SPAM and Blacklists

I promise not to turn this blog into a ranting device. I don’t want to be that negative all the time, and there are people who are much funnier than I am, who can sound witty when complaining. I worry that I fall much more into the bitter or cynical side, and I’d like to avoid that. All of that said, however, I’m going to post my 2nd consecutive complaint about a technology issue that really doesn’t have to be as broken as it is. And that technology is blacklists.

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Adobe Reader

This post is many days coming. I’ve been fighting with Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) for some time now, and I wanted to make sure my frustrations are not simply ill tempered rants, but actual problems that other people face. Also, this post is a tacit apology to all my non-Mac using friends who complained when I sent them PDF files. I now know the pain they had to suffer every time I sent a PDF to them, and expected it to be as easy as using Preview.app on the Mac.

First things first. There’s only one reason I can think of that any sane Mac user would ever install Adobe Reader on his or her system willingly is to be able to fill out PDF’s that have the built in forms. And no, for the record, I don’t count having the Creative Suite puking files, programs and browser extensions all over Hell and Creation to be a “willing” install of Adobe Reader. The forms are things like the yearly IRS Tax forms we get as US Citizens, and are required to fill out and mail in. It’s so much easier to fill out the forms on the computer, print them out, sign them, and then mail them in. Not only does it save the IRS from the handwriting of people like me, it allows people to save the filled out versions on their hard drives for long term storage.

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A Cage, A Monkey, A Bananna and a Firehose

There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a fire hose.

The rest of the article is worth reading as well, but for those of you who don’t code I’m not sure it will make as much sense as the monkeys.

All I Want For Christmas

How to make real, New York style pizza. 750°+, 2 or 3 minutes. Sounds like heaven.

http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm

Coffee Shops and Free WiFi

Well, I was going to write this on one of the many free wireless spots in the US – one of the things I had been missing living outside of the United States the past years. Sadly, that can’t happen. I’ve been driving around Raleigh this morning and haven’t located a free WiFi hookup yet. Admittedly, I’ve been perusing shopping malls and chain coffee shops, but still. When I left here, WiFi was free. Now, not so much. So, I sit here in a Barnes and Noble, not paying the $3.95 for 2 hours of WiFi. My iPhone tells me that there’s two free WiFi locations in Chapel Hill – both at Cup A Joe’s – and one of them is less than 5 miles from where I started my drive this morning.

That brings me to another gripe. I have an iPhone, and it’s wonderful and all, but… but, I can’t use it to tether my laptop to the internet. In Apple and AT&T’s infinite wisdom, that will be a paid service, later. With bandwidth caps. And it will cost an extra $20 or $30 per month. That’s on top of the $30 per month my wife and I pay for unlimited text messages, and the $30 a month I pay for 3G internet for my iPhone. Now, where I’m moving from – the “backwards” land of the Middle East (which many people here seem to think is camels and tents, not skycrapers) – SMS messages are 15 fils each. That’s less than .04 USD. So, I’d have to send 750 messages to spend the same on text there as I spend to have the ability to not worry about it here. AND. AND. There’s always an AND. AND – the person I send messages to pays for them as well here. Which is possibly the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard of. Anyone can send you a message. And you have to pay for it. I’m covered (with my monthly $30 of filthy lucre), but I’m hesitant to send messages to friends here – unless I know they have an iPhone. Otherwise, I’m costing them money to read my mindless “want to get coffee” messages. It’s actually cheaper here to just call them. Grrr.

Sorry, got a little distracted there. And I’m burning up my battery, as there’s no where to plug my laptop in. I guess my point is that while I love being in the US and all, and yes, it’s better for us to be here, with child coming and all – the US really has a lot of things backwards. No wonder the international community finds us so strange.