We must be in a downturn. Tech support is even harder to find nowadays.

I’m still trying to get my SoundBlaster’s EAX drivers installed. The drivers
are inexplicably not on the CD or on the website. The mountain of tech tips
and FAQs (“How can SoundBlaster’s technology enhance my gaming experience?”)
didn’t help so much either. So I finally broke down and tried contacting
Creative’s tech support.

Do they make this difficult? Boy howdy. There’s no email address. There’s
not even a web form to fill out. No, you have to create a user account
with them and file a service ticket. (The user account is one of those
amusing forms where, if you make a mistake, the form spits back at you
with all the “Send me promotional material!” checkboxes re-checked. They
almost got me with that one, but fortunately I made a *2nd* error, and caught
it just in time.

I don’t hold out much hope that these bozos will be helpful. I can’t find
my receipt (will I never learn?), so returning the card is not an
option. But at the very least, I’ll have the satisfaction of tearing the
card from the slot and snapping it in half. “Let this be a warning… to all
of you,” I’ll say, shaking my finger at the chassis.

Anyway, I managed to catch the SJ Rep’s “Ctrl-Alt-Delete” with Shauna on Friday
night. It’s a spoof on the dot-com boom, with a surprisingly upbeat ending.
It was… OK. Not “In the Bog of Cats”, but not bad. The couple sitting
in front of us brought their seven-year-old daughter, for what I think was
her birthday. A bit of an odd choice, but if they feel their daughter is
ready to see a beefy man pull a sock from his leopard-print speedo underwear,
who am I to criticize?

By accident, we found the bar where the actors usually come to hang
out after the show. Good stuff to know, since I have two more shows this season.
I probably shouldn’t have bought the whole package, but I was living
in different times back then. “Hey hon, guess what? I got us almost the full
season of tickets to the SJ Rep!” Who knew all those Good Boyfriend Points would
go to waste?