omicron arena

I have no had two instances of having to deal with so called “premium services” charges on my cell bill. I am sure pretty much everyone out there knows what I am referring to. Charges for things like a text message, a content download or something along those lines that didn’t really result in you getting anything. In fact some are so much a scam that they send you a text with the message content:

Get blahh for free! Or reply “stop” to stop receiveing these messages

If you respond you are hit with a nice fee of 10$ and you will never hear from them again. Not even the courtesy of a thanks. They are total scams. I am inclined to say the carrier is in on it. If not why would they allow something that is definable in no other way than a scam to occur then THEY bill you for it. The carriers have no interest in protecting their customers. If they did they would not allow this.

The argument is you can Opt-Out. Why in the hell should I be required to opt-out of being scammed? Shouldn’t that be an opt-in thing? At least you can opt-out. There are two ways, online via their site or call them. I have found it is best to do both, then give a follow up call. To disable these services via the web site with T-Mobile you can log in to their site with your account information, navigate to “Manage” -> “Change Services”. Look for the section that looks like this:

T-Mobile Messaging Services

As you can see from the image you can block “Content Downloads” and “All Messages”, or you can be picky and select certain message types. I wanted to block them all, which means the individual message types are not able to be added.

The reason I say give a follow up call a bit later is they suck. I called and discussed the charges the first time around with them. I agreed to pay initial fees since basically the kid (yes, this time around it was her phone line) walked right into it after being warned. My only stipulation was they enable the block, which they assured me they did. Well this month, one month later I get hit with another charge, on the same line. When I called to ask about it the rep said they could see the block was initiated, but not completed. Needless to say I was a bit mad and demanded it be enabled fully and the charge be removed.

The service has now been confirmed on both lines. At this point if they bill me again they are only wasting my time and theirs. Difference is they are paying for their time.

It has taken me far too long to upload these, but they are finally up. I have uploaded images from my trips to The Wave (Coyote Buttes AZ) and San Francisco CA. Some are a bit repetitive (I was trying to get a good one…) while with others I managed to snap a good shot right away. I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I did taking them!

Well, Christmas 2011 has come and gone and hopefully we are all still here. I should have pics up from that and a few other things in the next few days. One has to love the benefits of vacation time. Till then, I shall share with you what exactly 22 pounds of skittles looks like…

A 22 pound skittle jar!

Compliments of my mom with some sorting assistance from my sister! Let me just say, that thing is big and heavy and mighty tasty looking!

This here is my Little Lady…

Rebecca

It has taken me forever to get the images up, but I have finally uploaded the pictures from the last upgrade I did on my system. I say upgrade though it should really be called a complete build. Only thing to remain was the case and the hard drives. Hopefully some one will find the images interesting and worth looking at.

The kaon build

The majority of the images have been converted and uploaded. Hopefully the gallery will be much faster now that it is not loading multi-megabyte images. A few albums were consolidated while one or two may be missing. If something was there and is not now and you want it, tell me. Aside from that enjoy!

I have done my size testing and have decided on a resize method and format to use. Not that it matters to most (if any of you), bit I will be running the following command on the files:

convert -scale 2048x2048 $image.jpg $newimage.jpg

The size different this gives me is pretty significant. In my testing it took a file that was 2.44 MB down to 693 KB, down by a factor of around 3.5, numbers I am sure even a non-techie can appreciate. Then I realized, how many people are looking at these images at such a high resolution? Most don’t even own a monitor that can go that high! So a more reasonable size is, well, reasonable right?

convert -scale 1024x1024 $image.jpg $newimage.jpg

This yeilded a file size of 221 KB. A reduction note to a factor of 10! Now we are cooking with binary…

I am going to set things up to convert all the images locally tonight. I should be able to start uploading tomorrow. So, the gallery should speed up drastically in the next few days.

While looking at a package for a DVD you would surely know what you are getting right? Well when I went to open a Full Metal Panic TSR DVD set I got excited for a moment that I might get a nice bonus when I saw this:

Of course it is nothing more than a simple mistake. There was no bonus series inside…

For those of you who have no idea what I am refering to: Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid is the DVD series I had received. Full Metal Alchemist is a completely different and unrelated series, which I did not receive.

Yes, I know I said I would fix the slow loading of the images. I have been working on other projects that simply have left me lacking the time to undertake something of that scale. There are a lot of them to re-size and re-upload.

I have been delayed due to things like automotive work, site work (not on this one) and more. One of the major ones was the re-purposing of the lab. I used to house the majority of my technical content on a domain errantnutron.com, well I am working to drop that domain from my lineup and have since moved all the technical content over to the lab at http://secretwafflelabs.com. That site in turn got a complete overhaul and some new content. I will be re-adding the original content over time. So, for now, head over to the lab and check it out!

And no, the images are still not done

I am sitting at the Narita airport waiting for my flight. The end of my second trip to Japan. Just under one week spent in the Yokohama area. A decent trip with sadly little time to roam around the area and see much of anything. It was however still a worthwhile trip which I enjoyed. Now if only I could get some extra play time on one of these visits I would be good to go…

I did manage to get a few pics while roaming around and will upload those to the Japan album soon. After I get the image format and size thing sorted of course!