Today I’m free. Today is the last day of my Verizon wireless contract and in a few short weeks I’ll be a happy iPhone user and an AT&T customer. The company is horrid. My fairly cool Razr isn’t cool at all. My nephews Cingular/AT&T Razr can do all sorts of cool stuff and will communicate over bluetooth with a Mac. My Verizon Razr can’t. I can use V-cast to get content but all the content I have purchased off iTunes? Well, the only way to get that from my Mac to the phone is to buy a microSD card and an adapter. When I complained to Verizon about the crippling of the handset and asked for a Razr with all the features turned on, they told me I could return the phone and go back to a less feature-rich phone.

My DSL line is crap. When I went from voice and DSL to dry-loop DSL, they disconnected me. Then I was told I couldn’t have DSL in my location, after using home DSL and paying for it for two years!
It took almost a month to get DSL turn back on at the house and now every time it rains my line drops. I’ve called support so many times I have their script memorized. Of course you have to put up with the Peter from the PC support area telling you that “Verizon DSL doesn’t really support macs.” Then you get transfered to the Mac support line and they are shocked that Peter from the PC support office would say something like that. Once you get to a technician you restart your modem and they test the line and it works for 15 to 45 seconds and then it drops again. They promise to send a tech, but they never show up. I got a sticky note on my NID saying the line tested fine (of course they don’t show up if its raining, which is the only time I have the problem.)

I even tried to switch to Earthlink but Earthlink uses Verizon for the last mile connection and the Earthlink DSL line was 60% slower than the Verzion line to the same house (the NIDs were a few inches apart and I used the same internal wiring to both DSL modems) When I called Earthlink to get the line speed boosted I got sent over to Verizon, so I figured I wasn’t really getting out from under the red V and I gave up. Fairpoint bought them out and sooner or later a different company will be handling my dry-loop DSL, maybe then I can get someone to fix the rain flap problem.

Sure, poor customer support, crippled handsets, incompetent service techs, and a less than stellar product offering is frustrating and wastes time and if I live anywhere other than Vermont I could dump them like a hot rock and get something else, but my Verizon story isn’t anything compared to the pain and suffering the big red V caused this family: Verizon refuses to help locate body of a missing woman for 4 days

I was very disappointed with the initial release of Pirates! The Firaxis guys always seemed to get games out for the Mac fairly quickly, but Pirates! and Civ4 were sort of a downward trend for them. I had given up hope of playing Pirates! on anything other than my son’s Xbox, but a completely unrelated google search for video game midi files brought me to a Macworld UK article that had a link to this
Pirates! for the Mac

Spore can wait until they fix the DRM or Christmas when my kids will want it, I’m spending my video game allowance on Pirates! This game was wonderful back in the old days on the C-64 and the Xbox version is pretty good. I’m looking for a game to play when I’m not on-line (and would normally be WoWing it up) so this is perfect. If the game is half as fun on the mac as it is on the Xbox, it will be well worth the $29.99 retail price.

The big news this 9th of September is that we have new iPod nanos, a new iPod touch, and new iPod software. There’s some HD content on the iTunes store and iTunes 8 is being released sometime today. Software Update doesn’t see the new iTunes software (as of 2:30PM Eastern). I was really hoping for new Macbooks and Macbook Pros. I like my Macbook but, it just doesn’t have enough horsepower for what I’m doing with my classes and security work.

I’m surprised at how much hype was around a product refresh announcement. I’ve been an Apple customer and fan for a number of years now and I’m still surprised at how many people are excited by product announcements and the large volumes of rumor mongering and speculation that precedes one of these gatherings.