Click here to read about what the Paris Mixes are.

Robbie Watson - Paris #5

Robbie Watson - Paris #6

This rant has been a long time coming. I don’t normally eat McDonalds and I’m all of 145lbs and 5′11″. I’m a fairly thin guy for my height and so what I eat has never really been an issue…One thing I’ve grown to love over the years is a good chocolate shake. Just about every place has them. Wendy’s has included among their Frosty lineup a new Frosty Shake.

I went to Mississippi College in Clinton MS for a while and now live in the city of Jackson. In Clinton there was a McDonalds just down the street that was just the right distance from the school for a quick lunch or late night snack. One thing that you could always count on though was the shake machine being broken. Broken? Ok understandable - it’s broken and you can’t exactly fix that unless you have a repairman come out, have parts brought in, whatever… but the thing that made this shake machine special is that for 3 years that shake machine remained broken. It was a running joke on campus that you couldn’t get a shake there because the machine was always broken. Some guessed they didn’t have one, or they were too lazy to clean it or too lazy to get it set up. The big laugh came when they demolished the entire building. We’re not really sure why - but they tore down the whole Clinton McDonalds and build a brand new one over it’s foundation. The second day of business I went in ordered the usual and figured I’d get a shake this time since it was brand new… the shake machine was broken.

After that incident a few years ago I’ve always joked about how all McDonalds shake machines were broken. It wasn’t until I googled around until I realized I wasn’t the only one who thought so. This link is from Yahoo Answers asking why the machines are always broken. This link is a guy who tried to get one in an airport and is posting in a forum asking everyone else if they have the same problem. This guy at opentechsupport.net complains that both the local McDonalds shake machines are broken. The list goes on (reviewjournal.com) and on (my3cents.com) and on (tigerdroppings.com - scroll down a bit) and on (digitalspy) and on (another yahooanswers) and well… you get the point. It’s a freaking nationwide pandemic!!

I set out on my own to collect a little “statistical data”. It’s by no means completely accurate or even a good representation of the McDonald’s nationwide. I limited it to the 9 closest McDonalds to where I work and proceeded to stop by a different one every time I got in the mood for some fast food. I have kept track of which ones I’ve hit, which ones had shakes, and which ones didn’t.

Of the 9 local McDonalds I visited all but one of the shake machines were broken. That’s 8 out of 9 or 88%. That’s terrible! Why is this such a problem? My guess is that the shake machine needs just as much if not more maintenance than any other machine in the kitchen and sells a much lower volume than any other food - and the employees are simply too lazy to clean it up afterwards or get it set up in the morning. There’s absolutely no possibility that if the make/model of shake machines that are used by McDonalds break this much that they would continue to use them.

I know some of you are thinking “dude, it’s just a shake machine - go somewhere else…” But that’s only because you haven’t been repeatedly denied for the same item at different stores with the same lame excuse of “it’s broken.”

When I finish this rant I am going to attempt to contact someone in charge of my region about this. Chances are after seeing how hard of a time the guy in Supersize Me had in getting someone to call him back regarding an interview - I doubt I’ll actually ever get a response 10 miles within “we’ll look into it.” If you’ve had the same experience of being denied a milkshake because “the machine is broken” I suggest you contact whoever is in charge of your franchise…that’s the only way anything is every going to change. So spread the word! McDonalds shake machines aren’t really broken and we’re pissed!

So I get to work today and I’m not sure what happened last night because in about 5 seconds of use my background went solid blue and I started getting “Antivirus” software popping up telling me that my computer was at risk. Well duh - because I didn’t install any new antivirus software…

Anyway it became clear this was gonna be a bit more than some spyware removal because when I went to change my background back from this blue color I was missing both my desktop tab and screensaver tab from my Display Properties. Not good. I ran CCleaner to repair registry problems as well as look for anything shady in the add/remove problems. No help. I ran my AVG scanner (even though it’s running in the background) but before I found anything with AVG I fixed the problem with HijackThis.

The problem files were lphc3tmj0etn6.exe as well as some other garbled alphabet soup viruses. I removed them but that still didn’t help my missing tabs problem. Did some google searching and came across this problem solver.

1. click ’start’ then ‘run’
2. type in ‘regedit’
3. click HKEY_CURRENT_USER, then ’software’, then ‘microsoft’, then ‘windows’ then ‘currentversion’, then click ‘policies’, and finally click ’system’
4. double click the files NoDispBackgroundPage and NoDispAppearancePage and change their value from 1 to 0
5. close regedit

I also then did a Windows Search for lphc3tmj0etn6.exe and all the other alphabet soup names I had seen during the whole process to make sure there were no traces left behind.

Hope this helped anyone else who had the same issue!

Click here to read about what the Paris Mixes are.

Robbie Watson - Paris #3

Robbie Watson - Paris #4

So I was in Paris all week last week but the hotel I was staying at wanted to charge 20 euros a day for internet in my room. Needless to say I didn’t get it and when I had free time in my hotel room I decided to mix in Garageband instead. I came up with like 15+ songs (if you want to call them that…some I’m not exactly sure qualify) and if I manage to finish some that aren’t quite done then I’ll have even more than that. Most of it is electronic music with a little bit of rock or house thrown in along with the occasional Garageband “loop” thrown in if I needed a space filler.

I’m gonna be posting 2 at a time over the next several days. None of them have names so I’ve given them numbers instead. I’m also assigning each one a photo that I took while in Paris. Enjoy!

Robbie Watson - Paris #1

Robbie Watson - Paris #2

PS - feel free to add to these, share them, remix them, blah blah blah. Just let me know so I can listen to it and enjoy what’s being done with my work. The only thing I ask is that you not sell them unless they’ve been heavily remixed/modified. Thanks!

Was surfing Digg this morning and saw what I thought at first to be the same article twice. This wouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone who browses Digg on a regular basis. People repeatedly submit the same article twice despite being prompted with possible duplicates when they are submitted.

After actually clicking on both articles I realized that they were both Huffington Post (not linking to them b/c I hate them) articles…but different stories. They both have the same thumbnail picture on Digg and they both start “Obama Berlin Speech”. The posts are here and here.

My problem with this now lies in how sucky Huffington Post really is…I took a click at the articles and found this for both of them:

Their entire article could fit on a sticky note on my desk. How does something like that make the front page on Digg … twice?! Who knows probably another exploitation of the Digg algorithm or perhaps the fact that both headlines contain the word “Obama” and that’s an endless buffet for troll-hungry diggers. The only good thing they did was actually link to a video of the speech they were “blogging” about. The rest of the page was filled with content from ABC, CNN, UK Times, blah blah blah.

Summary: The Huffington post needs to get it’s shit together. They’re not writing any of their own content and with the list of editors and contributors on their “about us” page - they ought to put some of them to work writing some creative content for once.

Every story I’ve ever read on the Huff Post was the exact same (praising Obama and bashing McCain) and people claim them to be completely neutral and not biased towards one side or the other. This guy did some research and found that in a 24 hour period the Huffington Post had more front page articles than any other website and claimed 6% of all front page articles. What’s with the Huff spam? How do the short unoriginal articles make the front page so much? Oh well… who cares.