Monday, June 15, 2009

These kids today wouldn’t last 5 min in 1984!!!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizzards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a
straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where
they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it! 
SIMPSONS_GRAMPABut.... Now that I've reached the ripe old age of Forty-One, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it! I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet -- we wanted to know something, we had to go to the goddamned library and look it up ourselves! And there was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen! --and then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there! And there were no MP3s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and f@#* it all up! 

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn! You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options! We didn't have fancy shit like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and popo_emotions_full_version amazedsomebody else called they got a busy signal! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was it could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, your drug dealer, you didn't know!!! You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister! And we didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy was a little square! You had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win, the game just kept getting harder and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

AFTER LONG RUN

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! A tall guy sat in front of you, you were screwed! And sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 20 channels and there was no onscreen menu! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! And there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning... ...D'ya hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled, I swear to God! You guys wouldn't last five minutes back in 1984!

 

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Tips on how to live a happy life…

 

“The point is not that you can’t do all of these things, doing some of them makes you achieve a lot from what you were, if there were no fight, there weren’t going to be any winners or losers, if there were no wars the weren't going to be police or soldiers who fight for their countries, their lives. Try to look forward, this is a skill, anyone can master it, you only have to trust yourself “

Saturday, June 6, 2009

The Unbearable Lightness of Bing

“One thing I've noticed since I started playing with Microsoft's Bing "decision engine" is that there isn't very much "there" there. And the only decision Bing seems to care about helping me make is a pretty simple one: Buy it here or buy it there, but again there isn't a lot of, well, you know.bingLogo_lg

Even if Bing knows about the product I am interested in, which so far it most often does not, Bing then makes a fool of itself. It's "cashback" feature is most often, again in my experience, associated with laughably high prices. Great, the product costs 20 percent more and Microsoft will give me 5 percent back. What sort of deal is that? Call it getting Binged.

Warning: The prices shown on Bing already include the cashback discount. That high price you see is already discounted, except this is like a rebate: You pay the higher price now and get the money back in 60 days.

(If you ever find the cashback price to be the lowest price, please drop me a line. I'd love to see.)

Now, I like Microsoft as much as the next guy, but not enough to pay more so that Redmond can get its cut and give me a little back. Also, with Microsoft getting a piece of the action, how do I know the "decision" engine isn't tuned a bit in the company's favor? It would be easy for Microsoft to leave out the lowest price if the company decided to enhance its revenue a bit.

That's not something I think Microsoft is likely to do, but when they make such a big deal out of a cashback program that isn't such a big deal, what's a user to think?

Maybe the Bing buying, er, decision engine will mature over time, adding products and making the cashback a better deal. Or will vendors somehow send a different price over to Bing so that Bing's lowest price with cashback is the same as the regular price shown everywhere else? Not sure how they would do this, but gaming search engines is big business and where there's a will…

I want to like the little snippets of page information that appear when you hover your cursor off to the right of a search result. Except, of course, that most often the information presented was more useless and distracting than helpful.

News is another example of Bing's unbearable lightness. Now, some people will probably like Bing's spare presentation of the day's events. If you like empty space on the page and very, very limited customization features then Bing is for you.

If, on the other had, you'd like your decision engine to help you decide what to think about President Obama or the state of the planet at the given moment, Bing doesn't do it.

Google logo My Google News page has been customized to watch topics that I care about. It presents many more stories on many more topics than Bing shows on its news page, yet it is easier for me to skim.

To be the winning search engine, you need to either do all things really well, which Bing does not, or do one or two things really well and find an audience that really cares about those things. I don't thing Bing does that, either, and whatever audience it does find seems, for now at least, to be no threat to Google.” From David Coursey, PC World

This is what the inside of my Head feels like....

Flickermood 2.0 from Sebastian Lange on Vimeo.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Torrents!

 itunesinknots

I get asked a lot about how I get movies and music. Of course I buy it…. Bull%$@! Are you kidding me. I download it just like everyone else does… or wants to, but doesn’t know how. The RIAA has screwed themselves on this one. They spent so many years trying to stop illegal downloads (which isn't going to happen!) instead of trying to figure out a solution to make a little profit on it and living with it. They managed to miss an entire generation of people that now don’t have any idea of the concept of “Buying” iPod Video Whitemusic. Unless you consider the ITunes brainwashed idiots… Lets see, a CD used to cost $12… now I can download a CD for .99 a song (12 songs = $12 dollars). Hey I’m still paying the same! and I don’t get a CD, case, book, etc… Hell, it isn’t even an mp3 file without DRM and I can’t share it with anybody. ARE YOU FRIGGIN KIDDING! The “IDrones” deserve to pay for there own stupidity. As for the more intelligent of us… I can get it for free and share all I want. DUH!!! I went to the theater the other day and it was $30 to get in for the 3 of us… then 2 popcorns and 3 drinks… another $30 dollars… What the $#%$!!!!  $60… and I haven’t even sat down yet. I went home and downloaded a free movie just for the hell of it.

 iTunes 7 Green

“With iTunes I don’t feel guilty when I download music-
Apple and the record labels handle the screw job for me.”
Click here for “The real ITunes Story” <---------------------

 

News Flash-

To the RIAA… Quit being ignorant in thinking you will ever stop file sharing… and quit screwing the artist

To everyone else… support your artist by going to their concerts (they certainly aren’t getting anything from ITunes)

Here is a quick list of my favorite…. ssshhh! torrent sites.

Mininova.org (good all around family site)
tracker.btarena.org 
thepiratebay.com
torrent-finder.com
xtremespeeds.net (requires free registration)
xtvi.com (for all your TV shows)

And how do they arrive? – utorrent.com
uTorrent

My Opinion!

Welcome to the world where my opinion is the only one I care about... First off, if you can't understand sarcasm then you better leave now. Secondly, If you don't like my opinions, why are you here? Ok... Now that that is out of the way we can start to have some fun! Thanks