I hated the ringtones that came with my phone. Why is it so hard to just have a plain ring sound and a plain beep sound for voicemail?

Totally unrelated to not annoying ringers, guess what I just set as my ringtone?

Nightwish…WISHMASTER!

Faster!
A Dentist!
Hard porn!
Julius Ceaser!
Warrior!
This rifle!
In me!
The fishmaster!

Off to draw the comic! I have me a Kamelot and Within Temptation DVD to watch tonight. I think I’m gonna have Harkell set up the two monitors in a dual monitor setup so I can become one with the audio and visual of the metal while drawing arts. Hardcore.

All I am missing is Dragonforce.If you don’t know Dragonforce, Here is a sample on their myspace this is what I’m talking about. XD XD INHUMAN RAMPAGE!!!!!

Harknell thinks I am retarded. XD HE’S RIGHT. I am gonna sneak some Dragonforce onto his MP3 player, Again. HEE.

Joss Whedon speaks out about the public beating and murder of a young woman:

“Let’s Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death. This is not my blog, but I don’t have a blog, or a space, and I’d like to be heard for a bit.

Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones…”

Full article here.

You might recall that I just tried out a new cell phone – The Helio Ocean.

Well, I’ve just canceled my account at Helio after having to wait on hold with Helio for over an HOUR AND A HALF. I actually never did get through to their cancellation department. After that hour and a half, I ended up re-dialing into the main tech-help customer service area and waiting for another 45 minutes. Then I firmly told the person that they would right NOW find a way to cancel my account. He had to get his manager, but I’m finally out of there thank hell.

With such a long wait time, a lot of people must be canceling with them. Gee, I wonder why.

I’m mailing the Ocean back to them for a refund. I really wanted to love this thing. I tried to make it work for a few weeks, but the problems Helio and the Ocean device have are just BAD. It’s not a fun device to use. Helio is not a great company to deal with. The most frustrating thing is that the hardware for this device is really awesome. It’s just that everything else is off the hook bad. If they fix the problems, I’ll try it again, but I am not holding my breath.

I’m going to take my refund and buy a refurbished Blackjack on my existing Cingular account. The Blackjack is Windows Mobile, which I HATE, but believe it or not it’s so much better than the Helio Ocean’s OS. God I never thought I would ever say that WM was better than anything but there ya go. At least I can check my email reliably and use a browser that isn’t total shit (AKA Opera) with WM.

Here are the reasons I canceled:

1. Helio CSRs aren’t very knowledgeable about the technology and many times told me to try things that obviously would not solve the problem. Usually they just tell you anything to get you off the phone.

2. I had so many problems with the Ocean that I had to call customer service over 5 times in 7 days.

3. Email sucks on the Ocean.

4. The email feature only checked my email properly half the time.

5. I have no idea if it took my mail off the server or not thanks to a nightmare of a user interface.

6. It would force me sometimes to reply and include the original as an attachment without indicating to me that it was doing this.

7. It often failed to connect to the network for long periods of time while. (This is inexcusable – Helio runs on Sprint’s network and the people sitting next to me on Sprint phones had no problem connecting to the network. This is obviously a Helio Ocean issue, but they refused to acknowledge any problems when I called in. )

8. The web browser is absolutely the worst thing on wheels. I can say that the Ocean’s email feature at least works sometimes. The browser is not usable AT ALL.

9. It forces the web pages to all be reformatted to plain text, which sucks. It just leads the user to have to load the page twice to force it to load in HTML. There is no way to adjust this preference. This is likely a cost-saving method to deter the user from using much data transfer. Congratulations, I canceled my account and will never use any more of your data.

10. I could not post to Harknell.com with it. I could not post to my blog with it. I could not log in to Livejournal with it. All of these things were easy to accomplish on my old Pocket PC. Why are they irritating and nearly impossible on a device that is touted as an easy to use web browsing device?

Sure I could get to these sites with the Ocean – eventually. However getting this to happen often took me multiple tries. Just to log into Livejournal it took me 5 tries and almost a half an hour. I can do this in 30 seconds or less on a Pocket PC. I tried to make a post to Harknell.com only to find that while writing a post, the enter key takes me out of the post area. There is no way to use the Ocean and make a post that has any paragraph or line breaks. Just never ending blocks of text. I had to make the post later from a desktop.

11. The text entry always capitalizes the first letter of a sentence FOR you, which is really not intuitive. I often ended up typing in all caps because the shit key locked me into all caps. Text entry is not fun on the Ocean.

12. The browser will often quit without warning because the end key is right next to the D-pad that you have to use to navigate in the browser. There is no warning, the browser just closes. There is no cache in the browser, so if you’ve fought bloody hell to get to a place on a web page, you have to re-do it all from scratch. God damn this thing is a piece of SHIT.

13. Helio contact emails do not display on the Ocean. Helio customer service surveys do not display on the Ocean. Hell, everything from Helio doesn’t even work on their own device.

14. I emailed them a week ago asking where I could submit descriptions of bugs. I got two disjointed responses from two seperate CSRs today, a LONG TIME after I emailed them in the first place. (Too late.)

15. Helio fucked up so badly that their CSRS kept giving me free credits on my bill. In one week I had $50 of free credits for my first months and $30 for each of the next three months. My first month would be almost free. That’s great, but their service sucks so badly that it’s not worth it.

16. If I stayed with Helio, I would have been forced to pay for a plan that included features like Helio on Top, a news ticker feature. It doesn’t work on the Ocean yet, so why am I being charged a plan fee that includes something I can’t get? Why does your CSR say that it is available and that I have to download it? Its clearly NOT AVAILABLE FOR THE OCEAN. Then she tells me that it will be in a few months but it’s not available now. GREAT WHY AM I PAYING NOW FOR THIS SHIT IF ITS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH MY PHONE YET?

There is more but I am tired. Helio clearly released a phone too early that should have been a beta. Simple things like allowing Opera Browser to be installed on this device could have redeemed it a lot, but they do not allow Opera to be downloaded onto the Ocean so you are forced to use their shitbox of a browser.

The only thing that this phone does well is the hardware. I also enjoyed using AIM on it, but you can do that on any other phone these days. Some people online have reported problems with AIM on the Ocean, but I have not experienced any of those problems myself. Anyway, what good is hardware and AIM if the rest doesn’t work right? Why am I paying out the ass for features that are broken?

Oh yeah I’m not.

Have all the metalheads heard the new Nightwish single? The one with the new singer, Anette Olzon? There are samples of it and a few other tracks that are presumably from the new album here. What do you think of her?

You can buy the single here, but I have no idea how that works for us Americans. I won’t be buying it – I’m waiting for the physical album. I like having liner notes and more than one song. However, if you buy it from America, be sure to post and tell me how the process went.

Meow Meow, here is where I get catty. I am honestly not sure what I think of the new singer. I asked Harknell what he thought and he said she sounded shrill and weak compared to what we’re used to.

On first listen she sounds generic to me. Sure it’s good metal, but with Tuomas and Marco, it’s almost impossible to NOT have good metal. You could put a fucking monkey in there and have some hot monkey metal. In my opinion, Charlotte Wessels from Delain has a more distinctive voice. Why didn’t they just get her? There is one part at the end of the new Nightwish song Amaranth where it just sounds like Anette is doing her best imitation of Tarja for a second, but she just can’t handle it. It makes me think I just want Tarja back.

Is it good? Yeah. Will I buy it? Yeah. Duh. But it’s NOT Nightwish.

The bottom line is what I’ve always said. They should have changed the name. Call it Nightwish 2 or something stupid. Anything different. It’s not the same band without the same singer. That would also allow the fans to judge Anette for her talent and not compare her to Tarja. And for chrissakes don’t have her dress like a Tarja poser. Have her do something dark but different. Tarja did the stark black hair thing. Have Anette do something elvish with greens and reds and bodices. Softer, but still dark and appropriate to the subject matter.

Certainly Anette can sing OK. It’s just different than what made Nightwish famous. I wonder if she has as strong a classical background as Tarja, because it does not sound like it to me. I went and listened to some of her old work in the band Alyson Avenue and still feel that way. I remain skeptical as to how she’ll be able to handle the old songs and not blow out her voice. Tarja was a fucking master and the tour schedule was even hard on her.

Now let’s talk about image. Image is everything in the music business. As catty as it seems coming from me, image is part of the reason she was hired. I don’t personally feel she is nearly as cute as Tarja. And, judging from these two pictures of Anette, they went overboard trying to make her look like Tarja. You be the judge:

Anette with her old band, Abba: Super Gay Man Edition Alyson Avenue:

Anette dressed up as Tarja for Halloween the new Nightwish singer. Click to see larger:

It certainly should be interesting. In the meantime, Tarja is finishing off her solo album and there are some things on her myspace. Please tour America, Tarja. Don’t make me fly to Finland.

Here is a pic of Tarja for good measure:

See what I mean? I think the dark image just suits Tarja a bit better than it does Anette. Anette should be an elf. For reels.

Check out this Gender Genie. It lets you stick a passage of writing into a form and it tells you if the writing is male or female based on key words. Harknell had me do this with one of my rants, wondering if it would come out male. Surprisingly, I came out female.