An ironic bit of timing
This week's strip mentions items that you don't think about until they let you down. I wrote it over a month ago and as I posted it today I was having trouble with something that had always been dependable, and as such I am dependant on it.
Let me start by saying that I LOVE the Adobe Creative Suite. You hear musicians talk about the feeling they got when they picked up their chosen instrument for the first time. That's how I felt when I first learned to use Adobe Illustrator. It (along with Photoshop and InDesign) has helped make Basic Instructions possible. At least it did until two days ago.
I tried to open Illustrator and got a message that there was a problem with my license. I attempted to reactivate online and couldn't. I chose not to call customer support on the Fourth of July, and was working on the fifth, so today (Sunday, the sixth) was the first chance I got. They asked for my customer number, which I don't know. They asked my name (which I do know) and phone number. Then they asked for my address. I gave them my current address, which they said was wrong. I gave them my last address, which was also wrong. I then listed every address I've ever had since I first laid eyes on Adobe Illustrator. No dice.
Finally the support person asked helpfully if I've ever lived in Virginia. I said no. He replied that the current address he had for me was in Virginia. He then asked for a company name. I told him the company the copy of CS2 is registered under. He said it was wrong and named some company I've never heard of.
I asked if there was some other piece of info I could give him to prove that I'm me. He asked for the software's serial number, which I had been looking at on my computer screen through this entire conversation, so we were in business.
He asked me to describe my problem and asked me a couple of probing questions. Then he told me that he was unable to help me and that he'd have to refer me to tech support, which is not open on Sunday, so I'd have to call back tomorrow.
As I write this I'm pretty much dead in the water. I'm downloading a 30 day trial of Adobe CS3 in hopes that I can produce strips on it until Adobe can get this sorted out. I will most likely not have a fresh strip for you this Thursday though. Sorry about that.
Now to answer a couple of questions about last strip.
I agree that They Might Be Giants is a great band. If you like them, but have never seen Gigantic, you should.
Yes, I did watch Voyager, and what's more, I enjoyed it! Why is that so hard to believe?!
posted by Scott Meyer at Sunday, July 06, 2008
8 Comments:
See, it's things like this that piss me off about the recent wave of activation required programs and music. The only deterrent to pirates is them needing an extra week to get software onto the 'net, and it only harms the paying customer in situations like yours. Phone center closed? Customer's screwed. No phone, or can't find the number? Customer's screwed. Company go out of business, or decide to stop supporting their DRM? Customer's screwed. Gamers have been putting up with this stuff for years with crappy CD security, and it's finally worming its way into the productivity world. Even though I buy all my software, the first thing I always do is track down a crack so I can use the goddamn thing I just bought without Big Brother breathing down my neck.
Hey, this has nothing to do with the comic or the blog post, but this seems as good a place as any for general comments, so anyway when I click to look at the sites that I have bookmarked, they all have a little picture of like the site's logo which it also displays to the left of the address when you go there as well as to the left of the title of whatever tab it's in, all of them have it except for the Basic Instructions site, instead it's just that picture of a blank page with the top right corner folded down that it shows for sites that don't have one of those pictures.
In case you can't tell where I'm going with this, you should get one of those little pictures for basicinstructions.com, then when I'm looking through my bookmarks or if I had like 7 tabs open and one of them was your site and I wanted to go to your site I wouldn't even have to read.
Since the sites logo of you hitting someone in the back of the head with a 2x4 might be hard to see in such a small space, you may want to go with a drawing of just your head (well also probably a neck and the top of some shoulders so the head doesn't look decapitated), personally I think it would be awesome if it was making the "your hide will make a fine poncho" face.
Yeah, just my two cents, also I agree with the first comment that DRM sucks.
Ironically, you should be able to be up and running again if you use some of the "Pirate" key generators that can be found on the internet.
It's a sad world, when the legitimate users are the one's that suffer.
I posted about watching ST:VOY again after not really liking it when it was on (of course, I still watched every episode). I think that at the time, Star Trek was over-exposed, and with the (IMHO) far superior DS9 on at the same time Voy got the short stick.
I totally agree that you should have the poncho-face as the little picture that shows up. That would be AWESOME.
That "little picture" is called the "Favorite Icon". It is a feature of (at least) the Apache web server.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon
This info is so Scott knows what to ask his ISP for.
I get a little saddened when guys let themselves be the butt of male-female jokes. But I get more bummed when I see a guy keep doing it to himself. Really clever material you keep coming up with, though. - Dan Quixote
Just download the full CS3 on some torrent tracker, and you'll be able to use it immediately with a handy crack/keygen. Or you can just download a crack for the CS2 you already own.
The world today is a wicked place, when you have to download a crack in order to use your legally bought software.
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