:: theMediaman journal ::

XP Product Activation Woes (calling long distance to India) :: Monday, January 31, 2005 ::

Last week I performed my annual "Windows Clean Install". Something I needed after a particularly crappy day at work ("Why hasn't this been done yet?" repeated over and over after three weeks of working my ass off). So on my way home I grabbed the beer, then drank and installed an OS from scratch. What a geek.

I had my first run-in with Microsoft Product Activation... aka, "yet another dep't outsourced to India". I've done a number of system upgrades to my comptuer since buying it back in 2001, including a RAM upgrade just hours before the clean install. However, that wasn't the reason I needed to do the Activation "the old-school way". It seems that there's a maximum number of times you can Activate a perfectly legal copy of XP Home, installed legally, on only one legal PC.

(Note that I'm capitalizing "Activate" and "Activation", because MS is probably just around the corner from copyrighting another generic word like "Word" or "Windows").

I've had a difficult time finding any documentation on this element of MSPA. One page that I've found states (only in a sidebar) how you have a maximum of 8 to 11 installs before the key will no longer work through Internet Activation.

Seems less to me.

My last installation was just over one year ago. Before that, it was over one year, and I know that I did one clean install in under one year. That makes this the fourth time it's been installed.

Another kick in the pants was how I had to recite a 50-digit number to them over the phone (verbally, not using the keypad), then wait for someone to talk to, then repeat the first 6 numbers again, get the fifth degree, then type in a set of 36 numbers that they recited to me.

While on the phone to MSPA, the guy asked the usual "are you a criminal" questions, like "For how many computers are you using this licence", which is a trick question. An answer of anything other than "one" will immediately black list you, your parents, your dog and your neighbourhood will be carpet bombed.

The other question I expected - but was still upset with being asked - was "why have you installed this copy of XP Home multiple times?"

I do it regularly so that I can clean out all the crap and software configurations that are slowing down my computer, jackass (actual answer excluded the "jackass").

The whole experience would have been more entertaining had I remembered to use my Northern Ontario Accent there, eh? Unfortunately I was already well into the conversation before I thought of it.

Again, I encourage everyone who has to call technical support to use a fake accent. Even if it's poor, they can't tell. It's more entertaining for you, and they won't treat you like some "Stupid American" which - face it - most Canadians sound like.

So now I have a clean install on my machine. I feel like going through the Hell of a re-install again (Service Pack 2 takes over two hours to install... which is longer than the original XP install + manual Product Activation) just so I can call up MSPA and get them to activate my XP again.

"Why have you installed this copy of XP Home multiple times?"

"As a sleeper-cell terrorist, I need to wipe my hard drive clean of incriminating data on a regular basis. But it's still installed on the one and only CPU and hard drive it's ever been installed on, so what's my Product Activation Code(TM)?"

:: Stephen 1:23 PM [+] ::

Comments:

I'll have to remember to use a fake French accent if I ever have to activate my copy of XP. I already use the French accent when telemarketers call. I just tell them "I speek little english." The smart ones give up but the stupid ones only continue with their skript and I hang up on them.

PS: Could I get a password to post comments?

# posted by Anonymous : 9:08 AM

 

I had the dubious pleasure of installing an XP office product and having to go through that 50 digit rigamarole. It steams me to think it has come this far. Thankfully, none of my personal machines use XP.

Huzzah for comments! I've been waiting for this feature on tMMJournal for like ever. However, I'm no fan of this having to log in business. Humbug!

Anyway, I'm actually considering getting a (Mini)Mac. If only because people say that BigMacs are no good for me.

# posted by Anonymous : 11:41 AM

 

I like to wink at sexy ladies when I'm down in LA. Can you blame me?

# posted by Anonymous : 6:48 PM

 

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Here's a clip from an article on MSN's web site about the Sundance Film Festival:

If sex sells, as the advertising saying goes, the independent film world should be pleased with this year’s Sundance Film Festival that features a slew of movies with explicit sexual themes and scenes.

Teen sex, elderly sex and gay and oral sex fill a range of movies...

Hmm... sexual themes without any "normal" sex in the bunch??? At an Independant film festival you say???

When even Independent film is predictable, it's time for some new blood in the movie industry.

:: Stephen 1:59 PM [+] ::

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After the most recent tax increase on beer put forward by the McGuinty government (it's getting harder and harder to understand their strategy) as 2-4 of Sleeman is now in excess of forty bucks. There's no way I can justify that, so I've decided to start looking at the discount hooch.

There's a number of beers that are selling for or around $1 per beer. The biggest one to note is Laker, which crawled into the top ten beers sold in Ontario (not there currently, but it sometimes shows up on the list), most likely because of the price. Lucky Lager is also sitting comfortablly in the top 10, but quite simply, it's crap.

Laker brews a lager, lite and a red, so I decided to give the red beer a try last night. It cost me $13.20, which reminded me how we must pay for deposit on the bottles. Takes a little bit of the fun out of returning thirty bucks worth of empties to know that it's money I had already given them.

The Review: There's sometimes a kind of medicine-y taste at the end, but certainly up there with the mediocre Reds. It doesn't replace Rickards, and it's no Sleeman Dark, but I'd put it in the same class as Mick's.

So, it's not as good as Sleeman, but I would say that's it's more than 60% as good as Rickards Red, for only 60% the price... so I guess on a price-per-quality basis, it's better(?).

The one surprise came from the label, which says that it's brewed by Brick Brewing in Waterloo. In other words, I'm staying away from the lager. Brick lager turns my stomach whenever I have beers-plural.

:: Stephen 1:12 PM [+] ::

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Just found out that - once again - I missed National Pie Day *sad*

Weird things that you sometimes learn well after the fact. The History Channel has a page with "This Day In History", and it outlines how Russia came the closest it ever had to launching nuclear missles only ten years ago today.

Apparently, a missle was launched from Norway with scientific instruments. The International community was notified well in advance, but with in an underpaid, shattered civil service like the one in Russia at the time, it's little wonder that the early-warning center wasn't given this info. Apparently "The" suitcases with "The" button were activated for the first time in history. They were only minutes away from launch when they confirmed that the missle wasn't heading for Moscow.

I don't remember this in the news, but of course, I was just starting to date Rebecca at that time, and was probably lost in Love </cheesy>

:: Stephen 10:28 AM [+] ::

Comments:

oop--careful. Revealing personal history....

# posted by si_mi : 1:00 PM

 

s'okay... there's only one person now who makes me forget about all the bad things that happen in the world.

# posted by Stephen : 8:36 PM

 

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Part of my duties this week is to research weblog technologies for work. One of the key ingredients is to try and make this work on an ASP backend. However, the only two pre-packaged programs is a SourceForge program (still in beta) called FactoSystem and Microsoft's entry, SharePoint. The latter looks like a better-executed version of what MS wanted FrontPage 2000 to be. Oh yeah, that's the big problem with it. You have to use FrontPage XP or 2003. I'm gonna go with "nope".

The other possibilities are the PHP-based MovableType and, of course, Blogger. The viral nature of LiveJournal appeals to me personally, since I can link directly to other people I know (could only find two links so far).

However, that doesn't do much good for the project I'm looking at for work.

Building a journal from scratch was a project that was out of my scope of coding kung-fu. I was too anxious to achieve the same status as Hwan and He Who's Site Must Not Be Linked To, but alas, I am not as l33t. However, I'm seriously looking at something called Wordpress, which is apparently similar to Movable Type.

Haven't played with Wordpress much, so I don't know if it has certain features I'm looking for. But for the time being, I've allowed Comments in my Blogger posts. I'm gonna wait and see if 1) it works, and 2) I start getting SPAMmed.

:: Stephen 1:03 PM [+] ::

Comments:

w00t!

It works.

Have fun!

# posted by Anonymous : 1:37 PM

 

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Haven't been keeping up to date on Blogs, but the DVD project at Livewire has been taking up most of my time. Now that I've re-jigged (very technical term) the timeline, it looks like all the milestones are attainable. This might become a successful project after all! Pretty good for a completely new revenue stream for Livewire.

I'm MAKIN' this company money!

On top of DVD responsibilites, our tech/HTML guy left for "better things" downtown. That leaves me with the responsibility of handling all DVD production, Video editing, the resident Flash guru, and the only full-time employee who can program HTML. IOW, I'm back to being the primary developer for InvestorED.ca

Most people would be unhappy with this overload of work, but after spending the first six months of 2004 "twiddling my thumbs" as a job description, I'm glad to be so essential. They're all jobs that I enjoy, so that's a positive.

Can you tell that I've been watching four hours of Motivational Speaker videos over and over again for the last three weeks? I'm actually starting to believe them. In the last two months the only person who's heard Mike Lipkin more than I have, is Mike Lipkin.

Continuing on my brainwashed "focus on the positives" attitude: I figure that this is the best time of the year for this to happen. I'm effectively doing the jobs of four people, and the workload of at least 2 people. Barring any further problems, I should be able to hit all my deadlines."it's all about Time Management").

All of this only a couple of weeks away from my year-end review ;)

Just to finish off, most of my written creative genius has gone into personal emails, so I'm just going to CC a couple interesting comments here regarding all sorts of crap. If you've read it before, then enjoy it again!

There's an ad running on The Edge (or Mix99, something) that starts "What do sports fans talk about on their way home from a Toronto Raptors game?!?"

"I miss Vince Carter"
"I miss the Leafs"
"When's the Grapefruit League starting??"
"Why'd I pay a hundred bucks a seat for that?"

The Special Effects field trip was postponed... something stupid like that the fire dept. needed the firegrounds. Not sure how their practice is more important than blowing up a car, but I guess it's not my call.

I live about twenty minutes away from work, but commutes in the morning sometimes take upwards of forty. Between Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I spent two and a half hours driving to work. Keeping a good attitude on the drive in was fairly easy, since Humble & Fred were particularly funny both mornings. And since I've been leaving at 8:00, I get them for about a full hour. After they go off the air, I usually tune the radio back to The Edge - my default station (Sarah Mclaughlin and other soft-rock just doesn't get me "pumped up for my workday" like the 9 at 9 claims to do). I give Edge a 30 second try at entertaining me, and usually turn on the CD player after about ten seconds of that.

I'm thinking of getting a DVD player for home (simone starts jumping up-and-down with joy). But I really don't want to give up being able to play DivX movies that I download... well, I don't really download movies anymore. By the time they download, they're usually available on DVD at Rogers Video for ten bucks. What I'm really concerned about is being able to play South Park episodes.

They've gotten better at bringing them to Canada... there's only about a two month wait for an episode to air up here. But I still like to have the freedom of popping in a disc and watching a specific episode. The only thing I'd really be giving up is the network capability and playing video files off the network. That's been nice from time-to-time.

The nature of my job requires that I try out lots of DVD-ripping software, since we tend to get a lot of footage on DVD Video format - which means that I have to decrypt it in order to keep the footage digital. Frankly it's stupid that they don't have a proper program that lets you decode VOB files, even though my usage is 100% legal.

If anybody knows of a good program that will do the job, let me know. Right now I use VOBrator, but it crashes more than a Markham trophy wife's SUV in January.

Just bought the 256 MB CompactFlash card at Pacific Mall... SanDisk Ultra II (60x read/write, which makes it faster than CD-ROM, and about as fast as older hard drives) Paid $39 for it, even tho' the price tag said $49.00... my first negotiated price! yay! I'm such a white-boy/goy/wai-lo.

There's a REALLY funny story arc on MegaTokyo right now that is actually making me interested in the comic again. I was starting to lose interest - it started to become what I would call a "Humourous Drama" rather than a "Dramatic Comedy". The story jumps around characters, so here's the links to the comics that made me laugh my ass off.

BACKGROUND: Hayasaka is a Japanese girl who has a huge fan-base because she used to be a Pop Idol. Largo is... well... me.
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=649
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=650
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=653
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=654
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=655
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=657
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=658
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=660
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=662

:: Stephen 1:03 PM [+] ::

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A couple weeks ago, while browsing Queen Video (on Bloor, not Queen St. ?!?) Syl and I were chatting about what anime has come out in the last couple of years worth watching. Barring the DVD-enhanced versions of some classic favourites like Robotech and Ranma 1/2, and a collection of Fan Service stuff, there hasn't been much.

While on my Christmas break, I took one day to veg and do nuthin'. In the same day I that watched the sixth Pokemon movie, I finally sat down to watch "End of Evangelion". Eva had a predictably confusing "Akira-style", WTF-ending. Unfortunately, over the last few years since I was a big fan of the series, I've become disconnected from the characters and - to be frank - hate them. So the predictable ending and the loss of certain lives had no emotional impact on me...

SPOILER SENTENCE ...well, there was a tinge of emotion when Misato dies, but she was the only person who wasn't distinctly hate-able.

There has been no shortage of clever and original anime over the last five years, like Cowboy Bebop, Azumanga Daioh (haven't seen it, but supposed to be good) and the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series. However, the only one that I've watched all the way through in recent memory has been Love Hina - a series that has run its course and won't have any new episodes. Anything else I've watched has been largely Fan Service comedies.

However, it looks like we might be moving into a second revitalization of Anime titles. Maybe last year's Animatrix had something to do with it, but there's a lot of theatrically-released anime coming to North America this year. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence just finished its theatrical run and is sitting in the Rogers Video as I write this. Hayao Miyazaki's next opus, "Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (Howl's Moving Castle)" is already generating buzz, and the trailer can be found online.

More trailers can be spotted for Sky Blue and the Appleseed remake / sequel / something. The former uses a mix of CG and traditional animation, while the latter fuses the two - using the cel-shading filter built into most 3D rendering apps now-a-dayz.

While the Final Fantasy movie, "The Spirits Within" may have been a disappointment to many, the technology developed for the film has seen such heavy use that I'm sure it has been worth the investment by now. The biggest nouveau-anime flick I'm waiting for is the direct-to-DVD movie, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. They've just released the third trailer (flash site, so no deep-linking, but sound FX are taken from the original game) and the new trailer shows a fair bit of the plot. The bad news is that they've delayed release of the movie, but the good news is that it's rumoured that they will be following it up with a sequel GAME to FFVII:AC. Go Tifa! Go Tifa! Go Tifa! It might just remain a rumour, since it's been released that they're releasing the movie in the proprietary video disc format built for the PlayStation Portable (PSP).

The collection of theatrical-quality films sums up to a real boost for anime. If there's enough interest, then we might start getting some decent anime at the local Rogers and Blockbusters. Right now, all I can find is DVDs of the insanely dull Gasaraki or the umpteen variations on Gundam.

Oh, and Megas XLR could kick Gundam's ass, but that's partly because it has a better theme song, and it's driven by someone like Paul.

:: Stephen 11:47 AM [+] ::

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Nice, long, relaxing vacation. I took two of the last three weeks off work, and for the five days that I was in, I was digitizing video - so not as much work as fun! Just plopped a 250 GB SATA (geek) hard drive in the video edit suite to accomodate around 15 hours of footage that I have to capture, so now I've got nearly half a terabyte of storage in that beast. Sweet.

For details on my New Years, read the comprehensive entries on Reg and Hwan's sites.

I just had to post this site I found while looking for Interactive Fiction engines (for text-based RPGs). ScummVM runs most LucasArts Adventure games on multiple platforms including Mac, PocketPC, PalmOS and even Dreamcast. If I had one of those, I'd be tempted to try. Since I have half a dozen Pentium 200MHz machines lying around my house, I don't think it's an issue to put together a fully compatible system that would run any LucasArts games without help from ScummVM. The idea's still interesting.

Maybe if it gains popularity I can sell my old games on eBay?

:: Stephen 1:30 PM [+] ::

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