Flock again

As I stated earlier in this blog, I switched over to Linux some months ago. I knew that some browsers would take some getting used to and wouldn’t be the same as their windows counterparts. In fact, I’ve gotten away from firefox and usually use a small browser called Epiphany. Indeed, Epiphany is a nice little browser, but because of the hell that is installing flash, Firefox 2 is the only browser on my system that renders flash decently.

So imagine my shock and surprise when I found out that my favorite windows browser, Flock, had a linux version. So I tried it out today and I have to say that it’s the best browser on linux. The social networking aspect of it is great too, as I’m posting this from Flock.

I’m not about to delete the browsers on my system, but I have a new default browser that doesn’t take ages to load like firefox did.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The early sleep experiment.

I promised one of my friends that I would blog about my experience in going to bed early. In the past two weeks, I’ve been hitting the hay around 5am and waking up around noon. After joking that I would try going to bed early and blogging about the experience (My exact words: “Maybe I should try this ‘going to bed early thing’ and blog about it). So Raven, this is for you.

Timeframe: The following story is true. The names have not been changed, because no one is fucking innocent.

• 1:20am. Get a call from my wife vacationing in MD. Tell her I’m going to head to bed early. Wishes me luck and good night.
• 1:30am. Lie down in bed and cover up with blanket. Get immensely comfortable.
• 1:40am. Cannot reach an REM state due to extremely loud noise coming from my stomach region. Get out of bed and made waffles, due to the speed and simplicity of it.
• 2:00am. Attempted to fall asleep again. Succeeded.
• 3:00am. Woken up by mewing cat jumping into window. Proceeded to give Morgan (my cat) a stern glare. Morgan mews a few more times, then goes to the direction of his food dish, which is full.
• 3:30am. Finally fall back to sleep.
• 4:20am. Woke up, tossed and turned a bit before falling back to sleep 15 minutes later.
• 5:00am Woken again by mewing cat. Repeated the above. Went back to sleep.
• 5:30am Morgan finally falls asleep. Woke up very briefly to observe then went back to sleep.
• 7:30am Woke up again, tossed and turned and fell back to sleep, this time after half an hour.
• 10:15am. Woke up again to use the facilities. Tried to go back to sleep, but could not for some reason. Decided that I wasn’t extremely tired so stayed up.Especially since I needed to be up by around 12:30

Conclusion: Your cat is cognizant of your schedule and if it doesn’t coincide with his schedule, there will be hell to pay. Recommendation: Go to sleep when they do.

Ah….sweet news videos….

I hate news videos.

No, not the ones you see on TV. I’m talking about most of the ones you see online. Mainly on affiliate sites for ABC or CBS and the like. What annoys me the most about these is that most of the time they’re a link on the front page. So you click on the link to find out more about the story. However on the resulting page you find nothing but a video. No text at all.

“What’s so bad about that?” you may ask. Simple. What about the people who

1. Don’t have sound or are surfing the web at a time that others are sleeping?
2. Are hearing impaired?

I fall into both of these categories. I’m about 3/4 deaf in my right ear and 1/2 deaf in my left.  Even with headphones I find I have some problems understand everything. Also there are times when I’m up late surfing and don’t want to disturb my wife.

I know I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by this. Back in the day the video would compliment the story. In those cases I rarely clicked on the videos because everything I needed to know was typed out right next to it. Plus I didn’t feel like waiting for the video to load or to go through advertisments in order to get to the video I want.

CnetTV is a good example of how to handle things if you MUST be video only. While most videos (reviews for instance) have a corresponding article, a lot of the shows have an option for closed captions. It lags ever so slightly and it’s a weird experience, but to someone who watches a lot of close captioned TV, it’s a godsend.

Get it together newspeople. If you link to just a page with video without having some sort of summary, you’re going to piss off a lot of people.

Consumerist = Fail

[UPDATED] Consumerist.com begins censorship.

Ok, a little background on this. I stumbled onto consumerist.com back in April when I still worked for Sprint. They had a memo talking about a story that Consumerist put up regarding their shitty website security. Since then I have been a rather avid reader. However it seems that there’s some trouble in paradise.

Consumerist has gone on a bit of a power trip when it comes to commenting. First off, it’s only on a whim that you’re even allowed to comment. In order to get approved you basically have to comment and pray that a moderator likes your post enough to give you posting abilities. Okay, I can live with that. It seems fair.

However they have some rules that you have to follow when you post comments. Most of these I can agree with. However there are two I find annoying.

1) Don’t blame the victim. This one I semi agree with. However, in a lot of these posts, blaming the victim is warranted. Sometimes the OP (The person the story is about) has done something stupid or is at fault and the commenting public will tell them so. This can sometimes lead into…

2) “Why is this story here” posts. This comes up a lot more often nowadays. Consumerist is rather known for stories with sensationalistic titles. Such as this story. Now, if you look at that title, you’ll think one thing, but see that it’s totally something else. If you read the comments you see that a lot of people are correcting the site, which seems to be a no no, since we’re then accused of “Blaming the victim.”

Now, I agree that a post that just says “Why is this here?” is dumb. But if it they have a reason for posting that and add that in their comments, it should be perfectly fine.

It seems to boil down to “We’ll say what we want and you can too, as long as you don’t make us look bad.”

The terrible part about this whole thing? Chris gets banned from the site, and then they post his story about GM on the front page with no way of him being able to comment on it! So either they ban him and then take the story from his blog, or they ban him and decide to run a story he submitted before he was banned. Either way it’s pretty shitty.

So in the end, the site isn’t completely bad…as long as you don’t plan on posting because then 1) you’ll have to wait forever and a day before you’re deemed worthy and 2) you better not point out any flaws they may make, because they are almighty and will smite you easily.

Nice going Consumerist.

“Comment me! Comment me!”

Something I’ve noticed on the various social networks I’ve been on. Most of them seem to be all out popularity contests. Myspace is notoriously guilty for this as for every one person who doesn’t care if you comment on them or not, there are about 100 that will spam bulletins asking for comments.

That’s some ratio….

It’s different if you post a picture and someone comments on it. But putting up a pic and then asking…no…BEGGING people to comment on it is…well…pointless. Seems like an ego stroke…but when you have to beg people to comment then wouldn’t that HURT your ego?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like getting comments on my pics or whatever, but I don’t upload them with the expectation of getting comments. I do it just to do it. If I have a nice picture of myself (which is rare) I’ll upload it and that’s that. You comment on it, great. You don’t, eh. I don’t care.

Hey look, it’s another blog…

So I’ve migrated from livejournal….sorta. Not 100% if I’m going to stick with it. Though since I have the RSS feed of my LJ blog here, I suppose I could use both. WordPress seems more fully featured than LJ. Only time will tell I suppose.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Plurk timeline

Plurk.com

Just got home….

Just got home from Erie and let me say this was the WORST vacation of my life. Our hosts had a bunch of pets which caused my allergies to flare up. Plus I was bored out of my mind.

We had gone up because we were considering renting an apartment from them. Well we get there and the place is a piece of junk. The guy who owns it is a cable installer and decreed that there will be “no satellite dishes on my house”. Why? Because he doesn’t like them. Well that made an easy decision even easier because I have Dish Network and I won’t break my commitment for cable.

But let me talk about our hosts. Without naming names, the guy is one of those “I’m better than all of you” types. That annoys me a bit, but his girlfriend is a “I’m better than all of you and I always get what I want” types, which is ten times worse. Not to mention that she’s lazy as all hell and barely did anything while we were up there.

Now, on to Erie. Not to offend all of those who live there, but it’s a pretty run down city. There’s nothing really to do there and the jobs seem to be pitiful. Plus it’s just all around ugly in my opinion. Once you get past the mall, you see that most of the city is falling apart. This is in comparasion to Pittsburgh, which isn’t the best either, but from what I’ve seen is a beautiful city with a fair bit to do.

The only high point of the trip was seeing my best friend Nikkie. It’s been years since we last saw each other face to face, so that was a nice part.

Anyway, that’s the end of my rant. Next up I plan on talking about Final Fantasy IV.

Because this song is stuck in my head……