27 posts tagged “internet”
We watched this (thanks again to Tanya) at the office a few days ago:
One big mistake is that the Toyota Avanza (the car behind the lucky recipient) is in shot for a lot longer than the Hyundai that the owner, Todd Jamison, was presented with.
Now that I’ve figured out how to watch these on the RTL site, I am very much looking forward to this week’s instalment of Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei.
Disqus is the latest site I managed to find a bug with (sigh).
I have tried to upload an avatar to it. Now, I am pretty sure I had my photo set in Disqus a long time ago, but the site seems to have forgotten that setting and put me on to the default.
Not a problem: let’s try reloading one.
There is a 2 in 7 chance that I will get to the next screen, which confirms that the photo is saved. (The other five times, I was taken back to the screen that I had before this, with the old avatar in place. Reloads would not change it.) But on those two times, what’s happened? Did I ask Disqus to squash the photograph?
Friends joke that I have a Frank Spencer reaction to computing (and I encourage the jokes, because I find it funny). But I also argue that I am doing what everyone else is doing, but that the sites themselves are imperfect and untested. The difference is I am less willing to tolerate it when websites go buggy, and I expose the errors. (I know our own sites are imperfect, too, but at least we believe people when they alert us.) And since support staff no longer listen to complaints (note: I have not told Disqus of this error yet but their instruction page is a bit hopeless), I use blogging to vent.
First Twitter died for nearly two days. Facebook has been progressively dying, first removing its navigation bars, then its logo, then making false accusations, and now removing all the contents of my home page. And today, I see Vox has begun recommending splogs on my blog:
If you plan on asking Twitter for support, you can’t. The helpful section that was there has now gone, and you are stuck, as with Facebook, with known issues.
The only resolution I had was to go to this forum link on Twitter. In the lower right-hand corner of the page, you should see a box where you can ask a question. Fill it in, and you should be taken to another website called Get Satisfaction, which is monitored by Twitter. You will need to sign in using Open ID or Windows Live.
I am not sure what good this will do, but if you need to vent and hope there’s some remote chance someone from Twitter will hear you, it’s the best thing.
It has been impossible to Tweet here all day, and Twitter has made no announcement on whether its site is down—it certainly isn’t a ‘known issue’.
Hopefully the above will help some Tweeters out there who cannot post, add or block on the site.
Like Facebook and Twitter, our company has been under DOS attacks for the last few weeks and, as I write, we are under one right now. As for the “Joe job” that the Russians are suspected of having done to a Georgian blogger, I’ve had them, too—just that last year, I had no idea that this was a targeted campaign aimed directly at me or our company. I always thought it was random: like I am important enough to have a coordinated email attack against me. Yeah, right.
It makes me wonder about the motive. The latest attacks come from the US east coast, which is interesting. The Joe jobs last year emanated from servers in Russia, Poland, Greece, and the US, but the coordinator could have been anywhere.
You don’t get to 22 years in business without pissing somebody off. The Twitter attack last week was, according to some of the media, from the Russian government, and I can’t think of anyone at that high enough a level to even give a darn about what I do.
As you know, there are some nut bars out there who have accused me of quite a few far-fetched things (remember the posts about my being racist, against homosexuals, etc.) just because they are too stupid to read what is on the page and imagine I had written something against their point of view. Well, folks, your imaginations might be active, but they diverge too much from reality.
And if their grasp of reality isn’t that great, then I somehow think they wouldn’t be clever enough to mount an attack.
So, who would be that keen to waste time on me and has the brains to pull this off? Tongue firmly in cheek, here are the top 10, in no particular order.
1. Red China. They may be after anyone who has descended from family members who escaped in 1949. Each time I dis Chinese companies about bad behaviour, I will get a negative blog comment, or even a series of them. Seems pretty well coordinated—considering I don’t attract that many blog comments. Never mind that I say nice things about other Chinese companies who don’t do stupid things.
2. Technocrats and anyone else who wants to get their hands on New Zealand’s remaining state assets. But I am not alone on opposing them and there are more worthy targets.
3. Sen. John Kerry. It’s to get back at me for my decision to stop buying Wattie’s products because of the company’s overseas ownership. And the occasional quip about how the Forbeses made money in the opium trade. The latest attack did come from Massachusetts. Hmm.
4. Elle magazine. Its parent company had French defence contracts that were a little incompatible with the fashion image. (It still holds a percentage of EADS.) Folks, I find this funny—and it always gets a laugh in speeches.
5. Labour leader Phil Goff. I think his latest brochure photo sucks. And it’s probably not cool of him to brag about a free-trade deal with Red China to a roomful of expatriates who left because of 1949. Related to (1).
6. The ACT Party. Related to (2). Known for sending me spam in 2001 and on numerous occasions afterwards—so they’re definitely a tech-savvy bunch there.
7. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I’m not the one who talked about being under sniper fire in Bosnia. But I blogged about this a lot last year.
8. Toyota. So I bring up the war every now and then. However, I eat a lot of Japanese food.
9. Angelina Jolie. I am living proof that not all heterosexual men find her attractive, keeping her from a perfect hotness score.
10. Facebook. What I write about what is happening internally must cut pretty closely to the truth.
This is the screen that now permanently adorns my home page on Facebook. It says it can terminate my account if this supposedly bad behaviour on my part continues, even though I have done nothing wrong. It allows me to file a counter-notification, but despite doing so, this notice continues to appear. I have even filled out the form that is linked to the form that is linked to this notice (when Facebook tells me that there has been a problem with the first form). I have done this for a total of around 20 to 30 times over the last 24 hours. Nothing will shift this notice. In Facebook’s eyes, I am a baddie.
Strangely, Facebook has reinstated the video it removed earlier, although this notice relates to that very video. An earlier video has not been reinstated, but there is no way to provide information to defend myself there.
There is no way of reaching Facebook: there is no capacity to add a question to the help section of the site.
Americans have the common law concept of the presumption of innocence. Every American knows that. Every American who doesn’t work for Facebook—once again cementing their image of arrogance that many of us are tiring of.
I will probably now upload my videos to Vkontakte or Vox, and point people here. Unlike Facebook, I want Vox to earn money from views. It’s a pity that Facebook has become one of the worst sites on the web in terms of corporate behaviour. And for anyone thinking it’s going to be a major force forever, let me say that we thought the same thing about AltaVista in 1999. Then along came this service called Google.
Facebook, people don’t enjoy false accusations. It would be like me calling your CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, a pædophile.
Here is how Facebook has looked for me for the last two days:
In 2007, I would have written to the company to alert them, but given the callousness with which they approach their user base, I see no point any more.
I hope this is not the way the Book Depository site, which Empress Nasi Goreng put me on to today, looks—but I have reloaded numerous times and have been getting this:
However, as I am totally sure this is an error, I can recommend this site, too. The free shipping means that the books wind up much cheaper than they do via Amazon, which can only be a good thing to those of us in the antipodes. And even if this is the way it looks, I’m prepared to wade through it to save a few pounds.
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