Damned businessmen
15 August 2007, 4:30 pm. 25 Comments. Filed under Internet, Rants.
Dammit. I busted my monthly Internet bandwidth. Again.
Some of you in the nice Northern Hemisphere may be thinking "WTF Internet bandwidth" but yeah, that's right. Telecom Xtra is the monopoly over our broadband Internet here and we get crap service at high prices. The plan we're with gives 6 GB Internet bandwidth at the damned rate of $49.95 NZD ($36.00 USD) a month, not to mention we have one of the slowest broadband speeds in the OECD already.
Neither my sister nor I know what we did to suddenly bust the 6 GB bandwidth just four days before the recurring date but right now I'm having to suffer 56K dial-up speed. I can't even load my site properly in Mozilla Firefox. Actually, let me rephrase that: I can't load any page properly in Firefox so I'm back to Opera again. It's killing me.
I had always been complaining about the crap broadband speed we got—about 150~200 KB/s downloading from most sites—but now I understand what real pain-in-the-arse means. Last night, I was downloading a file at 4 KB/s. The second file I downloaded was progressing at 0.5 KB/s. All this is due to the bloody rich firm that provides the bad service. They have no competition to face in the industry so it doesn't matter what price they set or what service they give, we all have to pay them. Die.
And to add to all the slow Internet killing my mood, I accidentally bidded on a 1 GB MP4 player on TradeMe when I thought it was a 2 GB. It wasn't purely my fault since that auction came up in the search results when I entered "2GB MP4 player". Anyhow, I won that at $57 NZD and realised I made a mistake fighting over it with another bidder. I then went after the 2 GB one I really wanted and won it at $59 NZD. Yeah. $2 for 1 GB upgrade. I should laugh? Heee. But, no.
It was the same seller that listed the items and I mailed him straight afterwards asking if we could please cancel the trade and I would be willing to pay any costs he had incurred in listing the auction, which would amount to something no more than $3.95. And he replied me:
Please pay $10 (admin and restocking charge) to our bank account
"Admin and restocking charge" my ass. It was just a Chinese guy bringing cheap MP4 players in from China and reselling here for triple or quadruple the price and he's charging a sixth of the item's price for some admin and "restocking" crap. The item hasn't even been dispatched! I shall now give the 1 GB MP4 player to my friend who doesn't have one since if I do resell the item, I don't think I'd find another stupid girl who'd bid up to $57 for it thinking it was a 2 GB.
So now, I am broke again. But at least I'll now treasure my 200 KB/s download speed to come in two days. (Perhaps only for a week in, though.)
Advice, plugging, weirdos
10 August 2007, 8:36 pm. 35 Comments. Filed under Internet, Rants, Web-related.
I've been tracking my site's visitor data, and I've come up with the top five screen resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1280x800, 1152x864 and 800x600.
Now if I was going to provide desktop wallpapers, what sizes should I offer? All of them? That's a massive download list. I also thought of zipping all sizes up in a single *.zip file but I also know there should be a number of people out there like me who prefer loading the wallpaper in the browser and clicking "Set as Desktop Background..." So now what?
Another question: Do you use WordPress to run your site? Or another CMS? Do you prefer the whole manual updating work or coding your own CMS?
As for the plugging today, Veve has a new layout for DigiCreation. I've waited for her to upload the new design for so long and I'm loving the whole new format.
Also, if you like filling in surveys and the like, you might like to do this Psychology Survey thing for Belinda and be in to win a US$30 Amazon gift certificate (yeah, that's the best part).
I now drift away from all that nice general web-related talk and proceed onto my Internet weirdos rant. Have you ever come across stalker-like weirdos on the Internet trying to hook you up on random sites? For example, I joined Zedge for cellphone resources and StumbleUpon to surf sites, and I get very, very weird guys bugging me. The latest weirdo sent several messages. Warning: following material is strongly disturbing:
... do you know anybody who want to marry me?
dear i dont have any girl friend, will you marry me?
seriously what you think? if you are staying over here then i give you a merry kiss.
Thats i am doing will you merry me? i love you my sweety
There. I deleted my profile photo so at least now I seem like I'm so ugly I'm ashamed of putting my photo on a public profile. This friend cracked up so much over these messages and another friend said he probably just wanted New Zealand residence. (How offensive. I'm still yet to punch this guy.)
On the other hand, I've encountered less buggy weirdos on friends-making websites like Bebo and Facebook. Seriously though, I have too many web profiles. They're all over the place and I sign up because people send invites to me. MySpace really kills my eyes but sadly, I still have a profile there.
Saving Fish From Drowning
4 July 2007, 8:14 pm. 11 Comments. Filed under Internet, Literature.
There we go. I just finished one of the most boring novels ever—Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan. It was really not exciting. I don't recommend it unless you have a lot of time to spare but one should make his/her own decisions. For me, the best bit to the book must be this quote right at the start:
A pious man explained to his followers: "It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. "Don't be scared," I tell those fishes. "I am saving you from drowning." Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes.
- Anonymous
I find that incredibly amusing. 
Sadly, I did not see that tie in with the rest of the story. Perhaps because I was bored and didn't bother to analyse like I would have for an English exam but all in all, I wasn't too engaged in the story until I was about four-fifths of the way through.
I am proud I managed to finish it though. For I also found a bookmark left in the first one-fifth of the book by the person who borrowed it from the library before me.
Off on another topic, would anyone meet up with Internet friends? I mean, you see the news reporting stories of people getting kidnapped and raped by "friends" they met over the Internet. Doesn't that intimidate anyone? But then I also learnt from school that the media gives off wrong impressions of crime rates to the general public, especially about "street crimes" like homicides and rape because that's what viewers are interested in. So, what do you say? Better safe than sorry? What about the numerous other cases of good Internet friends meeting up to become "real life" friends?
