Over a year ago Verizon brought it's fIOS Internet service to my area. That's fiber optic, and I get 15mbps down, 2mbps up, hooray. So anyway, I've been waiting for their fIOS TV service to be available, and today got a call that it was finally ready to go. Cool! However, the guy, who I could barely hear because of a bad connecton (way to go Verizon, this was on a land line btw), was trying to sell me on a $99 a month package which would include the Internet, TV, and phone. The thing is, the Internet would be 5/2 and I want 15/2. I told the guy I had 15 and want to keep the 15 and he told me that I wouldn't notice the difference! OH REALLY?! WTF! So if I download a 100MB file which takes me about 1 minute now, I won't notice it taking over 3 minutes after the down grade to 5mbps? Or a 1GB file going from a little over 10 minutes, to over 30? He kept assuring me I wouldn't notice the difference and kept giving me bull shit reasons why. Holy shit! I guess they can fool the majority of idiots out there, but they weren't fooling me. I was insulted they'd try and bull shit me like that and when I call back to talk to another rep, hopefully not this douche again, I'll let them know I was not happy with the way they tried to BS me.

Normally I've had good experiences when dealing with Verizon customer service and I have a feeling they outsourced some firm to handle these Verizon TV sign ups.

Just thought it was kinda funny that they'd try to tell someone there is no difference between 15mbps and 5mbps. For most people it probably wouldn't matter much, but if you regularly send large files around, like batches of family photos, MP3's of your favorite radio show, or whatever, it matters.

Some of you may have noticed I've been a bit quiet around the site since the redesign. There was a reason for this. When the redesign happend the majority of our admin tools no longer worked. So I have been patiently waiting for the team to work out the bugs and fix some of the admin tools. We recently got back review mod tools, but just in the past couple days we now can once again delete user accounts. So ever since the redesign we were not able to terminate user accounts! We kept this quiet as we didn't want anyone to take advantage of the situation. However, we kept a list of accounts that needed to be cleared out.

So this is a warning to anyone who has or is thinking about violating our guidelines. We've seen a lot of hateful racist crap, pornography on user blogs, tons of crap entries spamming the Portal, etc. This is the time to turn over a new leaf, remove any content that violates our terms, etc, before you get caught! I'm constantly being tipped off to abusive behavior by users of Newgrounds.

Anyone who wants to throw a fit and bitch about their account being removed, such as an alt, whatever account they bitch from will also be removed. We don't remove accounts without good reason. Stolen content, pornography, child porn, racism, etc, will not be tolerated.

I'm starting to get my Halo skills back, what little I had of them from before. I like the way you can replay your games, move the camera around, and take screen shots. Here's a screen shot of me sticking some moron on a mongoose with a spike grenade.

So who got Halo 3? Thoughts?

We have tried to stay quiet about this, but ever since the redesign the review mod tools were down, even for me. So some people were getting away wth a lot of spammy reviews, abusive reviews, etc. However, they will no longer be getting away with it! The tools are fixed and the review mods are back at it. So keep flagging those abusive reviews! The review mods currently have a big back log of abusive reviews to sort through and judge, over 26,000 at the moment!

So a lot of users will be getting PM's from M-Bot informing them they had reviews deleted, were banned from reviewing, etc. The review mods have a big job ahead of them so please deal with whatever judgments they make. If you feel your review wasn't abusive, try to resubmit it, but try to be extra careful to follow our review guidelines. If you feel strongly that your review wasn't abusive you can PM me a copy and I will review it.

I guess I should post something new. So has anyone been following the exciting break throughs they are making with LED's? At some point they should start replacing all of our street lights, parking lot lights, and some home lighting. The great thing about LED's is they can now put out a lot of light and use far less power and materials than current light bulbs, sodium vapor lights, mercury vapor, flourescents, etc. For those concerned with our energy consumption, replacing all our lights (someday) with LED lights, nationwide, would result in a major reduction of energy use. Did I also mention LED's last 50,000 to 100,000 hours, or longer?

The first place many of the latest and greatest LED's are showing up is in flashlights. It seems every few weeks there is a more efficent LED hitting the market and soon after some company is putting them into a flashlight.

So who here has any of the newer LED based flashlights?

Here's a shot of a standard old 3D Maglite (3 brand new D batteies installed) next to a much smaller LED light with the new Phillips Lumileds Luxeon Rebel 100lm LED:

Since everyone went to Comicon Tom wanted me to hang out at the NG office to keep an eye on things while they are away. So here I sit. I feel kinda lonely since I'm using a computer I'm not familiar with and I can't get on AIM to keep in contact with mods, Liljim, etc. Tom has Trillian installed and I don't want to mess around with it or install anything like AIM on his computer. So I will be relying on PM's while I'm here if there are any "emergencies".

My kids and wife are here. The kids are watching a DVD on the giant NG office TV and my wife is currently being treated to "Chocolate Rain" so she can see what all the fuss is about with that.

For those who enjoyed the otter article, here's the otter smelling its business.

Just got back with the family from the Lehigh Valley Zoo, previously known as the Trexler Game Preserve. We had a good time as it's a smaller zoo, some what remote, and usually not very crowded. If you live near it, I encourage you to go with the family and help support it, as they need support to stay in business. My in-laws donated money to adopt the River Otter they keep there as a gift to my kids, and today was the first time we actually saw it swimming around. Normally it's just sleeping under a log. At one point it got out of the water, got ontop of a rock, turned it's back to the audience, took a shit, and then turned around and smelled it. The rest of the time it was pretty cute as you can see below. Here are some more ZOO PICTURES.

This will be available in the event CPF and other means of contact are down.