Yes I use an Ad blocker

I’ve been seeing more and more little notices on web pages telling me that I use an Ad blocker.

Often these sites will try to shame me, pointing out that they are supported by Ads.

Lately the tenor of some advertisers has been more like the bitchiness of an ex girlfriend complaining that I’m not buying her a drink when we run into each other at a bar.

Let me explain, breaking up with you wasn’t all that hard to do.

While you’re telling everyone in earshot, my dick is too small, or I make funny noises when I cum.

You should probably know honey, all my friends and their friends, know your hole ain’t quite as golden as you think it is.

A little advice… Ya might consider some Kegels, and some soap & water occasionally.

Sometimes a site is a bit more direct, simply asking me to support them with a donation. This approach is a lot more honest and typically causes me to consider, “How often do I actually go to this site?” If I go to a site less than once a month, I dismiss the notice, if I’m on the site often, I’ll think about donating.

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Ad Blockers have become a necessity, like virus protection.  Since I don’t buy a newer, faster computer every year I’m susceptible to ad inundation.

The condition that occurs when you can’t get your task done because you’re unable to dismiss ads fast enough. I call it ad rape, or ad fucking, or ad pounding.

My little netbook for example doesn’t have the horsepower to handle the barrage of messages telling me I don’t have Flash installed, all the popups for health aids, creams unguents, and God only knows what else. The CPU pegs at 100%, memory utilization shoots through the roof and then the browser folds.

I’ve wondered about people whose only access is with an older computer or a netbook or Chromebook. Does ad pounding place them at a societal disadvantage?

What about the poor? They can’t afford the latest $2000.00 computer and their internet may be provided via cell phone or public access at a McDonalds, doesn’t ad pounding increase the unfair disadvantage the poor are already laboring under?

Have I been reading too much SJW propaganda?

My tablet has the same problem but not to the same extent. I commonly see the message, “Due to a problem, this page is being reloaded.

Usually I’ll see this message after the page blanks while I’m reading an article.

I’m sure it’s some POS Ad that’s trying to commandeer all the system resources to show me something really important about unknown Insurance loopholes.

Brietbart.com is among the worst offenders. The New York Times, and LA Times are right up there too.

So I use an Ad blocker.

It helps, but doesn’t completely alleviate the problem.

Because I don’t run Flash, I see a fair number of messages telling me I don’t have Flash loaded and that I should have it loaded so that I have a better browsing experience.

Yeah, right, that “better” browsing experience is someone at the web site deciding to download, then play a video on my machine without my permission at a volume only slightly lower than the flight deck of a carrier during a scramble of fighter jets.

“DO YOU WANT BETTER SEX? THEN LISTEN TO THIS IMPORTANT MESSAGE”

Speaker blown, computer screen cracks and then the ad says for only $29.95 they’ll tell me the secrets to having a bigger dick and more fulfilling sex life. RIIIIGGGHHHHT!

The secret to having a more fulfilling sex life, is having more sex.

Being unafraid, unashamed, and open to the variety of experiences that we are presented with daily goes a long way towards having a better life in general and definitely a better sex life. Bend your partner over the arm of the chair, put on a cowboy hat and yell “High Ho Silver!” Okay, so that’s not for everyone… Try new things is all I’m saying.

There, I just saved you $29.95. You can send donations of $9.95 to me.

Yes, for a limited time you only pay 1/3 for the secret to a happier life. But act now, this is a limited time offer.


The question that the web sites and advertisers should be asking themselves isn’t, “How do we get around Ad blockers.” They should be asking, “WHY so many people are using Ad Blockers?”

They should be asking why ads have become such rich fodder for episodes of South Park.

The answer is simple. Ads have become abusive. They’ve gone from being something we’d notice in the margin, to offending and annoying us all, by blocking the content we wanted to see and demanding that we figure out how the fuck to close them.

We go to an article, or a site to look at something specific. Not necessarily to see which celebrity had botoxed themselves to the level of a mummy in the Cairo museum.

I don’t even try to close full screen pop-up ads anymore. I close the page. If the article, goods, or services, has to display a full page pop up ad covering their shit, then they can’t be very good articles, goods or services.

So Advertisers, instead of getting all bitchy because most of us are using ad blockers, how about you check your abusiveness and stop sounding like whiney little pussies.

That advice is my Christmas present to the advertising industry.

That’s Better, I think

I just thinned out the categories and eliminated all the #tags from my blog.

It had gotten to be a pain in the ass to keep track of something like 250 distinct items to categorize the posts.

So I eliminated a ton of stuff.

I spent some time re-categorizing a lot of posts that ended up in the “General” area. No doubt I’ll be continuing the process over the next weeks.

I think I’m going to see if I can pare the list down some more, but my eyes are about to fall out.

This should make it easier for me down the road if I decide to make some more major changes to the blog.

Hopefully I haven’t destabilized anything.

OK, 2018 I’m researching a move to another domain provider

Over the past year, Hostgator has become increasingly more difficult and their staff is becoming increasingly arrogant.

Case in point. I have a client whose web site was suddenly just, ‘gone’.

I’d received no notifications of any billing that was due, and neither had they.

So I go digging through all the invoices I have on my account and couldn’t find any evidence that I’d fronted the money for the domain name. The client also couldn’t find any evidence that they’d paid for the domain name.

In checking through my invoices I ran across one invoice that said it was a bill for two domains but neither of the domain names was listed.

Weird…

So After waiting 50 minutes on hold, I get connected to a snotty person in billing. This person tries to make the problem about me and my mismanagement of the domain. Uhhh NO! And this guy keeps cutting me off mid sentence as I’m trying to answer his question about if I’d properly entered the DNS information. Uhhh yeah I guess I did since the site has been up for 3 freaking years!

I was talking to my client at the same time I had this guy from Hostgator on the phone. Yes, it was a bit of a ploy. I could have muted my mic or put the Hostgator rep on hold. I didn’t because I wanted him to hear exactly what I was saying.

“Well, this guy I’m talking to has yet to provide any information about this mystery invoice, and can’t seem to find any invoice with your domain name on it.”

The guy at Hostgator got a little excited about that. Then asks to place me on hold.

After a few minutes he comes back and say that the mystery invoice is in fact the invoice for the two domains that have been suspended. (The original invoice was for 3 years beginning in 2012, which means that it expired in 2015.)

Since the invoice and the associated domains were apparently somehow botched up in Hostgators billing system, it meant that the Hostgator systems never sent a billing notice, generated a request for payment, or notified anyone that these domains were due for renewal.

Uhhh how is this my fault?

After a brief pause suddenly the Hostgator rep is very interested in getting this resolved.

Point is, with one notable exception, every time I’ve contacted Hostgator in the recent past they’ve been snotty and arrogant and pretty much unhelpful until I’ve held their feet to the fire.

In other words they’ve begun to behave like typical IT people in large companies.

There’s a reason most employees bring their own shit into a company. It’s because the IT people are such assholes that nobody wants to deal with them.

IT people often forget that they exist to serve their clients not the other way around.

One Hostgator rep was very helpful a couple of weeks ago. He told me that my website had malware.

“Okay,” I said, “Which of the 10 sites that I host are your referring to?”

“You should have malware protection on your sites.”

“Dude, not at a cost of 9.99 or 19.99 per month per site! And by the way, aren’t you supposed to be monitoring for that kind of stuff? Why did I have to ask you if there was something going on with a particular site? Why did one of your colleagues just tell me that they found no evidence of malware? Are you just trying to sell me a rather expensive service?”

Suddenly, that representative went silent.

Regarding malware protection on sites, I wouldn’t mind paying for a service if it protected my main site and all the sites I host. Just scan the whole tree say up to 25 individual domains, once a day. That would be fine and it would be a worth while expense.

Ahh suddenly the domains are associated with my account. I’ve even got an invoice. Yippee! Paid it just now, but the site isn’t up yet.

Looks like all the DNS info is correct although it’s curious why some of my DNS entries point to one server and some of them point to another. I’d have thought that all my sites would be hosted on the same server as my main umbrella site.

Why do I feel like I’m peeling an onion?

I’ll give it a couple more hours then if the sites are still not back we’ll have another conversation with Hostgator.

I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t something else going on. I wonder if they switched the server that my stuff is hosted on and that has caused a bunch of weird little problems.

It’s probably worth my time to get it straightened out, since I’m going to be with them for another couple of years. However, based on what I’m seeing I think the next couple years I’ll be shopping and comparing Hosting providers.


Update:

After waiting 48 hours, my client’s website still wasn’t up. I called Hostgator once again.

This time, I got hold of someone from the Old Hostgator. That Texas drawl was somehow comforting and he got right on the situation. No nonsense, no bullshit. It was, “I see, well let me check on that.”

A moment or two later he said that’s strange, then a couple of moments later, he was asking for my client’s website address again. Then he said, “There it is.” and started describing the site. I checked it on my end and there the client site was.

“Sometimes the DNS propagation takes time and the occasional kick in the pants.”

I swear if I could talk to that guy every time I needed something I’d be a seriously happy camper.

Trouble is, I know that it’s catch as catch can, and the next time I call them it’s likely I’ll be talking to someone not from Texas. They may be in Texas, but they’re not from Texas, there’s a big difference.

For the moment, everything is up and running. It only took two phone calls and one online chat session to get the issue resolved.

Huh… OSX Update this morning

There was a large (2GB) update this morning to El Capitan, and Xcode.

My computer notified me of this right after Sophos Anti Virus (Which is a great AV program, by the way) told me that there was a trojan virus of some kind on my machine.

Lovely!

The trojan was in an email and had been sent to the Junk folder, in addition to Sophos quarantining it. I love it when software does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

For those of you who may be interested, the mail containing the virus looks like it’s a zipped invoice. The text is terse and looks for all the world like someone is sending you a copy of an invoice that you either need to pay or that you’ve already paid.

In other words it looks innocent and as busy as we are this time of year I could see any of us opening the thing, thinking it was something to do with a gift.

I have to admit, I have a grudging respect for whoever created this little bit of nastiness. It’s simple and innocuous. No logos, or florid attempts to fool anyone into believing anything. It’s simply, “Here is your invoice, thank you for your business.”


The Xcode update was also 2GB.

My computer was a busy little camper!

Apple says the OS X update is about security and stability improvements. I can say that it “feels” snappier.

My system is currently backing up 12GB of changes, apparently caused by the updates so obviously I’m not going anywhere for a little while.

Anticipating a big backup, I connected my computer via hardline to the network. Gigabit Ethernet should make this a little bit quicker than WiFi. Even so, the time estimate is about 2 hours.

Well off to work on Job applications. If just one application is on the Taleo site, two hours should be just about right. Then I’ll see what other trouble I can get into today.

Oh For Goodness Sake!

The tech news is literally whipping itself into a foamy frothy santorum today over the RUMOR that the iPhone 7 will do away with the 3.5mm headphone jack.

OMG! This is worse that a nuclear attack! According to some of the moronic pundits.

Really?

So you’re going to have to buy an adapter or pay for headphones that have an adapter or special connector? That’s got your panties in a twist? Big Deal!

A few thoughts:

It’s a rumor, that means it may or may not be true.

When was the last time you really used that 3.5mm port? Is it going to be that big a loss?

With Bluetooth headsets becoming more common, packing all day battery life, and audio quality that rivals all but the highest end headsets, is this really gonna bring your world to a crashing end?

Given that the current iPhone 6s boasts a water resistance that borders on waterproof doesn’t it make sense that apple is going to minimize the number of openings in the phone?

After all you don’t have to seal what you never opened in the first place.

Personally I’d take waterproof and a bigger battery over a 3.5mm headphone jack I rarely use. I’m more concerned about the rumored thinning of the iPhone itself. I happen to have an iPhone 5s. I like the size, I like the shape, and the edges. I like it’s gripability.

I’m not overly enamoured of the iPhone 6 shape and rounded edges, I think it’s harder to hold onto, and knowing me, I’m for more likely to have the thing go crashing to the floor, no doubt after a really humorous juggling act.

Making the phone thinner is probably not going to help me out.

That being said, I’ll patiently wait for the iPhone 7 “reveal” in 2016 because until you actually see the product, there’s no need to freak out about it.

I don’t know who Dan Savage is having sex with… But if santorum is common in his life, he needs to find another partner or learn better hygiene.

Yeah you’re never going to wash these images out of your brain.

Slave! To my bed, bring the lube!