As I was stat­ing here, there is some­thing wrong with the way peo­ple are treated by giant com­pa­nies. It strikes me as odd, that now there actu­ally IS a response from Cre­ative. Of course, there were some state­ments before but now they’re finally com­ing up with some details. Check it out here.

Obvi­ously, every gamer who’s expe­ri­enc­ing the popping/crackling issues owns a high-end gam­ing sys­tem. Most of these prob­lems could be reme­died with a BIOS update or a mem­ory adjust­ment but this didn’t resolve the issues for all cus­tomers. Cur­rently, Cre­ative is work­ing with promi­nent moth­er­board and chipset man­u­fac­tur­ers and will report back within the next 2 weeks. Now, that’s the atti­tude I like to see …

Yeah, it’s true. For the 12th time the world’s most antic­i­pated trade-only event kicks off today and many peo­ple around the world have been wait­ing eagerly for this day. The Elec­tronic Enter­tain­ment Expo takes place at the Los Ange­les Con­ven­tion Cen­ter with more than 400 exhibit­ing com­pa­nies rep­re­sent­ing 90 coun­tries. We’ll get to see the lat­est com­puter and video games and tech­nolo­gies within 540,000 net square feet of exhibit space. Wait a minute. No, we’re not gonna see that in per­son. Since the trade event is not open to the gen­eral pub­lic we have to rely on the usual sus­pects for sup­ply­ing us with all the lat­est infor­ma­tion on upcom­ing games and gear. So, we browse over to E³ Insider, Next Gen­er­a­tion, GameSpot’s mon­ster cov­er­age, IGN’s E³ Cen­tral, and G4 TV. There are many other sites report­ing in from LACC, I’m aware of that, but I’m more than sat­is­fied with the ones listed above.

A major­ity of about 60 per­cent of E³ exhibitors are said to get the show­cased games into stores by the hol­i­day sea­son. That’s some­thing, I sup­pose. Well, I’m not that big a gamer any­more. The last game I was fas­ci­nated of was Prince Of Per­sia: The Two Thrones. Although it was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing it still is one of my favorite games. Last year, UbiSoft made quite some fuss about that game on E³ 2005. It didn’t live up to the great expec­ta­tions. And so we’re mov­ing on to this year’s trade show. Ah, I wish I could be there, walk­ing from booth to booth, check­ing out all the new stuff. I’m plan­ning to attend the show at least once in the years ahead. In the mean­time I’m dig­ging through the cov­er­age avail­able on the net right now …

Usu­ally, that means that an enter­prise takes care of its cus­tomers. One would expect – in the IT busi­ness, for instance – a com­pany to solve (crit­i­cal) issues, to take on prob­lems, and to pro­vide their cus­tomers with peri­od­i­cal soft­ware and firmware updates. In short – it should try to address every prob­lem, even minor ones, in order to sat­isfy the needs of its cus­tomers. In the long term, no com­pany can suc­ceed with­out proper cus­tomer care management.

Obvi­ously, that’s not really true as is evi­denced here. I wanted to buy one of the cards of Creative’s new rev­o­lu­tion­ary X-Fi lineup. Back then, it seemed very impres­sive and pow­er­ful, a real break­through. Well, I don’t doubt that – the card really is an intrigu­ing piece of hard­ware. Right before I wanted to go to the next com­puter store and get me a sound card of this lineup, I searched online for some help in the decision-making process of what model to buy. It was only when I lit­er­ally stum­bled over hun­dreds of posts com­plain­ing about many issues; pop­ping and crack­ling noises made it num­ber one amongst all com­plaints. As an owner of a Cre­ative sound card I’ve been seri­ously dis­ap­pointed by the lack of inter­est the com­pany seems to have in these problems.

If Cre­ative isn’t going to change their cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment or their pol­icy regard­ing fix­ing known issues, I don’t think my next audio proces­sor will be a Cre­ative prod­uct. I can do pretty well with­out EAX but I can’t do with­out work­ing dri­vers pro­vid­ing me with good audio. The X-Fi is an extremely good card and I think it’s very sad I can’t just plug it in and play with­out hav­ing to fear some difficulties …

I’ve read scores of books up to date and there’s only thing I want to state: I love books. You can’t read enough because you never know what infor­ma­tion might come in handy. Ok, I con­fess, I’m not down with tech books or lex­ica. I read to enjoy, to relax. Got to admit there are quite some books I read for edu­ca­tional pur­poses. Well, one can’t read for plea­sure alone.

I’ve roamed the pub­lic libraries of the city I live in and I spend about one hour a week look­ing for new books, online or in local stores. I’m always on the hunt for a good read, be it in the sci-fi, the fan­tasy or the (high-tech) thriller genre. I like hor­ror sto­ries too, but Stephen King sim­ply sucks. The only one to ever make me look over my shoul­der was Howard Phillips Love­craft he wrote very admirable, sub­tle stuff. Over the last few years I’ve bought a whole lot of fan­tasy books and that’s the genre most of my favorite authors work in. Coin­ci­dence? I’m not so sure … I read Mem­ory, Sor­row and Thorn when I was a teen and I quickly came to love Tad Williams.

From this moment on my path has been pre­des­tined, I sup­pose. I read many books – some good, some bad and most of ‘em aver­age – and there they were. A few names who stand for qual­ity and inno­va­tion. A few authors capa­ble of cre­at­ing believ­able worlds unsur­passed in con­ti­nu­ity, appear­ance and cred­i­bil­ity. Ian Irvine stands out most. His Three Worlds cycle is really note­wor­thy, one of the most excit­ing reads I’ve ever had. Since I don’t want to plas­ter this piece of text with the names of my all-time favorites, I should stop now. You can always take a closer look at my pro­file to see the bunch of ‘em.

Ah, what am I try­ing to achive with this text? Very good ques­tion. I don’t know. I’ve had this nag­ging feel­ing for quite some time now. There’s … hmm … noth­ing new in town. Most of the sto­ries are uniques if you take a closer look but if you strip down the tales to their bare essen­tials there’s always a very sim­i­lar plot inside. Even the con­cept of the anti­hero isn’t new any­more, too many writ­ers have already adapted this idea. Is there noth­ing new to be writ­ten? Aren’t there some untold sto­ries left? Plots evolv­ing around some unique, inno­v­a­tive ideas?

I’m sure, there is more than enough stuff only wait­ing to be addressed by some nifty writer. It surely isn’t easy. We all know why even some well-established authors avoid some top­ics. If it’s too weird, too many peo­ple won’t like it and, thus, aren’t going to read it. Ah, the very pit­fall of writ­ing. A story is either too lame and unimag­i­na­tive or it’s too sick. To cut it short, you need some seri­ous writ­ing skills to get it right. I sin­cerely hope the deliv­ery from Ama­zon is com­ing soon …

The Da Vinci Code is a pop­u­lar and very con­tro­ver­sial novel writ­ten by Dan Brown and first pub­lished in 2003. Nowa­days, it’s really famous because it gen­er­ated crit­i­cism from the very moment it has been pub­lished. Since the movie is going to hit cin­e­mas on May 18th this year, it’s about time to take a closer look at this topic. Well-known actors like Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McK­ellen, Jean Reno and Paul Bet­tany, just to name a few, should be able to get some peo­ple storm­ing the the­aters. Also, there’s a game slated for release on May 19th (the movie will be released in the USA on this day too).

First of all, I’ve read the book in 2004 and I found it quite enter­tain­ing. Oh yeah, I’ve been bap­tized and I was a Catholic Chris­t­ian until I turned 19. At least, it’s been this way on the paper. My tutors and teach­ers always encour­aged me to think for myself, to ques­tion things instead of blindly believ­ing them and so I did. I won’t bother writ­ing about the reli­gious aspects of my life. I’m not reli­gious and I believe that nobody can nei­ther prove nor dis­prove God’s exis­tence. Either way, I wouldn’t care because belief only mat­ters to the believer as I shortly tried to point out here.

As of March 2006, more than 40 mil­lion copies have been sold. Obvi­ously, the book is a work of fic­tion but it isn’t treated this way. Instead of the usual crit­i­cism, this book has gen­er­ated much more con­tro­ver­sial dis­cus­sions and there has def­i­nitely been a lot of pub­lic­ity; in fact, there still is. The Da Vinci Code has attracted gen­er­ally neg­a­tive responses from within the Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties through­out the whole world. It has been argued that Brown has dis­torted – fab­ri­cated, even – his­tory to fit his novel best. Because of two law­suits and the call for boy­cotting the movie from a Vat­i­can offi­cial – there’s even a web­site refut­ing the key claims in the novel – Sony won’t have to put that much money in pro­mot­ing the movie, that’s for sure.

As for the ques­tion if your money’s well spent on the book or the movie, I can’t be of any real use. I do like a good read and it’s been quite enter­tain­ing, as I already stated in the very begin­ning. There are many bet­ter reads, that you can be sure of. The Da Vinci Code repeats a num­ber of erro­neous claims, which only mat­ters because of a state­ment in the begin­ning of the book: All descrip­tions of art­work, archi­tec­ture, doc­u­ments, and secret rit­u­als in this novel are accu­rate. If you’d like to know more about these claims be sure to head over there. Even­tu­ally, you’ll come to under­stand what that fuss is all about.

As a reader, I don’t care. I’d never expect a fic­ti­tious work to con­tain an accu­rate repro­duc­tion of the real world we live in, no mat­ter what kinda dif­fer­ent claims there may be. I’d like to be enter­tained. I want the book to thrill me. I need the book urg­ing me to read on until I’ve reached the end. I can’t say that all this applies to The Da Vinci Code. Nonethe­less, I’m gonna watch the movie and I’ll try to evade the not so open-minded fanat­ics boy­cotting the movie because of some wannabe-claims in a fic­ti­tious book. Yeah, I’m gonna laugh out really loud although it’s a very sad world we live in. With all the efforts they’re ded­i­cat­ing to this cause they could help thou­sands of other peo­ple. They chose to boy­cott the movie and the book respec­tively in a fruit­less effort to cleanse the world of this blas­phe­mous work. It’s a pity.