Category: Miscellaneous

General stuff, some funny, some informative, and all interesting.

Seriously, Stop That!

I can’t believe in this day and age that you can still visit a site that wants to take control of your main browser window by resizing it. Are you kidding me? That shit went out as soon as it came in. It’s totally annoying and way too intrusive. I can understand doing this to a popup window, but a main window? No! Typically websites entirely in Flash violate this rule more than any other, however I’ve been noticing a few other relatively high profile sites doing this crap. Once it happens to me, I’ll never visit that site again.

Another gripe I have is websites that use fonts that are unreadable unless you’re using ClearType. Not everybody uses it dipshits. Matter of fact I’d be willing to bet most people don’t use it. Just stop, or I’ll never read another damned thing you write – because I can’t without straining my eyes until it feels like I’m having forks jabbed in them.

Just these two examples alone make me feel like I’m bitching about midi music in the background of a web page, or animated cursors on a web page. That’s how ridiculous these things are and nobody should be implementing them. So stop.

Pop vs Soda

This “debate” has always intrigued me for some reason.
Apparently it has done the same for others as well – hence this map.
Personally, I say “soda” when making a general reference.
Interestingly, it would seem the southern west coast, center Midwest around St. Louis, and northern east coast all typically share the same term for a soft drink.
And to think the west and east coast will ask us if we grow corn in our front yard.
Believe it or not, you can actually see a bit of history in this map when you start to think about things like the first railroad lines being built across the country.


[via: strangemaps.wordpress.com]

Beware: TruGreen / ChemLawn Sucks Balls

So continues my luck with companies in general. I swear, anymore, there isn’t a company out there that’s worth a shit. No matter the service or product, I seem to find the ones that absolutely suck ass at what they do.

I’ve been using TruGreen for over a year now. My yard is not the greenest on the block, I still have crab grass and other weeds. I don’t know what their service is like in your area, but in my area (and apparently other areas) – it’s not worth the price.

My yard looked better when I did all the maintenance myself. The only reason I chose a company to help with fertilization was because I’m very limited on time. Well I can plainly see that the limited amount of time I have to spend on that would be more beneficial than paying this sorry ass company called TruGreen. They pretty much have done nothing to help my lawn become greener or stop weeds. So what the hell am I hiring them for? I don’t know. What I do know is that after my last scheduled treatment, they are history.

Doing just a bit of research, I see I am not the only one who has been unlucky enough to find out that TruGreen / ChemLawn blows ape dick. See: consumeraffairs.com, search Google for trugreen sucks, or search Google for chemlawn sucks and you will see I’m not the only one completely dissatisfied with their service.

Beware: Charter Internet Sucks Balls

I have never, since 1992 seen such horrible service from an Internet Service Provider. If you have any other options for an ISP, I highly suggest you explore those other options. You definitely won’t find a positive review of Charter Pipeline at any respectable consumer information site. I’m not even talking about not receiving the speeds as advertised or you pay for, I’m just talking about availability. Charter’s Internet service is down more than it is up on most occasions. People pay a monthly fee for their unbelievably shitty service, Charter never pro-rates their bill due to outages on their end. And they will rarely admit to the outage being their fault. The best you can do is argue until you get a certain amount off your next bill. That amount never goes above $15 – $20. That is all their lackies are allowed to issue. In the end, if you use Charter, you overpay for a service that you don’t get to benefit from in the slightest.

You should also get in the habit of checking your bill. On numerous occasions we’ve seen billing errors. It is up to you, the consumer to catch Charter’s mistakes, report them, and make sure you receive compensation. Paying your bill is a hassle in itself. I can’t tell you how many hoops I had to jump through just so my wife could pay the bill over the phone (which thankfully isn’t provided by Charter or it wouldn’t work.)

Don’t dare call any of their service representatives unless you are ready to translate thick Indian accents that will absolutely not deviate from the script sitting in front of them. The scripts they read from immediately put the blame on your end. Before you know it, you will be rebooting your machines, unplugging everything, swapping out cables, etc. All this before they will even type a fucking zip code into their machine to see if outages have been reported. And by the way, they don’t even log reported outages as a problem until a minimum of 10 different people/locations have called about the same issue. So there you are, stuck – and awaiting a bill for service you do not get. How this company stays in business is a mystery.

Here’s a report I ran testing out the connectivity through Charter.
Outage report as seen by new jersey USA
--------------------------------------
DOWN 2007-08-01 21:32:48 - 2007-08-06 02:48:57 (6076 minutes)
** You had 39.72% reachability during the period

Outage report as seen by california USA
--------------------------------------
DOWN 2007-08-01 21:32:57 - 2007-08-06 02:48:57 (6076 minutes)
** You had 39.72% reachability during the period

Outage report as seen by san francisco USA
--------------------------------------
DOWN 2007-08-01 21:42:58 - 2007-08-06 02:48:57 (6065 minutes)
** You had 39.84% reachability during the period

Speed test history
------------------
2007-08-01 21:20:42 2824/233 kilobits per second down/up

The results speak for themselves. Up to 60% of the time, there is no Internet connection. That’s pitiful and it just gets worse.
You can read my full review from 2007 here.