Showing posts with label The Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Internet. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The Perils of “Free” Internet

There is the old adage of “you get what you pay for,” which seems to be doubly true for any sort of place offering “free” Internet access. For whatever reason, all of the coffee shops near me that advertise access, it’s really nothing but a cruel joke. Their sign should instead say, “We will tease you by seemingly offering an Internet connection but you will not actually be able to get anything done.” (That’s a lot of words for a sign, I know, but with The Economy the way it is right now, I’m sure you can get a deal.)

At first, I thought this was just because there was a bunch of people trying to get access to the Internet, like I am. But I’ve also been at these shops when no one else is there, because I’m a weird nomad that works at all hours of the day, and no dice. The popularity of the place seemed to have no effect on the Internet connection – Even when empty, Panera in Wakefield still has incredibly horrible access that works for, at most, about five minutes.

Making things worse is that many portions of South County also have shitty cell phone access. I have this nifty wireless aircard for work, which gives me web access via cell phone signals. As a result, I’m hoping acres and acres of farmland here is devoted to cell phone towers, because I’m getting annoyed that just checking my Facebook takes about five minutes at Brewed Awakenings.

On some completely random notes, I made some Shake and Bake chicken last night – it came out awesome. Just thought y’all would like to know. Also, poor Chris Jericho. Why couldn’t he have won the Royal Rumble? (Since this is a blog, I do feel the need to throw in these two completely random and intensely personal observations.)

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The ancient vagueness of the Internet: Names

As the Internet has progressed, there are some bad things that have happened, such as comments on ESPN stories. However, there have been some good things - Such as people finally getting appropriate web site addresses for themselves.

The best / worst example of this was Major League Baseball, which for years was only accessible via:

http://www.majorleaguebaseball.com

This is quite annoying, since you would naturally think that MLB.com would bring you to the proper site. Nope! Instead, some lawyers owned it, which must have been great for them because they were constantly overwhelmed with traffic for Major League Baseball. Click here to see what the site used to look like - Apparently people would get so misled that they felt the need to put a link on their site to the actual MLB.

Anyway, MLB eventually bought them out, as most big companies did. This of course led to a perverse situation where people would just squat on domains - like AdamCarolla.com - and hope that someone would buy them out. Carolla famously refused to, and called the guy a pussy multiple times on national radio.

... I'm not really sure where I was going with this entry tonight. Sorry! The baseball clip art is from here.

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