Archive for the 'Annoyances' Category

This week, Circuit City is selling Half-Life 2: Episode 1 for $8. You read that right: eight dollars. I paid $17.95, thinking I was getting a “pre-order discount.” Although I am aware that I recently said I’d gladly pay $19.95 again for another episode, I’m afraid that this revelation has changed my mind. Never again will I pre-order a game from Valve. It’s highway robbery, plain and simple.

Another thing that I’m mildly annoyed with is that episodes 1 through 3 are Half-Life 3, according to Gabe Newell. What? So why aren’t they being called Half-Life 3: Episode X? Well, it seems that the folks at Valve screwed up. Things seem to be getting a little sloppy over there. Could this be the beginning of the end? I certainly hope not.

Social networking websites are all the rage, and they’re appearing more and more in the daily news, particularly in regards to people’s privacy. But I truly don’t understand the mentality of those who use such services. Granted, the majority of users are undoubtedly teenagers who “hang out” with their friends online. But can’t you just do that using something like instant messenger, or IRC? Or is the concept of IRC so ancient now that the kids today don’t even know what it is? I just don’t see the glamour of posting a web page where I place all of my personal information out there for all to see.

“Hey, check out these scandalous photos of me,” or “check out a map of where I live,” or even better yet “here’s my social security and credit card numbers!”

I mean, do people even think through putting stuff like that on the web? Today’s web is forever. With Google cache and sites like the Internet Wayback, things you post can live on for eternity. Did you really want that photo of your drunken prom night broadcast for all to see, even potential employers who may Google you when considering whether or not to hire you?

Perhaps I’m simply too “high brow” for these websites. Or perhaps I’m just a freak who isn’t “with it.” Or perhaps the millions of people using such networking websites are just idiots.

I am of the latter opinion.

I surf Digg.com nearly every day. And the more I use the site, the more problems I see with it. Granted, the experience has improved over time, but we’re still a long way from perfection. One side effect of the democratic approach to news posting is the introduction of stories not worthy to be labeled news. Sensationalist stories show up there all the time, undoubtedly posted by people who know absolutely nothing about the topic. Recent headlines to this effect include “Autistic or just a geek? Take the test!” and “40+ suggestions for better desktop” (yes, that headline is grammatically incorrect). Do you see where we’re headed?

An internet “test” isn’t news, nor is it a scientific way of determining whether or not you have Asperger’s Syndrome. Likewise, a collection of suggestions for improving desktop software is purely opinion, not news. “So vote against the story,” you say. “It is, after all, a democratic process.”

Well, not exactly.

To “digg” a story, a user need only click once (after logging in) on the associated “digg it” button. But to vote against a story, a user has to click three times: once to open the “problem?” drop-down menu, once to select the problem, and then once on the JavaScript alert that pops up, indicating that the story has been “reported.” Reported? To whom? I thought this was a democratic process!

So, voting against a story requires three times the effort. No wonder so much crap makes the front page. If Digg would make it easier to vote against a story, using only a 1-click process, I predict things would get much better.

Every year, I forget how cheesy and how over-produced the Super Bowl really is. It’s not until the pre-game show really gets going that I sadly remember. This year’s tragedy with the legendary Stevie Wonder is a testament to how cheesy things have gotten. Let’s let Stevie play two of his songs: all the way through. Playing 10 second interludes of 50 songs, while rotating musical “stars” on and off the stage, is an insult to Mr. Wonder’s incredible talent. It cheapens what he’s done for the music world. Can’t we save the embarassment?

Sadly, the Super Bowl isn’t the only thing that’s this cheesy in the sports world. The Daytona 500 is just as over-produced. All the “pre-game” hype is just that: hype. I can’t believe that there are sports fans out there that want to see touchy-feely stuff before the game. Who exactly are they trying to market this stuff to? I’m clearly not the intended audience. Or perhaps I’m just too high brow.

Update: Well, there appears to be some hope. The half-time show with The Rolling Stones was done exactly as it should be. A few songs were played all the way through … and a good time was had by all.

I’m taking part in a Qt class this week at work, and the only web browser installed on each computer in the classroom is Internet Explorer. And the more I use IE, the more I realize why I switched to the best little browser in the world. While browsing through my web statistics before class, I clicked on a strange referral link (some sort of poker site), and was immediately drowned in a sea of pop-ups. I had forgotten that IE doesn’t support pop-up blocking natively (although it may very well do so in Windows XP - we’re running 2000 here in class). I had quite a difficult time getting out of the site without a million more pop-ups appearing. And the site didn’t even have a link back to my website (so how did that referral string appear in my stats?).

And oh how I miss tabbed browsing! I must have tried to open a new tab at least a hundred times or more. Why anyone still uses the hunk of junk browser out of Redmond is a mystery to me. If you haven’t switched to Firefox yet, please do so today. Won’t you think of the children?

Many websites use an image as the background of a page element (take the header of this website, for example). And all too often, those websites do not provide a corresponding background color to go along with that image. Take, for example, the games section of Slashdot. The purple background for each headline is an image. In order for the headline text to be readable on this background, the text color is set to white. The following rules are used in the corresponding CSS file (the image URL has been chopped for formatting reasons):

.generaltitle h3
{
    margin: 0;
    padding: .3em .8em .2em .8em;
    color: #fff;
}

#slashboxes h4, .article h3, .generaltitle h3
{
    background: url(<path>) repeat-x;
    padding: .3em 0;
}

Note that no background color has been specified for the h3 element. What is the effect of this omission? If images are disabled, we end up with white text on a white background, rendering the page illegible! “But who would turn images off?” you ask. People on dial-up may turn them off (to speed up download times). Some low-vision users may also turn them off, to prevent distracting backgrounds (and presumably improve text contrast). And keep in mind that the image file may be corrupted, or the server that actually serves up the images (if they are located separately from the site content) may go down, causing images to be inaccessible. Regardless, a specified background color would fix this problem. The image would override the color (when images are available and enabled), but the color would get used when images are disabled.

If you ever develop a website, and you use images to specify a certain region, make sure that you also specify a corresponding background color. Web users the world over will thank you for it.

I occasionally watch any number of items up for auction at eBay (most recently, they’ve all been auctions for Prince Valiant books). And, almost as frequently, I forget to actually bid on the items I’m watching. This happened just today as I was watching five separate auctions, all of which ended this evening. When I left work, I reminded myself to check the items once I got home. Several hours after I actually got home, and well after the items had closed, I remembered my reminder to myself.

I would eventually like to write some sort of Perl script that would do the bidding for me. But, unfortunately, this would involve HTML scraping (the eBay API doesn’t support bidding, for obvious reasons). Such a script would involve a little more work than I’m willing to put into it at the moment, although it would be a neat project to work on. If you know of any (preferably free) services that automatically bid, let me know.