Why did you abandon us? Southern California once had lightening speed and oh-so-reliable Internet connections. Now there are times when I may as well go back to dial-up – Road Runner should be called The Coyote – because it seems like although he never caught the road runner in the series, he is regularly mangling and possibly even disemboweling this Road Runner because TIME WARNER CABLE IS TERRIBLE!
After years of being spoiled by Internet so fast it beat the T1 at my company’s offices, I now have to deal with deadly sluggish page loading and times when it barely seems to recognize there is an Internet to connect to.

Maybe one day you’ll come back – you’ll feel guilty – or maybe if all of us here in So Cal who think TIME WARNER CABLE BLOWS THE BIG ONE will wish itchy rashes on your executive asses until you put this Road Runner out of its misery and give us back REAL broadband speed.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

It took me 5 minutes to save this entry because TIME WARNER CABLE is about as fast as a Target cashier.

If Hugo Chavez thought he was earning points by being all clever and cute with the sulphur comments – he’s really quite the fool and does not get Americans at all. Even people who CANNOT STAND GW find themselves feeling a little defensive when a big mouth gets up at the US-funded (mostly, let’s be honest here) UN and says such things. It doesn’t really make us think – oh, I’m so sorry Hugo feels this way, let’s get him and his ilk out of office to avoid future embarrassment. The people who are embarrassed were embarrassed long before Hugo made his remarks.

I wonder if this is how the government is run in Venezuela – do people just insult each other in public? Has this resulted in great improvement in the some prime indicators of a country’s “health”? For example, there was a significant reduction in the infant mortality rate between 1970 and 1990 – since 1990, not much improvement.

In the last thirty years Venezuela’s people have gotten poorer, and the number of the extremely poor has, by some estimates, tripled. These are pretty much the poorest people in South America at this point in history. Maybe Hugo should focus some of his ire on his own country’s leaders.
Don’t get me wrong – I think GW is a huge embarrassment, and if the person complaining about him were a legitimately decent and effective leader, I would be even more embarrassed by such comments. In this case, it just seems like a little man trying to raise his importance in the world by being all blustery and confrontational and “tough” on the U.S.

The problem is – they are a huge part of our crushing dependence on oil. Everything these days seems to come back to the fact that the United States – once the country 10 steps ahead of every trend – is now 2 steps behind, and it’s having a sickening effect on our foreign policy (not that our foreign policy in South America/Central America was anything to be proud of in the past).

1. A person must manually approve each one. How annoying is this?
2. It implies that you don’t trust people. I want to see if you read my e-mail! I want proof!
3. Some might say, you can set your Outlook to automatically send the receipt each time. Well, experience web folks know this is a bad idea because you could be sending confirmation to spammers/junk mail people that you received their unsolicited offer.

My new policy is to simply deny all of these return receipt requests. For others who are bothered by this cumbersome even insulting request, this is how you do this. In Outlook go to Tools > Options > Email Options > Tracking Options. Under how to respond to requests for read receipts, check off “never respond”.

While folks may now “believe” I am not reading their email, the truth is, I am simply not deciding my work processes based on their paranoid need for confirmation. As someone who gets upwards of 100 emails a day (and that’s on a light day), I don’t have time to send this little security blanket to everyone.

The problem is, these nimwits mess up the web for everything else. As long as their are suckers out their the spammers have a market.

I flew Delta back from Salt Lake City today. It was a great flight – although they have implemented about the lamest zone-boarding system I’ve experienced. It’s really weird when your seat is near the front of the cabin, a window seat, and you are one of the last zones loaded. I had to make two people get out of their seats and use the baggage compartment behind my row.

I gather they are staggering which rows are allowed to get on the plane so no log jams occur, but wouldn’t it make more sense to load window seat passengers before the middle and aisle rows. Just a thought.

Silly me.

It was a bunch of filthy spam pretending to be related to my content when really it was casinos and porn. And the variety! I swear there are as many fetishes as there are people from the looks of it.

I blocked the IP, a bunch more came in. I then realized they were actually adding to my posts these vile links and descriptions.

I know that’s how trackback works, but it just took a little while to really hit me what was going on.

I went to the movable type forum to find out how to moderate trackbacks so they wouldn’t automatically post – I would have to approve them. It does suggest you do this. Of course, there doesn’t appear to be this option in my software. And I’m am not a neophyte to software. When I tried to submit a support request, their system wasn’t working properly (PAGE NOT FOUND!).

Oh brother.

This is just to say that if any of this garbage manages to slip through, it is unintentional and I am working on blocking it permanently.

I remember my first experience with massive spamming. Back in the late 90s I put my email all over my websites and loved getting comments from my visitors.

Then came spam bots – munching up all those emails like hungry baby birds then spitting out email after email to me.
I ended up removing my email, setting up autoresponders, and using only webmail systems for any web-based email (so at least it wasn’t downloading to my hard drive).

For this reason, I really don’t feel sorry for the idiots who lose their life savings to scam artists who send the variations on the Nigerian theme or the like. If people didn’t respond to this spam, it wouldn’t be so worthwhile for spammers to keep trying to find new ways to get through to our in boxes.
The people who respond to spam or buy through spam links or give someone their PIN or PayPal password (puh-lease, have some sense!) keep these jerks in business.
OK. I’ve vented.

Disemboweled Packaging

Originally uploaded by Smash Monster.

It took me, and I’m not exaggerating here, TEN WHOLE MINUTES to get this package open to pull out my new wireless mouse. Really, I couldn’t find a way in. I sliced, cut, pulled, mangled. Finally, out came the mouse. The USB device was a little easier to slice out of its hermetically sealed pocket. Then those darn batteries, buried deep inside the packaging. Glad it is working fine. If I had to return it they might have asked me if wild dogs had gone after it, rendering the mouse useless.