I Have A New Computer!

Yes, I have been using a decade-old computer I found for free in a bin, but no more! My local computer store offered me a deal too amazing to pass up! (By which I mean I found another computer for free in a bin.)

As of a few days ago, my local computer store (the bin two streets away) has furnished me with a five-year-old Macbook with nothing but a head crash separating it from a long(ish) career as my primary PC.

As of now, it has a brand new hard drive and is running quite happily. So a hearty thank you to whoever didn't realise that hard drives could be replaced or that a hard drive failure was the reason their magic box stopped working, and decided to chuck it where I could find it.



Now I get to experience the thrill of computing luxuries as yet unknown to me, such as a reasonably up to date version of Firefox and a flash player that's still reasonably serviceable! (The PowerPC maxed out at 10.1, while this happily runs Flash Player 11.3, a version that was still supported within some semblance of recent memory.)

The PowerPC has been demoted to Computer I Can't Use Without Getting Out Of Bed status, but I'm keeping it anyway; turns out I'm not willing to abandon ShadowWraith and Diamonds 3D and other wonderful games just because they can't run on Intel hardware.

Vital stats:

Computer: Newer
Date: Today
Current Mood: Bouncy
Sleep Status: Not a wink
Word of the Day: Lurid
Platform: Macintel
Browser: Actual proper Firefox now.
RAM: 2 GB
No, the RAM on the table: That was the broken one from the old computer.
Why?: Well now it's my bookmark.
Oh: Yeah, it's not very useful as RAM anymore but it holds my place in books.
Redundancy: A bit.
Do you has?: Five bucks.
Boond you like?: No.
Favourite character: The Doctor
Doctor who?: I believe his name is Graben.
Sayan?: No, and the demonym is "Siana."
Rambling: Yes
More: No

Little Things That BUG Me #6

The companies that produce food for public consumption collectively expend approximately zero effort producing lactose-free dairy products (except for straight-up milk) and exactly zero effort making lactose-free dairy products that actually taste authentic (seriously, lactose-free milk is disgusting). Proper, good-tasting, real-tasting lactose-free milk, cheese, and ice cream just aren't priorities for the food industry; none of them bother trying.

And yet, they readily churn out gluten-free pasta and gluten-free bread and gluten-free versions of anything that may potentially be made from wheat, and although they may be more expensive, they usually make their gluten-free items taste like the real thing.

Gluten intolerance is a very rare condition, affecting less than 1% of the population.

Lactose intolerance is the default condition, with the mutation that causes lactose tolerance in adulthood present and effective in less than half the population.

Advice To Ad Agencies

In order to further transition ITIHAB into "Why Marketers Suck," here's a post containing some advice to them.

This will probably come as a surprise to absolutely no one who knows me in real life given that I'm perpetually broke, but I take market research surveys for money. This fact is also unsurprising to people who found my blog through some random Google search because they don't know or care about me, and it's not particularly surprising as far as facts go; if I had revealed I was secretly an alien, or the Queen, or that I had recently used the Book of Parallels that showed up in my postbox anonymously to retrieve a cure for cancer from an alternate universe, then that would be surprising but that I take market research surveys for money is generally more of a resident of the "meh" territory, like revealing I had a movie about aliens, or that I was a queen, or that I just made up the Book of Parallels and you shouldn't bother googling it because it's not a reference.

I typically can't share any juicy (or gruesome) details about experimental products because of confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements and most surveys not actually having any. However, I can share my comments from these surveys because they're, you know, mine.

One survey asked, on its final page, if I had any advice I'd liked to give to ad agencies and the people who make adverts in general. As it turned out, I did have some advice, and so I answered thus:

On balance, an ad is a BAD THING. By definition. If it supports content, then "ad + content" might total out to a positive, but "ad" is ALWAYS negative. Nobody *wants* to see ads, so stop trying to pretend that you can make your ads "better" so people will enjoy them. So basically, telling us that an invasion of privacy is justified because it means you can show "more relevant" ads doesn't just insult our intelligence; it makes you look like some freakish alien that's doing a really poor job of trying to imitate human behaviour.

As for what will make your ads "work" (in the sense of actually driving traffic/sales/etc), I can't help you. My browser has an adblock, and my mind has an adblock as well, so I can't remember ads once I'm no longer looking at them. If a company advertises, I will interpret this to mean that their products are inferior or overpriced since they obviously can't rely on quality or price to drive sales. I have never clicked an online ad unless I was (1) paid to click on it or (2) clicking on it repeatedly because it was offensive and I enjoyed the prospect of making them pay for a dozen-odd clickthroughs for zero conversions. I have responded to direct mail adverts by filling business reply envelopes with various items including (1) rocks, (2) direct mail adverts that didn't come with prepaid reply envelopes, or (3) the lyrics to "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley and mailing them back at advertiser expense. And I don't watch TV so don't think you can advertise at me there either.

Oh, and happy new year and stuff I completely forgot to blog about at the time. Cheers!

Eat It, Bell!

You evil telecommunications monopoly!

I alluded previously to my problems with a Bell Mobility prepaid plan for my mobile, noting that by topping up my account, using the credit, and then charging back the top-up fee, I forced them to honour their agreed rate of 30¢/minute (more or less).

Well, it's a few months later and the chargeback stands; either Bell has declined to dispute the matter or they have failed to convince my credit card company that 50 = 30, so I have officially won. Yay me.

For my next trip, I'm going to consider renting a portable satellite uplink rather than muck about with local SIM cards and prepaid plans. Especially if I end up in third worldier destinations next time. (Here's hoping, at any rate.)

Speaking of which, plans to sail to/from Manila are on indefinite suspension on the grounds that cruise lines suck.

Little Things That BUG Me #5

Pet food commercials that use the advertising tropes used to sell human food.

I'm starting to worry that this blog is turning into Why Marketers Suck rather than a sort of general collection of the wide variety of ideas I actually have, but pet food commercials which tout ingredients and tastiness and have detailed close-ups just bug me.

Yes, humans make the purchase decisions not pets, but I refuse to believe that the neural pathways by which people think about feeding their pets and those they use for enjoying their own food are the same. When I see such a commercial, the similarity between pet food and human food is just enough that trying to make me view the former in terms of the latter mentally "works" just enough to be really disgusting.

Sort of like how arsenic is toxic because it's chemically similar enough to phosphorous to insert itself into our important phosphates but different enough that the resulting arsenates can't replace their function. Or why it's really disturbing when people try to make me think of children as cute in the same way kittens are.

Pro tip: My dog will eat anything. Therefore, I buy her the cheapest food.

Other Ads Fail

I really wish there was a version of Safari that supports adblock and runs on my machine. (Or a version of TenFourFox that supports Flash.)

Because apparently every site I visit that requires plugins and uses ads has the most obnoxious ads there are. So far, I've seen:

An ad for a scammy lead-gen site that tries to convince people seeking insurance/mortgages/whatever to search through them so they can get a big affiliate commission. This ad features a creepy Uncanny Valley woman waving her arms, with a big flashing light on her head, so that it creates a constant seizure-inducing blinking rendering it impossible to concentrate on my actual email. The ad claims you can get, like, a WHOLE BUNCH of free money by clicking it; an actual spite-click revealed absolutely nothing beyond the usual "click these links to visit insurance companies/banks/etc so we can get our affiliate commission." The people who made this ad should be forced to spend eternity with an autistic child who constantly shouts "HEY! LOOK AT ME! LOOK WHAT I DID!" at them 24 hours a day.

An ad for something called "Wartune" which depicts Lady Not-Appearing-In-This-Game, with the caption "She has all the excitement you need!" This ad regularly shakes itself, creating distracting motion in the corner of my eye. The people who made this ad should be forced to spend eternity with a stamp collector, train spotter, or bird watcher (whichever they consider the most boring) who tells them that their hobby represents all the excitement they need and makes them do that whenever they try to do something they consider more fulfilling.

Several repeated ads for cruises. What part of "I Am Not A 'Cruise' Person" do they find difficult to comprehend? These are targeted ads, after all; despite making a big show to help escape regulation, it's not actually possible to opt out of targeted ads. The people responsible for this ad should be forced to spend a substantial chunk of their lives attempting to flirt with someone who is clearly not interested in them, except in all likelihood they already do, so I suppose wasting their money advertising at me is punishment enough.

A website trying to sell me some scam (I don't remember which) that I got paid to visit, and which when I attempted to leave, popped up a javascript-induced dialog box saying: "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO LEAVE? If you close this window, you'll miss out on this FANTASTIC OFFER!" I can't think of a cool and unusual punishment for popping up dialog boxes with sales pitches in reaction to people leaving, so I'll just propose the death penalty for it.

Google Ads Fail

So whenever I use a browser without adblock, I get piles upon piles of ads asking me to download Google's Chrome browser. I have no clue why Google has the obsession with which browser I use (since it's not like they get any extra ad revenue from Chrome; maybe it has built-in spyware to track my browsing habits?) but they seemed extremely adamant.

So having seen months of constant ads begging me to try Google Chrome, I finally clicked one of the ads.

At which point, Google declared: "Click here to download the Chrome browser for Mac! System requirements: OSX 10.6 or later."

OK.

I'd been seeing these ads for awhile, so I looked up the system requirements for the earliest versions of Chrome, in case they had only just changed.

System requirements for Mac: "OSX 10.5 or higher, Intel only."

So this entire time, Google has spent untold sums of its ad money or its ad space or its clients' ad money/space, in a massive and perpetual effort to convince me to download a browser that would never, at any point, run on my computer.

Obviously, I never got rich starting up or getting hired as CEO for a massive international company, but if you asked me, I'm pretty sure it's not a particularly good use of Google's marketing budget trying to convince me to download a piece of software just so I can look at a message that says: "You can't open the application 'Chrome' because it is not supported on this architecture."

And the most ridiculous thing is that even without any privacy-invading profiling and without any cookies, Google's ad server can tell that my computer won't run Chrome; I'm pretty sure I can download a user agent switcher for TenFourFox, but I haven't.

Now I have to install Chrome on the laptop just to see if I get ads for Chrome whilst actually using Chrome. Assuming it doesn't require Add Minn privileges to install, since there's no way Google's getting those out of me even if I could give them.

Vital stats:

Browser: TenFourFox
Date: Today
Current Mood: Ironic
Sleep Status: Wrong
Word of the Day: Architecture
Platform: Mac
Operating System: Mac OSX 10.5.8
Processor: Dual 1 Ghz PowerPC G4
RAM: Broken and tends to cause kernel panics.
RAM: Replaced
Redundancy: There is some redundancy here in that this item is redundant.
Redundancy: Yes
Redundancy: Triply so for added security
IBM: No, Motorola
Mobile: Also Motorola
Computer: 10 years old.
Intactness: It still runs.
Computer Store: A bin.