Category Archives: Humor

Things that made me laugh.

Corante Not Trustworthy?

Humor, RSS

Okay, it was very funny that a blogger by the name of Dana Blankenhorn (who we’ve seen before) attributed Why Google Is Faltering on RSS and that “Google needs to bring in someone with a Clue.” He had no “Clue” himself that the person he was trying to roast left the company half a year ago and he’s now doing cool things with Odeo. Now it’s not worth mentioning or even surprising that someone made a false assumption and came to a silly conclusion because of it. What is interesting is how Corante’s response to the entry, or lack thereof.

As it stands the entry is inarguably factually inaccurate, yet only the comments point to that. Dana has not responded to the comments or updated the entry, even though he had time to write 8 more entries that day. It may seem obvious to you and I that the entry is wrong, but not everyone and the entry is still gathering links. What’s more interesting is that entry has disappeared from the front page. (Screenshot of where it should be here.)

Corante claims to be “a trusted, unbiased source on technology, science and business that’s authored by highly respected thinkers, commentators and journalists; read by many of the sector’s top entrepreneurs, executives, funders and followers; and is helping to lead the emergence of blogging as an influential and important form of reportage, analysis and commentary.” They’re not helping blogging or their trust by leaving that entry up un-corrected and covering it up by taking it off the front page.

Update: Jason notes that the entry was deleted in MT, just not removed from the filesystem.

Windows AntiSpyware

Humor, Microsoft

To download the new Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) software you need to verify that you’re a customer “running genuine Microsoft Windows.” I’m pretty sure mine is legit, at least the guy on Market street said it was. Of course on the confirmation page, it seems you can get by their million-dollar verification system by choosing “No, do not validate Windows at this time, but take me to the download.” Hat tip: Robert Scoble.

Bizarre Windows Behavior

Humor, Microsoft, Music

So I’m sitting in bed on the Powerbook doing some editing. My music stops and I look up just in time to hear the Windows-shutting-down noise and see my main desktop turning off. My first thought is something is wrong with the power, which is why the desktop would be acting funny but the PC laptop is just fine. I was going to turn the music off anyway so I keep working. Then beeps and noises start coming from my laptop. The laptop (which has never had problems, even with SP2) looks like it’s shutting down too. I get to my desk in time to see it close the unsaved documents I was working on and start rebooting. It totally ignored the dialogs that were popping up, I couldn’t click or stop anything. Totally helpless. Now I’m in panic mode. Did one of the computers get infected with some new virus and they’re going to keep rebooting? Is some joker on our wifi network messing around? I quickly go to my router status page from my Mac and see just the normal clients are connected. I check the logs on the router and there’s no unusual activity. By this time the desktop PC has rebooted and I decide to log in to see what happens. It boots up normally at first, but then everything starts blinking and explorer.exe seems to be stopping and starting every 3 seconds. The laptop just came back up, so I login to that. A little icon pops up in the taskbar telling me a security update has been installed that required rebooting my computer.

THANK YOU MICROSOFT! I didn’t need those hours of work anyway. I feel so much safer now because I don’t have to worry about evil crackers getting to my data because I can be certain that you will mess it up first. God. There goes my weekend.

I just ctrl+alt+deleted out of the desktop because it was getting painful to watch. The laptop seems fine but I’m so disgusted I don’t even want to touch it. Just earlier this evening I was reading Scoble and thinking MS had some pretty decent stuff in the pipeline I could see myself buying, like the OQO. Not anymore.

The desktop started the login screensaver, but now appears to be totally frozen. I’m just going to turn it and the laptop off. I can see in the morning if maybe this was a virus/worm pretending to be a security update. This weekend will be spent getting valuable data off NTFS partitions and reformatting hard drives. Thinking back I’ve been a user of Microsoft software for about 75% of my life, I grew up with it. Now I’ve grown out of it.

I’m actually kind of sad. Yes it’s 4 AM. Yes I’m going to have to recreate the lost work. Yes I save, and thankfully it looks like I only lost about fifteen hundred words.

Update: Scoble apologizes. He reminds people to save often, personally I hadn’t really left the computer, I was just about 6 feet away. It’s a laptop so I never worry about power outages, it’s highly locked down and hasn’t crashed in at least a year. I wasn’t using Word 2003, even though I own it, most of the work was in open XHTML/PHP documents and a bit in a browser window on my local wiki. I can live with the fact that a hard drive might crash, or lightning may strike, or any number of extraordinary circumstances might cause me to lose data. I can’t reconcile that it was due to a feature of an operating system, a feature I was told to turn on to stay safe, and a feature that bugs you when it isn’t activated. I trusted the computer because of the improvements to stability Microsoft had made in XP and SP2. Trust like that is slow to build and easy to break.

Mark Cuban on HD

Humor, Review

Mark Cuban on HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future. Great read, I didn’t know that the HD content they film is higher quality than what they broadcast. I’ve gotten the full HD experience once at a friend’s house who had one of those giant 6 foot TVs and it was amazing, we watched golf and the nature channel or something. The junk they show on the TVs at the stores does not do HD justice at all. Cuban also thinks HD is the answer to piracy, contrast to this interview with Jack Valentini on Engadget.