People like this…
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL
Really annoy me.
Ownership is one thing, but Tech Level? Full bar. One egg review, no pros but at least took some time to write a con. Look at that picture carefully… the con is that the drive doesn’t work. On arrival apparently, so essentially DOA. But has a tech level of 5, and wants to know, via Newegg reviews, if there’s anything anyone can do?
People like this need to GTFO the internet. Seriously. Goddamn.
AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL
*clasps face and runs around the house* AHHHHHH!!!!
Why the hell can’t I keep this thing going? Curse you Facebook, curse you. But then I realized last night that I have a hard time with Facebook because I can’t write down long thoughts about something that I just can’t stop wrapping my head around, so I’m going to run a little experiment. I’m going to create a group on Facebook, let folks opt into it, and then post my blog updates to just that group. I also don’t like how the Facebook comments system integrates with WordPress at this point in time, so I’ll leave the commenting back on Facebook for now I s’pose. I may tinker around with the plugin later and see if I can’t get it working right.
That being said, oh hai 2012.
I’ve been keeping a running log of things I want to write about here, so I’ll be posting pretty frequently until either that list runs out or the site crashes. I hope the latter never happens, and as long as I’m wishing, ditto for the former.
woot woot.
Hey Weather.com!
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL
Fix your fucking map! It’s been like this for a month! I’m getting sick of it. It doesn’t matter which browser I use, or whether I use a computer at home or at work. The map never loads! FIX YOUR DAMN CODE!
Fix the map! You broke it sometime within the past 90 days.
Google Chrome is… not Chrome-y
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL, Geekin' Out
At the behest of a friend or two, I decided to give Chrome a try a few weeks ago as my primary browser. I had it loaded already, I just didn’t use it that often. I know about all the claims that say it’s supposed to be faster than IE9 or Firefox, and I know that Google gushes about it all the time for the other features. I loved the bookmark sync tool and for the first time in a decade, I made a valiant effort to syncronize my bookmarks between all the PCs that I use. It worked, and I was happy to be using the same exact set of bookmarks everywhere, even on my phone.
But then I got to know Chrome better, and some of the “charm” was quickly evacuated into deep space faster than you can say “Event Horizon.”
One of my biggest pet peeves was the fact that Chrome was supposed to be this lean mean social surfing machine. Sure, if you use it like 99% of the population SEEMS to. Facebook, Google tab or two, maybe your Email. Not here. This geek loads up his browsers in full-on browsing warfare. I build myself fast computers, and I expect them to perform as quickly as I built them to be, but Chrome was not helping the situation. It would spawn additional threads as necessary, which was nice, except that I ran into two issues with that. Firstly, the extra threads didn’t serve to do much other than eat up rows in my task manager and spike the CPU graph every so often. I didn’t ever see a tangible benefit to the “spawn more overlords” …er I mean -threads-, scheme. I looked closer at those threads and realized a more horrific truth. Those additional threads were eating up gobs of memory. I thought maybe I had an issue with my PC, so I repeated my inspection on two other machines – my laptop, and my work PC. It’s noteworthy here to mention that my work PC didn’t run with any extensions or addons, while my laptop and desktop at home did. Chrome ate memory up like a fat kid in a Waffle House on Chicken & Waffles special day. Odd. I knew Firefox could be equally as ravenous on RAM usage, so I fired up the same test pages with Firefox, and discovered that while the program did use a sizable chunk of ram, it still used 90-120 MB LESS than Chrome did with all of the spawned threads. What’s up with that?
The complete deal breaker however came when I noticed a behavior that was unbecoming of a browser. Maybe Firefox spoiled me, and this is how they are supposed to be, who knows. Chrome could not handle multiple concurrent tabs, especially if they were loading.
I love Break.com. I love the galleries they post of images from all over the web, it’s like a mini “best of imgur” in one place most of the time. So I got into the habit of, much to Break’s server admins distress I’m sure, opening the tabs all at once. I’d open a gallery page, and then either Control-Click or mouse-click on every link in the gallery to have it open in the background while I looked at the prior tabs. For some reason, Chrome handled it like a horse trying to choke down a Volkswagen Beetle full of obese clowns wearing skunk spray aftershave. Many times, on the smaller galleries, I’d only notice lockups and occasional freezing. But the larger galleries would bring the party crashing down in an instant. The larger galleries would cause extensions and even the core Chrome operating environment to halt. You’ve probably never had to deal with it, but the “dead man” face Chrome throws up when it can’t run for some reason sucks. Really sucks. And the glorious auto-recovery that both Chrome and Firefox have is useless in Chrome. You can end the program, but if you chose to open Chrome again, it tries to restore the same clusterfuck that you were trying to load in the first place.
I thought that last part was just me, so I had a friend try it out on his computer, with no extensions or addons to speak of. He used dual monitors, running on the same computer to give both browsers even more of a workout. Sure enough, when he tried to open the same assortment of tabs in Chrome as he did in Firefox, Chrome would spit up and spew binary bits all over the place. Firefox, through whatever magic the browser coders whipped up, knaws through the page loads without a problem, every time. I performed the same test on my system, where both browsers have a few addons installed (Chrome: AdBlock, Firefox: Adblock, DownThemAll, TACO) and it still ended the same way. One other problem surfaced as well – Chrome would have kittens on multiple tabs with flash content. Woah, wait a sec. I know Google, Adobe, Apple and Steve Jobs are all on the “I HATE UR GUTS” stage right now, but give me a break. It’s pretty obvious when a platform neutral company (Mozilla) makes a browser compared to one that thinks Flash should die a horrid death, reserved for those who try to choke down VW Bugs and clowns who masticate too much.
Google, WTFBBQ?
I should note that I don’t hate Chrome, I just prefer to use Firefox. Since I did all the hard work with consolidating my bookmarks, the import into Firefox was all the much sweeter. Firefox’s sync has been just as good to me as Google’s feature in Chrome was. Bummer G-Team. The bottom line is that you should use the browser that fits your surfing style, and just read this knowing that Google has to do some more fine tuning on their browser before I’ll give it another shot (and I will, in the future for sure.) After all, this is just a blog – who said my word was law around these parts? 
Mobile Computing Hassles
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL
My first true mobile convergence device was a Palm Centro. It was fine for about 8 months and then the crashes and other problems started cropping up. You could be sitting there doing nothing and just like a Mac, “KABOOM!” Your program or the OS would have to restart. What a pain in the ass. I moved from there up to a Windows Mobile phone (the HTC Imagio) thinking that the platform had matured enough to the point where I wouldn’t have any major hassles. Oh how wrong I was. The phone itself was fine, no dropped calls except in low signal areas, and for the most part, it was a quick device. Then the signs of age progressed and I learned how nasty the phone could be. One day for example, I went to use the phone to make a call over the speakerphone. I was greeted by the sound… of silence. The speaker was completely dead. I thought maybe a new ROM I had installed was the problem, so I wiped the device and installed the original ROM back onto the device. Still no dice. So I had the handset replaced.
The new handset was nice, but it wasn’t the one I bought in the first place. ARRGH. It was also annoying that no matter which computer you plugged it into, you still needed that damned Windows Mobile device software. What. The. Fuck. It’s a Windows phone, so if you plug it into a… Windows computer… shouldn’t it just… work? Apparently not. Apparently the two devices are so foreign to each other, it’s like a French Tribble trying to mate with a Klingon with a serious Bipolar disorder. But installed the software on each system I used it on, I did, and dreamed of a day when my phone would just work when I connected it to a PC. It should be noted that the Imagio itself had some firmware that enabled the device to work as a portable hard drive, so it wasn’t ALL bad, but other Windows phones I’ve used aren’t as fortunate. Thanks HTC for your foresight on that. The other things that annoyed me were the damn buttons becoming unclickable. Sure, they’d work fine, but there was no tactile “click” action anymore. Dammit. Oh, and don’t get me started on the phone’s inability to multitask. A kid with depressed immune system would have better luck at keeping two things going on at once than this poor thing would have.
I trudged through the hell that the first Windows Mobile phone brought me, and started looking for alternatives. This all happened around the period of time in which Android had started to make itself known. “Surely!” I thought, “the Android will be my savior! And stop calling me Shirley.” and around the time that a friend bought his, I decided that as long as he was liking it, I shouldn’t have any problems with it. I jumped, no, not off a bridge or a skyscraper, but into a new Android phone. It’s actually quite roomy inside. The hot tub is a gyp though. Why they call it the Droid X, I don’t know – does that mean I’m just the lucky bastard that got the Droid’s ex? If so, that would explain a few things, because this phone has more issues than my last girlfriend. More on that another time. The Droid X has, for the most part, been a pleasant experience. I’m finally able to plug it into ANY computer I want (COMPUTER, not those goddamn pieces of fruit, before you get too excited) and in doing so, I enjoy the true freedoms of having my data wherever I am. Of course that also makes my X the resident digital slut, but I won’t hold it against the phone. I’m a guy afterall. Woo hoo! A slutty phone!
But of the issues that the Droid X DOES have, are persistently annoying as all fuck. Why should my phone suddenly be unable to play ringtones? What about the MP3 I set as my alarm clock? “Oh sure!” you say, “Just reboot the device like the manual says to do!” and then I do that, skippy, and the fucking thing STILL doesn’t work right. For example, my fiance’s profile has a custom MP3 ring set to it, and so when this happens, I have to go back in and re-assign the same goddamn mp3 as the ringtone for her. Seriously, What. The. Fuck?! I had another issue where I thought the phone was losing photos, but it turns out that dumbass here (the writer of this said blog post, get with the program, internet readers) hit “move” instead of “copy” on the backup of his device’s photo gallery. *facepalm*
So where does that leave me with the phone today? Let’s do a run down.
Windows Mobile: Needs software to play. Is the digital equivalent of a digital hooker. A free digital hooker. Still unsavory.
Droid X: Plugs into anything with a USB port that isn’t some heathen knockoff of Adam’s favorite treat. Effectively the digital world’s mobile slut. Me likey.
Windows Mobile: Couldn’t multitask without eating up all of the memory. Effectively ‘Alzheimers in a Pocket™’. I should get that trademarked. I’ll add the ™ symbol for you. See? That was fucking easy. Where’s my Staples button?
Droid X: Also runs out of memory if you try to do too much at once, but at least unlike Alzheimy Winderz, keeps going. It’s more like the Energizer Bunny without his Energizer. I knew that damn rabbit was on drugs.
Windows Mobile: Absolutely no market for cool apps. I would struggle to find things to waste time at work all the damn time, and give up in frustration and take photos of myself and post them on Twitter.
Droid X: Not only does it take good digital photos to which my Twitter follower is even more grossed out about, but there’s so many apps on the Droid Market, I could literally spend all 35 years of a lifetime sentence in there trying them all out. Not that I have any reason to be serving a lifetime sentence. What are you doing? Get that straightjacket away from me. OMG No! GTFO!
Misdiagnosing Happens
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL, Geekin' Out
I finally got around to performing a critical backup on a system last night. Over 750GB needed to be backed up, and I couldn’t use normal means to back it up. I had to improvise. I ended up connecting a spare hard drive via USB (2.0!) and running the backup client that way. I didn’t want to stick around and see how long it was going to take, so I went to bed. I woke up this morning to a pleasant surprise – the backup finished just fine, and a quick file verification proved that the files were intact. Hooray for small miracles. I disconnected the drive and shut off the box that it was sitting in, labeled it and stuffed it away in my safe.
This morning, I was one
Fast forward to work this morning. I tried to log in remotely, thinking that today was going to be like any other day. Upon my attempt to log in, something was immediately clear – something was amiss. I know, how concise, but allow me to explain. In my morning ritual, I also open up my personal intranet page from work, and that took 2+ minutes to fully render. I also thought that the RDP was taking too long, as the desktop to the host wasn’t quite loaded after a similar amount of time. I diagnosed EVERYTHING I could think of. Ran a virus scan, ran a malware check, uninstalled the new Antivirus scanner and restarted the box. Nothing worked, everything was still very slow. Then I thought to check other web services that I use. They were all slow. Turns out, rebooting the pfsense box and the modem was all it needed.
So yes you mortal PC users out there, even us geeks sometimes over analyze things. *facepalm*
Don’t do it!
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL
