|
TheFourthFerret
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Dave
Birthday: 5/16/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: My faith, computers, cars, airsoft, gaming/LAN parties, people, flying, music, hanging w/friends, swimming, photography, knives, guns, fire/demolitions, etc, etc, etc. Check out my Photography xanga: past_impressions
Expertise: Computer stuff.
Occupation: Computer related
Industry: Computers (Hardware)
Message: message me
AIM:  DaveDude7000
MSN: DaveDude7000
ICQ:  218723334
Yahoo:  DaveDude7000
Member Since:
6/21/2004
|
|
| There should be a movement back to Xanga. It's really sad how I've just completely neglected the slightly more intellectual, actually written-blog-centric outlet in favor of a somewhat mindless simple social networking site offering the same as everyone else - mind-numbing daily life updates, limited photo albums, simple email-like messaging, basic collaboration, and bandwidth-sucking video and applications. Not to mention all the side-banner adds necessary for someone to become filthy rich off all of us.
Upon revisiting my long-beloved Xanga page, I was greeted with a notice that they had changed the interface and "Everyone seems to like it," or some such promise. I continue to my "homemain.aspx" page, which has become heavily laden with shiny Web2.0-like buttons offering.... the same as everyone else. Now you can add photos, video, albums, audio... It happens to be just like that other place. Except it seems Xanga's rip-off is simply trying way too hard. It's very poorly tied together, in my opinion of course, but I do have to admit that at least the user "home" page is still generally clean with a basic white background and minimal "fluff" scattered around. Or perhaps that's just because my browser extension is blocking half of the active-content scripts the page is trying to force down my throat. Firefox, I love thee. I miss landing on the familiar simple HTML-based page, clicking on "Subscriptions" and being quickly handed an even more basic plain page showing me the text-only writings of my brilliant friends. Even smilies were excluded from this glorious, perfectly minimal center of pure efficiency. Granted, the new subscriptions page is similar, but no longer spartan, it has melded with the new home page, now including images and yet an additional script trying to run in the background for who-knows-what purpose! Something tells me I'd have more to gripe about if not for NoScript (http://noscript.net/).
Wondering what wondrous things Xanga has done with my public home page, I find the familiar link at the top left to go directly there. I was immediately surprised with the absence of a top banner ad, which was historically prominently located at the very top of all pages. This method proved forgivable because it was politely separated from the body and even the header of the page. Instead, I quickly noticed a brand new module grouped right in the middle of those modules I carefully approved and populated. This newcomer was completely blank, showing just the module background color of my site's theme. Curious, I employed the right mouse button to find out that this wasn't just a happy new neighbor offering an opportunity to improve my overall site content, but instead was a collection of scripts once again being faithfully blocked by my renewed best friend in the whole world of browserdom. A little torked (or a little *more* as was the case), I needed to know to what were my visitors being subjected. After NoScript obediently allowed that panel of evil scripts though, I was horrified to see some obnoxious Valentine's Day animation jumping around in clashing bright red, completely distracting from the clean interface that has been my strive from day one and text body of my front page. The prominent, yet polite, has now turned into something very annoying and INTEGRATED into my design! As if I put that there - An endorsement!?! At least sometimes that pest is driven by Google's AdSense, a much less "screaming-in-your-face" method of advertising. Even with AdSense, there are still no fewer than an average of 5 scripts trying to load just with a text-plus-outline-formatted web page. It's an outrage!
With all these improvements, it seems like Xanga's racing to become more bloated than even the abandon-all-rationality-in-favor-of-depressing-stupidity... on-a-stick, MySpace. If only I wasn't already established, and was looking for a good outlet for a writing-oriented, blog-centered medium, sorry Xanga, I'd move right on by.
That said, I can't argue with the familiar feel that Xanga does still have and the great sense of once again, sitting down to write something more than just a status update letting everyone know that I can be creative and witty with a saying about myself as long as it's kept to a one-liner with a character limit... That no one really benefits from anyway. The truth is, it's sort of nice to drop another little rant about nothing too important that maybe one person find can a little humor in the satire. And ultimately, after all of the above, it's just nice to be back on my good old Xanga again.
Thank you all, and good night.
| | |
| ...From Microsoft.
Thanks to our good friends over at Microsoft, IT departments have yet another headache. Windows Desktop Search, a program that integrates into your desktop and explorer to speed up searching for files on your PC, promising instant results when you need to find something, is by no means new. It's actually a few versions old and has been around for a bit.
While faster searching sounds like a great idea, and don't get me wrong, it is, what isn't advertised is the painful processes it uses to achieve such claims. By continually monitoring and cataloging certain locations on a computer's hard drive, it maintains a "list" so to speak of every file and folder in those locations. When you use it to search, it then speeds through its list rather than drudging through the hard drive's file system. This sounds great on paper and even better when applied in the brilliant method many people use daily without even thinking about it- on Google.
Give WDS a test drive and you'll quickly find that it's far from convenient or even piratical. Actually, you'll immediately notice how much better your life was without the "instant" search super power you are now supposed to have. Tests have shown that this program slows many computers down to a crawl as it constantly rummages through your files as if it were doing something. I say that because in my own tests, never once did I actually get it to turn up what I was trying to find. What's the good of "instantaneous" when you "instantaneously" get nothing? Even worse was when I tried its integration in Outlook 2007. The heavily bloated resource hog as it is, became much worse when my dual-core very capable laptop refused to do much else the first several minutes after launching Outlook in the morning. Between the Outlook plugin and the Desktop Search, I think a couple years were probably taken off the hard drive's life as it was continually active.
Now, since we have this shiny piece of trash that is actually good for nothing but wasting minutes at a time while not actually providing any useful service, the next great idea is to release this little gem as an automatic update. That's right, we don't want to let anyone get board with their computers actually working! But wait! That wasn't far enough. Be it a bug or by design, they went to the next level by not just hitting the home user, but also the corporate world as well. The ones who must monitor and regulate every outside influence to keep their networks streamlined and secure. The ones who painstakingly set policies and regulate and evaluate the impact of each element introduced to their fragile web of perfectly humming resources. There are tools to prevent a rouge update from suddenly crashing a database costing thousands for each hour of lost productivity. Servers with the task of organizing, regulating, and letting administrators choose which updates to allow and which to disapprove prevent such situations from happening on a regular basis. Not this time. Reports have shown that even if Windows Desktop Search isn't approved by these "Windows Server Update Service" servers, it still whent straight through effecting companies and schools large and small.
To mix it up a little, there seems to be little consistency. Some report the WDS update patiently waiting for approval contrary to others' nightmares. To add to that, it will show up in Add/Remove programs to let you uninstall it most of the time. When it doesn't, there's still a chance to remove it from an uninstall location in Windows... when it's there. If neither exist, you can always just try to find the uninstaller on another workstation that has been infected.
Microsoft is widely criticized for rubbish software. Sometimes they deserve it, while sometimes not. But at least in this case, with legitimate applications like that, who needs spyware?
| | |
| I rarely had time for Xanga posts as it was... then came Facebook.
| | |
| I figured I should post something, though I have no original content to offer at the moment. So here's a little feature you may have noticed on Xanga's front page: An amazing story
Although this story isn't new, it's still good to reflect on how amazingly brilliant people can be... Or just how many suckers there are in the general population. Either way, the guy found a way to profit off of the masses- on a cheap item no less. Props to him.
| | |
| Some of you knew I went up to Wisconsin to see the Oshkosh Air Show (EAA"Airventure") over an extended weekend with my bro, and two good friends.
Traveling Thursday and attending Friday, the ground part of the show was nothing short of amazing with many pieces of flight history and modern aircraft parked on display. Also incredible was the "fly-in" where private small airplane owners had [litterally] flown in and were camping on the airfield grounds for the week. There were whole parking lots and the field area along the flight line (spectator area parallel to the main runway) full of small planes parked parking-lot style, many with tents set up next to them. And we're talking hundreds of small aircraft from ultra-lights to 4-6 seat models old and new.
The first actual "air show" act ended very soberingly with two P-51 Mustangs colliding on landing, killing one of the pilots. Some of you may have caught the news story. There was a real sense of sadness around as, although they continued the show after about an hour for the rescue teams to try to clean up the crash sites, it was clear that one of crashes was fatal short of an extreme miracle. After 3 more classic-era acrobatics routines, officials called the rest of the show off as it would have been dangerous to continue with debris and workers still out at the end of the main runway. In light of the situation, tt seemed very trivial to feel disappointed having not been able to see two F-22s in action as I was primarily looking forward to.
Saturday was spent getting a later start and visiting Bay Beach, a natural reserve located on the shore of Green Bay. Seeing lots of birds including Turkey Vultures, Bald Eagles, and many others as well as other non-typical animals up-close was fun and relaxing, and provided another great excuse to play with my camera. That evening we discovered an excellent Italian restaurant in southern Green Bay called Grazies Italian Grill (http://www.graziesitaliangrill.com). If you're ever in the Green Bay area, forget "Packer" related activities and go there! That's one restaurant where our experience was top-notch from food to service and even value. Highly recommended. Seriously, if you're around, look it up.
Traveling back was mostly uneventful with some detours in Chicago to avoid the Dan Ryan Express way, which had apparently turned into a parking lot. As is common in Chicago, ordeal significantly lengthened our journey home. The great thing about it was this gave my sinuses plenty of time to clear up in solid Bear territory after my allergic reaction to staying at a hotel just a couple blocks distance from Lambeau field in Green Bay.
Now it's just back to the routine...
| | |
|
No one person knows how to make a pencil