Rants!

My rantings…

Articles/Editorials, Product Previews/Reviews, Rants!

I hate Christmas.

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Yep I’m probably considered a ‘Scrooge‘ but I honestly hate Christmas and all that it has become, everything that Christmas was is gone from it, it’s all commercialized now and it’s all about having your hand out to get something. It has become the ‘gimme’ holiday and that’s about it, everyone expects something and the commerce industry has made it so you feel guilty if you don’t go and buy something for everyone.  I can’t wait till it’s all over, I’m sick of dealing with people in more of a hurry and more rude than they are normally are the rest of the year…

-Scrooge image from http://duckman.pettho.com/characters/scrooge.html

anyway I’ve got some cool stuff for review over at DSM, I guess that’s something good, but that’s business as usual..

Thermalright sent me over their Ultima-90 Heatsink:

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Brando sent me over a cool credit card sized2gig mp3 player, it even included some music from Asia as well!

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and I got some other stuff as well… so I’ll be busy for a while, even posting a review tonight…

Christmas… Bah-Humbug!

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

Digg violates human rights?!

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Not exactly violating human rights from what I see, but it’s more of a discrimination thing against gays and lesbians..

To me it doesn’t matter which way you go, I’ve had some best friends that were gay/lesbian, but from what I’ve seen on Digg they are a bit discriminatory against gays and lesbians unless of course it involves a lesbian sex scene or lesbians kissing etc, then of course it’ll hit the front page of Digg….

Becky over at Girl in Short Shorts has been banned from Digg (link HERE to read more), but it gets more interesting when another lesbian related site gets banned from Digg, Lesbiatopia is the name of the site. Apparently the site just doesn’t have enough lesbian sex scenes in it to get dugg by the little boys over there, so of course it gets banned…

There is a mob mentality over at Digg yes, sometimes that’s good but when the mentality is immature then there’s going to be a problem as is happening here now.

So Lesbiatopia is taking things a step further and charging Digg with Human Rights Violations, and is taking their concerns to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission with allegations of homophobia and misogyny. Read about it HERE on their site..

Sometimes we’ve seen the mob over at Digg bury things with their wonderful ‘bury brigade’, but then of course we know for fact that Digg editors bury and/or delete things as well.

Digg is a great site, or at least it was at one point in time, it has changed quite a bit since its humble beginnings, I think they’ve grown to the point where they feel they are above everyone else. What Lesbiatopia is doing might be what’s called for here, maybe bring Digg and its ilk down back to reality, a bit more grounded and bit more understanding to all views..

While I’m sure it will be hard to prove, it will prove to be bad press for Digg though… and that may lead to needed changes in their system.

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

Tragedy Strikes Again! Another HDD bites the dust

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I swear if it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have any luck at all… last month I had two hard drives up and die on me.. not a big deal they weren’t important but still inconvenient as hell though….

So normally I do my backups every Sunday evening when I get some alone time, today I went to access my videos and pictures from the Cyberconxion last night and my HDD is acting all goofy, so I restarted the computer and I get a nice Corrupt Master File Table error.. this means I’m pretty much screwed… on my laptop now while I’m trying to rebuild the MFT, it’s 200gigs so it takes a LONG time to scan the drive to find the mirror MFT to rebuild from… it really pisses me off that this drive is only a couple months old, I think it’s still in warranty, it was a refurb segate, but I don’t care too much about the actual drive I just want the data, it’s all my work from all week, things I cannot get back, including pictures from my sons Christmas party he had at school on Friday…

…so of course this HDD had to crash on the day do my backups didn’t it? I do manual backups, but I do believe now I will be doing daily backups to TWO separate HDDs only updating the changes, it might be a waste of space but in the end it will have to be worth it right?

I’ve got to be cursed… this stuff only happens to me I swear, and I just don’t understand… I must have been one mean evil MOFO in my last life, because only that can explain the nasty shit I’ve had happen to me in my 35 years on this earth…..

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

GoDaddy Sucks!

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So, I decided to give it a few days and see what was going on with this GoDaddy hosting problem I’ve been having, and it hasn’t gone away… it is just stupid slow.

Using FTP or just http into the back-end of my site is just entirely much slower than it used to be and I’ve also noticed a major drop in traffic as well since this has all happened.

I’ll tell you what though I can’t say too many good things about BlueFur though, FTP’ing into it is like blazing fast, it’s just amazing, and the entire site is just so snappy and quick to load, I love this host, I need to move all of my sites to BlueFur like now I think…  but that’s for something after Christmas… get all my ducks in a row as it were and move everything over then! Sounds like a plan!

Articles/Editorials, Rants!, SEO/Traffic

Hosting Companies, I don’t like GoDaddy anymore and shopping for a new webhost

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So Bluefur was offering a special this month for 1year of hosting for $10, I figured why not go for it, I’ve been meaning to set up another site for sometime now and I thought that would be perfect for it… it’s another techie blog, not quite finished yet though… not sure if I’m happy with it.

I found the special over at JohnChow.com his post about the special is HERE and I see there are only 63 packages left as of writing this post.

But I just wanted to say that Bluefur is really cool, especially compared to GoDaddy… obviously I transfer all the information via FTP, pictures etc to my DragonSteelMods and this account. If you have a WordPress or any website you do this as well most likely.

Transferring stuff to my new site via FTP on Bluefur was amazingly fast, I was shocked by how fast it was, the site itself is very snappy and fast also. My GoDaddy accounts are slow to do this, originally I just though it was my internet service that was slow for uploading, but as I can see now that’s not the case it’s GoDaddy that is slow.

Bluefur also has some great customer support as well, I was thinking of just migrating this blog over to them before I decided to create the new site and I had numerous questions about the migration process and other questions as well. They answered all of my questions quickly and actually answered them.

I’ve been thinking about moving DragonSteelMods for some time now to a new hosting service and I’ve been looking into many of them, emailing my questions and seeing what kind of support I can get.

Some companies haven’t even responded yet! How can you not respond to an email from a prospective new client or customer?

I had another company (media temple) who just quoted my the things that were on there website and never really answered my questions. I even went so far as to point this out to them, that they didn’t answer my questions and they just quoted me from their website, I got back a response that was yet another quote from their website…

If you can’t answer simple questions for a prospective customer then how can you expect that customer to give you their business? If that’s what I can expect from support there is no way I’ll be working with them…

Another reason I need to leave GoDaddy is that they recently migrated my website to god know where, and now it’s much slower than it was before, and I’ve noticed a drop in traffic as well since this migration occurred.

This is the reason my account was migrated:

Your hosting account, dragonsteelmods.com, is being migrated to
a new server within the next 24 hours.

So that we may continue providing the highest quality of service
to all of our customers, we are working to reduce the Java server
capacity being used by hosting accounts that are not utilizing
JSP/Servlets functionality.

I’m not by any means an expert or even a knowledgeable person when it come so to the hosting end of websites so I have no clue what that means exactly… Can anyone tell me?

but since the site has become slower that means it really is time to move on to a new webhost, and that isn’t going to be easy at all with my site. At the moment it takes about 6 hours to download for backup, my site via FTP, I’ve got some 19 thousand pages, and thousands and thousands of pictures stored there. It’s gonna be fun but I do believe that I’ll be moving to Bluefur!

Rants!

ATM Fees Suck!

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I’m sure most people already know that ATM fees are just stupid, why should we have to pay blackmail to get access to our own money?

Seriously though, does it really cost $3 for a bank that is not mine to let me use their machine and give me money? So basically they are charging me three dollars for them to connect to my bank and see if there’s enough money to give me what I requested.. It’s goofy, it’s extortion is what it is…

So I had to go downtown recently and of course there were no parking spots on the street so i had to use a parking garage, it sucks really because I only had to run in for a quick 15minute meeting, but of course I got charged for 30 minutes. Luckily this was on a Saturday and 30 minutes to 1 hour is only $2 at the garage I parked in.

Normally I like to have some cash on me, or I’ll hit the ATM on my way to town, well that day I didn’t have any cash and of course the ATM was out of order at my bank, they were doing the maintenance on it… So of course I figured I’d be alright because I had change for the meter or I could just use my card to pay for a parking garage.. So as I said there were no spots on the street to park so I went into the garage to park, well when I got done with my appointment I went to pay, it’s all automated so there is no one there to take your money, and when I try to pay I find out that the machines are not accepting credit cards right now… So my nearest bank is about 5 blocks away, I really didn’t want to walk, so I hit the closest ATM that was only about 100Yards from the parking garage. I took $10 out, got charged $3 by that bank, so I get my statement in the mail from my bank and THEY CHARGED ME $1.50 as well for that transaction!

So it essentially it costs me $6.50 to park for 15 minutes. The ATM charged me $3, my bank charged me $1.50 for using a strange ATM and the parking was only $2….

$4.50 FEE for withdrawing $10 OF MY MONEY!

There’s something wrong with this system, there really is…

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

I don’t get it…

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So yesterday I posted on here and DSM about the sale that USBFever was having, the MicroSD reader for 1 penny plus $3 shipping…

“Ultra Slim T-Flash (Micro SD) Card Reader for 1 Penny!

http://www.usbfever.com/index_eproduct_view.php?products_id=282

original price US$11.99/pc
sales price US$0.01/pc-Can’t beat that deal… but I believe there is a $3 shipping charge, still though it’s a very good deal..”

Well I thought it was a great deal so I posted it on a couple forums I frequent thinking other people might like to have one for basically $3.. it’s a great deal and most think it is… but today I get a PM from one of the mods on a forum that I won’t name, telling me that they deleted my post about the deal… telling me something along the lines of since they are a sponsor of mine I shouldn’t be posting things like this… essentially saying, (without actually saying-reading between the lines here…) that I was getting some sort of kickback for the deal… how much of a kickback could I possibly get when the thing sells for ONE PENNY?!?!?

I mean, I could be off base here, but that’s what I read into it, that it was being deleted because they thought I was getting something in return…

I thought I was being nice by sharing a great deal with others….

no good deed goes unpunished eh…

oh well..whatever