Tag Archives: internet

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Christmas shopping. I know the old saying goes “It’s better to give than to receive” and while I’m sure there are some very good socio-religious reasons for that adage, my own Christmas shopping does not in any way reflect it. After a week of hitting the sales at my usual haunts, it’s pretty much Jeff: 10, Everyone Else: 0. I’m shooting to get most of my list covered down over this coming weekend. Fortunately, in the finest tradition of 21st century man, gift cards are pretty easy to find and I can have just about all of that knocked out in about an hour. I’m sure I could go spend the next three weeks carefully pondering what the recipients might want, but in the end, shopping for other people is mostly a wild ass shot in the dark. It’s better all around to take my chances with them knowing what they want instead of giving it my best blind guess.

2. Arguing on the internet. I’m a regular member of several online forums. One of the best aspects of the internet is that no matter what you’re interested in, there’s almost guaranteed to be a group of people out there interested in talking about the same thing. From investments to tortoise keeping, there’s a discussion out there for you. What I don’t understand is why so many people spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on these sites arguing with one another over nitpicky details that really make all that much difference. There’s something about having an internet connection that imbues people with the sense that they alone are the herald of the One Truth. I’m of the opinion that there is room for smart people to disagree, for there to be more than one version of the truth, without everyone being a bunch of doucheknockers. Then again, that theory depends largely on it being a discussion between smart people. Which may be the ultimate flaw in my logic.

3. Thirty minutes. That’s how much later than normal I left work on Tuesday. I signed off on it in advance and for once actually wanted to go to a meeting, but that didn’t take into account the fact that apparently leaving 1800 seconds after the end of my usual duty day approximately doubles the duration of my drive home from 45 minutes to nearly an hour and a half. If I wanted to deal with that kind of asshattery, I would have accepted the job down at Ft. Myer and not here in the sticks, thank you very much. File that one under the category labeled “Mistakes I Won’t Make a Second Time.”

The not so mysterious case of Comcast sucks…

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Well, tonight you were schedule to get the post you should have gotten yesterday… But it seems “Comcast is experiencing technical difficulties that are impacting your cable television and high speed internet service.” Therefore, since I don’t feel like re-typing the damned things with my thumbs, you get another day of space filler. So in conclusion, Comcast sucks.

Yes, I know this is a first world problem… and since I live in the United States and not some remote herding camp in East Dirtbagistan, we’re just going to call them problems from now on. It’s one of the perks of living in the first world.

25,000…

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Sometime while I was at work today, jeffreytharp.com rolled over the 25,000 view mark. That’s pretty impressive for some random guy posting whatever pops into his head on a website that doesn’t do any actual advertising. The internet never ceases to amaze me with the reach of its long arms. In that 25,000 visits, every continent is represented (except Antarctica). Not a bad voice at all for a kid from down the Crick.

I started blogging in June 2006, wandered around through a host of platforms from MySpace to Blogger and finally here to WordPress. It started as an occasional post, morphed into posts showing up a few times a week, and now a new post shows up, generally, every day. I’ve learned more about writing from keeping this blog and its predecessors than I ever learned in school. I’ve learned more about myself that I thought I wanted to know too. I’ve learned that sometimes I pull my punches and that despite a life largely lived online, there are still elements that I’m never going to feel comfortable making available for public consumption. I use to feel guilty about keeping some part of myself separate from the blog, but I’m past that now.

After seven years of writing, I’m a bit surprised that I haven’t run out of things to say. I’m even more surprised that there are people out there who are legitimately interested in what’s going to show up on these pages next. For a guy not exactly known for his humility, I’ve found that to be incredibly humbling.

For good or bad, every word written on these pages is mine. They each reflect the moment in time that they were written. For those 629 people currently following jeffreytharp.com and for those yet to find this little endeavor, I really do thank you from the bottom of my heart. Even though I’ve said I don’t write for an audience, I have to admit that it’s far more entertaining with everyone along with me for the ride. Let’s see how things look from the 50,000 view level.

The international edition…

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I get the vast majority of my page views from right here in the good ol’ US of A. No surprise there. One of the fun factoids I’ve noticed recently is that I’m starting to see a lot more international traffic filter through the doors. Now I don’t want to imply this increase is a direct result of a couple of posts talking about the National Security Agency (Hi there!), but that’s more or less when the traffic picked up… and in the best traditions of snarky blog authors everywhere I want to take the opportunity to welcome my new readers from the UK, France, Germany, Canada, India, the Philippines, Australia, Serbia, Bangladesh, Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lithuania, Mexico, Ireland, Russia, Norway, Finland, Poland, Romania, Vietnam, Sweden, Paraguay, South Africa, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Brazil, Egypt, Singapore, Austria, Cyprus, Angola, Jordan, Malaysia, Israel, Taiwan, and the Bahamas.

I hope you have a pleasant visit here at jeffreytharp.com and find many, many interesting posts for your reading pleasure. Please keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times and remember that all posts on jeffreytharp.com are subject to the copyright laws of the United States of America and traffic here is probably monitored by at least one domestic intelligence agency. Thanks for your interest in my blog.

Your viewing of this site constitutes consent to hold the author harmless in the event of an invasion of your homeland or a drone strike on your house.

Too exhausting…

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© 2013 Imgur, LLC.

© 2013 Imgur, LLC.

I feel like I should write a post about some combination of the IRS, NSA, privacy, and executive overreach… but honestly it’s just all too exhausting to put into words. This great country was a constitutional republic once and could be still if more than a handful of people were interested in holding the elected representatives of the people accountable for their words and actions. I’m not holding my breath. If anyone needs me, I’ll be downstairs turning the basement into a room-sized Faraday cage so I can have the occasional untapped conversation.

The great leveler…

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Email, like death, is one of life’s great levelers. From the high and the mighty down to the lowest of the low, we all get entirely too much email. Shoving electrons through the network make it so easy to moving information from here to there that most of us never stop to ask if the people on the receiving end actually need the information we’re pushing at them. Because the most important thing the average bureaucrat does on a daily basis is cover his or her ass, we end up in a seemingly endless do-loop of email and instant messages.

The ability to generate an instant distribution list is possibly the worst thing to ever happen to the average office drone… because let’s face it, if the email is addressed “To” more than one or two people, no one is going to take on the individual responsibility of answering it. If you address it to 20 people, no one is even going to bother reading it at all. The only thing four pages of addressees gets you is the merciless ridicule of your colleagues and the tears of a God disappointed that you’ve used your free will for such douchebaggery.

I wish I was making this up, but four pages of recipients for a message that needs to go to three people is, politely put, a bit much. I’m the first to say that if something’s worth killing, it’s probably worth overkilling, but sheesh, even I have limits. I’m not saying an email addressed to +/-700 people makes you look like an asshat; I’m saying that by actually sending that email out into the world you are, in fact, an asshat. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one… kind of like the distinction between covering your ass and becoming an object of loathsome contempt.

A taxing case of hypotheticals…

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I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a fan of tax-free shopping on the internet. Of course I know that theoretically I’m supposed to self-report and pay Maryland state sales taxes due on the items I purchase, but… Yeah. I’m going to invoke the 5th Amendment and not discuss the particulars of what I may or may not do.

As a Republican, I should probably be up in arms about this “new” tax, but as a Constitutionalist, it’s pretty well established (i.e. expressly written) that the Congress has every right to fiddle with interstate commerce as it sees fit. As much as I wish it otherwise, my reading of the tea leaves is that the collection of state income taxes by internet retailers is going to become a fact of life sooner rather than later. Do I like it? No, of course not. Am I going to gird myself for battle against it? No, not so much. I’ve got limited brain power and limited time to dedicate to causes and this isn’t going to become part of the long list of the windmills I enjoy tilting at from time to time.

If I were a good patriot who disagrees with state and federal tax policy, I’d hypothetically vote with my dollars – and have as many hypothetical major purchases as possible shipped for in store pickup in Delaware, where at least for the time being can hypothetically continue to avoid onerous state sales taxes and excessive commercial regulation. Of course if I were really to take by business out of state, I’d obviously file the appropriate quarterly tax forms with the Comptroller of Maryland in accordance with whatever batshit crazy laws the legislature has passed.

Always on…

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If your work involves a computer connected to the internet, you’ll know that there is something far more sinister that a normal network outage. When faced with a total disruption, you can at least try to make the best of it and do something that doesn’t require accessing the internet. What’s more insidious than a total failure of the network? It’s the dreaded “intermittent network connectivity issues” message that shows up during one of the windows when the internet is actually working.

As far as I can tell, the intermittent problem is far worse than a full blown outage. It means you’re going to sit at your desk and keep hitting refresh or resend indefinitely – locking you into a kind of electronic purgatory of endless spinning status icons and error messages interspersed with occasionally glimpses of the wonderfully connected word of the interwebs that exists just beyond your office firewall. For someone whose job is mostly based on gathering, analyzing, and moving large amounts of information from Point A to Point B, it’s the contemporary equivalent of Chinese water torture or death by a thousand cuts.

In any case, it’s intolerable. I’m beginning to lean towards always-on, high-speed internet streaming to your computer and phone being the civil rights crusade of the 21st century.

Something corporate…

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I’ve spent the last 90 minutes waging my own personal war against Comcast… the company that we all love to hate. If it weren’t for basically needing to have high speed internet, I’d cut the cable all together. Sadly, there just isn’t a viable alternative to cable internet available here in the back woods of Cecil County and I’d end up paying as much for internet alone as I do for the cable/internet bundle.

Up until I made some changes, I had 300 channels of which I watched maybe a dozen with any consistency… something about paying for something I’m not using just rubs me the wrong way. Since my TV is usually parked on some combination of History, Discovery, and Fox News, cutting way back on the number of channels just seemed like the thing to do. As far as I’m concerned, they ought to pin a bright shiny medal on the guy who finally cracks the code on unbundling television channels. Let me pick five for $20 and I’m on it before the ink dries on the deal. Still, I managed to cut my bill in half tonight and I have the funny feeling that I’m not going to miss much even after “losing” two thirds of the channels I had been getting. With Apple TV, Netflix, and Hulu lined up to fill in the gaps, it’s possible that I’m well on my way down the road to ditching cable television completely just to make a small personal statement regarding my thoughts on the services they offer.

Is anyone else out there using Comcast for internet only? As always, feedback is encouraged.

Go Google Youself…

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Three years ago, if I googled myself, I think the blog I was running at the time started showing up somewhere around page five or six of the search results. A few minutes ago I typed my name into the search bar instead of the address bar and ended up googling myself by accident. I swear it’s not something I do on a regular basis. Seriously. I don’t. Honest.

As it turns out, a few years make a difference in the standings and there I am right there as the second listing whenever anyone searches for “Jeffrey Tharp”. Let’s just ignore the reasons why anyone might be doing that for the moment. As it turns out, the #1 Jeffrey Tharp in all of the internet is not yours truly, but rather an orthopedic surgeon based in Ohio. He seems like a good enough doc, rated better than average from what I can see. But still, I lust after his coveted 1st place search result location. Does that give you any indication of how slow a week it’s been? Yes, I’ve had time tonight to sit here and ponder zen and the nature of Google search results.

All I can say, Dr. Jeffrey S. Tharp of Akron, Ohio, is I’m coming for you. Do you hear the footsteps? You’ve probably improved the lives of hundreds and thousands of people with your healing arts, but I’m a go to source of humor, sarcasm, and snarky commentary for at least several people who I can name off the top of my head. I think we can all see why I should be first in the rankings, right? So you can either stand aside gracefully to let me claim my rightful place atop page one, or I’ll be forced to continue blogging five days a week until I simply overwhelm Google with the volume of subpages linked from http://www.jeffreytharp.com. The choice is yours. I know you’ll do the honorable thing.