LeeRagans.com

There are multiple reasons why I cancelled all of my accounts today.  It has been coming for a long time.  The overwhelming reason I am quitting is that it is no longer fun.    I need the time back to do other things.

What was the final straw?  I had a hauler destroyed by gate camping pirates in high sec.  The game balance for high security is more like living under a dictator where the dictators thugs get to do what they want with a slap on the wrist.  If you are a hard working tax payer, you just get stolen from and your pleas for help are ignored. 

There are changes coming to the game, but they are too little too late.  I am going to reclaim my life.  Watch some TV, and get my WASD hand ready for Warhammer Online.  I can play that for an hour a day and not care what happens.

Hey Gideon Shaftoe, you want your BPOs back? 

I have been spending quite a few hours playing Warhammer online.  It is the Preview Weekend for people who are in the open beta and have bought the game.  The levels are lock and the graphics are locked in the lowest settings due to all the debugging code running, but I am rather impressed.  It can be compared to WoW, but I think it would be silly not to compare it to the biggest MMORPG ever.  Now I am spoiled and have issues with games as an Eve Player, but I think I have found a game that I will enjoy playing.  There are better people out there to speak about individual game play elements, but many things have caught my eye.  The public quests are great.  In a public you quest you literally just walk up to what is happening and you are in the group.  You complete the mission or missions and get XP.  There is also the traditional quest system and PVP, but those are nothing new.  I have to say that the beta feels no worse than WoW was on opening day.  No loot lag, or other obvious problems other than not being able to quit the game.  That that is the kind of thing that happens when you make a huge application.I will be playing and enjoying this one for a long time.  I can’t wait for the head start, and I will probably take some days off work to get ahead of the teenager.   

So if I run, apt-get upgrayd, does it “pimp out” my linux rig rather than just update?

Most IT people are good problem solvers.  I am not.  I just look like one.  I do trial and error very fast.  Making lots of errors quickly I eventually run out of possible errors and thus I arrive at a solution.   Note, this methodology is why I don’t do plumbing or electrical work.  Both are unforgiving of lots of errors, while carpentry strangely is. 

Taxes on gasoline will keep the price around $4.  The price drop will be because of the switch to other fuel sources and the forces of supply and demand will kick in.  Governments will increase taxes to cover the costs of alternative fuels. 

As the number of electric cars increases dramatically over the next few years and plug in hybrid cars, the power grid will become strained and brown outs will become the norm in the late afternoons and evenings.  At some point the power companies will issue guidance that we should charge our cars after a certain hour because of the strain on the power grid. 

This will be used for some technological and maybe political predictions.

lee@starbuck:~$  history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
168 ls
119 cd
54 sudo
30 who
20 df
16 ./teamspeak2-server_startscript
13 exit
11 mkdir
9 ssh
8 vi

If you have a Sirius Satellite radio and have ever bought new equipment or sold a car with a Sirius radio installed you have discovered that you cannot cancel the subscription from the website.  You can cancel your Star Wars Galaxies subscription on-line but cancelling a recurring subscription for a radio requires a phone call. 

Now if you are like me you will just set aside some time and pick up the phone can call to cancel.  Last week I traded my LR3 and purchased a Prius again.  That discussion is for another post.  Right now is this is to describe the horrid customer service that Sirius provides.  In the interest of full disclosure, I should also point out that I have a significant number of shares in Both Sirius and XM.  That, is a subject for another post.

I sat down while working and went ahead and made the phone call to Sirius.  Following the telephone prompts when I chose honestly, and stated that I wanted to cancel an account, I was hung up on by the system 3 times.  They should be ashamed of themselves for conducing business in this manner.  Note, the 3rd time I called and chose the cancellation option I did it just to really get myself aggravated.  I knew what would happen. 

The 4th time I called I changed only one choice and lied.  Saying that I wanted to activate a radio.  3 minutes later I was talking to a nice lady to took my information and seemed completely unsurprised that I had to lie to get to her.  She passed me off to another person, and 30 minutes later another nice lady is informing me they want to charge me $75 for cancelling my service before a year is complete. 

Time for another note, this is a second account, and only cost $76 for the whole year.   

I started laughing.  Then asked if she wanted me to cancel both accounts.  She was already working on stopping the silly charge.  15 minutes later the charge was reversed.  Total time, 1 hour 15 minutes spent doing something I can do with a click of a web site check box using most services.

The conclusions, I will never recommend anyone install a Sirius radio to just try it.  I will never activate another installed radio in a vehicle for Sirius.  I will most likely cancel my Sirius service on the portable once the merger settles.  I will have a radio already.  I don’t need two radios for the same service.

Sirius makes it impossible for a fully honest person to cancel their service, and then they try to charge you a penalty for doing so.   This is radio folks.  Your company has said that you have a large number of competitors, thus justifying the merger with XM.  It might be good for your customer service managers to remember that. 

If you let customers come and go, some will come back.  If you make it hard for your customers to leave, they will stay gone.

Eve-Online does something that may be unique, since I don’t play every MMO ever deployed, I would love to hear what others do this.  CCP, owner of eve-online, facilitates the secure sale of game time cards for in game money.  This allow players who play the game to earn time to play by playing. 

There are parts of the world and even life styles that don’t allow one to fork over $15 a month to play, but they have the time to play to earn enough ISK to make it worth while for someone to trade $15 or $35 worth of real money for game money.  The going rate via public auction appears to currently be $15 for 160mil ISK, $35 for 360 mil ISK.

Now that is not enough money to fun a corporate war, but for about $100 I can afford to buy that giant freighter I am working toward.  Would I consider making sales to this end?  Not sure at this point.  I am in a small corp of just my son and one friend.  I could sell thousand of dollars in game time cards and we could not afford to do much more than we are doing.  Again, it can close the gap on some of our capital projects.

I like the idea that this emergent world allows people to earn their play while playing.  I wonder how many subscribers WoW would have if they did the same thing?  I know that someone will point out that you can buy things in game from players.  The difference here is that the company who runs the game has a secure system for making the transfer guaranteeing the the seller gets his money and the buyer gets a time card that works.

I will see how this goes.  When I am 300 million ISK short of that new freighter I may be inclined to sell a time card or two.