Tag Archives: internet

Explorer…

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Until the arrival of the new computers, the fact that many of us installed Firefox as our default web browser wasn’t quite officially sanctioned, but wasn’t banned either. I’d have still rather used Chrome, but that wasn’t even considered worthy of being an option. Now look, I’m all in favor of network security, but that doesn’t have to mean we get stuck using antiquated software – and yes, even a three year old browser feels antiquated after you’re use to using one of the other available options – you know, the ones that have been released in the current decade.

Hey, I’m super excited about getting a new computer. It’s swell that I can now unplug the machine and not have the battery die immediately. It’s just on this one little point of software where we’re having a real problem. I’m sure Internet Explorer works just fine for most people under most conditions, but on a machine that’s already bogged down with metric tons of security software and on a network that no one would call speedy under the best of conditions, IE pretty much adds insult to injury.

We’re a nation that prides itself on technological innovation, so please, for the love of God, his saints, and all things good and holy, can we find a way to look at the interwebs that doesn’t involve dragging out this old warhorse of a program? We’re seriously not doing ourselves any favors here. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and ask about the nine times I had to force quit Explorer before I went to lunch this morning.

And while you’re at it, can you please stop resetting my default homepage. I know our web address and I find it a lot less useful in my daily work than Google is. Sigh.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Wi-Fi. If you’re going to go to the trouble of installing building-wide wi-fi connectivity, it might be a good idea to actually let people in the building know what the password is. Otherwise you’re just beaming radiation at us all day long for no apparent reason. Mmmkay?

2. Assumptions. Just because I’m sitting in class typing something on my laptop, doesn’t mean that I’m not paying attention to whatever you’re saying up there in the front of the room. You’re just going to have to trust me on that one. Calling on me to give an opinion on whatever topic you’re discussing isn’t really going to give me much trouble. That’s not a critique of your skills as an instructor so much as it is a function of having covered this material half a dozen times in other classes.

3. Laundry. How can one guy generate four full loads of laundry a week? And before anyone asks, no, that’s not “separated”. That’s four filled to the brim loads of whatever I can cram into the machine to avoid having a fifth load magically appear. There simply has to be a better way to spend your life than just wandering around picking up after yourself.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. FM Radio. I’ve had a satellite radio account since back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the state of the art was a receiver mounted to the air conditioning duck and an antenna wire snaking out the window to a magnetic antenna. After the better part of a week tooling around in a car without Sirius, I can honestly say that normal radio is actually worse than I remember it being. Constant commercials, bad reception, God awful “morning zoos” on just about every channel, there’s clearly a reason that broadcast radio is a free “service.” If nothing else, this brief time off satellite has proven to me the value of being able to toggle between the BBC, any genre of music I can even think of wanting to listen to, a dozen news/talk stations, and the need to get an occasional Howard Stern fix. I’ll try to remember that the next time I notice the bill come in.

2. The Network. Reliable 24×7 high speed internet isn’t a luxury item in the 21st century. Sure, maybe if you’re a moisture farmer somewhere in the third world, dial-up is good enough but if you’re a knowledge worker who trades in ideas it’s like trying to make a phone call with duct tape over your mouth. Unless “I’d love to do whatever random task you want me to handle today, but can’t because I can’t see the interwebs” becomes an legitimate excuse for falling off timelines, it’s really falls to the employer to ensure network availability on more than three days out of five. Sure SkyNet might have destroyed civilization, but at least it didn’t collapse into an unusable mass of Network Errors every couple of hours.

3. #FirstWorldProblems. I’ve run across a spate of articles lately decrying the fact that so much of what we Westerners b*tch and complain about are “First World Problems” and wanting us collectively to me more attuned to ongoing plights like famine, pestilence, war, and plague. Let’s go ahead and get one thing straight right now. As a rule, I am opposed to most of the aforementioned issues. However, since I happen to live in the developed world, the things that annoy me on a regular and recurring bases are going to tend to be, by definition, first world problems. And here’s the kicker: I’m OK with that. I’m just a guy trying to do a job and have some semblance of a life. Every now and then I do my bit for the poor, downtrodden, diseased, or hungry by kicking out a check to the charity of my choice. So stop trying to lay down a massive guilt trip on everyone. There’s nothing anyone can tell me that’s going to make me feel compelled to go wandering around some backwater village in a part of the world not even the State Department has heard about on a quest to stomp out GonoHerpiSyphilAids.

Viva la Capitalism!

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I’ve really been sitting here metaphorically bashing my head against the desk trying to figure out what was worth writing about tonight. The solution, as usual, was right in front of me. Usually, I don’t pay that much attention to the internet. It’s basically transparent to the user… I mean I don’t sit down at the keyboard and say I’m going to use the internet to access WordPress or my bank. I just point in the direction of what I want to do, and it gets me there. The wonder if the internet really isn’t what got me thinking tonight, though. It’s the sites like eBay and Amazon, Etsy and Cafepress that let any schmo create an account, log in, and start selling products to a whole world of consumers that they wouldn’t have access to from the kind of businesses that people started from home five or ten years ago. Maybe I’m coming late to this party, but damnit, that’s a big deal. It’s huge! Someone with an idea that’s good enough can sit in the comfort of their on home and make money from nothing more than their ideas and a willingness to put in the time to identify and reach an audience.

Your chances of becoming an internet millionaire are probably about the same as hitting tonight’s MegaMillions jackpot, but still, in this case it seems to be a function of the harder you work, they luckier you get. The beauty of this new wave of micro-capitalism is that it takes so much of the hugh startup costs out of the equation and lets people focus on delivering a quality product while someone with the technical expertise deals with the “back office” stuff. With a few good ideas and a high speed internet connection, we can all be in business. Talk about a radical departure from all of human history.

Viva la Capitalism!

Blackout…

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As a general rule, I’m not a joiner. I don’t show up at protests and I don’t use my blog as a forum for anyone’s opinions other than mine. Today is an exception. S. 968 – The Protect IP Act is bad public policy and amounts to nothing short of censorship on a scale this country has never seen. Essentially, this Act would grant the government a nearly unfettered ability to order private companies and individuals to remove content, hide content from search engines, and generally make it impossible to continue using the internet as a means of freely exchanging ideas that it has been since its inception. The theft of intellectual property is absolutely wrong and should be prosecuted. Allowing blanket censorship of the internet, however, is like using a nuclear bomb to shoo a fly.

I urge everyone reading this to contact your Members of Congress and tell them that a free and open internent is in the national interest and that they should oppose efforts to censor what we can and cannot see online.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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After a brief hiatus due to Thanksgiving induced laziness, What Annoys Jeff this Week is back by popular demand. As always, here they are in no particular order:

Lame news headlines. In the age of digital media, I get that what qualifies as news might not now be on the same journalistic level as was expected in the heyday of newspapers and network news broadcasts. But really, a banner headline screaming “THANKSGIVING TRAVELERS HEAD HOME” seems like one of those things that should pretty much be expected the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I mean was anyone expecting large numbers of people to go away for Thanksgiving and never come back. I’m not asking for much, just a little journalistic perspective and common sense. Oh yeah, I guess I am asking for too much. Never mind then. Carry on.

Shouting. Yelling across a room full of cubicles to ask a question is not a substitute for the old fashioned intercom system. Actually, it’s not a substitute for anything. We have phones, email, and instant messaging at our desks. In a pinch, we could even walk the 20 feet to ask a question if we really had to, so wall to wall shouting is really unnecessary. Especially at 7:45AM. Maybe I’ll start wrapping notes around small rocks and winging them in the general direction of people when I need to get information to them. That would be at least as effective and much more entertaining.

The Internet. The internet really should be a privilege and not a right. I’m all in favor of people having a difference of opinion on important issues. That’s good. That’s healthy. But only when it’s an informed opinion. When it’s not, well, you’re just left with a large group of incoherently rambling lunatics whose only justification for anything is “that’s just what I think.” While that might be good enough for Jesus and you mother to keep loving you, the rest of us think you’re an asshat.

Blockage…

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I realize that I’m using a work computer on a work network and I’m completely cool with there being limits on how those things can be used. I just think there should be a little more transparency about what the rules are and how they are applied. No internet porn. Got it. I’ll try to remember that it’s whitehouse.gov next time. No harm, no foul. But how about the BLOCKED/Humor category. I can’t get to The Oatmeal or The Onion, but I can get to Dilbert.com. Irony much? Why is it I can’t check the winning Powerball numbers (that site is BLOCKED/Gambling), but the guy next to me can spend half the afternoon selling stuff on eBay? I mean we’re both just trying to strike it rich, right? He’s just willing to put in a little more effort than I am.

Look, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be standards… I’m just saying that once again, you guys down in the network ops bunker are doing it all wrong. At least you’re consistent.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

The searchers…

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Running a blog is a mixture of art and science. The art comes in the form of the actual words on the page. The science tells you who’s searching for what, why people are visiting, and where their coming from. It’s probably not a discussion to have with your friends who are worried that the government or big corporations are tracking your every move. The analytic tools that are available to me, a poor simple blogger, would be profoundly disturbing for them. Disturbing images of big brother aside, I’m always curious about what brings people here. And since it’s bad form to blatantly ask, I’m using some analytic tools to let me know what web searches lead people to me. So yes, I’m tracking you, but only a little bit. I’m sure there are ways to put names with hits, but that’s not something I’m interested in so your secret identities are safe. All I know is that you’ve been here. Sort of like knowing that people lived in your house before you did by finding a box of their crap pushed all the way to the back of the crawl space.

If you’re wondering what brings people here, there are some obvious answers. The top draw was apparently the DOD/Army hiring freeze. That one’s still bringing in hits although I haven’t written about it in three or four months. Electronic cigarettes is another big winner. Apparently there’s alot of interest out there. Of course my old favorite is still well into the top five: Teamwork Sucks. That’s been bringing in consistant visitors since I opened the doors here. None of those is surprising, really, once you remember the the town square of the modern world.

The ones that are really interesting are the one offs that land just one lone individual here on the site. Some of my personal favorite searches from the last year are:

– memphis storm drain backup
– how can i protect my grass from people driving over it?
– narcotics jeff tharp
– how to piss off apartment manager
– ocd mowing the lawn
– jeff tharp star wars oregon
– tactical retrograde
– glen beck institutionalized

Some of them I can understand. I did spend some time ranting about Glen and an inordinate amount of time worrying with my lawn. If any of you are updating my mother, though, can you please assure her that I have no idea where the narcotics part came from. Thanks for the solid.

Where credit is due…

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I was all set to come back to the house tonight and write a scathing rant about Comcast. Give their track record, I didn’t think they’d have a prayer of restoring service today. Happily, I would have been dead wrong in that assessment. So now I’ve got to give credit where it’s due. Less than 36 hours after the lines came down, I’m back up and running with TV and internet. No fuss, no resetting boxes, just walked in turned things on and the signal was there. Nice job, Comcast. You done good this time around and I appreciate that.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll get lucky and I’ll have something to rant about.

Memory…

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I read an article last week about human memory essentially being destroyed by computers that file everything from phone numbers to copies of the Gettysburg Address for us. Far from making my mind less capable, it was the interconnected series of tubes that let me take a passing flash of recognition and run down the rest of the story. It let me make connections that I could have never made on my own, adding a helpful boost on the weakness of 13 year old memories. If there was ever something to be celebrated, that would be it.

Ten years ago, if I had passed someone in the hallway and thought they looked familiar, that would have been it and I’d have gone on about my day without giving it another thought. But thanks to Google, any passing thought can become the focus of an entire day of searching out leads from four year old newsletters, generalized e-stakling, and finally putting a name with that long ago face. All for the simple moment of pleasure at walking up and saying, “I thought I recognized you,” and spending a few minutes reconnecting with someone who knew you a lot more hair ago.