is providing to the game.  With all that, I still have not been able to play the game for two days.  Needless to say, my wish list and actual purchases will no longer contain any product that requires Steam to run.  If this is the future of copy protection, then I’m calling it quits.  This is doubly insulting based on the fact this particular game was selling out all over the place when it came out.  In case you are wondering, I did finish the game.  As a review, if you like console games you should feel right at home… if you are instead installing it on a PC then recall how you felt once Unreal Tournament 3 came out and ruined the experience.

In my best Arnold imitation, “Let off some Steam, Bennett”  and go and uninstall that crap.

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Jun292010

Out With The Trash

Two wicked storms and an 8 hour straight shot from Cleveland means we’re back from vacation.  All things considered, it was no where near the time we had in Yellowstone last year.  Some of that can be blamed on the uncooperative weather but mostly a total lack of wildlife to photograph.  Looks like I will have to work on finding good fodder for the blog in the upcoming year.  I’ll have more details on the trip coming up, but it is the 29th and guess who needs another post?  Figured a standby was in order tonight – this is mainly due to suffering from a mild case of heat exhaustion tonight and need to get some fluids and sleep, so off to the post.

If you visited previously, you may have seen a mention that I lost my Internet connection for a period of time.  Having moved to the country a few years back, one of the negatives was having to get rid of cable Internet and go with more archaic on ramps to the Information Superhighway.  Our phone coverage only guaranteed 14.4 due to old wiring and the technician even admitted that was pushing it with all the noise on the line.  Our Verizon card gets one bar if you stand on one foot and spread your arms out in the correct dimensions, but as a backup we also installed a satellite provider.  At the time, Wild Blue was about the only option and it was actually being run out of a small town about 45 minutes away from us.  Paying the extra fee to get 1.5M downloads (correction, paying the extra fee to never reach 1.5M but at least get an average slightly above crap).  Sometime on a Thursday, our access stopped working.  Being vulnerable to weather issues, we decided to wait it out – Friday – no luck, Saturday still no luck, Sunday officially frustrated.  Time to make a call to the home office.  Linda made the call which prompted a quite colorful text message to me summarizing her experience.  Turns out they could not care less whether their service was working and informed us that a service call would be ~$75/hr and that started from the moment they left their building (45 minutes away).  Minimally, we requested that they ping our satellite router to see if they could see it from their end giving us some indication where to start looking to resolve the missing bytes.  Nope, they refused and then started the argument that there was a storm showing on their radar and that was probably the cause – note, it was perfectly sunny that day and this problem had been occurring during other good days.  Pointing this out to them resulted in a very interesting comment.  Essentially, they told us to go find someone else to try and fix it.  When Linda told me this, I was literally stunned.  Here we were, a long time user of their service, a customer paying a premium for a higher transfer rate (which on average we rarely got) and basically just asking them if they can verify that our satellite connection to their uplink was working.  Any guesses what happens when a service provider tells me to go find someone else to fix their product?  Well, we did go find someone else, another service provider.  Four days later, the Wild Blue dish pole was ripped out of the ground and another company’s put in its place – that would be another service provider that actually appreciated our money.  So now Wild Blue was kicked to the curb and I am happy to say we are back online with Hughes which is significantly snappier than our former solution.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Wild Blue for such great advice, although you might want rethink that business model.

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