Do you get BBC America? If you do and you have a TiVo or DVR you should be recording and watching Top Gear. What is Top Gear and why should you watch it, I’m so glad you asked.

First let’s start with what Top Gear isn’t. It isn’t a car show. Well ok, sure, it’s about cars but it isn’t a car show. It isn’t a documentary show (but has some truly amazing cinematography). It isn’t boring, even if you can’t stand cars. It’s unlike any show you’ve ever watched actually. it isn’t reality TV but it’s not a sitcom either. So what is it? It’s awesome. Well since that’s not much of a description (unless you’re referring to an Aston Martin V8 Vantage), so what is it for real? Well it’s sort of like a late night comedy show where the cars are the guests. It’s hosted by three of the funniest guys you could ever watch on TV. There’s Jeremy Clarkson, the shows lead and wonderfully funny curmudgeon; Richard Hammond the great looking young guy who almost killed himself in a jet car last year; and James May (Captain Slow) the laid back British gentleman that you’d love to have a pint with. Where the show shines is with the interaction between the three when their great personalities and presence come screaming through. Sure the incredible cars are also the stars but this is a show for people that aren’t even into cars. If you’re reading this thinking “yeah yeah, but I really could care less about cars” trust me, you’re wrong. Remember it’s not about the cars, it’s about the characters and sure the cars are one of the characters but not the only characters.

Then there’s the crazy shit they do. There’s the episode where they turned a Renault Robin into a Space Shuttle (which actually flew and was amazing), the episode where they race a Bugatti Veryon against a fighter jet, and the episode I mentioned above where Richard Hammond crashed in a Jet Car at over 300mph. The greatest thing about the show is how funny it is, it’s easily the funniest show I currently watch on TV. The way the three of them play off each other (and the guests and cars) is just wonderful. Oh and I haven’t even mentioned one of the greatest parts of the show, the Stig. What is the Stig, well I guess you’ll have to tune in and see. Oh, and did I mention the cars? Well yeah, ok, it’s a car show so yes, they do drive cars. Amazing cars. But the great thing is they drive a lot of practical cars too. I was very pleased to see that my 350z did the exact same time on the track as Chris’ M3 (with another friend’s S4 1 second faster than both mine and Chris’). They keep track of all the cars on a giant board so you can see which car is fastest.

So if you get BBC America (Comcast in Denver/Boulder carries it) watch Top Gear (watch at least a few episodes to get into the characters). I think you’ll thank me for it…

Before I explain let me first say Happy ThanksGiving! Ok, now that’s out of the way back to my post. I woke up a little early this morning and have been watching the news. One of the first things I hear is a story about how a traffic ticket saved a little girl’s life. I watched the story very curious how this could be. Well as with most things in life don’t believe the headline, get the story.

So the story is this. A state trooper pulled over a a lady who was swerving from lane to lane. After pulling her over he finds out why, her two year old daughter is sick, crying, and crawling around outside of her child safety seat. Now I don’t have kids or anything but even I know you must have a small child (I think she was 2) in a child seat. So obviously he ticketed her for not having her daughter in the car seat. An hour later the lady was involved a high speed head on collision with a semi truck. She was badly hurt but should recover and thanks to the car seat the child was basically unhurt.

Here’s where the insanity comes in. The media is running this story as the ticket (and therefore the officer) saved the girls life (the headline on the link above is “UHP trooper’s traffic stop may have saved a life”). What the fuck? Did I read that right? No, the ticket didn’t save her life, a stupid mother almost got her daughter killed! How was the story not “Negligent mother could have killed child”. Or at a minimum “Office saves idiot mother’s daughter from serious injury”. The thing that scares me most here is we are now thanking our government for saving us from ourselves (or rather saving stupid people from themselves). Please, please stop the insanity…

So I’ve been dorking out playing Rock Bank for the last few hours or so and I have to say, I’m surprisingly disappointed. Maybe I just had expectations that were way to high. I also didn’t like Guitar Hero 3 the first week I played it so maybe it will grow on me.

I have a few issues with it. First, either my guitar is broken or the new strum bar just sucks ass (I can hear something banging around inside the guitar). It’s loose, mushy and just feels like crap. I like that it’s much quieter than the previous guitars and I love the new design (looks like a Fender Startocaster). It’s much larger and feels much more like a real guitar in your hands. The addition of the smaller fret buttons at the bottom of the fret board is nice but they just don’t work that well. It’s not smooth to move between them and the raised bumps on them are too small to easily find your place. Given that you can’t really look down you should be able to feel this very easily, maybe it will just take me some time to get used to it.

Don’t get me started on the drums. Yes, they are built very well and look like they will take a lot of abuse. It is hard to get comfortable with them, you can’t really sit on a couch and need to sit on a real chair to play them well. The issue is they track oddly, or maybe my TV just isn’t calibrated properly. I’ve tried to play them three times (remember, I can sorta play drums, certainly enough to keep a beat with real musicians) and each time I’m getting boo’ed off. I can’t see how, I’m right in beat with what I hear so maybe I’m just retarded.

Don’t get me started on the USB hub. I mean I know that they didn’t need to go nice here but come on, this thing is a tiny piece of shit with a very short power cord. When this system is almost $200 can’t you give me a nicer hub than this? The packaging of the whole system sucks (looks like something for a factory, not a “cool” game). Oh, and from what I can tell so far my mic doesn’t work at all, or at least when I plug it in the game tells me there is no mic connected. Bargh!

So I gotta say after playing a few hours I wish I hadn’t spent the almost $200 on this. I’ll post back in a few days, I did read that single player is pretty weak so on Thanksgiving I’ll be taking it to a friends house where 4 of us can play all at once. That will be the real test… Man I hope it lives up to the hype! I will let you know in a few days, right now I’m back to Guitar Hero 3 for some fun…

So I was going to put this in the post I plan to follow this one, installing Vista from an image onto a Macbook Pro, but I’m so annoyed about it I figured it deserved its own post. Apple, in their infinite wisdom to make things as easy as possible hasn’t had a fucking CD/DVD eject button on a computer in years. Like most things Apple if you live in their world 100% of the time this isn’t an issue, you can simply hold down the eject button on the keyboard and you’re fine. But these days Apples don’t just run OS X anymore. So while trying to install Vista via WinPE I needed to eject the disk to put in the DVD I created with the Vista image on it (since WinPE doesn’t have network drivers for the Macbook Pro). Well I’m screwed, there is no way at all to manually eject the disk. I even started to take the damn thing apart to find the button but it’s so sealed up that I was sure to fail (or damage something).

Yes I know what I’m doing it non-standard and I think that’s the problem with Apple. If you do what they expect, what they want of you things will generally work great. It’s when you get outside of their rather small box that things go wrong. For a company that markets itself to people that live outside the box they need to get a bit more flexible I think. Remember, step 2 is opening the box!

Ok, so that’s probably not going to be the next hit single by Buggles but it’s exactly what HP and a number of technology companies are doing. For some reason they don’t understand that the primary key to consumer computing is tech support. They have also reminded me why I don’t buy consumer level hardware unless I can help it (or it comes from someone like Apple or IBM). Let me explain.

On Wednesday afternoon Jason decided to get himself a new home PC. We talked about it a bit and afterward he decided to head out to Costco to see if he could find himself a deal. And man did he. He got a smoking fast quad core machine with a 24″ LCD monitor for $1600. A great price to be sure. Of course he brought it straight to me so I could install our corporate image of Vista on it and get rid of all the crap that HP (and just about every other major PC maker) installs. I threw it on the network and set out to reimage it. Everything went smoothly as it booted up but quickly I realized it didn’t load the network driver. Bummer I thought, now I’m going to have to track down that driver for later when Vista is actually installed. I went on my way installing the image from DVD instead. When I rebooted sure enough no network driver, so being a good little dork I headed to HP’s website, this is where things start to go wrong, very wrong.

I head over to the support and downloads page and type in the model number from the front of the PC. Nothing. Nada. I think “huh, how can an HP machine not exist on their site?” so I do some more looking around. I see a sticker on the side of the machine that has some sort of part number or something (not the human readable m9077c) and try that. Nothing. Nada. Again. “Ok, this is getting very weird, let’s try Google”. “Ah, a result, but only one?”. I take a look at the only result is a link to Costco’s site (which is a bad link BTW) and that’s it. “How the hell doesn’t this machine exist anywhere on the net?!?!”. Ok, enough of this let’s look through the stuff that came with the machine. Again nothing, nada, no CD’s, DVD’s, etc. Ok enough is enough let’s try tech support. Here’s where we really start going down hill fast.

After sitting on hold for about 10 minutes (which really wasn’t that bad actually) I get through to someone, clearly in India who I can barely understand. I spend 30 minutes on the phone with her asking where the download page is so I can download all the Vista drivers for the machine. It came with Vista so clearly there are drivers somewhere right? Well after 30 minutes of back and forth, being on hold she tells me I need to call Microsoft. “Call Microsoft!” I exclaim, what the fuck for? “You built the machine, not Microsoft, they have no fucking clue what network card is in it!”. She puts me on hold for 5+ minutes and comes back with the same answer, call Microsoft. Ok, clearly this isn’t going anywhere so I ask for a supervisior. Again hold. Again “sorry, they are busy, call Microsoft”. I tell her no, that isn’t an acceptable answer, “I want a fucking supervisior and I want them right now”. Hold again (5+ minutes again) and finally I get a “supervisior” (I’m guessing the guy in the cube next to her). He then tells me the exact same thing, “call Microsoft”. Finally I get out of him that the only way to get the drivers is to get the restore DVD which, convienently, they don’t ship with the machine. Takes 2 weeks and costs $50 to get it. So I finally realize there is no way in hell these people are going to help me so why not try a different tactic. I know it’s an Intel card but not which one. So I ask “ok, well could you please tell me which Intel network card is in the machine?”. “Uh, it’s an Intel, uh, 10/100, uh Ethernet, uh network adaptor” (clearly he’s reading this from some sheet). “Uh thanks, I can read the box too, WHICH Intel network card is it, there are hundreds!”. I’ll spare you the rest but 10 minutes later I was slamming the phone down having wasted more than an hour with nothing to show for it. BARGH!

So what did I do? What I should have done in the first damn place, I figured it out for myself. I cracked it open and found the model number of the motherboard. “Ah, it’s an Asus board”, 5 minutes later I’d figured out everything I needed, Network, Sound, Wireless, etc. It took a little sluthing but I finally got everything running just great.

So, HP, you can send me my check for the hour of my life you wasted and for the time I had to spend looking for the shit that should have been on your site in the first place. How on earth could you sell a computer at a major retailer that doesn’t exist on your site! Oh, and you can send me my check for the following, for any of you that have this machine here are all the drivers you’ll need if you fresh install Vista on it:

Network
Wireless
HD Audio

I think I can safely say I’ll never buy another HP product (or at a minimum won’t be calling their support department). Further reminder of why it’s worth it to spend a little more for business level hardware, Apple/IBM I won’t let myself, or my friends, stray from you again…

Hello there, and welcome to the all new Jasbone.com! As you can see I’ve made quite a few changes to my site in an effort to make it easier to read and to encourage myself to post much more often. You’ll see that I’ve added a number of new widgets and features, I still have a few more that I’m working on so I’ll point those out as I add them in.

Hopefully you like the new design as much as I do. If you’ve got any ideas for the site please drop me a line at ross@jasbone.com