by Matt | Jun 16, 2007 | Aggravation, Web
Apparently, even with an upgrade for K2 and a plugin problem workaround, it’s still horribly mangled. Since the developers of K2 have moved on to other things, so shall I. I guess this kinda forces my hand at yet another redesign. Something a bit more compatible with the new WP widget system. We’ll see what I can come up with on Monday. Until then, enjoy this rather lack-luster theme.
UPDATE: Yup, you guessed it. Still broken. It seems like none of my themes, plugins, archives, etc even remotely like WP2.2. Awesome. I didn’t end up coming up with anything that would work as a theme, especially one that would be compatible with the new widget system, which seems to be 99% of the problem with this release. I’ll have to work on it more over the next week or so. Chip also gave me a heads up that the theme I was using temporarily wasn’t able to submit comments, so, now we’re back to the rather pathetic default theme for the moment. It seems to be the only one anything will work with.
by Matt | May 22, 2007 | Aggravation, Personal
I wanted to talk a little bit about something that was bothering me on the way home from work tonight. Allow me to be serious for a moment or two and then I promise it’ll be right back to t-shirts and video games.
What was bugging me were the things that a certain Houston area radio DJ was saying. Today the hot-button topic in the news is the immigration package being passed through congress. While my personal opinion on the matter is that if people want to come here, it should be legally, end of story, I’m always open to hearing diverging opinions from other people.
So, since I’ve practically disabled the FM button on my car stereo, I occasionally listen to the news AM station, mostly for the traffic report for my commute home. While I’m waiting to hear about what massive traffic jam I’m headed towards, this moronic talk show host is going on and on about “immigration reform”. He was debating with a caller about what will happen if people are allowed to stay here under that guest worker program. His caller was concerned about criminals and terrorists being here, being allowed to stay and not being monitored. The host said something to the effect of “well, that’s while we’ll just have to monitor their every move.” To which the caller responded, “if they become American citizens, what about their right to privacy?” “Americans don’t have a right to privacy, reread you constitution” says the host.
I had to turn the radio off.
(more…)
by Matt | May 17, 2007 | Aggravation
Not the clothes specifically, I’m sure their khakis and neckerchiefs are very nice, but the people that have that persona. Tonight as I’m pulling into my apartment and my typical parking space, some jackball walks out into the space as I’m pulling in. He freezes like a deer in my headlights and stares back at me for a minute. He’s wearing a pair of nicely pressed pants, a button up shirt, sunglasses in his hair, a blue-tooth headset in his ear and a shit-eating grin on his face. He continues to stand there while his equally annoying girlfriend/wife, who’s half his age and complete with her own blue-tooth headset, joins him in standing in my spot. Being the type person I am and having a general dislike for the type of people they are, I rev my engine a little. Just enough to make it clear that I really wouldn’t mind running them over. This elicits more staring. Once they’ve fully grasped the concept that I’m waiting for the spot that their consumer whore bodies are currently occupying, they open the doors of the Lexus in the next spot over. Sure to take his sweet old time, J.Crew leaves his door open while he eases himself into his leather covered seat. The second the door swings shut I’m in the spot. It takes them a full 2 minutes to ease their over priced Toyota out of the spot enough so I can open the door. The whole time I’m staring at them as they BOTH answer calls on the cancer producing widgets jammed in their ear. Normally, I’d let behavior like that slide, knowing full well that somehow karma would catch up to them. In this case I didn’t need to. Their Lexus sputtered and coughed leaving the parking lot, and, judging from the oil slick they left in the parking spot, I’d say karma is already knocking at the door. Hopefully the car breaks down on the way to their fancy cocktail party/jackass yacht club meeting and they’re terribly inconvenienced by the rental car company when the only car they have available this weekend is a Chevy Aveo. I also hope they’ve moved into my apartment complex so I can continue my silent war with them. It would be a shame if they were only here for a visit. I wouldn’t get to ask them where they got their lovely Burkenstocks.
Asshats.
by Matt | Jun 28, 2006 | Aggravation
Maybe it’s the hour of morning that I’m writting this, but something really ticked me off about Senator Jim DeMint’s comments on Net Neutrality yesterday. I simply can’t understand why Senators and Representatives are voting on things they don’t understand. 99% of our politicians don’t get it, and that’s scary when you consider what they’re planning to do can and will effect most of us for decades to come. It makes me almost want to run for office. I’m in the same distict as Tom Delay was, it can’t be that hard. If that moron got elected, people must be hard up for someone to vote for.
Why can’t we take all these public officials on field trips, or maybe to a seminar or two, so they can learn that the “magic box” on their desk doesn’t come by it’s information from the elves running around inside of it. You can read the article if you like, it’s linked above, but here are the main points.
“The overarching idea is to bring the benefits of competition to consumers by streamlining the video franchising process. This will allow more service providers to enter the cable market and begin offering Americans more choices at lower prices.”
Riiiight. More competition, I see now. So, instead of breaking up these large companies into smaller ones (like we should), we’ll let THEM decide who and how to allow competition into their already monopolized markets and then lower their prices to compete. You know what happens when services like cable get deregulated? The big companies with the bigger market shares BUY the competition, not compete with it. Once you’re allowed to own 99% of a market, are you going to give that up to new rival services? Hell no. Anyone who tries to start their own cable company, ISP or broadcast service not only has to cover their costs but the cost of getting the service itself from their competition. You think someone like Comcast is going to give “Bob’s Cable” a break in price just because they want to offer a video on demand service? Hell no. They’re going to buy Bob, take his VOD service and charge the customer 25% more than Bob did for the same thing.
“In reality, the definition of Net neutrality boils down to the government telling network owners that they can’t provide higher speed or more capacity for Internet sites or services that have different needs to serve their consumers.”
No, the definition of Net Neutrality boils down to the government telling network owners the can’t provide shitty service to sites or services that don’t pay out the nose. It also means you can’t charge someone who uses more a higher fee for the same service as someone who uses less. Just because an RV uses 100 gallons of gas doesn’t mean he should pay $5 at the pump instead of $3. It also means that hybrid cars shouldn’t be penalized for buying less. It keeps everyone on the same playing field.
“It would also restrict the ability of these network retailers to reduce costs to consumers by charging content providers differently based on their network requirements.”
HA! Don’t make me laugh. When has a company EVER reduced it’s prices out of good will and not because of some marketing scheme. Give me a break. Without neutrality, the small guys will pay what they’ve always paid and the big boys are going to pay out the nose. Companies like Google, who are at the forefront of innovation, will stop working on new technologies because they have to divert more of their revenue to cover bandwidth costs. I’m not worried about “the little guy” getting price gauged, I’m worried about the people with the money not innovating and moving our technology into the future. It’s exactly what happened to cable. Cable is the same as it was 20 years ago and they were originally given all the freedom to create their own price levels and technologies. You can see how well the cable industry has really help the consumer and brought the price down. That’s why on average, most of us spend between $50-$100 on cable. HA!
“Proponents of this regulatory bonanza say that without government interference, networks will block basic Internet services and Web sites to consumers. Yet this has not happened without federal regulation. Unlike the current video franchising problem, Net neutrality remains only a theoretical threat.”
First off, you get minus 10pts for using the word “bonanza” you fucktard. Who the hell does that? Second, the reason they haven’t blocked services is because their idea of tiered service is a recent one. Sure, I’m sure they thought of it a long time ago, but this is the first time they’ve really made a push for it. They never had the motivation to do it before now. Recently, with video services, torrents, VOIP, etc, bandwidth usage has shot through the roof. Now that people want all this stuff, now they’ve got their panties in a wad and want more money for it. And, as for it being a “theoretical threat”, so is a caged tiger. He’s behind bars but he’s still angry and hungry and you’re head looks pretty damn tasty. I tell you what, I’ll let you be the one to open the cage and see if he wants to “play nice” once he’s loose.
“It would be commercial suicide for any network provider to limit the ability of their customers to access any site or receive any service: Their customers would simply go elsewhere!”
Yes, normally it would be suicide, except you and all your senator friends allowed the cable companies to establish local monopolies. In my area you have 2 choices, AT&T DSL or Time Warner Cable. Both TWC and AT&T want tiered service, so, who exactly should I turn to? I can’t “go elsewhere” because they’ve put everyone else out of buisness. That’s like saying, ok, if you don’t like WalMart, why don’t you go to the local hardware store… oh wait, it went out of buisness along with every other small buisness in town. You big buisness fuckheads think that “more options” mean I can choose between basic cable and cable with HBO. That’s not a fucking choice!
“Consumers have a growing number of choices of networks, and this competition will force networks to continuously upgrade their services.”
Really, growing number? So, when Comcast bought Savannah Cable in GA a few years back, that was a “growing number of choices”? Also, let me educate you my ill informed friend, the federal government GAVE the cable industries millions of tax payer dollars to UPGRADE their services. The cable companies upgraded nothing. The end comsumer is still on the same shit connection that they have been since cable modems were introduced. You have any idea what internet providers offer in other countries? People in Japan have 3mbit to their houses, and that’s considered old, they’re upgrading most of the country to 8 or 10mbit in the next few years. We can’t even get fiber to the fucking curb! The providers are perfectly content to sit on their asses and upgrade when the HAVE to, not because they’re “investing in the future” or some bullshit like that. You want to make the US a 3rd world country in terms of internet, go ahead, let them “regulate themselves”. Don’t come crying to me when Asian market cell phones can load a web page faster than most American homes… oh, wait, too fucking late.
“Federal regulation, on the other hand, would only reduce the quality and access of Internet services for all Americans.”
Yeah, because when we realized what was going on and started regulating the phone companies they just stopped working all together. Basic, low level government regulation isn’t a bad thing. That’s like saying municipal water supplies, which are regulated, would be serving us fresh tasty Perrier from the tap if we weren’t on their case all the time. Give me a break.
You know, for all the back and forth and all the complaining both sides do, if you look at it, it’s really a non-issue. As consumers we’re fucked anyways. We have no choice, we’re getting price gauged to death and our service is shit compaired to what we pay for it. $49.99 for cable modems, come on guys. You’ve recouped the cost of building that network a long time ago. The telcos haven’t done anything good for the consumer in at least a decade, and the Senators and Representatives are getting kick backs from the service providers yo turn a blind eye, so there isn’t going to be any change. It’s pretty much status quo. We’re taking a broom handle hard to begin with, now we’re just taking it sideways.
by Matt | Mar 15, 2006 | Aggravation
It completely blows my mind when banks process debits so completely inaccurately. It’s electronic. Purchases should be instant, if not, then by the end of the buisness day at least. I think it’s a fucking scam. Over the past two weeks I’ve done all my normal purchases the way I always do and none of them went through UNTIL I had $20 left in my bank account. I had 15 transactions go through in 1 day. 15! That’s not a fucking coinsidence. Two weeks worth of charges just happened to all hit at the same time… the day before pay day. I don’t think so. I think the bank held them. I do. When I made every single one of those purchases, I had the money in my account. It wasn’t taken out, it wasn’t even reflected in my available balance. Then, suddenly, a large check cleared that dropped by balance. THEN all those checks went through. Not only am I over drawn, but I have 8 over-draft charges at $30 a pop. I have receipts for everything and it boggles my mind that dinner from March 2nd went through yesterday, as did gas from the 5th and a snack yesterday. Two weeks worth of charges just sat there and waited for my balance to be low. Now, I’m not saying I’m a saint when it comes to spending. I’ll freely admit that I run my account into the red on a regular basis. But, it seems to me, that all but the last of those charges should have cleared and ONE check should have bounced. Not 8. They took the biggest and latest BEFORE the eariler charges. That’s crap. Those 15 charges should have been applied in order, the days they occured. Waiting two weeks for charges on a debit card to clear is rediculous and unacceptable. I hate banks. I hate banks, credit unions, credit agencies, money in general and the basic aspects of our commerce. I wonder if anyone will trade animal pelts for beads anymore?
Recent Comments