I've used Verizon Wireless since roughly 2002; I've only had to call customer service a handful of times, but it was usually painless and quick. The only time things took a while was when I had to get my phone serviced under the best-buy service plan, and I "lost" my unlimited data. The Verizon rep got me my unlimited data back, but it took a couple of weeks to receive a waiver.

Longer version: I left my phone in my jeans when they went in the wash. Took it to bby, where I had a service plan for the phone, and they gave me a temporary feature phone and, while activating it, told the Verizon rep that I had unlimited data and that they should give it back to me when I received my repaired phone. When I got my phone back, they put me on a metered plan. The Verizon rep who worked on getting my unlimited back said that bby had screwed up and that, since I had a smart-phone data plan, they were supposed to give me a smart-phone as a temp. Tbh, I believe the Verizon rep because I recall clearly that when I had gone to bby, the person who handled my service claim said they didn't have an open phone to give me to use as a temp and called her manager over, who told her to open up & give me the cheapest phone they had on hand.

I uninstalled FB from my phone as much as I could a year or so ago. I specifically went out of my way to disable check-ins and the like as much as I could, yet I noticed that every time I fired up the FB app, it would engage my gps for a good 30 seconds. So I uninstalled all the updates, logged out, and now use the mobile web interface if I need to. Yeah I still use FB, but I don't really trust them at all.

I've never really had uptime issues w/ Comcast's service. However, roughly 5 years ago I was trying to price Comcast vs Verizon for internet-only service. The phone rep I spoke with from Comcast kept telling me that it was impossible to get cable internet w/o cable tv.

I can only imagine that's why they made this statement...

is that the government version of saying, "I know I'll get down-modded for this, but..."

If a person shows up and the product isn't in stock and they get angry, that person is probably a douchebag. If said person then proceeds to take it out on the workers, that person is definitely a douchebag. Even if you've had a bad day, there's no excuse for that unless the employee personally did something outrageous.

Nice write-up. I'm also a relatively old hand at MMOs -- started in college with EQ, then played DAoC, tried my hand at FF XI for a couple of months, and played WoW since basically release. I quit WoW about 1.5 years ago, and only really started playing ToR because friends and family would be playing.

I like that the quests draw you in to the story-line. I've been playing as an evil smuggler, however, and all the side-story stuff has started to become a little stale to me. Right now I'm on Alderaan and it just doesn't make sense why I'm getting involved in all these things. Even the lure of credits doesn't really make sense since I'm on the trail of Nok Drayen's treasure. I finally realized last night that this is why I was becoming bored -- if I was playing a good guy I would be more interested in helping out, but instead I just mash the spacebar and pick the meanest dialog options available.

I'm a little torn on the crafting system. I like that you can send your companions off to gather and do missions -- this means I don't have to fly around and manually gather mats. On the other hand, the timers can be a little prohibitive. For example, if I have only an hour to play tonight then I might only be able to send companions out once or twice depending on the missions. You're also pretty limited in what you can do until you get your ship as you generally want to have your first companion with you. Lately I've found myself playing some other game for 30 mins or so, then logging in to check the AH, send companions out, then log out again.

There seems to be a little imbalance as well in the various crew skills. Slicing, at release, was a killer crew skill. I've read accounts on g+ where people took it just for the credits it could generate and, by the time it was nerfed, had already amassed over 500k credits. I have one guy who has armstech and the weapons it creates are just plain underwhelming. I can make lvl 33 weapons, but all the trainer recipes are green. Why would I use any of those when I can go to a commendation vendor and for ~14 tokens buy a pistol that blows away anything I could make? Meanwhile, my bro-in-law's brother sends me nice blue gear a few times a week -- all stuff that he made with armortech, with recipes he learned from the crew skill trainer.

The reverse engineering system is an interesting idea, but not very reliable. I basically only RE stuff I make to get back the materials (gun barrels excepted). Say I RE a pistol and get a new recipe -- the blue schematic will have the exact same stats as the green one, except it will have a small added bonus (which is randomly selected when you discover the recipe). My smuggler can make a crappy blue pistol that has a tiny amount of defense on it -- a stat that I will never need.

I dislike a lot of the choices they've made so far with the UI. Maybe it's because I haven't modded mine? I'm pretty accustomed to the rather useful interface for WoW and a handful of mods for tracking cooldowns and abilities (mods which, I understand, are now incorporated in to the base UI for cataclysm?). You're right that the AH interface is pretty awful too. I almost feel like they made some UI choices just to be different from WoW, with no concern over whether it was a step in the proper direction. There are still a handful of places where they messed up very basic things. With one of my companions, every time he appears / is re-summoned, this one skill is toggled to on. All his other skills remember their previous state... but not this one. And it's the skill where he pulls the target to him, so not exactly what you generally want as the default for two ranged characters. At least there's no hunter dead-zone. Another one I noticed is that my "show Sith corruption" option keeps resetting to "on" every time I have to load in to a zone. I'm just confused as to how stuff like this made it past basic QA.

I purchased Elder Signs from the market because I enjoy Arkham Horror so much. I found the game to be a huge disappointment. I wanted to do the auto-refund thing, but by the time the app had downloaded all its data files (which occurs the first time you start the game), much more than 15 minutes had elapsed. 15 minutes for an auto-refund is nice, but it's by no means a perfect system.

The way I see it, "Mayor Quan never said they coordinated" is different from "Mayor Quan said they did not coordinate"...

In a large part of NJ, all left turns are made from the right lane... jug-handles, etc. Just a thought.

The year the first Android phone was released, sales for it were up infinite percent from the prior year! Amazing!!

Wait, now the zombies will be ONLINE?? Oh jesus christ, we're fucked!

A while back I tried some flash-based game on facebook and noticed it was causing my browser to eat up nearly 100% of my 3-core cpu. I couldn't tell if the game / flash was just that poorly written or if it was using my comp to do some sort of background processing like some sort @Home software. The game mechanics were designed, too, so that you really needed to leave the browser open w/ the game running to succeed (even when you weren't actively playing).

Not sure if you're just joking with a uid that low, but "fag" is just slang for a person. "newfag" is something like "the new guy" or "newbie". "wowfag" is someone who plays WoW. You get the idea.

Seriously, these people already spent time finding & downloading the film, and possibly the even watched it. Haven't they suffered enough already?