*sigh*

Sony, sony sony. Stupid sony.

You were a prestigious brand name in the ‘80s. People the world over sought your quality electronics, and back in the day, your Walkmans were innotative, and The Thing to Have.

You remember the Walkman, don’t you? At the time of its launch in 1979, it was The Shit. It commanded a high price for the time period, and if you had one, you were In. The rest of us made do with off-brands and knock-offs, like Coby and GPX. And if you were really broke, you had the lowest of the low: a Yorx.

But nowadays, there’s no question. The Must Have media device is the iPod. it is The Shit. And you’re In if you have one. Those who can’t afford one make do with, well, Coby, or GPX.

And, if you’re truly lame… you get a Sony Walkman.

Sony, you are now the Yorx of 2008.

You used to be golden. What happened to you?
Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look at this photo, ostensibly dated 1985 from the Chicago Tribune, depicting a mall that (in current times) is about to get razed and redeveloped.

Let’s see, in 1985, I would’ve been 7 or 8 years old.

Holy hell! Did things really look that… old, back then? I mean, the cars, the signs… they look so… well, OLD! I would’ve easily pegged this image as being early 70s if I had not been told of the date. In fact part of me still has doubts!

23 years down the road, am I gonna look at photos I took of my car recently and think “DAMN! I owned THAT old jalopy?!”

Maybe it’s just that the photo was shot in black and white that makes it appear so dated. I mean, Christ, when did people finally get it that shooting in color isn’t so bad, particularly for historical preservation purposes?

Maybe I should’ve just taken Easter off, and left the site alone. Alas, the fact that I hadn’t written anything in a while left me with a bit of guilt, and so I put together this nice, invective-laden piece about Sony turning into a too-big-for-its-britches ghetto brand. You might’ve seen it, for the few hours it was actually up on this site. Coincidentally, I spent two days writing the piece, and I failed to notice that it was article #666 in the scaredpoet.com article database. Oh, what a bad, bad omen that was.

Sadly, the article is no more. Because shortly after I wrote the article, I sat back to vainly admire the literary fruits of my labor. And then I noticed a curious bug in the site’s code.

So, I went to fix it. A simple software update should do! Right? No, alas, the software update not only failed to solve the issue, but caused another annoying problem. So I tried another fix. Another bug is created!

Well, now I’m annoyed. So I decide the one way to fix all of this, once and for all, is go directly into the site database and manually edit it.

MISTAKE.

Read the rest of this entry »

Better be careful, fellow bloggers and website proprietors. According to mobile television provider mobiTV, if one of your users happens to post incredibly easy methods to get free content from them, you could be labeled a 1337 H4x0R and your site potentially taken down by their crack legal team. At least that’s what the owner of HowardForums, the premier geek site for wireless phone enthusiasts, has learned. HowardForums has been the go-to-site for years now if you want to, say, hack or unlock your iPhone, or aren’t happy with the restrictive interface on your Verizon-branded Motorola phone and want to remove it.

But recently, one site member turned his sights on mobiTV’s awesome, incircumventable DRM and authentication security, and were shocked… utterly shocked! When he managed to penetrate it.

What, pray tell, does their awesome DRM and site security consist of? A simple plaintext file, with the extension renamed, that’s what. A Howardforums member posted details on how to download and crack the encryption of this plaintext file (read: open it up on the same web browser you’re viewing this site with). Soon after the shit hit the fan, MobiTV’s legal department tried to put the smackdown on site owner Howard Chui, alleging among other things, that:
Read the rest of this entry »

Incredibly silly, and incredibly stupid, but if you’re a cat-person, it’s just damn funny. 🙂