Why is Ticketmaster set up this way?

You know what grinds my gears?

Ordered Mayhem Festival Tickets on June 4th. I still haven’t recieved them in the mail yet. Safe to say they are lost in the mail. If you call TM, they say they can cancel those tickets and you can pick them up at the venues’ box office the day of the show. Kinda dumb. Emailing TM, they can switch your mail order to TicketFast, which is they email it to you and you print it out. Except they are so insanely slow in replying to emails! Why the hell do the phone agents and the email agents use 2 different systems? The phone agents can’t switch it to TicketFast for some idiotic reason, only box office pickup. Who thought that was a good idea? Since the tickets were so cheap I went all in and got VIP parking, which are also lost. So that’s great, I’ll probably need to park on the moon, hoof it to get all the shit that should already be in my hand, then go back to the moon and drive to my reserved spot. What a pain in the ass.

I sent the first email on July 6th. Got a reply back on the 8th. I asked a question back (which was a mistake, instead of just giving the info they needed to switch to TicketFast). After waiting 2 days I sent another reply with my info on the 10th. I got a reply to my question (that was sent on the 8th) on the 14th. I sent the info again on the 14th in a panic thinking they didn’t get my other email with the info they wanted or they just have their head up their ass. Either is possible. So the 14th was the last response and it’s now the 20th and still nothing.

Why is this process so backwards? I just want to show up and have fun, not worry about jumping through 6 hoops when I get there.

Inception the Review

Movies

Inception is a breath of fresh air for movies!

Things have been a bit lukewarm at ye old picture house this year. Aside from a select few real great movies (Toy Story 3 comes to mind most recently) people seem to be pretty bored with what Hollywood has served up in the first half of 2010. Enter director: Chris Nolan.

He’s really one of the best filmmakers working today, you just need to look up his name and see his resume. He unleashes something every 2 years or so, slowly baking new ideas with his crew and serving them up when they’re good and ready. Inception is his latest and greatest and judging by other reviews and the box office results, he’s made some very happy viewers.

Inception is a complicated movie. At it’s core, it’s about working in peoples dreams. There’s a way in, you can manipulate the environment, the dreamer, steal ideas and get out. That’s called “Extraction”. “Inception” is the act of planting an idea in someones head. Inception is the difficult task given to Mr. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team.

That’s the gist of it. You won’t get everything in just one viewing, there’s a lot of wild concepts, terminology and just general mind bending stuff at play here. The visuals are incredible, the direction clean and precise, the soundtrack fittingly epic and the cast is just fantastic. Inception is a mix of The Matrix (in terms of sci-fi) and your favorite Jason Bourne/Italian Job type heist movie. I absolutely love the concept of it and the execution of it is just of the highest caliber, we don’t see these kinds of movies out of Hollywood that often. Inception grabbed me hook, line and sinker. I look forward to seeing it again to connect more of the dots.

I think the less you know the better it will be for you. Just know that it’s easily the best movie of the year and enjoy the ride.

A week with Verizon FIOS

Tech

It’s been a week since we got FIOS installed and so far so good. We got a guy who knew what he was doing when he installed it. That’s always a good start. He did a lot of work in 5 hours, but the TV, internet and phone worked right off the bat.

Internet is crazy fast, not that optimum cable was slow. FIOS just outclasses it, especially the upload speeds. You can skip around in videos and it almost never buffers. The new FIOS router wanted nothing to do with the bridge attached to my 360, so I replaced the bridge with a new Linksys bridge. Not the ideal scenario as it cost me $100, but it worked right away, it’s got a good connection strength and the bandwidth is definitely improved so the 360 is cruising right now.

Phone works just as well on the cable system, nothing worth mentioning there. The TV service is really great. Menus load in less than a second and they don’t look like they were designed in 1999. And! Stuff that is supposed to be in Dolby Digital 5.1 (like movie channels) actually comes through the receiver as DD 5.1! No audio or visual artifacts either. The TV service just looks and feels like a step above Cablevision. So it’s a thumbs up for the service so far.

Music!

Music

Korn III has leaked and I couldn’t help myself! Why rob myself of 10 days of enjoyment? Still have the special edition with bonus DVD to look forward to and that has 2 more songs and a new live recording of Blind. I’m gonna write a big review of the album when it officially comes out but I’ve listened to it in full 5 times since yesterday and I’ll just say that I am very happy.

Poking around the net I just found out the Smashing Pumpkins are doing this crazy concept album where they release 4 songs at a time for free on the net. There will be 44 songs total for “Teargarden by Kaleidyscope” in total. 11 EP’s will be released over time and culminate in a giant deluxe uber set when it’s all done. All can be found on smashingpumpkins.com

Astral Planes
A Stitch in Time
Widow Wake My Mind
A Song For a Son
Freak

Corgan got a new Bass player and Drummer too.

Lastly, Eminem’s “Recovery” is phenomenal. Triumphant return I’d say.

Summer

Movies, Music, TV

After last years 3 week long summer, it’s good to see this year we don’t have to wait until July for great weather. Makes a big difference, it seems like everyone is happier with sunshine and heat.

The standard TV season is over, Lost is pretty much gone and forgotten. It wasn’t a bad ending, but the show pretty much collapsed under it’s own weight. Shame because the show started so strong. Breaking Bad on the other hand was probably the best show on TV this season. Maybe one weak episode out of 13 (with no breaks might I add) and even that episode was better than most other shows. 3 amazing seasons and going although I’m not sure how they’re going to get themselves out of the intense corner they are in.

I’ve watched some movies here and there, but nothing really special. It’s been a weak summer for movies so far, but Toy Story 3 should change that. I’ve watched more TV shows on DVD more than movies lately. Started Mad Men and it’s good, but I haven’t seen anything so far that seems to make people go wild for it. I’m only 6 episodes in so it’s still early. Watched season 1 and 2 of Party Down and I didn’t like it at first. The characters started growing on me so that made me stick with the show and I’m glad I did. There’s some good stuff in there (it’s about a catering company in Hollywood. My favorite actor from Freaks and Geeks is in it and there are a ton of cameos through out). Justified (on FX) had a great first season as well. I look forward to the second.

True Blood is back on and it remains as mediocre as usual. There’s a new show coming up on HBO about gangsters in old school Atlantic City that looks pretty cool, I need to remember to record it.

Played through Red Dead Redemption and really liked it. The Wild West setting really drew me in and for some reason it’s made me want to finish all the lengthy side quests. On the other side is Blur, an awesome real car take on kart racing by Bizarre Creations. Easy to hop onto that for awhile and have a good time beating on a dozen or so other people. I just started Dante’s Inferno which is basically God of War with a different theme. Seems competent an hour into it. Crackdown 2 is next in my sights, the demo coming out tomorrow will swing me on a purchase or a rental.

Eminem’s Recovey is a fantastic album. He’s shed most of his lyrical cliches and he’s better off for it. He’s got some brilliant rhymes to go with some really creative beats. It’s a much more positive album for him and it’s got a soul that was missing from Encore and Relapse.

Korn III: Remember Who You Are is less than a month away and I’ve got tickets to see them at Mayhem Fest 2 weeks later. Really looking forward to it.

Iron Man 2 the Review

Movies

I saw Iron Man 2 more than a week ago and I just realized I didn’t write about it.

A well made, average movie. I’m pretty apathetic about it. I’ve never been a fan of the IM character so I really have no expectations for it. Maybe just wanting to see a guy in a robot suit lay down the law in a blaze of glory, of which there is very little of in this movie.

After the 2 hour movie was over, it was left feeling that there wasn’t enough fun stuff between all the talking and Robert Downey Jr. making faces at the camera. There were a lot of cop-outs. I dig Mickey Rourke, but he was barely in it. His whips were really cool, but again, he barely uses them. I have no idea how he survived getting his torse crushed by a 2 ton car either. Tony Stark is a drunk but they pass it off here as his reaction to being unable to find a cure for his power core induced illness. But the worst is the way they cured him, I can’t remember seeing anything that dumb and ludicrus in ages. People ridiculed Avatar for it’s silly use of “Unobtanium” but the magical model/over night Hadon Supercollider/laser beam triangle element-ium is just insulting.

The cast is fine, the effects match and what action there was, was fun to watch. In the end I just feel like it’s nothing special, a good rental. Batman for life.

PTK

Life

It’s been a week since I had the PTK procedure (surgery?) done on my left I. It was unpleasant. It’s kinda like going to the dentist. You can think of a million things you’d rather be doing, but it’s not that bad. It only takes 5 minutes to remove the scar and a laser was used in the last bit, for what I have no idea. It was literally a few seconds and then it was clean up, put a contact lens in to protect the open area and then it’s eyedrop mania. Had the contact lens off yesterday and now I have a different eye medication for the next 2 weeks, So the haze is gone but I have a some blurriness. It’s not that bad and it seems to be getting a little better everyday. The healing process is still in full effect so it’s going to be some time for my vision to stabilize. Hopefully this stupid thing works unlike last year, so the end game is out on that one right now. It should cost me a whole lot less even though the medication has cost $200 (which would have been almost 600 without insurance, which is insane). Should get a statement from the insurance company to see if they’re going to be useless or a real benefit.