Loading... How Verizon FiOS is as enjoyable as Event Horizon
So sometimes I need to get something off my chest. Call it a PSA, a public service announcement (PSA). Is this a PSA for Event Horizon or Verizon? You be the judge. You may be a defender of either of these “products.” If so, comment away. But remember, my mother said I was special. 
The movie, Event Horizon looked good on the commercials: sexy spaceship, strong looking cast, and a goth looking warp drive. I was ready for a great show. Then about thirty minutes into the film, I wanted to leave the theater because the same suspenseful music used in Friday the 13th movies grated my ears to forshadow something wasn’t right.
That’s about what it was like using FiOS: the HD channels were an extraordinary 1080P, the Internet connectivity gave me undreamed of download speed, and the goth looking Verizon router was loaded with features.
But then the problems started. The router would reset itself and lose my settings, the WIFI would shut down and come up again. Some features of the router only pretended to work. The equipment acted is if I got massive speed but at the cost of tapping into a universe of infinite evil.
I could almost live with this. After all, were talking about Verizon here. This is the company that cooperated with the so called Patriot Act and sold out Americans to the NSA as part of a warrentless wiretapping program. So their boardroom is comfortable with practicing evil.
But Verizon, in it’s infinite wisdom, decide to block port 80, which means in laymen’s terms, I could no longer host LancerKind.com.
After talking to an amazing number of different people at Verizon, and searching the Internet, I decide that working around this problem wasn’t worth the amount of time it was taking. After another call to Verizon and requesting that they put GIANT warning labels on all their slick FiOS commercials that say: we’ll make your website go dark (unless you want to spend $100/month for a business line), I went back to Comcast.
That was then, this is now. Now I’m in China and rather than brave the Great Firewall and self host LancerKind.com, I’m using a hosting service called BlueHost.com. I can’t say enough good things about them.
OK, that’s my PSA. Back to our regular scheduled SF programming.
Comments
Comment from Lancer Kind
Time August 12, 2009 at 12:23
Lol! To tell you the truth, I think I’m going to watch it again. Most of my reaction was probably due to having the wrong expectations set. As a movie goer, I like to go in fresh with very little information. I thought I was going to see a great space opera film, not a horror film. But then they hit me with that suspense music, and I just sat there thinking–oh shit!
Still, I always think that movies with un-conquerable evil, such as Jason in Friday the 13th, are weak. The only value to watching the film at that point, is to see who survives and how insane they are at the end.
But…. I really dig Event Horizon’s out of space suit EVA scene. They had done the best special effects/coolness job with that and it was a first as AFIK that someone survives exposure to space. They did something like it again in Farscape, years later. And then years later again, they did it in the new Star Trek film (though I think they had on space suits… wimps!
BTW, in China, all the cheap DVD players that are even 3-4 years old can play Blu-ray. I couldn’t fricken believe it!
Comment from Bradford
Time August 11, 2009 at 10:29
We just bought Event Horizon last week… on Blu-Ray.