Yes, it’s official. It’s now a podcast.

Topics this time include my hatred of Twitter, fighting agoraphobia, and what I happened to have for lunch today.

Link to podcast (still won’t embed): Here you go.

Sites mentioned:

• “Heroin content” via http://webpagesthatsuck.com
• The personality quiz: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv

Also, a bit of errata in that it’s “National Blog Posting Month”, not “National Blog Publishing Month”.

Otherwise, enjoy.

Sick of bloodshot eyes and mushy brains from reading so much of my drivel? Well, fret no more. Freshly introduced, it’s atylmo Daily* Rant in semi-podcast form. Guaranteed to ease your eyes and yet still manage to disappoint in any manner possible.

In this groundbreaking first episode, hear me moan and groan about such random topics as fasting, social phobia and lackluster video producing equipment.

Yes that is my real voice. And yes I am too lazy and/or broke to pay for WordPress premium hosting, so you’ll have to put up with low quality Snapvine goodness. Perhaps someday.. *sigh*

Enjoy.

Well, since stupid WordPress won’t let me embed, how about you try this link instead?

I have a moral conflict with animal products. Hell I have a moral conflict with eating – animals or otherwise – but that’s a bit of a tangent.

On one hand, I think “Well, if we weren’t eating them and their by-products , just what would be the use of having cows, pigs and chickens around?”

It’s the natural order of things for us to eat them, because we’re higher up on the food chain. We have the ability to eat them, there must be a reason this is so, therefore we should.

I can’t help but compare animal farming with slavery.  Granted, the animals don’t really perform labor, but they’re held in captivity and lead a fruitless life until they die. Slaves were in similar conditions throughout history, and now we know how wrong that was, so who’s to say that these animals don’t have a greater purpose that we haven’t yet discovered?

Of course, that probably sounds ludicrous, but so did the idea of seeing slaves as people rather than property.

However, I look at the other side of the slavery issue and think about how important such acts were, especially to the economic survival of, say, the early US. Now if we all went to being herbivores, let’s just say it wouldn’t do much for the recession.

And even though we may be higher in the food chain, who exactly decides that it’s OK to eat them? I wouldn’t call a higher energy level as being a legitimate reason, especially because humans are rather domiciled (well, now), meaning that we actually don’t go out and hunt it, not even the farmers. They raise them, kill them, butcher them and sell them. How is that considered fair in the food chain? We simply don’t need animals to sustain us like we used to. Hunting for sport is not considered “necessary for survival” either.

And don’t even start me on that “humane death” crap. There is no possible way to kill an animal humanely. Why? You can’t ask it if it wants to die. Silly? Maybe. But would you like someone to forcibly kill you? No, probably not.

Even if one was to die while induced under an anesthetic, such practice strikes me as a bit…sadistic. They can’t sign a paper saying “You have the right to kill me while I’m induced under anesthesia.”

Keeping the animals leads to a greater biodiverstity, but of course it overcrowds. Using them exacerbates a low biodiversity because the same animals have to keep being farmed over and over and over. There aren’t any chances for new species to develop because 1) there aren’t any niches that need to be filled, thus, no uniqueness and 2) for the standard of the food to remain constant, the species probably won’t change.

Oh and in case you were wondering why I’m “anti-eating” and why veganism isn’t much of an alternative, it’s for the same reasons, save for one which I might prepare as another post later.. if I remember it.

If everybody went vegan, biodiversity and sane, stable habitats would disappear because of all the monoculture-type-things popping up due to such high demand for so-called “healthy food”. It’s not any better. Arguably, using existing farmland for new crops would help with this.

I’m “anti-eating” because me eating food takes away from someone else’s chance at having food. Even with pure non-animal products, I can’t help but feel a sense of shame when I eat, because I know I have to but it’s insufferable to think of those who don’t have anything in their plate.

Thusly, turning vegan is bad for the environment, but staying an omnivore is hell for your conscience..at least mine.

Because everybody loves a good “Start your week off with a rant”. And.. a poll! Yay..

Prentice Hall Apostrophe Catastrophe

I swear it seems like I can’t stop running into these things.. but I just found this one, and I find it ridiculously.. ridiculous. A textbook publisher publishing a book about Spanish grammar is screwing up on English punctuation.

I’m not as much of a grammar Nazi as I used to be, but this still kills me to no end, especially from a high-up, reputable company. My motto is this: Regardless of how many people see each page, make them all worth looking at.

Waiter, there’s a copy editor in my soup..

Oh, btw, yes I totally saved that as a GIF. I know, I know, use PNG or die. Well, when you can’t get the PNG below 239KB in GIMP, you find ways

I saw an interesting discussion today on how television broadcasters are trying new (and increasingly more ridiculous) ways to shove ads in your face. One of the most glaring cases that got me fuming out the ears was TBS.

I’ve never been a personal witness to this, but they’ve inserted little “pauses” at the end of some shows (I’ve heard that only Everybody Loves Raymond does it as of yet) for personal promotion of their own programming. Literally a guy walks across the screen, pauses the picture, and proceeds into a soliloquy about why we should totally be watching his new hot show.

What?

They already roll commercials with the credits, before them and after them and after the intro to the next show. Now they’re doing it before it’s even over? Naturally it’s because people are trying to skip them, so do they give what the consumer wants and eliminate them? No, THEY PUT MORE OF THEM.. I thought the first rule of business is “The customer is always right.”? At least it was in-house promotion, not an ad for bleach or something.

I’ve always had an immense pet peeve when they scrunch the credits or speed them up to advertise more. That’s the show’s time, not yours. Not to mention the people who did the work deserve the credit.

Like we don’t get enough ads and product placement in shows. And they say brainwashing is illegal. Psht. They’ve brainwashed us to make us think it is anyway.

TV is dead.

I am sick of ads. They are ugly and NEVER add (ha!) ANYTHING to the content. TV and sites with them always come off as arrogant money-hungry bastards. I’m all “aww, poor wittle TV show/website. Baby need more moowah?”. I’ve all but abandoned TV and use AdBlock.

I must confess that I did buy something from a surprisingly relevant Google ad the other day but that’s a rare case.

Warning: This is a rant, and I am a Linux fanboy, so.. yeah

So the big buzzword going around Microsoft’s offices these days, and the tech community in general, is “money hungry…err Mojave”. Ok, so maybe it’s a bit old but I just found out what it was today.

Mojave is Microsoft’s way of covering their ass and making them not look like burnt toast compared to the others’ decadent crispiness. (If you do happen to like burnt toast…too bad, you get the joke anyway)

Essentially it’s an advertising campaign to make Vista look good. Think “blind taste test”, like those old annoying Pepsi commercials. Participants are chosen and shown a demo of “Mojave”, which is really just Vista without the associated bad baggage with the name, and then asked to rate it on a scale from one to ten. They rate Vista before and “Mojavista” after they see the video and as it turns out most of the ratings were far higher for Mojave. At the end of the “experiment” it is revealed to the panelists that Mojave was really Vista in sheep’s clothing.

Once again you know how I feel about advertising. The majority of the participants aren’t technically minded and thus are perhaps biased against Vista based on what more in-the-know people opine on. It’s still advertising, it in no way, shape or form is an experiment. The only way it’s an experiment is in people’s heads.

Why it sucks – the bullet point bonanza:

• It never touches on Vista’s problems: The hardware incompatibility, the ridiculous hardware requirements, the fact that IE can’t be removed, the fact that it’s the only OS offered on 99% of PCs, huge price but little value, etc.

• It’s a demonstration by a salesman. The participants never get to actually use it for themselves. I guarantee that if they did the ratings would plummet lower than my popularity. Also, from what I can tell you as the viewer of these videos never get to see what’s on the screen the people are looking at.

• It’s advertising, not focus testing and therefore not much more than a rebranding. They don’t fix their problems, they only make them less obvious.

• The “decide for themselves” tagline. Honey it’s advertising. They put words in your mouth even when you don’t feel it. You aren’t deciding, they are.
• The website is oddly vague..pretty, but vague. I mean what are they looking at on the screen?
• We all know that even Windows 7 won’t be any different from Windows 2000..or barely so for “compatibility reasons”. It’s too huge for itself. Why try to make Vista look good? Just make the next one better and maybe people will listen (and give yo monay like you so desperately desire) The best thing you can do is start….all the way…over. I don’t care if it takes 10 years, make it the best OS and people will buy it because they want to, and they may even pay more money. Forget Vista. It’s dead in the womb.

Though, I can’t totally dis them. If their facts on the official site are, well, facts, they did a pretty good job of getting the majority of computer users in different areas. Windows, Mac OS, Linux, they covered it pretty well. And they are brave enough to admit (and video!) that some were skeptical. And, it was interesting to see what a simple name change can do to impact your brand.. Surely people would’ve recognized it or something..

The way I see it all you’re doing is cheating users. You named it Vista, you released it in its crap state, now you deal with the repercussions. Simple. Your OS is preinstalled on almost every computer, most users have no idea that it isn’t the only one made and no idea they have the freedom to remove it. How much more do you want?

Mojave = MohavemercyMSisgreedy

Links:

http://mojaveexperiment.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_experiment

Yes I did use Wikipedia for this. Complain all you want. That article is a bit biased but it’s the only concise source of info I had in one place.

Yeah…not much. I always despised those things. For quite a few reasons actually…

• They all provide the same functionality: search, translating, stupid pointless links to the page’s services – easily accomplished by bookmark folders
• Most of them are baited to sucker in the inexperienced user who can’t remove them
• Some are spyware-laden (I’m eyeing you Smiley Central)
• They come mercilessly bundled with new PCs, and most people won’t know they can get rid of them or switch to another browser
• And naturally if you don’t get rid of them they keep piling up because the stupid luser can’t figure it the fuck out (sorry), on the bright side it’s a great time to charge a ridiculous price for a simple fix mwahahaha
• Even for semi-experienced users (moi ), some are notoriously hard to remove. I had a run-in with Yahoo!’s bar before. It just would not die.
• And tying it all together they’re just for marketing purposes, and they are f’ing bundled with every single thing imaginable. WHY I ask, WHY? I downloaded Google Earth to see the earth not see a toolbar. I downloaded CCleaner to…CClean, not dirty my computer with a toolbar.

I’m not talking about stuff like Firefox’s “Web Developer Toolbar”, that thing is damn useful. There are a lot of good things about them but gah they get on my nerves. Stuff like stock tickers and stuff, that may be useful. But really you can accomplish all that with a Firefox extension, so why use a toolbar?

Well I think we all know why they suck, but anyway…

I was gonna upload a video to YouTube, and naturally my video just so happened to have some non-permission-granted copyrighted material in it. You can’t use a SONG in your video…even if you give credit, no pictures of anybody, even if you give credit, without their fucking permission. It’s like calling to mommy, and she says “No Billy you can’t do that because the world hates you.”

 Also, if we show ourselves and only ourselves, without copyright infringing the “digital media”, I have a question:

• Is it copyright infringement to not get permission of the maker of the grass seeds to film outdoors?

• Is it copyright infringment if I film indoors and have a TV behind me? ooh I didn’t get permission from RCA to let me take a picture of it! I can’t photo me in front of a wall because the builder didn’t say I could. The house design is copyright them.. and the sheetrock maker has a patent on the material probably.

• Is it copyright infringement without getting permission to film, period? I can’t take a picture with the camera unless I credit the camera manufacturer; and in turn I have to credit every one of the individuals who worked on that camera, and its parts. I guess you buy a license to do that when you pay for the camera/software/etc though.

Heck for that matter do I have to credit God for making atoms? It must be copyright infringement to live.

Copyrights suck. It’s still important to give credit though; you just shouldn’t have to beg to use a 3 millisecond sound.

The original title was a bit misleading. I didn’t mean the Internet should actually be free. I mean that the Internet is not a place for excessive advertising. It isn’t the classifieds in a newspaper.

Ok I guess some clarification is in order (ie “you’re an idiot” down in the comments):

First, from the struggling new product department: Products do need a marketing push. I agree with that. But don’t push it too hard. Ads showing nonskippably before a video are plain wrong. Heck I see them as the mortal sin of advertising, next to pop-ups.  I can deal with text ads or graphics, just please no popups or anything that gets in the way (ahem I’m looking at you “Content Link”, “Intellitxt”, etc.)

Also, from the siteowner’s standpoint, people need money. Websites aren’t free to keep up. I can understand that, and I respect that. But once again ads should never degrade your site’s appearance or content. I don’t want to go to a page with ads on the left right top and bottom of it, along with pop-ups and “2 new crush requests!”. They clutter your page. They’re annoying to use. And I think some siteowners do this on purpose because they know they’re the only choice for a particular task. They can plaster ads everywhere and people will still use it because it’s the most common choice (or the only one). Thus, profit!!!$

Indeed it is a hard balancing act. Get them noticed but don’t deface your page.

Ads need to get noticed not hated. Most importantly they need to be relevant. RELEVANT. And I know for sure that having them obstruct my online experience makes me grumpy toward the product (and to some extent the site as well)

PS: Just for the record no I don’t use ad-blocking software because I understand people need the money. I dislike them but I do put up with them. Heck sometimes they are genuinely useful and relevant.

I may be an idiot but at least now you know from an idiot’s point of view. Of course I’m not an expert in either advertising or webpage management. No obviously I don’t pay for webhosting. I’m completely aware I’m unqualified to discuss this. This is simply a little rant in a little section of a little blog in a little corner of the huge Web. I don’t expect it to change the world, I only expect it to help me write better

Original rant straight ahead:

No. Ads. Ever. By free I don’t mean not paying for your ISP, rather that by paying for your ISP, you’re already paying for the Internet and thus you don’t need to see no fucking ads. Websites should not pay for themselves, people should pay for them. Get the maintainers to monetize it. And only through donations.

I don’t WANT TO FUCKING SEE A NONSKIPPABLE AD IN THE MIDDLE OF MY FUCKING VIDEO. Honestly this makes me hate the product advertised.

The only sites that should have ads are the sites specifically dedicated to shopping. No pop-ups either. Strictly inline text or graphic ads that showcase a special. Or, company sites that produce a product can advertise that product on their site. BUT ONLY ON THAT SITE.

Same thing goes for TV. The service is paid for, so why do we still get ads? Over-the-air, free channels I might could give lenience to, but this is ridiculous.

Hell DirecTV has like 10 channels showing 24 hours of infomercials. WHAT THE HELL.

Thus any and all websites I ever create will never have a single ad on them.

Case in point: Paint.net. Great app, sucky as hell decision. They cut out the help files from the download so they could get more revenue by posting them online next to Google Ads…(Source) Ok they do provide a download for the files separately, but this is still a very snarky decision.

Never ever put ads in your help files. Never ever put ads or endorsements on your personal websites (unless they’re non-monetized or advertising yourself), and never ever place an ad anywhere that obtrudes vision to your page (ie AT THE MAIN TOP OF THE PAGE, between content, etc)

No graphic ads that flash, no flash game ads, no stupid crush request ads, NO ADS. If you want to get your brand spanking new product out there, make a website and let the search engines crawl it, people will find it by word-of-mouth eventually.