Oct 20

Fun With Radio Shack’s New Universal Remote

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remote control wrist watchEarlier this year, Radio Shack released a new universal TV remote that’s conveniently shaped just like a wrist watch. I bought one a few months ago planning to have a little fun with TVs in public places. It took awhile, but I finally got around to screwing with a few businesses this past weekend and I highly recommend picking up this item for yourself. It’s only $29.99 at your local Radio Shack and will make your visits to otherwise boring places much more fun!

Me and a friend started out eating at Applebees in Fairview Heights, IL. We took a quick stroll around the bar area, noting the brand names of each of the 3 TVs. Each one was a different brand and the one closest to our table ended up being a GE. I had typed all of the TV codes into my Palm phone so after a few minutes of scrolling through the Palm, I found the correct code and tried it out. It worked perfectly on the TV closest to us when I moved the channel up a notch. Now instead of watching baseball, we were watching football. At first I thought changing channels would quickly get boring, but minutes later the people at the table next to us started bitching amongst themselves about wanting to watch the baseball game. They finally asked the waitress to please change it to the game they were watching. The waitress stood on her tip toes to reach the TV buttons as I interfered with her efforts by changing channels at the same time. I finally let her get it to the correct channel.

remote control wrist watch manualAbout 15 minutes later during a commercial break, I changed the channel on their TV again. I flipped around for awhile trying to find a channel with cartoons but I ended up settling for the Weather Channel. The group bitched again, signaled a waitress and the process repeated. At one point the old man at the table got up himself, went over to the TV and looked at it for a few minutes probably trying to figure out how to work it. He finally decided it was too complicated and sat back down. After those people finally left another group came in that didn’t seem very interested in the baseball game. So I found the home shopping channel and cranked up the volume as much as I could. Nobody complained to the staff about it so for the rest of the meal we got to listen to the TV screaming at us to buy amazing products. Right around the end of our meal they finally switched it back to baseball. As we paid for our meal and got up to leave, I turned off the TV. Didn’t want to waste electricity you know…

After this it was back to our hometown of Alton. We decided that after having so much fun at Applebees we just had to hit a few bars to try it out some more. Our first stop was a place called Time Out. This place was pretty large. Not only did they have 2 different rooms with bars and tables and Samsung TVs everywhere, they had a room for dancing and a room for betting on horse races via satellite. In the horse racing room, about a dozen people sat at tables staring at the bank of at least 50 large screen RCA TVs on the wall. We started with that room. Unfortunately, the bar wasn’t very busy that night so I was afraid of being spotted in that room. Rather than going inside, we stood at the door and tried to shut them off from there. We only managed to shut off about a half dozen of them from the door. Next week we plan to try again at a busier hour from the back of the room. I’m betting I can shut them all off with just a few hits.

Inside the dance room ended up being much more fun. The bar lined 2 walls of the room and there were 7 – 10 TVs above each side. I programmed my watch for Samsung models and got to work. One press of the button shut off 3 TVs on one wall. Another press shut off a few more on our wall. After awhile the bartender was walking around turning them all back on by hand. As she passed each one, we turned them off again or changed the channels. This went on for awhile and the fun finally ended when my batteries started going dead.

So anyway, yeah it’s not exactly something that people haven’t done before but the watch is very nice! The face of it is an analog display, rather than digital which makes it very hard for someone to think that it could be controlling TVs. The manual says that it works for 15 feet but I’m pretty sure I was further away than 15 feet from some of the TVs in the bar. If you like to screw with people, this is the watch for you! You can click here to order the watch from Radio Shack. As long as you can keep a straight face while you’re doing it, you shouldn’t get your ass kicked by a bunch of dumb hicks who are upset about missing their precious baseball and football games.

RBCP

Aug 17

Free Calls on Cell Phone Displays

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look at this dorky 80's kidA few weeks ago I was in Office Max for one reason or another. I ended up at the counter where they display PDAs and cell phones. I came across the Samsung palm/phone and I ended up playing around with it’s Palm features for while, comparing it to my own Kyocera palm/phone, which isn’t quite as nice as the new Samsung.

As I was setting the phone back down to go play with the other items, I was surprised to see a sign under the phone encouraging customers to make phone calls on it so they could see what a nice phone it was. So I stood there for 45 minutes, calling random numbers all over the country for free. I called the PLA Voice Bridge, Curtis Lee Jones, a few friends, and a few enemies. Then I called my own cell phone so I could get the phone number to the display phone.

A few minutes later, I was sitting in an office display chair behind an office display desk, pestering all the customers who walked by the cell phones with my phone calls to the Samsung phone. I had a clear view of the display counter so I could yell at them for answering a store phone, make fun of their clothing or pretend to be a sales rep. trying to sell them a the phone. I convinced a few people to hand the phone to other people in the store. “Yes, my uncle should be there looking at cameras and he’s wearing a blue shirt and a white hat. Just hand him the phone. Thanks.”

Hours later when I was at home, people playing with the display phone starting calling ME on my cell phone since I never bothered blocking my caller ID. I recognized the number when they called and went into an automated sales pitch. “Press 1 if you’d like me to tell you about some of the kickass features on this bitch.” One person fell for it and I took him through a maze of automated options until I ran out of things to say and admitted that I was just screwing with him.

There were a few things that I didn’t even think to try with the phone while I was at the store. It had Sprint PCS service on it, which means that the phone most likely had call forwarding on it since that’s an included feature when you sign up. I could have forwarded the cell phone’s calls to the PLA Voice Bridge so I’d have my own local dialup to the bridge. And I doubt anyone at the store would ever even notice that. I’m definitely going to go back later this week and try that out. And I’ll keep you all posted on the new midwest dial-in number for the bridge.

RBCP

Jun 08

PLA Issues Are Prettier!

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I spent my weekend revamping all the old PLA issues into a more modern format which matches the rest of the site. Isn’t that sad, I really need something better to occupy my time. They are now much easier on the eyes and they don’t look like they were designed in 1996 anymore. I tried not to read them while I changed the code around them but at times I just couldn’t help myself. And as I read, I began to realize something – they really suck. Why do you people LIKE that garbage???

I mean, I tried to put myself in a 1995 state of mind to make them more enjoyable but they still sucked. And I’m not trying to be sarcastic or funny here, I really do think they’re horrible. There are the occasional classics like Dino Allsman, Beige Boxing, Fred Meyer, etc but overall the old PLA zine was really crappy. Nevermind the horrific HTML that I wrote back in the 90′s, the new format just makes them look pretty. But the content – sheesh. It’s pretty bad that it’s taken me 7 years to realize this. When I was writing them I thought they were funny. My god, what have I done with my life… -RBCP

Jun 03

Screen Savers Plugs PLA

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Tech TV6/3/2002 – On Friday (May 31st) TechTV‘s show called the Screen Savers did a whole 90 second bit about the PLA and their tech support calls. They were doing a segment about strange phone calls and one of PLA’s tech support calls was the first clip they played. Martin Sargent actually seemed to understand how the calls were done and explained that he felt he should plug our site to keep us from crossing his phone lines with a feed store. For this, we will spare you our wrath, Martin.

We caught the rerun of the show today and made a clip of that segment. If you have Windows Media Player, you can view that clip by clicking here. You can also visit the Screen Savers page that lists our site along with a couple of other good phone call sites. (Leave some comments on that page.) We realize that it’s only a matter of weeks now before TechTV will see how cool we are and will give PLA TV their own 30 minute weekly show on the TechTV network. Thanks in advance for that, Martin & Leo! We promise to cast both of you as extras in our big budget motion picture after Hollywood sees our TV show on TechTV and offers us a lot of money to create PLA: The Movie. -RBCP

Jun 03

Comedy Central’s New Show Sucks

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Crank YankersWelp, the word is in. It appears that most people aren’t liking the new show on Comedy Central called Crank Yankers. That’s just the people I’ve been talking to, your own opinion might be different. I forgot to watch it this Sunday but I’ve been told that I didn’t miss anything good. Maybe it’ll get better though, or maybe it’ll get canceled. We’d like to hear your opinion of the show. Click here to read a review of Crank Yankers done by Ese Bastardo Amarillo and you can post your own comments about his reivew and about the show. And while you’re there, check out the rest of cal.phonelosers.org! It’s got a nice, interactive, PLA-themed look that you might get into.

And thanks to everyone who used the Crank Yankers web site features to prank call my house this weekend! My answering machine was filled with the same Crank Yanker prank calls, over and over and over and over. I sure did enjoy that. Yeah. -RBCP

Jun 01

New PLA Summer Contest!

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new contestHere’s your newest chance to win fabulous prizes like PLA t-shirts, CDs and stickers. All you have to do is pick any section of our website as a theme and draw a cartoon for it. It can be any character from any section of the site, it can be based off of any story or incident that you can find on the site, any prank phone call or video we’ve done, it can be absolutely anything as long as it’s some way related to something on this web site. The contest will be over at the end of this summer. This contest promises to be much less disgusting than the Make RBCP Gay Contest from last year. You can view the contest details by clicking here.

May 30

Comedy Central’s New Show

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Crank Yankers5/30/2002 – If you’ve watched more than 5 minutes of Comedy Central this past month, chances are you’ve seen several commercials for their new upcoming show called Crank Yankers. They’ve been promoting the hell out of the show the past few weeks and it’s hard to say weather or not it’s going to be a hit. The whole idea of puppets talking on the phone for 30 minutes could end up getting kind of old really fast. Remember Greg The Bunny? Yeah, me neither.

The crank calls I’ve heard on their web site aren’t very original, in my opinion. But who knows, the puppets might be enough to keep it interesting. Maybe they’ll add some kind of storyline into the show that’ll make it fun. The show premieres this Sunday (June 1st) so you’ll be able to see the show for yourself. You can visit their web site to listen to clips, post public messages about what you think of the idea and you can even have a Crank Yankers puppet call your friends for free!

And by the way, just to set things straight, the new episode of PLA TV that me and EvilCal have been working on for over a month now features puppets talking on pay phones and at one point making a prank call. Since the prank call isn’t important to the episode, we’ll probably cut it out to keep people from yelling at us about stealing Comedy Central’s idea. But we want people to know that we think Comedy Central broke into our homes and stole the ideas from us. Then they went created puppets, hired writers, made prank calls, produced the whole show and launched a massive promotional campaign in just under a week to make us look silly. But we’ll see who gets the last laugh, oh yes, we’ll see…

May 16

Our Site Has Returned

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So here’s what happened – on Tuesday our site stopped working and nobody could figure out why. After a couple days of trying to fix it, those wacky hosting guys decided to just delete everything and start from scratch. So now we’re restoring everything from my personal backups and it might take a few days for everything to return to normal. Right now little things like sound clips, video files and cgi scripts (like the control room) might not work like they should. But as I have time, I’ll work on fixing everything. Just be patient.

EvilCal put up the “for sale” message on the main page just to make visitors cry. I thought it was funny and I had planned to leave it like that over the weekend but all of the instant messages and emails that came pouring in started to depress me. It really seemed like a lot of people were taking it really hard that I would be giving up phonelosers.org to the highest bidder. I seriously think that some people are going to lose sleep about it tonight if they don’t get to read this update. I’d hate to be the blame for a rash of school shootings and/or suicides so I’m putting it back up tonight. Please do not panic anymore.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve added quite a few new features to the site over the past few months into the pay phone menu bar. There’s the page of homemade projects, a collection of payphone inserts, comics for phreaks, and I’ve started updating my old archives page so you can read about old updates, rants, stories, etc that used to be on the main page. In unrelated news, Curtis Lee Jones’ website has also been updated recently with some new prank calls. They’re pretty funny and I highly recommend listening to them. It’s the same old stuff, Curtis trying really hard to sound smart while unknowingly making a complete fool out of himself.

So that’s the update.
RBCP

May 12

PLA Icons and Desktops

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Some weirdo named Nide made a PLA image to stick on your desktop. Then some other weirdo named sabrebutt made a few PLA/phone icons for Windows. So I’ve stuck all this stuff into a directory called /themes/ for other people to download. Next thing you know someone is going to make a bunch of crazy PLA mouse pointers, startup screens and shutdown screens. Right? Right?? If you do, we’ll add them to the themes directory.

May 11

Phoneloser Monthly Newsletter

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Ever since I killed PLA back in 1997, people have been saying that we should start up a new zine. Well here it is. But rather than release it in text file format and give it away for free, we’re going to print it out and expect you suckers to pay for it. It’s my best scam ever! But here’s the best part, I won’t even write original stuff! Instead I’ll take old updates that you can read for free on phonelosers.org and I’ll print them in my newsletter. You will pay me $1.00 per issue for this! I fucking rule!

Okay so here’s the thing – usually when a person orders PLA Merchandise I’ve always enclosed some sort of thank you note. Originally, it was just a hand written thank you. Then it evolved into a photocopied thank you. Then I started putting advertisements for other PLA products on a full sheet alongside the thank you. Then I started putting other fun things into this thank you note, like puzzles, phone call transcripts and drawings. So I figure, why not just turn it into an official newsletter that I can give away with each order. But screw that, instead I’ll call it Phoneloser Monthly and charge $1.00 for it.

So that’s what I’m doing. Only it’s more than just recycled articles and advertisements. Each issue is at least 8 pages and contains different items like word searches, phone number lists, facts, crossword puzzles, mazes, phone call transcripts and other things you’ve never seen before. There is no official format and no strict schedule for releasing issues. So you won’t have to read through a 3 page update of us apologizing for being late and making up excuses. And you won’t have to read paragraphs of us begging the readers to write articles for us. You may not find it useful, but you’ll probably have fun reading it. You can learn more about it by clicking here.

SPECIAL PROMO! To sucker you into our scam, we’re offering the first 2 issues (January 2003 and April 2003) for just $2.00 total. That includes shipping and you get both issues, meaning you save a whopping $1.00! So PayPal us $2.00 (or mail it) and you’ll get our first 2 issues to try out. At the very least, you can just use them as toilet paper so it’s not a complete waste. Click here and place your order immediately!