daily shriek

i am going to have to move so much crap out of my yahoo when microsoft takes over. i’ll probably just delete everything and let it lay fallow like i do with my a hotmail account.

i only signed up for hotmail to stake the claim to my other moniker.

oh well, whatever.

every day i code in visual basic .net i grow more and more fond of c-style languages and their delicious terseness and their symmetry and i grow more disdainful for languages who try to sound like natural language to make them easier to grok for the layperson, but in the end, like their natural language counterparts, wind up confounding common sense with their lack of consistency, and obscure the deeper workings of computers from those brave enough to plumb their depths.

but it is paying the bills right now, so this shall be my last rant and i will suffer the polyester k-mart suit of the computing world and soldier on, hoping that i don’t slide into the easy ways of vb slackerdom.

i started my own online social network once, and cultivated it like a garden, styled in a manner i hoped would make it unique and appealing, attempting everyday to push it to take on a life of its own. i made it invite-only and male-only and left it in a listserv format that didn’t require people to visit a website to make it more a conversation. i really worked very hard for three years.

and i am not sure how or where i failed, but though it still exists, it is limp and lifeless. i learned a lot about how write posts that elicit responses and for a time the members felt as though they were a part of something special, something they created. or perhaps is was just a mirage, my own cheerleader-like personality whipping some friends of mine into a short-lived sort of party that like all parties must end. they’re still my friends so i don’t really care about the network, and maybe that’s what’s at the core its demise, perhaps we all felt that way.

so i was reading that facebook’s numbers took a hard hit in january and february and it got me to thinking that social networking may have begun to run its course, perhaps sliding in to decline. but, the interwebs themselves are naught but a social network of astronomical scale and are just the latest means to interact with one another, simply tribes, nations, what-have-you.

wrapping a bar around people and corralling them in ironically concrete places such as second life failed to work because the virtual world exists but in the mind and 3D-animated avatars are in the end, unnecessary. the various mmporgs are just convenient gamer circles and myspace has become what geocities once aspired to and linkedin is strictly business.

today, the cyberlandscape seems at once barren and cluttered and the chaotic choir of empowered voices raised in indiscernible static have become the human background cosmic radiation and computers have become tuners, looking for broadcasts as well place phone calls. our heads truly are in the cloud.networks such as a few private ones to which i belong offer a freedom not known in public spaces, and silliness too — i check them more than i do my e-mail.

but while these are virtual, they share one thing in common, that their roots border on familial and predate the cyber universe in which their collective dopplelganger reside — i already know most people within them.

the virtual world on which i gaze in wonder is but the telephone and my son will think me a relic and will never know the newness nor the awe i hold and sadly, i will most likely never grasp his realm.

i am but a fool think i am seeing anything new.

it occurs to me as i watch hillary become more and more desperate, that i kinda gotta give props to mitt ‘the mormon marauder’ romney for bowing out gracefully for the sake of his party.

hillary clinton, by contrast, is becoming a poison pill — whether she hacks her way to the nomination or suffers a defeat at the convention, her antics are sure to turn off huge swaths of the party faithful, and will drive down voter turn out enough that any republican could win even without rigging electronic ballot machines.

Video with audio on web pages that starts playing automatically when those pages load is presumptuous, intrusive, loathsome and horrible. Please knock it off.

You just interrupted LL Cool J with some inane drivel about AJAX that was saved out with such a low bitrate that it may as well just have been radio static and the volume was jacked up so loud it scared me half to death. Do ya feel me?

The computer may look like TV and may one day replace TV but right now, I’m not watching TV. I’m working, writing code, and was looking for information on your product and frankly I have no desire to listen to some generic-sounding voice-over artist your tragically-hip marketing person hired read some cliche, second rate ad copy that is so clogged with worn-out buzzwords and smarmy lukewarm hype that given its poor recording quality is really just vocal vomit.

That insipid little aural stunt just made me hate your company. I just closed your web page and will never visit it again.

and the air is warm and pregnant with rain. it’s supposed to be winter.

i’m drinkin homemade wine outta south philly and thinking about how much i hate nVidia — it would see that they cannot make a product that simply works. every time i get stuck using one of their products there are issues. my ati cards never give me grief like this.

i put one of their cards in my desktop and windows won’t even see it, their tech support informs me that they cannot help me and to return the product. my laptop comes with an nvidia graphics and it can’t change resolution of the external monitor.

i dunno, seems to me that if you’re in the biz as long as they have been, i’d expect better, ya know?

eh — fuck’em

a little late, but i didn’t think you really cared, so whatever.

i’m just so sick and fucking tired of people’s bullshit. it’s entirely too rare the person who tells you like it is, how they feel, not what they think you want to hear. i’m guilty of doing it, i try to fit, say the right thing, but when it comes down to it, i don’t candy shit up for people. if i want something i say so, if you want something say so.

fucking bullshit assholes who don’t have the goddamned courage to just ask for something, or simply say “that’s what i want” aggravate me to no end!!!!!

“no, really whatever is fine” NO IT AIN’T, YOU’RE A FUCKING LIAR, DO YOU WANT THE SANDWICH OR NOT??

fuckit.