Recently I had to rebuild a couple of work computers because some people had used a proxy bypass to get around the content filter and firewall so that they could access several social networking sites. In case you didn’t know, we IT people don’t put those sorts of protections in place to thwart users from having a good time, but rather to cover our own asses and keep needless repairs to a minimum. Besides, no one ever claimed work was supposed to be fun, otherwise it would be called happy fun time instead of work.
While social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have a fair amount of innocuous content mostly directed toward online dating, inane ranting and probably far too revealing personal information, there is a dark side to it. MySpace has been repeatedly linked to sex offenders, child molesters, pornographic content, character assassination and even a few cases of people committing suicide due to continual harassment on the site. Not to mention the time and energy spent updating, reading, and playing an idiotic game of one-upmanship to keep your profile more cutting edge and ironic than your colleagues and friends. I imagine the productivity loss is on par with that of chain smokers and heavy drinkers.
The practice referred to now as micro blogging has seen a huge increase in popularity due to these sites. Micro blogging is when you write short, usually incomprehensible, blurbs about what inane things you did that day. It is most entertaining to know that spacedgurl69 had a greasy burger for lunch and cried about the size of her ass afterwards. I can see the therapeutic benefit to this, but people in the olden days used journals or diaries and very rarely let other people read them.
Letting people know about your hobbies, quotes you like, your preference for music / food / sexual partners / etc., favorite web comics and other such things might seem like a good idea, few realize that pretty much everyone can see this information. I like my boss and most of my coworkers, but I don’t want them to see what I do outside of work. I really don’t want people who could fire me to know what I do on odd weekends when I am really bored, especially if I was still wild, single, and in my twenties. I would rather charge people for those sorts of stories and probably could make money doing it too.
It is also a sad state of affairs when people count their so-called friends by the number of little cutesy pictures with a badly misspelled note beside it on a website. It has become popular for politicians to claim to have millions of friends based on these sites. I hardly have time to keep up with the handful of real friends I have, I can’t imagine the time it takes when you got millions. But then again, if our current crop of idiots in power had that many friends they wouldn’t have had time to screw up so damn many things. Think about it, if they had been perusing their friend’s social networking pages instead of doing whatever it is they supposedly do, we’d still be able to make it through an airport ‘security’ checkpoint in less than an hour, the US dollar would still be worth more than it’s Canuck counterpart, the oil market wouldn’t be such a mess, and best of all 4300 or so soldiers and who knows how many tens of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive.
While researching this article, I found a petition supporting MySpace removal from block lists in schools here. Some of the responses, with the associated terrible spelling and grammar, are about the best reasons I can find for keeping it blocked in schools.
Links:
MySpace sex offender and other problems
MySpaceIM security problems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace#Security
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=2588
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Starbucks and Sleep Depravation
Does anyone really need that much caffeine?
Is it really worth that much?
I like fancy coffee as much as the next guy, but I have to draw the line at paying anywhere from $4 to $8 for a cup of flavored hot water with some cream and sugar. I know that in some circles showing up with a cup of joe that doesn't come in a brown cup with the all too familiar logo on it is like showing up naked to prom. But if your identity revolves around how much money you stupidly throw away on a warm caffeinated beverage, then you really need a reality check, and soon!
Who says that everything we drink has to have caffeine and sugar in it?
I was reading an article on MSNBC recently about how people are not getting anywhere near the recommended amount of sleep. It is really bad news for teens, sleep deprivation really screws up their development. There are plenty of articles on the internet and in print that say these things, so I wasn't too surprised to read it all over again. It was a slow news day. One thing that did stick in my head about this article were the ads that were splattered all over the page. Normally I filter these things out, but these really caught my eye. It wasn't the fancy Flash animation or the hot girl that caught my eye this time. It was the fact that I was reading an article about sleep problems, how most people do not get as much sleep as they should, and the ads on the page were for Starbucks and Coca Cola.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the two things are related. Just try to find a drink other than water that doesn't have caffeine in it. Sure, there are sports drinks, but they are starting to put caffeine in those too. I lost a few nights sleep to the new Gatorade AM because I had no idea that it was chock full of caffeine.
The whole craze with overpriced drinks with harmful chemicals in them reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. In that movie no one drinks water, the word water is usually followed with the question "like from the toilet?". They prefer this nasty looking sports drink that has something called 'lectrolytes. Of course no one knows what this wonderful chemical is or does, but they don't seem to care either. This hits a little too close to home. Does anyone actually know what an electrolyte is? For that matter does anyone know what Retsin® is either?
Overall, people are too stressed, too sleep deprived and too unhealthy, yet we pour caffeine and sugar down our gullets like it was something we can't live without.
A few more questions to ponder.
Exactly how many chemicals do you put into your body on a regular basis that you have no idea what they are or what they do?
How many people drink sports drinks that rarely drag their fat asses off the couch or computer chair?
How much caffeine do you really need?
Is it really worth that much?
I like fancy coffee as much as the next guy, but I have to draw the line at paying anywhere from $4 to $8 for a cup of flavored hot water with some cream and sugar. I know that in some circles showing up with a cup of joe that doesn't come in a brown cup with the all too familiar logo on it is like showing up naked to prom. But if your identity revolves around how much money you stupidly throw away on a warm caffeinated beverage, then you really need a reality check, and soon!
Who says that everything we drink has to have caffeine and sugar in it?
I was reading an article on MSNBC recently about how people are not getting anywhere near the recommended amount of sleep. It is really bad news for teens, sleep deprivation really screws up their development. There are plenty of articles on the internet and in print that say these things, so I wasn't too surprised to read it all over again. It was a slow news day. One thing that did stick in my head about this article were the ads that were splattered all over the page. Normally I filter these things out, but these really caught my eye. It wasn't the fancy Flash animation or the hot girl that caught my eye this time. It was the fact that I was reading an article about sleep problems, how most people do not get as much sleep as they should, and the ads on the page were for Starbucks and Coca Cola.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the two things are related. Just try to find a drink other than water that doesn't have caffeine in it. Sure, there are sports drinks, but they are starting to put caffeine in those too. I lost a few nights sleep to the new Gatorade AM because I had no idea that it was chock full of caffeine.
The whole craze with overpriced drinks with harmful chemicals in them reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. In that movie no one drinks water, the word water is usually followed with the question "like from the toilet?". They prefer this nasty looking sports drink that has something called 'lectrolytes. Of course no one knows what this wonderful chemical is or does, but they don't seem to care either. This hits a little too close to home. Does anyone actually know what an electrolyte is? For that matter does anyone know what Retsin® is either?
Overall, people are too stressed, too sleep deprived and too unhealthy, yet we pour caffeine and sugar down our gullets like it was something we can't live without.
A few more questions to ponder.
Exactly how many chemicals do you put into your body on a regular basis that you have no idea what they are or what they do?
How many people drink sports drinks that rarely drag their fat asses off the couch or computer chair?
How much caffeine do you really need?
Cell Phones
Most useless toy ever.
Even the best ones drop calls, don't work where/when you actually need them. Their batteries die at the worst time, none will stay charged more than a week and that is only if you don't use it. They have the lamest games, Atari 2600 games rocked compared to those. Tiny little buttons usually in some stupid swooshy pattern aren't a bit intuitive. They take terrible pictures that people inevitably lose before anyone can see them, which seeing them isn't the greaest experience, like looking at a ViewMaster disk without the actual ViewMaster thingy.
Their annoying ringtone suck, especially those stupid pop song downloaded ones, which I get 500 spam emails a day to buy in Hotmail and Yahoo mailboxes. The minibrowser is garbage, only sites that support the browser well enough to use are those that want to sell you more stupid garbage to put on your little toy.
The only thing that sucks more than recieving imbecilic shorthand text messages is having to respond by sending a text message to some hipper than thou wanker on a tiny ill designed 'keyboard'.
The very worst of it all is that these lame communication devices even have stupid games, cameras, minibrowsers, and text messaging. It is a freaking phone! Make it actually able to make a phone call reliably every time!
Even the best ones drop calls, don't work where/when you actually need them. Their batteries die at the worst time, none will stay charged more than a week and that is only if you don't use it. They have the lamest games, Atari 2600 games rocked compared to those. Tiny little buttons usually in some stupid swooshy pattern aren't a bit intuitive. They take terrible pictures that people inevitably lose before anyone can see them, which seeing them isn't the greaest experience, like looking at a ViewMaster disk without the actual ViewMaster thingy.
Their annoying ringtone suck, especially those stupid pop song downloaded ones, which I get 500 spam emails a day to buy in Hotmail and Yahoo mailboxes. The minibrowser is garbage, only sites that support the browser well enough to use are those that want to sell you more stupid garbage to put on your little toy.
The only thing that sucks more than recieving imbecilic shorthand text messages is having to respond by sending a text message to some hipper than thou wanker on a tiny ill designed 'keyboard'.
The very worst of it all is that these lame communication devices even have stupid games, cameras, minibrowsers, and text messaging. It is a freaking phone! Make it actually able to make a phone call reliably every time!
Cancel or Allow THIS...
I recently upgraded my laptop from Windows XP Pro to Windows Vista Business and this is my story. Oh yeah, and I am sticking to it. I went into to this with the full knowledge that if you use your computer for anything more than solitaire and surfing the Internet, upgrading is almost always a mess of some sort. There is always a ton of stuff that isn't compatible from one version of an operating system to another and you have to relearn where all the usual control stuff is all over again.
I also know I shouldn't want to change anything since Vista is 100 per cent perfect; Uncle Bill knows best about what I want anyway. If I had my druthers I'd still be using DOS 5.0; it was pretty nice and it worked pretty well. Then along comes Windows which made the pretty interface the way to go. I know it opened up computing to a lot more people, which is a good thing, right? Unfortunately they didn't quite get it right till Windows 3.1, and then they fumbled through to one of the better ones with Windows 98 Second Edition. Then Windows XP, which is now the standard for Windows users. As usual, everyone complained about the Fisher Price like interface at first then learned to accept it. So it should come as no surprise that people are whining about Fisher Price 2.0 in Vista.
As an IT manager, a network consultant and an all around compooter fixer, I figured I will need to know how to work Windows Fisher Price 2.0 eventually. Sooner or later I am going to have to upgrade to it and people will bring me their computers with it installed that they made a mess of. So I took the plunge.
The first thing I became annoyed with was the security advisor thing. I already knew what I wanted Windows Vista to do -- that is, all the stuff that I was already doing on Windows XP -- so the incessant prompts got really annoying and quick.
Would you like to allow yourself to continue to do what you are doing?
[Cancel] [Allow]
Are you REALLY sure you want to do this?
[Continue] [Cancel]
Are you sure you are not a moron?
[Yes] [No]
I really think it was a bit more complicated the way I went about it because I did a roundabout upgrade using PC Mover, usually a great app but going from an OS that is compatible with everything I have to one that makes an old finicky cat seem carefree was a real pain.
Anyway after a few evenings of adding and removing programs, sometimes via the registry and sometimes with downloaded tools I found on the internet, I managed to get it to do what I wanted. All in all I have to say about upgrading to Vista the way I did, if you value your sanity, don't try this at home.
While doing this I thought several times of those silly Apple computer commercials with the guy that does a bad impression of Mr. Smith, the Matrix agent guy, that does the Cancel or Allow thing to the poor fat dorky guy that is supposed to represent Windows. I feel sorry for the Windows guy in those commercials. While I wouldn't mind the money from a commercial, that isn't something I would be proud to have on my resume.
While those commercials are amusing sometimes, they make me remember when I upgraded from an OS 9 machine to OS X machine for someone. I thought that was supposed to be pretty easy to upgrade a Mac. To hear Mac people talk about it, it is like taking candy from a baby. I guess if the baby in question was Baby Huey, the gigantic infant duckling cartoon character that would apply, I suppose. There is also a quote I heard somewhere about taking candy from a baby: those that say that have never actually tried taking candy from a baby. After a fair amount of hassle, only two of the old applications actually worked on the new machine. The new $2,500 Mac machine ended up costing about $6,000 once all the fancy Adobe artsy stuff had been upgraded to work with OS X.
I guess the main difference here is that Microsoft doesn't act like it is the computer of the people then charge outrageous prices for Little Tykes looking computers; Microsoft just acts like there are no other computers in the world. I guess they could be like Linux instead, and just act like everyone else is evil then require you to go through 15 hours of hell to install it properly.
Now if someone could come up with a Winuxintosh computer with the best of all three. I heard that Lindows was supposed to be that, but I think the main programmer got kicked out of his parent's basement for smoking pot or something like that.
Imagine, if you can, a secure OS that is compatible with everything, and has great file handling capabilities, installs easily and doesn't look like it was designed by the fine folks at Lil Tykes or Fisher Price. I know I would be first in line for one of those.
I also know I shouldn't want to change anything since Vista is 100 per cent perfect; Uncle Bill knows best about what I want anyway. If I had my druthers I'd still be using DOS 5.0; it was pretty nice and it worked pretty well. Then along comes Windows which made the pretty interface the way to go. I know it opened up computing to a lot more people, which is a good thing, right? Unfortunately they didn't quite get it right till Windows 3.1, and then they fumbled through to one of the better ones with Windows 98 Second Edition. Then Windows XP, which is now the standard for Windows users. As usual, everyone complained about the Fisher Price like interface at first then learned to accept it. So it should come as no surprise that people are whining about Fisher Price 2.0 in Vista.
As an IT manager, a network consultant and an all around compooter fixer, I figured I will need to know how to work Windows Fisher Price 2.0 eventually. Sooner or later I am going to have to upgrade to it and people will bring me their computers with it installed that they made a mess of. So I took the plunge.
The first thing I became annoyed with was the security advisor thing. I already knew what I wanted Windows Vista to do -- that is, all the stuff that I was already doing on Windows XP -- so the incessant prompts got really annoying and quick.
Would you like to allow yourself to continue to do what you are doing?
[Cancel] [Allow]
Are you REALLY sure you want to do this?
[Continue] [Cancel]
Are you sure you are not a moron?
[Yes] [No]
I really think it was a bit more complicated the way I went about it because I did a roundabout upgrade using PC Mover, usually a great app but going from an OS that is compatible with everything I have to one that makes an old finicky cat seem carefree was a real pain.
Anyway after a few evenings of adding and removing programs, sometimes via the registry and sometimes with downloaded tools I found on the internet, I managed to get it to do what I wanted. All in all I have to say about upgrading to Vista the way I did, if you value your sanity, don't try this at home.
While doing this I thought several times of those silly Apple computer commercials with the guy that does a bad impression of Mr. Smith, the Matrix agent guy, that does the Cancel or Allow thing to the poor fat dorky guy that is supposed to represent Windows. I feel sorry for the Windows guy in those commercials. While I wouldn't mind the money from a commercial, that isn't something I would be proud to have on my resume.
While those commercials are amusing sometimes, they make me remember when I upgraded from an OS 9 machine to OS X machine for someone. I thought that was supposed to be pretty easy to upgrade a Mac. To hear Mac people talk about it, it is like taking candy from a baby. I guess if the baby in question was Baby Huey, the gigantic infant duckling cartoon character that would apply, I suppose. There is also a quote I heard somewhere about taking candy from a baby: those that say that have never actually tried taking candy from a baby. After a fair amount of hassle, only two of the old applications actually worked on the new machine. The new $2,500 Mac machine ended up costing about $6,000 once all the fancy Adobe artsy stuff had been upgraded to work with OS X.
I guess the main difference here is that Microsoft doesn't act like it is the computer of the people then charge outrageous prices for Little Tykes looking computers; Microsoft just acts like there are no other computers in the world. I guess they could be like Linux instead, and just act like everyone else is evil then require you to go through 15 hours of hell to install it properly.
Now if someone could come up with a Winuxintosh computer with the best of all three. I heard that Lindows was supposed to be that, but I think the main programmer got kicked out of his parent's basement for smoking pot or something like that.
Imagine, if you can, a secure OS that is compatible with everything, and has great file handling capabilities, installs easily and doesn't look like it was designed by the fine folks at Lil Tykes or Fisher Price. I know I would be first in line for one of those.
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