NOT HAPPY JAN!

Author: jawapro
Date: Wed 12/09/2007 10:49 PM




 
 
Well – I’m currently rather angry.

But before I go on with that – I’ll let you guys all laugh at me.

I occasionally enjoy playing the Sims 2. About once a year or so I’ll decide I want to play it, and then a week later wonder why I’d bothered and stop.

Ok - you can stop laughing now.

Well, it’s been ages since I last played it, and I decided I’d like to give it another shot.

But instead of borrowing a copy from a mate again, I decided to buy it (I’m trying to own all the game I play these days). So I headed off to ebay to see how expensive it was.

And for a fairly cheap price I could buy a copy that came with 3 of the expansions packs.

So I bought it, and it arrived very quickly (I was impressed – as it had come from overseas). But when I opened it and read the back, I knew something was up. The Case looks pretty good and professional, but the back talks about the fact that it comes with “trainers” and “cheats” and things. Somehow I doubt that the legit copies of the game would come with them.

So I asked the seller point-blank. “Is this a legal copy”.

And he was quite happy to admit it wasn’t.

So now I’m rather angry.

I’m not a big fan of the software copyright laws or the price of games and things – but I really detest anyone who copies someone else’s work for profit.

So now I have to decide what to do about it. I’ve asked for my money back – and if I don’t get it, I’ll contact ebay and try to get my money back from them. It was via Paypal, so there’s a fair chance I’d get it back. And I might even contact EA Games just to see if they can do anything against him. I’m rather annoyed – as I’ve already said.

But anyway – enough of that for now.

In other news.

The results of my opinion polls are in.

9 out of 10 Klutz’s prefer www.headlessmoron.com to www.jawapro.com for their browsing experience. And so, it appears, do the rest of you.

And yes – that’s how Klutz worded his response when we were chatting on Yahoo.

So I’m going to transfer this website over in the next few days. This domain (www.jawapro.com) will continue to work – no worries, but the website will look like www.headlessmoron.com instead.

And I had an embarrassing moment at work today. I had replaced a computer a while back (changing host name) and it turns out that another computer was trying to print using it’s printer via the old name – and I hadn’t noticed. And it took me a while to fix it because the printer driver thought it had the wrong ink cartridge installed or something stupid.

Wouldn’t have been an issue – except I happened to be with the Boss at the time – so it was rather embarrassing.

Not as bad as Nifen though. Sounds like he’s had a lousy day. He was installing a hard-drive in a server, and the whole thing crashed – and they’ve been working all night trying to fix it. Not his fault, mind you, but it’s an awful feeling when you mess something so important up.

I’ll be praying for you Nifen, wether you appreciate it or not.

Anyway – hasn’t been a great day for either of us. And I’m still annoyed that I got scammed on ebay. I had a vague feeling it might not be legit, so I’d actually emailed another customer who had already received theirs to ask if it was legit – and they said it was! Far out!

Anyway, stay tuned and I’ll let you know how I go. I don’t even feel like playing the Sims anymore anyway.

 


Comments: 9

 

Comment: 1

Author: Nifen
Date: Wed 12/09/2007 11:33 AM




let comment on your bad day compared to mine.
Mine well 6 pm change over time. 2 new disks, need to be raided and added to the exciting raid, sounds simple. I´ve been told its hot swap so no restarting needed. put 1 disk in, seems fine. put second disk in and it starts chatting to each other and then nothing. frozen, then blue screen of death.
turn server off and on again, no booting. appears the the boot sector has been wiped on both drives. or something else. not sure...

soo lost total server of a customer, they have about 40 employee´s and about 80 gig of customer contacts (which is fucken loadsss when you think of how small a contact is) all been wiped. all the work is gone too. backup didn´t work as well as we´d like so thats scared.

Now i come to work, think oh well they will recover it some how.

And another back up seems to have been failing for about 3 weeks, no one noticed and im getting the blame.

someone tried to recover some lost data and well, it looks doutful. i´ve had my boss breathing down my neck, and everyone´s just been a bit angry.

to recover the data from the other company they are saying around 3000 to 9000 pounds to recover.
oh gooody!!!

second server company, is bitchy at the best of times, so this isn´t going to help. and just recently thid company backups arn´t running. so now 3 companies with bad backups. 2 of which are being blamed on me. (well sort of, just grumpy looks)

wonder if i´ll be coming to work next week?

 

Comment: 2

Author: jawapro
Date: Thu 13/09/2007 11:34 AM




You´ve had a worse day than me mate.

How long before you were planning to resign? I hope you dont end up leaving the company on a bad note - that wouldnt look good for your next employer.

 

Comment: 3

Author: turkeybrain
Date: Thu 13/09/2007 03:11 PM




Well, to put it mildly, I don´t think I have ever had anything that bad happen to me! As I´m still only a lowly student, I don´t get to put my mitts on anything like that. But it seems odd that they are blaming faulty backups on you. Surely they should be running some sort of mirrored RAID so there´s no issue if a drive falls over, and then also having some sort of backup to an offsite location with a different style of media. Why didn´t they dump this stuff to tape or something?! You really can´t be blamed for that one!

Man I´m glad I don´t have any big responsibilities really!

And I am also opposed to people making money off illegal games. That is totally wrong, and its especially bad when you aren´t informed before you buy it! I don´t imagine I will ever buy games off ebay! Hope the money comes back to you...

 

Comment: 4

Author: jawapro
Date: Thu 13/09/2007 03:11 PM




You´ll get there one day Turkey.

It might have been a backup that Nifen was supposed to have set up - and thus they could say he didnt do his job (maybe). But they still should have checked to make sure it was doing the right thing.

And I´ve bought many games from ebay - and this is the first one that´s been dodgey.

If it looks too cheap to be true - and it´s from Singapore then it´s probably illegal.

I´d thought it might have been, so I even asked a previous buyer, and they said it looked legit. I must admit, the DVD looks pretty good for a fake.

The seller has agreed to refund my money - so I´m waiting to see if he refunds all of it.

I guess I´ll end up with a burnt copy of the Sims for free. Not exactly what I was after...

 

Comment: 5

Author: turkeybrain
Date: Thu 13/09/2007 04:05 PM




It will certainly be interesting to know if they will refund your postage as well. If I were you I would appreciate that too. I suppose ending up with a free illegal version of Sims 2 is better than ending up with an illegal copy that cost you a fair bit!

But that is so not the point! Ah well, at least you had good intentions. Will you be buying a legal copy with the money you got back?

 

Comment: 6

Author: jawapro
Date: Thu 13/09/2007 04:05 PM




If I´d wanted an illegal copy - I could have downloaded it. So I wasnt saying it was a good thing that I am going to be left with the dodgey copy.

But I dont have a desire to play the Sims at the moment (occasionally I´ll feel like it - used to be about when I should have been studying for exams). If I decide I still want to play it - I´ll buy a copy. It probably wont be as cheap as this one - but at least it´ll be legal.

 

Comment: 7

Author: Nifen
Date: Fri 14/09/2007 08:09 AM




lets work out how fucked things are right now.

I was there until 11 pm tuesday night, so i got home around 1. then andrew took over until about 2 the next afternoon when byron took over until 7 when i arrived and i worked with him until 11 and got home around 1 pm. then went to work at 8 am and worked until 7 pm and tomorrow i´ll be working all day again.

fucked wouldn´t describe the pain im feeling. I dont care it died, not at all, i care that im working my ass off fixing the shitty thing and not getting paid for it!!!
im really depressed and i still have 2 months till i quit, the thing is 2 months usually goes zooom and its gone, but right now it feels like 2 years!!!

The day i tell them im leaving, is the day i dont give a shit what happens to all there crappy servers. (which are expensive, but i still think they are shit)
who the fuck would use tape backups really (well apart from most of the world) they are totally crap. ok sure use it for daily backups, but weekly should be disaster recovery backup and should be used on a hard disk instead of tape. it would only cost around 200 pounds to sort it out and that would give you 4 weeks of backups which is enough.

much faster to restore!!!

Oh and i´ve got a good friend from Microsoft now. he´s great, really great help!!!! He gave me a bit of software, it fits on a cd, and well i can get into anyyyy and i do mean ANYY windows system with out the password. Its like a backdoor to the world of windows. It was a bit hush hush and all and i wont mention names. but this software fucking rocksss!!! I used it on 3 machines today which we lost the admin passwords. and it totally kills the password and allows you to enter a new one. Takes about 5 minutes to boot and all is done.

plus loads of other cool features including data recovery!!!

Great having a microsoft expert, he´s a developer!! :)

 

Comment: 8

Author: jawapro
Date: Fri 14/09/2007 08:10 AM




That CD could be very useful :)

And we use tapes for backups (as does most of the world, as you said). But we also copy stuff to other servers and are trying to have redundancy for all our systems on other servers in case one goes belly-up.

And please - DONT SWEAR ON MY WEBSITE! I know you´re feeling rather pissed off at the moment - but I really dont want people swearing on my site.

What is so hard about getting the server back up and running? Or is it getting the data back thats proving the trouble?

 

Comment: 9

Author: Nifen
Date: Sat 15/09/2007 02:20 AM




Sorry about that Rob, i dont swear so much in person (i hope) but you pick it up with out noticing.

Hard part is getting back the data, even now we don't have it all, but instead we sent the hard drives off to a data recovery place, as they are in nearly perfect shape it will only cost 1900 pounds!!!!!!! just to plug in and copy data off, there not damaged anyway, they were just not bootable, its just as they are raid, we dont have a server to stick them into (another one)

Still going, friday at 5 pm and im now fixed most of there pc's and reconnected them to the domain but now adding 8 more new pc's.
doing 2 at a time, when one finishes, i swap it out for another one and keep going. leaving the monitor and keyboard and mouse in the same place.
quite quick going now.  nearly finished 5, one's decided to download 84 updats grr. while rest haven't. soo im on an odd number now.