Category: Useless Update
Tomorrow is an Excellent Day
Tomorrow is Tuesday, June 30 2009. It will be a very excellent day. Here is why:
- Firefox 3.5 Release – Everyone MUST upgrade their browsers to Firefox 3.5 tomorrow. It has many improvements, the most significant being a drastic speed boost in javascript. It’s much faster than 3.0 and blows away Firefox 2 or even IE 7 or IE 8. If you are on Facebook or any modern web 2.0 social networking sites, lots of scripting is used, so they will load slower than shit if you use IE. Get speedy and use Firefox! Other features include HTML5 support – including embedded video playback without any third party plugins, improved CSS3 support, private browsing mode (won’t remember anything from sites you visit for your porn… uh… paranoid folks out there) and location aware browsing (Firefox can ask you permission to look up wifi hotspots, ISP info and cell towers to try and pinpoint your location. Sweet). Have IE try and do that. HA! Check out http://hacks.mozilla.org to view live web demos of cool shit that only works in Firefox 3.5 and NEVER in IE or other shitty browsers*
- Alice in Chains Music Video – Alice in Chains will be releasing an entire music video from their upcoming album Black Gives Way to Blue (sweet title). This is their fourth studio album, first in over fourteen years and first without vocalist Layne Staley. It won’t be the same, but Cantrell is still amazing so it should be awesome. The video for the song “A looking in View” will be on their website, and is not the first single from the album. The album is set to be released September 29th.
- I get to wake up really early to clean dusty ass projectors, get my hands black and breathe in harsh fumes. But then after that, I am going to party my ass off with 3-4 smokeshows with nice asses who all want me really badly. Then I’ll wake up in between the two lucky ones the next morning and be like “shouldn’t I be at work.” Okay, just kidding about this one (for now). But in other randomness: go Yankees, and happy birthday grandma (also 6/30). The day is really packed.
*Google Chrome is an exception. It is an excellent browser and I’d be all for you if you chose that over IE, but I still like Firefox best.
PS – This is post number 13 for the month of June. I had this many posts the entire year in 2007
Iran Solution
I strongly advise the United States to adapt the portfolioso.com solution to the situation in Iran: do nothing. That’s right folks, this issue they are having with elections and oppression has absolutely nothing to do with the United States and is of no concern for this country. Who cares if people are going around screaming “death to America.” It’s not doing anything to me. Does it suck the way protesters are being treated? Yes. Should elections be fair? Yes. See, apparently even in the United States, elections are full of shit. Just look at 2000 – the majority of voters chose Gore (although he was also a moron along with most other politicians, but that’s not my point right now and he couldn’t have been worse than Bush). But we have this genius thing called the Electoral college, designed for morons on horses who couldn’t communicate easily in the 1700s and 1800s to vote for electors to vote for a person – mostly because government officials back then thought the common man was a moron (which is still true to this day). Even so, you don’t see people here turning into looting animals when the election goes awry.
By telling other countries what to do, it simply angers some people and this is why foreign countries end up hating the United States. Read Persepolis. Iran was a mess during the Iranian revolution and it will be that way again, because they don’t have their shit together. We have our shit together and it shouldn’t bother us what other nations do, unless there is a direct threat to American freedom. Last time I checked, their oppression has nothing to do with me. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but lots of people are being oppressed. Why should the country get involved with Iran and not for instance, Darfur and everyone else all over the world also being oppressed? Political interest/oil/money. It all comes down to that. There is no monetary benefit for helping Darfur, so you don’t see the US anywhere near there. But the Middle East? Oil, etc. There’s simply too many problems in the world, and those being affected need to deal with them. Take the advice of the country’s founders – stay away from entangling alliances and remain neutral in foreign affairs. We don’t do that anymore, and this is why the United States is going to the doghouse.
Twitter Gone Private
I regret to inform my fellow stalkers that I had to protect my Twitter updates. This isn’t because I don’t want strangers reading it – I could care less. There has been an abundance of spammers in the past few days and I am sick of being followed by accounts that take my tweets and re-tweet them on other people’s Twitters with spam links. I will probably undo this in a few days, but for now, this is one solution. So if you’re the Editor in Chief or the General Manager of the Mirror who refuses to join the Web 2.0 revolution and get a Twitter account, now it looks like you’ll have to in order to read mine or be in the dark. Sorry.
Cablevision’s Deceptive Practices
July 16, 2009
Useless Update
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Portfolioso
Cablevision is a sneaky, deceptive company and practices dirty tactics that are unfair to competitors. They have monopolistic tendencies and downright lie to consumers about everything.
Please explain to me how this is fair: Cablevision owns the Rangers, their arena (Madison Square Garden), and their TV channel. At first, they refused to gice Verizon the rights to these channels until the FCC forced them to do so. Cablevision then proceeded to deny HD channel access in order to form a competitive advantage in its markets. Verizon filed another FCC complaint regarding this matter which (at the time of this writing) is pending.
As a result, they can go around advertising that it is the only company that provides all NY sports teams in HD. Cablevision’s ad doesn’t state that they are the reason they are the only company that carries, due to the sports monopoly they hold.
Remember the 2002 fiasco with the YES network? If not, the Yankees formed their own TV network after their MSG (owned by Cablevision) contract expired. Cablevision refused to carry YES on their system because they were sour over losing the Yankees and were too cheap to pay royalties to YES for access to their content. The result? An entire season was blacked out on Cablevision. At the start of the second season of no deal, after arbitration Cablevision did carry YES, but sold it as a premium channel.
Next: MSNBC. MSNBC and Cablevision signed a secret agreement stating that MSNBC can only be carried on Cablevision in areas where other TV providers exist. No one knows the terms of the agreement, or when it expires. How is that legal? And what blockhead at MSNBC would sign that? All it does is limit your viewers and make you lose advertising revenue. Take Verizon FiOS for example. They carry MSNBC by default, but cannot put it on the system in areas where Cablevision is the primary cable provider.
The Connecticut Attorney General has asked the FCC to look into an exclusive programming deal between Cablevision and MSNBC, stating that this is anti-competitive and unfair, in particular to AT&T’s U-verse.
So Cablevision has two pending FCC investigations, because in short, their business practices are deceptive and manipulative. The company thinks it can do whatever it wants, but is pretty screwed.
Shameless plug: If Verizon FiOS is in your area, get it. It is beyond amazing.
Cablevision