BenPaddon.co.uk

Just had this most riveting conversation with Microsoft Xbox Customer Support in the UK:

Support Rep: How can I help you?

Me: Um, my account is set to auto-renew on, I think, July 21st. Except the card details you have, the card has expired. I’d give you my new card details only I actually live in the United States now and I’m quite sure you guys won’t take a card with a US address. So the best thing for you to do is to remove that card, those card details, and I will get a 1-year membership card thingy. I’ll order it from Amazon UK and have it shipped over or something.

Support Rep: Pardon? You’ll be using the renewal card? Or Another Credit Card?

Me: I would love more than anything to be able to be able to use my current debit card, but you guys won’t accept it because it’s an Xbox Live UK account and I now live in the US, with a US bank account and a US address…

Support Rep: Yeah.

Me: …and you guys won’t accept that. The card details you guys have at the moment are for a card that has expired, so I just thought I’d let you know so you can drop those card details off of the account. Then I will renew my membership another way, probably with a Membership Card.

Support Rep: Okay, no worries, you can just enter your new credit card details on your Xbox.

Me: (Too tired to continue this stupid cycle) Okay. Lovely. Not to worry, thanks for your help.

Support Rep: You’re more than welcome. Thanks for calling the Xbox Customer Support.

You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft’s Customer Support team - they really listen to you and do everything they can to accomodate you.

…and remind me that it’s never a good idea to leave my computer unlocked when I go off to do Other Things. I came back to find someone had changed my wallpaper (click to embiggen):

Suffice to say, I am… purturbed.

I’ve been living in America for an entire year.

It feels… well, it feels odd knowing that. One year. 365 days. Just shy of 8,760 hours. I’d write out the number of minutes but then there’d be a dangerous risk of more than one of us bursting into song. Nevertheless, a year is a long time to be doing anything, and even though on the day I arrived in LA I was mostly spaced out from a lack of sleep it still counts.

A lot’s happened in that year. I’ve been working at Disney for 11 of those 12 months. Jump Leads launched a mere two weeks after my emigration and has received critical acclaim from a number of unlikely sources. I’ve made friends, I’ve failed to start learning to drive, and I’ve become the Producer for SoulGeek Media. I’ve been to Disneyland so many times I’m starting to feel guilty about it, considering the number of terminally-ill children who’d love to go but can’t because their parents can’t afford it. I’ve amassed an unhealthily-large collection of Mr Potato Heads (for those of you who want to know, an unhealthily-large collection is basically owning more than two - I presently have nine). I’ve been given free entry to Comic-Con because of Jump Leads, and received $600 from the American government just for existing. I’ve seen parts of California I didn’t even know existed, I’ve been to Houston in Texas, and in two months I’ll be trekking up to Seattle, WA for PAX08.

So what are the plans for the year ahead? Absolutely no ruddy idea. It’s all been very “as it happens,” really. I’m going back to England for two weeks in September, and again in December, and then probably again in March. I’m trying to get fit and lose a little weight (even though absolutely everyone who isn’t my Mum or my friend Westy insists that I don’t need to). I’m hoping to see more of America, to maybe head up to Canada, and to definitely, definitely learn to drive. Fo realz this time.

In the more immediate future I’m hoping to get rid of this ruddy headache.

Living in LA has given me a ton of opportunies and opened up a number of doors for me, and it looks like this next year could be very interesting and very, very busy. Here’s to another Awesome Year, I guess!

I caved and upgraded - that Quick Find glitch was really starting to piss me off. I’m surprised to note that the glitch is still there, although since upgrading it’s only happened to me once. As opposed to, say, every seven bloody minutes.

I’m seriously considering switching to Opera at this point. Hmm.

I like Firefox. I don’t get quite as “Holier-Than-Thou” about the browser as others do, largely because it’s just a web browser*, but I can read web pages the way nature intended (i.e. without a bunch of Internet Explorer proprietary shit getting in the way) and so all is right with the world. Firefox 2 is not without its bugs, however, and one bug in particular is beginning to… well, to bug me. It’s this one:

Quick find bar opens when typing in text fields

The / (slash) and ‘ (apostrophe)keys are shortcuts to open the Quick Find bar. You can also configure Firefox to automatically search for text when you type any characters outside of a text field. When typing in a text field these characters should show up in the text field and not trigger the Quick Find bar.

I don’t know if this bug has been fixed in Firefox 3 as I haven’t downloaded it yet (I’ll get into that in a bit) but from what I can recall while researching the bug a year or two ago it was one that Mozilla were aware of but weren’t fixing. I remember reading that when people reported the bug the Firefox devteam would get quite arsey about it, saying that they had no intention of fixing it and stupidly telling people to fix it themselves because it’s Firefox and it’s Open Source and they have Better Things To Do than to fix one teeny tiny bug. Indeed, a simple Google search for firefox Quick Find bug reveals a number of fixes available. Mozilla never fixed this bug themselves, though. Note that down because I’ll be referring to it later.

The bug is annoying, but as it only happened sporadically (maybe once a week, if that) and it can be “fixed” by opening and closing a dialogue box such as the Options window or the “About…” blurb, I saw no real pressing urge to repair the glitch.

Spin on to this past two weeks - this glitch is now popping up every time I run Firefox. Not just on my desktop PC at home, but on my laptop and my work computer as well. I’ve come to anticipate the glitch by first opening and closing the “About…” dialogue, which is easy enough, but then there are some other small glitches which occur as a side-effect of this - opening a new tab with Ctrl+T doesn’t automatically place the focus on the address bar, for instance, so I can open a new tab and type in an address only for nothing to happen at all.

I yesterday I was about to do what I always do when a program is glitching on me - look for an updated version. Then I remembered that, oh yes, Firefox 3 was released this week. And, oh, weren’t Mozilla trying to go for a download world record on June 18th? The little cogs began a-turnin’ in my head and I began to wonder: What if Mozilla deliberately “timed” this bug to become more annoying around the time Firefox 3 launched? What if the very reason they decided not to fix this glitch and become arrogant cocks at the mere mention of it were because they had planned to use it to encourage annoyed people to update when FF3 became available on the 18th?

I’d deliberately avoided upgrading to FF3 before I came to this realization because the browser is incompatible with pretty much every plug-in and add-on available for FF2, but now I’m even less inclined to want to update. I don’t like the idea that Mozilla may be forcing people to update their browser just because they want to break some kind of non-existent, unimportant, trivial record. I don’t like the idea of being forced to update at all, to be honest. And now, as if by magic, Firefox is refusing to acknowledge input from the arrow keys, so in order to me to go back and fix a typo I had to click on it rather than use the arrow keys to get back to that point. Harrumph. Harrumph, I say.

Anyway, that’s my Unnecessarily Paranoid Conspiracy Theory for the year. Tune in again next June.

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* I have a great deal of difficulty comprehending why it is exactly that people get so militant about their choice of browser. Firefox users tend to consider themselves the Cats Meow because they happen to have a standards-compliant browser, which is also Open Source (and we all know what a bunch of elitist wankers most Open Source advocates are). Opera users tend to rank themselves higher than the Firefox users because their browser is somehow more compliant and passes some obscure test that only people who work in web design for a living will have any idea about.

Why does anyone actually give a shit? Why does anyone give any bodily fluid about which browser they’re using? As long as nobody’s using Internet Explorer aren’t we basically alright? Get a little perspective, people.

So hot they named it twice. Also, fuck me that’s hot.

On Wednesday night I recorded an interview with the wonderful guys at the GigCast, where we talked about Jump Leads, Ghost Hamster and PodWarp 1999, amongst other things. You can listen to the podcast here, if you’re interested.

I mentioned last week that Dino Andrade, voice actor and founder of SoulGeek, and I had lunch about my getting involved with the site. For some reason, Glod only knows why, Dino seems to think I’m talented and asked me if I’d be interested in taking control of SoulGeek Radio, the podcast Dino’s been planning on doing for the site for some time now. He also asked me if I could help video-edit the remaining footage they’d filmed for SoulGeek TV. Naturally, I said yes.

Today we met again for breakfast on the Disney Lot (he had an audition there, so it made sense) and as well as handing me some of the video stuff for SG-TV he offered me the job of Producer for SoulGeek Media. That’s not just putting the podcast together and editing the videos but essentially handling every single aspect of SoulGeek’s audio/video output. Naturally, I said yes.

This is all incredibly exciting stuff. The podcast is taking shape and hopefully we’ll have some recording in the can inside of the next couple of weeks. I have some writing to do for… well, for a part of the podcast (again, as I said, I don’t want to give too much away about that just yet, but I’m fairly confident that it’s not something a great number of other podcasts are doing - watch this space!), but all in all it’s looking good! I’ll keep you guys informed as and when stuff happens.

Remember that “webcomic dumping ground” idea I wrote about earlier today? I’ve only bloody gone and done it.

This morning Paul Southworth this tweet about today’s Ugly Hill:

Today’s comic is what happens when I don’t feel like I have an outlet for any other ideas. Wish I could do it more often.

That got me thinking: What if there were a website where cartoonists could put up such strips? Think about it - a daily webcomic with different comics every day by different people, for those occasions where they come up with an idea that doesn’t fit into their own comic. Somewhere to put ideas that might work for one or two strips, but probably couldn’t be sustained over a long period of time.

Say Krishna comes up with a funny idea for a strip about zombie proof-readers. One quick joke, one quick strip, but it doesn’t quite fit in with PC Weenies or Uncubed. Or say Jim wants to take a break from Outsider and do one or two quick little three-panel strips about a Leprechaun Pimp. They could draw a strip and send it on to this site, and then it gets put up in a few days as that day’s comic. One day you’re seeing Jim’s Leprechaun pimp-slapping someone, the next you’ve got Krisha’s zombies lamenting the number of spelling errors in their latest document. A different comic about something different every single day, forever.

I’m seriously considering setting this up. GhostHamster.com is going woefully unused at the moment with no sign that Eric and Jeremy are interested in actually getting around to launching it, so maybe I’d stick it there. Or maybe I’d set it up as something new. But it’d be interesting to see what people think about it. I’ve already had some positive feedback on Twitter.

Any thoughts?

In an attempt to make my blog seem as mundane as possible, I’m now going to talk about my posture.

Those of you who listened to Saturday’s edition of The Program with Kris Straub might recall a very brief discussion about how photogenic I’m not. Kris mentioned that he’s seen photos of me and I always seem to be slouching, which is something I’ve been vaguely aware of now for a long time. I’m 6′ 4″ and a lot of stuff - door handles, bathroom sinks, elevator buttons, etc. - seems to have been positioned lower than I require it to be. Plus I like to keep eye contact with the people I talk to, so if I’m walking and talking to them it’s easier to simply lower myself down so that they’re not looking up my nose. That and it’s less intimidating. Also I’m scared of heights.

However, Kris is right and I need to be less slouchy and more upright and awesome. That’s been my goal this week - stand tall, walk proud (I narrowly avoided the urge to write “Walk Hard”), etc. I’ve been pretty successful save for the fact that since I’ve been keeping myself upright my back has begun to ache and, as I mentioned above, everything seems to be just out of reach. It’s annoying, to be sure, but I imagine it’s something I’ll get used to.

In other news, I had lunch with Dino Andrade on Tuesday. For those of you who don’t know, he is (amongst other things) the voice of Skull on PvP: The Series, and the founder of geek dating site SoulGeek. He’s also a good friend and a top bloke, and I’ve been wanting to work with him for a while now. Fortunately for me he wanted to work with me as well, and he’s decided I would be the perfect guy to produce and co-host Radio SoulGeek, the official SoulGeek podcast. So lunch was mostly us talking about what we want out of our respective futures (there appears to be a fair amount of overlap there, which is nice) and planning the format for the podcast. It’s all looking incredibly promising and I don’t want to give away too much but besides the usual stuff - Geek News, Interviews, music, all of which will be delivered in a unique, fun way - there’s some really cool stuff that I don’t want to go into too much now for fear of ruining the surprise. I can promise you that it’ll be available to everyone (not just SoulGeek members) and, assuming we do it properly, it’s going to be a must-hear podcast. Whee!

There’s also some very cool stuff happening with Jump Leads in the near future but I definitely want to keep that one to myself for now.

Anyway, that’s enough from me for the moment. I have work to do!