The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘love’

God of War III comes out today (YES!), and with all the hoopla surrounding it, I thought this would actually be a good time to recommend/pay tribute to the other God of War games.

Go here to read the rest: 
A tale of God of War

No one likes the food at San Quentin State Prison. That’s the gist I get from reading its reviews on Yelp. Yes, it’s on Yelp.

Maybe this shouldn’t be all that surprising since there is a museum that you can take a tour of (and they occasionally do private tours). But if you read over the reviews, a number of them are from people who have family inside or have been in themselves. Sure, they could be lying, but it’s still kind of humorous. California’s oldest prison, with the largest death row in the country, is being actively reviewed on Yelp.

Here’s one reviewer — a supposed former short-term inmate — that gave it 2 stars:

The 4 days I spent here were miserable. We all arrive on the grey goose & are schackled and escorted to a main pen to be counted & dispersed.

This place is cold & damp and just like every prison movie -(the green mile) you have ever seen depiciting a shit hole prison.

Yeah they play baseball with local sF organizations and they have deathrow inmates but mostly its a minimum/medium security facility with a bunch of short timers.

It’s kind of nostalgic because of its sorted history but…

This is not a place you wanna end up. Not all big bad & scary like the movies make it, but cold,damp and miserable with really shitty food.

AVOID AT ALL COST!

Ouch.

And Yelp isn’t the only social site showing San Quentin the love. They have a Foursquare page too. Seven people have checked-in so far, with one Jeff D. lucky enough to be the mayor (with three visits). Gino W. left a tip:

Stay away. The food is horrible

I can’t find the prison on Gowalla yet. If some inmate is reading this, consider making the venue.

As you know, today is Valentine’s Day. As such, I thought it was the perfect time to write a love sonnet for my new favorite company: Expedia.com. Actually, I’ll do the opposite.

Seeing as it’s a long weekend in the United States (President’s Day is on Monday), I decided I was going to set up a little trip to get away with the girl I’m seeing. A few weeks ago, I set up all the plans for what I thought would be a nice, relaxing weekend. It’s actually been anything but relaxing. My mistake? Using Expedia to book it.

After a few hours of driving, we pulled into our destination yesterday and attempted to check-in to the hotel. Problem 1: they’ve never heard of us. My name is nowhere to be found in their reservation system. Problem 2: they were completely booked. Problem 3: even if there was a cancellation, there was a waiting list for a room because apparently, Expedia had done this exact thing to no fewer than four other couples — just at this hotel alone.

So what happened?

Well, it took me a couple hours to get a straight answer out of anyone, but apparently, the system that Expedia uses to book reservation with its partner hotels is a mixture of antiquated and just completely fucked up. Because it would be too much of a hassle, and more importantly, cost too much money, Expedia has an automated system for communicating with its partners. Sometimes this is done with an email, sometimes this is done with a fax. Yes, a fax.

In my case, Expedia’s system apparently faxed the reservation to the hotel I booked. It then claims it got a confirmation back that my hotel room was all set and ready for my arrival. The only problem? According to the hotel, not only did they not receive the fax, but obviously they never sent the confirmation back. And why would they? It turns out all their rooms had already been booked before I attempted to book mine through Expedia. Of course, according to Expedia, there were plenty of rooms available when I booked — I even had many room options to choose from.

The icing on the Valentine’s Day cake though was my subsequent six calls to and from Expedia. For the first one, after waiting on hold for 45 minutes, I was told that according to their system, my reservation was indeed confirmed. I knew this would be Expedia’s stance because I received an email from Expedia a few days prior stating that it was confirmed.

After I made it very clear to the poor girl (poor, both for having to face my wrath, and working for this awful company) that there was definitely no room under my name at my supposedly booked hotel, she didn’t seem too clear about what to do. I was demanding a full refund (obviously) and demanding that they book me another room in the city and pay for that. She put me on hold so she could talk to her manager.

When she came back on 15 minutes later, she wanted to make sure I booked the room correctly in the first place. I demanded to speak to her superior. This guy was great (that’s sarcasm). Not only was he trying to convince me that this wasn’t Expedia’s fault, but he wasn’t sure they’d be able to reimburse me for the room that they had never actually booked for me, and that I clearly wasn’t going to be staying in. He said he’d have to call me back.

Meanwhile, I get a call from another Expedia agent whom the hotel had apparently called because again, this had happened a number of times just this day for the same hotel with Expedia. He wanted to let me know that the hotel was overbooked and my reservation wouldn’t be honored. Thanks buddy.

The other agent finally calls me back. Good news: he thinks he can refund what I paid for the hotel that I’m not staying at, but wants to make sure I want another room booked for me in the city. If so, they might take some of the refund to pay for that. At this point I start really yelling. On the street. With a lot of children around.

After a solid five minutes of verbal abuse from me including no shortage of swear words, he sees my point. But he still has to call his supervisor to okay any kind of deal he can cut. He needs to call me back again, but assures me that when he does, he’ll have another room for me and the refund in my account.

He calls me back. The good news: the refund has been processed. The bad news: there are no other rooms in the city that Expedia can book for me. Not one.

Further, if I am able to find my own room outside of Expedia, the company can’t do anything for me in terms of reimbursement. He is only authorized to offer me a $100 gift certificate to use for a future Expedia purchase. If there is anything in the world I want less at this point, I can’t think of it. I’m certainly never going to book another trip through this site again.

Hearing me still upset, he suggests that maybe if I book a more expensive place, Expedia can make up the difference. That’s a ridiculous proposal for a number of reasons, but the best is that there is no way I’m going to be able to find a hotel nicer than the one I had thought I had booked to stay at on Valentine’s Day weekend. The only options were going to be shittier ones — and those are probably taken too. So maybe Expedia was trying to trick me into paying me negative $500, I’m not sure.

At this point we’re almost 2 hours into my little romantic getaway so I ask for his supervisor’s number, his supervisor’s email, my reference number, anything he can give me. I hang up the phone.

I tried calling them. It’s a switchboard. No one seems clear as to who I should talk to.

So I write this now from my quaint (used kindly) little motel that I had to book myself, at a ridiculous rate because it was so last-minute on a busy weekend, with my own money. Never in my life have I had an experience as bad as I just did with an online company. This includes Comcast and AT&T. Expedia just made them look like models of business perfection.

Expedia, which was founded as a division of Microsoft in 1995, was later spun-off into its own company in the IPO-happy days of 1999. Ticketmaster then bought it in 2001, and eventually, it became a company under the IAC conglomerate. IAC spun it off again in 2005 as Expedia, Inc, which also includes the sites Hotels.com, TripAdvisor, HotWire, and others. In other words, the company’s history has been a mess.

Despite being an industry bicycle (everyone has had a ride), Expedia still manages to make $3 billion in revenues a year — undoubtedly helped by cases like mine where they try to make you pay for places you can’t even stay at because they can’t seem to figure out how to properly do a confirmation. Well, except if that confirmation is with one of their never-ending chain of superiors who needs to confirm a Kleenex in case an employee sneezes.

And so ends my love story about Expedia. I write this now both because it’s a nice Valentine’s Day tale, but also as a warning to anyone using the service. A simple Google search yields results that show I’m hardly alone in my experience. In fact, the number of hate sites specifically about Expedia is quite impressive.

There are far too many other competent companies out there that do the same thing, including a number of startups. Kayak is the one you hear about the most, unfortunately, they have a deal to offer up Expedia results first. Feel free to leave your favorite travel startups in the comments, I’d really like to know the best alternatives.

I also write this because even if Barry Diller (Chairman) or some other higher-up sees this post and offers me a full reimbursement of my trip, I’m not accepting it at this point. They may not have ruined my Valentine’s Day, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

Dearest Expedia,

Happy Valentine’s Day.

It’s over.

Love,

MG

For a while, the only way to play the location-based Foursquare was through its iPhone app or the scant mobile website. Then came an Android app, opening the game to a whole new group of users. And now, BlackBerry users are getting the love.

The service is officially launching on the BlackBerry today after several weeks in private beta testing with a few hundred users. Specifically, the app with work on all 8000 and 9000 series devices (any BlackBerry with a trackball), and it will also work with the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm, but Foursquare notes that a special version built for that device is in the works too.

As you can see in the screenshots, the app is pretty similar to the Foursquare apps on the other platforms. While not quite as pretty as the latest iPhone version, it gets the job done. Our own Leena Rao has been one of the beta testers, and speaks glowingly of being able to use the service after months of iPhone-envy. That said, she does note that there were some bugs, but can’t be sure if that’s more of a BlackBerry problem then a Foursquare problem. A number of testers have noted in the forums problems with location-sensing, but with the latest update that got sent out last week (the “release candidate”) version, the service made a number of UX tweaks in an attempt to make it more obvious to find the actual venue you are looking to check in at.

This BlackBerry launch is an important one for Foursquare as they continue to grow. Windows Mobile and Palm Pre versions has also been in the works for some time by independent developers using Foursquare’s API. Once it’s on all the mobile platforms, it will have a pretty strong defense against both Gowalla, which is currently iPhone-only but has a mobile web interface that works on Android, and the Yelp application, which just last week added the check-in feature that is the key to Foursquare. That is still only available on the iPhone app, but it has some 1.25 million users — well above Foursquare’s total numbers (somewhere around 200,000).  Foursquare also just yesterday confirmed the hiring of a COO (which they are calling their General Manager).

Men have often dreamed it, but it hasn’t become a reality until today: the sex robot. Developed by Douglas Hines of  True Companion , an electrical engineer and computer scientist who formerly worked in the artificial intelligence lab at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Roxxxy, the sexy bot, is a completely anatomically correct and customizable companion (from features to hair color) that exhibits different personalities and responds to touch

See the original post:
NSFW: True Companion Debuts Sex Robot Roxxxy

First Planet Company, a subsidiary of the MindArk Group that develops and markets the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game Planet Calypso, which is based on the Entropia Platform and part of the Entropia Universe (still with me?), claims that the world record for most expensive virtual object ever to be sold has been smashed into thousands of virtual pieces.

First Planet Company about a month ago announced the public auction of the Crystal Palace Space Station, according to the release ‘an extremely popular hunting destination that is in orbit around Planet Calypso’. The lucky winner of the auction, Erik Novak (aka “Buzz Erik Lightyear”), ended up winning the bid with a $330,000.00 USD offer.

It’s 2010, so it’s no longer surprising for most people to see this kind of money being spent on virtual objects, and I doubt this world record will stick around for long.

Novak puts it this way:

“This is a stunning investment opportunity, and I have complete faith I will recover what I spent relatively quickly. To say Planet Calypso has changed my life would be an understatement. I have even found the love of my life in the game, and now we live together in real life. I feel very confident about purchasing the Crystal Palace Space Station as I have already invested years of time, dedication, work, hope and love. All of those things have already paid off more than I could have ever imagined. With the new game engine, new features and almost ten years of experience Planet Calypso is one of the few safe investments in this economy.”

For the record (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), the previous world record as registered by the authorative Guinness World Records book in 2008, was also a sale of a virtual property in Planet Calypso. The amount paid for that property was much smaller though, with a reported $100.000 USD being spent on a Virtual Space Resort and Nightclub now dubbed Club Neverdie.

Do you spend money on virtual goods? What if it would concern a significant investment that you’re confident would generate a great return down the line?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

New year, new faces as two of the most innovative technology companies on the planet are making some changes in their management team.

Norwegian developer of desktop and mobile browsers and related technologies Opera Software has appointed a new Chief Executive Officer, while Brightcove has managed to steal away a long-time Adobe and Macromedia exec to become its new President and Chief Operating Officer.

Opera Software has replaced Jon S. von Tetzchner, who co-founded the company in 1995 and has served as CEO since that time, with Lars Boilesen as head honcho. Boilesen previously worked for Opera from 2000 to 2005 as Executive Vice President, Sales. In 2005, Boilesen joined Alcatel-Lucent as CEO of the Nordics and the Baltics only to rejoin Opera a year ago as Chief Commercial Officer. Formerly Vice President of Opera’s Board of Directors, he will be leading the company from this point forward while von Tetzchner will continue to serve Opera full-time as a strategic consultant.

Online video platform provider Brightcove announced earlier this morning that it has appointed David Mendels as its new President and COO, assuming responsibility over driving Brightcove’s global expansion strategy and operations. Mendels comes to Brightcove most recently from Adobe where he was served as Executive Vice President and general manager of Adobe’s Enterprise Software and Business Productivity division, a billion dollar business that includes Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Connect, LiveCycle and Flex. Mendels will also continue to be a member of the Brightcove Board of Directors, which he joined in late 2008.

(Image credit: Flickr / ccarlstead)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Unless you’ve been living offline for the past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard and/or seen “I’m On A Boat,” Lonely Island’s mock hip hop song/video. Today brings a response to it in the form of a group of Apple fanbois rapping about their love of using Apple products. They even have one character autotuned up, just like T-Pain in the “I’m On A Boat” version. No word on if they used the I Am T-Pain iPhone app to get the effect, but a major plus if so.

It’s pretty standard stuff: Love Macs, love iPods, love iPhones — hate PCs, hate Zunes, hate drivers and viruses, etc. Fairly well made, this isn’t nearly as bad as the Bing Jingle, but it’s still a little cringe-inducing. Sample line: “I’m pluggin girls, you at work pluggin in devices.”

These guys clearly have an agenda as they run the site Switch to Mac — you can probably guess what that’s about. This video is technically the follow-up to their “Mac or PC” rap video.

[thanks Banyan]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

I’ve already proclaimed my love and affection for the Astro Boy netbook . I love the overall style, lid graphic, and all the sweet Astro Boy-themed accessories. The video above makes me want it ever more.

See original here:
Video: Hands-on with the $900 Astro Boy netbook

EA announced that the demo to their much anticipated game, Dante’s Inferno would be available before the Holidays for your gaming enjoyment. The “Gates of Hell” demo lets users play through the entire first level of the game, introducing us all to the horrors abound in the Nine Circles of Hell. The demo opens with the protagonist returning from the crusades only to find that the love of his life has been murdered, and her spirit stolen by Lucifer

Originally posted here: 
Spend Christmas In Hell: Dante’s Inferno Demo Comes Just In Time For The Holidays