They make it out to be like they are trying to be helpful.  In fact, they aren’t trying to be helpful.  They are trying to monetize your typo by getting you to click on advertisements.  In my opinion that is just taking advantage of someone for your own profit.  I am a hardcore capitalist.  So I don’t begrudge a company its profit.  This is just idiocy though. 

It takes about 5 seconds for the Time Warner computer to return your page that shows you that you have made a typo.  This is the part that pisses me off.  Before they used to do this, you would get the infamous “Page Cannot Be Displayed” message.  But, that message would come up almost instantly when Time Warner’s DNS server found there was no such myreallybadtypo.com website.

I never considered how to fix this recently until I heard that Google was publishing a set of public DNS server addresses that anyone could use.  I changed the settings on my computer.  Holy bajesus am I pleased.

Not only do I no longer get that incredibly stupid page from Time Warner, my page load speeds have gone way up.  That means I am navigating the internet at much faster speeds than I was before.  And, it is all free.  Kick ass!  I am a huge fan of free things that actually rock!

Thank you Google.  Click on that link to see more about Google’s public DNS.

I really don’t have many nice things to say about Time Warner.  The amount of bandwidth you get is pretty good.  Their latency to some major websites is crappy.  Their DNS is crappy.  Their reliability is crappy.  I wish that FIOS would come to this neighborhood.

I like having the extra bandwidth that I get over a standard Verizon DSL connection.  But aside from that………………..

I also have a low level password for things that don’t matter a whole heck of a lot, like my accounts at social bookmark websites or my accounts at other social media sites.  The way that I see it is if something gets compromised on there, then I will just create a new account.  I think the incentive for hackers to crack those accounts is pretty low.  It really wouldn’t be a big issue unless someone had a really trusted account with tons of followers who marched in unison to their every request.

Then I have some mid level passwords.  Those are the passwords for sites that are important to me and would be a pain if they were compromised somehow.   Maintaining lists of passwords is a necessary pain in the rear.  Even if you use a program to save them, you still need a master backup.

The whole point of this post though was to rant about something that bothers me.  An awful lot of the time, I will go to create an account at some website and the password I want to use is not within their guidelines for passwords.  This is completely infuriating.  The passwords I use are pretty long.  I do this on purpose to make it even harder for brute force password crackers to figure mine out.  It is going to take a computer a number of years to crack my better passwords.  I usually change them within that time frame anyway.

The infuriating part is the fact that my higher security passwords are declined on some of these websites.  The company actually has the nerve to tell me that my password cannot be longer than 15 characters.  Screw you pal.  I like long passwords.  You guys are idiots for not accepting them.  As far as I am concerned, there should be a much higher threshold on password length.  There should also be more flexibility in terms of what you can put in there.

I skipped out on a service for a website that I like to visit that is called Intense Debate.   Basically it is a script that some bloggers use to monitor their comments.  You have to log into the system if you want to comment with your name.  Otherwise, you just comment as a generic guest.  Nobody gets to see your link back to your website if they are really interested in your opinions.  I skipped out on this because the dumbass service requires that your password be 15 characters or less.   The password I wanted to use was a few more than that. I just wasn’t in the mood for this bullshit today.  I whipped the bird at my computer screen and took that person’s blog off my reading list.  I am no longer a subscriber.

People are fickle.  I guess I am too.  This blogger probably thought he was doing something great when he decided to use that particular service for his blog.  Well pal, you lost one reader because of their stupid password insecurity.  This isn’t the only service this has happened with.  There are a lot of them out there.  I have just gotten to the point where I am fed up with companies not taking reasonable measures to make it easy for people to participate in things that the companies pretend to want participation in.  If you actually want people to comment on your site, you should probably make it easy for them to do so.  I was willing to sign up for intense debate so I could comment on that site.  But, the second inconvenience of having to come up with a new low value password that I would have to record specifically for a rare service like this one was a deal breaker for me.

In any event, I feel like I need to post here from time to time just to let people know that I haven’t abandoned it.  I work really long hours.  As a result, there are many times I just get too bogged down to spend any time here.  On another note:

Welcome home Todd

I thought I would take a minute to welcome home a guy that has been serving our nation overseas.  His name is Todd and he runs a blog called TMtips.com.  Todd is a good egg.  You can read about his adventures in Iraq as well as his online business material on his blog.  He is not a bullshitter either.  His information is genuine.

Glad to see him come home in one piece.  I can only imagine how happy his family is to see him.  Thanks to guys like him, the rest of us can go about our daily lives and bitch about politics.

Today, I went to create an account at Delicious so that I could bookmark some of my posts as well as other posts that I come across on the internet.  Come to find out, they require that you create a Yahoo account in order to log into your Delicious account.

It is no wonder that Yahoo is being crushed by Google.  The talent working at Yahoo is obviously inferior to those who work at Google.   This decision to force more people to use Yahoo just so they can log into what used to be an independently run company (delicious.com) is stupid.

At first I didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal.  I thought, big whip!  So I went ahead and created the account.  Then I realized that in my profile, it displayed information about me publicly that I don’t want to volunteer to everyone and anyone.  That really pissed me off.

What kind of moronic idiot at Yahoo thought that Delicious users would like this?  So basically it looks like Yahoo bought Delicious so that they could siphon some users from it and ultimately run it into the ground.  Good job you friggin idiots.  What business school did you guys graduate from?

With competition for services like this so eager to snag whatever traffic they can, it amazes me that Yahoo would make such a foolish and unpopular move as this.  This stains the Yahoo brand in my opinion.

I guess maybe they don’t care about the concerns of people like lonely old Dave from Buffalo NY.  I wonder how many other people out there have made the same decision to dump them or not use their service as a result of this dumbass decision.

I have been using Google calendar to keep track of important dates for the last few years.  I decided that I was going to put reminders on my Google calendar to see if that helps me stay on track with my resolutions.

So,  I added a little phrase to my Google calendar beginning on February 10, 2010.  On my calendar it says “ Read This Immediately – You Promised”.  Then when you click on the task it says “I promised myself that I would stick to my New Year’s resolutions this year.  How am I doing so far.  It is not too late to stop and recommit myself to them.  It is never too late.  I need to look back at my goals and remind myself to stay on track.”

I know enough about myself to realize that somewhere around that time is going to be when I start reverting back to my old bad habits and forget about the promises I made to myself.  I also made this a reoccurring task.  It will show up on the tenth every other month.  So it’ll remind me again in April, June, August, October and December.  This year is going to be different.  I hope this works.

I need to commit to some of them like “losing weight” for health reasons.  I have put on weight pretty steadily since my teenage years.  Damn, that was a long time ago.  I will not admit how much I have gained totally since then, but let’s just say that the beer gods have been generous in their contributions to my spare tire.

Here is to us and to us sticking to our New Year’s resolutions.  Na zdrowie!

I can’t wait to see its demise. I doubt it will ultimately fail because there are very limited legit uses for it. The legit uses for it are far far surpassed right now with every Tom Dick and Harry who wants to think they are cool because they got thousands of pretend friends out there.

These are pretend friends because very few of the people who follow you are going to actually want to read the drivel you post on there. The vast majority of twitters out there are going to get sick of it within a year when they realize that only about 5 people really give a shit what they have to say about meaningless nonsense throughout the day.

It is a lot more fun to just text back and forth with those people using a cell phone. It is way more fun than logging into your twitter account and posting two words.

Try it for yourself if you don’t believe me.

Go create an account on twitter and see how many people follow you even when you have said absolutely nothing. I experimented with it. I created an account on twitter and never bothered to promote it.

All I did was choose to follow one person on there. To this day, I get tons of emails from twitter saying that so and so is following me. Why, I ask. I made one completely insignificant comment on there and all of a sudden I have hundreds of followers. What a freaking joke.

Why would someone want to follow someone else that they don’t even know when this person has said absolutely nothing. It is a total joke. The reason people follow you is because they want you to follow them back. Yay! Let’s all pretend we are back in kindergarten playing you’re it. Yay!

Twitter is for the most part a totally useless portal for people who think they are going to somehow make it big time in social media or social marketing. Whatever. I think you could find more use out of submitting social bookmarks to some obscure Pligg site that isn’t even indexed in Google anymore.

Twitter is an utter and complete total waste of time. If I had an ownership stake in it, I would be looking to sell that POS right now. Let some poor sucker overpay for it.

People are using it to make themselves feel important. Once they realize that only 3 people out of their 80,000 followers are actually reading what they have to say, then they will quickly realize what a hunk of crap it is.

Just my two cents.  Here is an opinion of it from a guy on Youtube.   This is pretty much what I think of it.

Who really cares what I have to say anyway.