Tag Archive for rant

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

Rant: All these Fees Suck!

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So far this month I’ve racked up $28.80 in fees from Paypal for receiving payments…

we know Paypal is ridiculous with their fees… but this is adding up quickly now…

It costs me $2.50 to withdraw money from my Paypal account at an ATM, but then Paypal charge me $1 on top of that.. so it costs me $3.50 to get my own money?!?!

and I thought it was free to get money if I bought something with my Paypal card, y’know if I buy something and get cash back.. but apparently it’s not, they charge $1 for that as well…

But…

I paid my Electric Bill yesterday over the phone and it cost me $5.95

I paid my car today over the phone and it cost me $10 ?!?!

Stupid Chase Auto Finance doesn’t have an online payment system in my state.. I don’t quite understand that though, what exaclty does the state have to do with online payments?

-my last car was through Chrysler and I could easily pay them on the web every month, the fee was 50 cents but I’d take 50 cents over $10 anyday obviously..

Seriously, WTF?!  Why do I have to pay to give them my money?

I mean, you want my money, but I have to pay you to give it to you.. how does that work?!?

I wonder if all of these fees are tax deductible?

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

I hate people….

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So last week the 9th, my wife went to pick kids up from daycare, my 2yr old son, opened the car door a bit farther than my wife had opened it and it touched the car next to ours, it left a scuff mark that could be rubbed out with your finger.. big deal right?

Not a f*cking chance, I just got a phone call from my insurance company that these people filed a claim and that there’s a huge dent in their car…

how much damage could a 2yr old do really?

The thing that bugs me the most is of coruse that I wasn’t there to see this, but what really intrigues me is that the car itself has not been there since this incident so I can’t even look to see the damage of take pictures..

The lady was rude and ignorant and sceamed at my wife, my wife came home upset and crying because of this stupid lady…

My wife says it’s an older car anyway with numerous dents and dings in it, but still though how much damage could a 2yr old do in like two feet of space between the cars…

Also what bothers me is that the lady said she was going to talk to her husband and see if he could possibly do something bout it, now I don’t think this guy is an autobody expert, so I’m suspicious that this guy may have done more damge when he tried to ‘fix’ it..

it was a scuff, you could have rubbed it off with your finger, there’s no work that was needed to fix it…

I’m tired of being nice, I’m sick of it, no one else is so why should I be right?!?

I’ve got numerous dents and dings in my car from that parking lot, the first was when my car was only two months old, I was dropping off ky kids and wasn’t even in there for 10 minutes, it’s a very large mark on my bumper where even the paint is missing, but of course  NO ONE claimed it or apologized for it….

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

RickRoll WTF?!?!?!

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I must be too old or something, I don’t understand or find anything at all funny about this whole RickRoll thing going on now…

It’s asinine and childish from what I’ve seen, I didn’t think I was that old, I’m only 36, have I lost my sense of humor?

Or am I more mature than those who find the whole RR thing amusing and funny?

I don’t understand it all all… and I can’t figure out what is so funny about them.

I don’t know…

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

Bodies the Exhibit

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So, my wife and I went to see Bodies the Exhibit yesterday (Friday) at the Carnegie Science Center and it was interesting from what I saw… but the overall experience sucked.

Apparently they had several high schools there and many, many people also. I bought the tickets at the beginning of the month actually hoping we could avoid the crowds, they mention if you buy your tickets before you get there you won’t have to wait and you can avoid the crowds. Now I understand that they need money etc, but it seemed to me that they were just letting as many people as possible in there at the same time.

Each exhibit has a display card telling you what’s going on, and some have a few of them, it was pretty much impossible to read the cards with people standing in the way, literally pushing you out of the way and being generally ignorant. It was so crowded that when you moved you bumped into someone or they bumped into you, and of course no one said excuse me, they basically gave me a dirty look like I was in their way and how dare I try and even look at something they are looking at.

And of course the high school kids that were there were all immature, laughing, giggling and of course pointing out the male and female reproductive systems. One guy was going along and actually fingering the vaginas when he could get to them, and pointing out how great of a job they did at shaving the pubic areas of the women on display… mind you you’re not supposed to touch the displays at all, there are signs all over the place regarding this.

The entire thing took us less than an hour to get through and the experience was not worth the $47 for the tickets and parking on top of that.

I really couldn’t get to see much of what I wanted to see, it was just the most miserable experience I’ve been through regarding the Carnegie….  I can recommend NOT going to see bodies unless you know there won’t be lots of people there, it’s just not worth the money you’ll pay to deal with that…

I was very disappointed at how unprofessional the entire thing was, the Carnegie is usually much better about there exhibits and such.

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

Digg and its’ Top Diggers

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 —————-

Digg is a great site overall, and I visit it quite a few times during the day to check out what’s going on and there’s usually something I find interesting on the front page.

This recent little debacle, revolt, or whatever the hell you want to call got me to thinking, how do these ‘Top Diggers’ get to those top spots?

I mean they’re the so-called Elite of Digg right? This essentially means that they submit the most stories right? The most stories that hit the front page etc… but how?

Don’t they have jobs? Don’t they have families? How do you just spend all of your time searching through stuff to find things to submit to Digg? I mean they’re not getting paid for it right? So, I have to guess that they are independently wealthy and I guess have nothing better to do with their time than find things to submit to Digg?

What did they do B.D. ? Before Digg? Seriously though, what did these guys do before Digg came around?

Don’t they have lives? Especially since it seems they hold so much weight on Digg, they’ve got to have money or something?! This latest little ‘revolt’ or ‘bunch of immature geeks crying because they didn’t get their way’ just proves that the power is not with the people… it’s with a select few that have nothing else to do in the world except try and find things to submit to Digg…

Then of course there’s the bury squad.. which I don’t even want to get into…

and of course all the other trends that we see on Digg like linking to blogs that link to three or four other places before they get to the actual story… Why do I have to wade through all of that just to read the story that interests me?

lately I’ve seen a lot of Engadget and Gizmodo appearing on the front page, don’t get me wrong, it’s not getting on them, I visit them often as well, but they’re a prime example of Diggs that take you to five other places to get to the original story… I’m guessing it’s because they are popular so that when someone sees the name Engadget or Gizmodo they blindly Digg it and it hits the front page shortly thereafter…

Prime example is something I submitted, this was a while ago, but I linked to the original story, 4 days later it’s on the front page but linked to Engadget and they linked to another, and they linked to another and they linked to yet another to finally get to the story… it’s goofy. They complain about Blogspam all the time on there but yet it’s there all the time on the front page, I see people all the time complaining about the same thing, why don’t you link to the original story instead of linking to a blog that then links to other blogs…

and as for the users on Digg, well most of them need to grow up, I don’t comment often because its pointless, immediately you’ll have someone flaming you and then burying you because they agree with the flamer, even though the flamer has no clue as to what was actually meant by the comment and just doesn’t plain understand it..

Oh well.. that’s enough.. bah

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Articles/Editorials, Rants!, Scams / Phishing/ Mail

Spammers and Hackers need to get a life or just up and die

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Since I have Counterize enabled on my blogs it’s always interesting to see what’s going on, and it’s kinda cool that the blogs will email me if there’s an error somewhere like someone trying to go somewhere on my site and not being able to access it…

Lately I’ve come across quite a few ‘hacker’ entries, and actually backtracked them to the originating server, and even went so far as to explore the stuff they’ve got in there, all of there hacking tools, like scanners etc. It’s really interesting because they like have their names right in there, or at least their aliases, they sign their programs and work, leave email addresses and IRC channel addresses to contact them with…

I also found it interesting that most of the hackers use PocketPCs to do this stuff…

Here’s a screencap from Counterize showing what I mean:

screencap.jpg

You can click the tiny one for it to open full screen to 1137×153 size…

anyway, I even went through their directories and downloaded the tools they use just to check them out and get some more info about them.. why, curiosity I guess…

as for Spammers, I was thinking, they are a real PITA, I get quite a bit of spam, thank God for Akismet really, but wouldn’t it be cool if those spammers would at least click on one of our ads? I mean they make use go through these junk messages/comments, couldn’t they at least make it worth our while to do so?

Back to the hackers… these guys are a trip, here’s an excerpt from their code:

# Release Name : XxX-SuperScan-XxX
#
# RFi Scanner Christmas Release ! 😀
#
# ————- [% Notes %] ————-
# This rfi scanner contains piece of code from; PitBull CreW, Mic22, Inphex.
# And also lets just say more version wil come 😛
#
# With this release you must be happy since its the best RFi Scanner around.
# And its even public, happy x-mas ! 😀
#
# You can also PM the bot with your scan, this is handy when you have loaded multiple scanners.

and here’s another that I found rather funny as well:

# Mafia_KB, i hope i pretty fucked up your sell
# asking 2000 fucking euros for a crappy scan ?
# this one is 1000 times better so i hope
# it affects your sell even more lol.

Oh well.. tis life I guess

350-018 is related to AES and EAP wireless protocols that maintain safe wireless access to devices across the branch networks. 70-297 is related to devising an Active Directory in addition to network infrastructure. 640-816 explains how VLANs produce logically detached networks and the requirement for routing between them. 156-215 generate rules and adapt a Security Policy’s properties. Candidates for 70-528 should have a functioning knowledge of Visual Studio 2005 and a solid knowledge of the latest features of ASP.NET 2.0.

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!