Puceronie

Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

In Which I Still Live

Friday, September 25th, 2009

I am here. And God, do I hate this layout. I have a new one ready, but I couldn't get it online before this weekend.

So, where have I been? Well, just here, turning my computer on once in a while and playing Hearts.

I have returned to Montreal in August. I live in a residence for people with mental health problems. There are eight of us (nine when the other girl comes back from the hospital).

Once I got a table to put my computer on, I called a company to get an internet connection. They required a prepayment, so I did that, and faxed a confirmation. Then I waited. And waited. In the past month, I spoke with three or four different people from the company, had my order canceled a couple of times, was given two different appointments that were both canceled for various reasons, etc.

Their system just can't accept that multiple people living at the same address could want separate internet connections.

I finally got a connection with a different company, activated today. The guy worked around the system, so that, while the bill will be sent to my home address, it is written that I live next door.

I was bloody relieved when I turned my computer on and was signed in to MSN. AT LAST! Needless to say I am pissed at the other company and will obviously ask to get my prepayment back.

In the meantime, I have a new boyfriend. He is one of the residents here. I don't feel very well, rather depressed. And the web has gone on without me. I have many things to catch up on.

Things That Just Don’t Work On The Internet

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

I just need a bit of ranting.

  • Multi-colored capchtas. It's already a pain in the butt trying to read an ordinary catpcha, with horizontal, same-sized letters, in shades of gray. When you make it multi-colored too (with a colored background and letters in different color), you're making it harder for the average person. Also, you're making it practically impossible to read for someone with an eye problem such as color blindness.
  • Close lettered captchas. I could list a million possible problems with captchas, but I'll go only with the previous one and this one. It's already hard to know if it's a 'zero' (0) or an O, if the letter is uppercase or lowercase, if it's a diagonal Z or a diagonal N, and you decide that the letters will be touching each others. Congratulations, now I just want to close the tab and move on to a different site.
  • SnapShot Page Previews. I can maybe perhaps do lots of efforts to try understanding the idea behind providing a preview of sites to your visitors. There are however problems with that. First, not every site in the world has a preview. Second, it is so damn slow. It's been forever since I last used a slow phone connection, but I still can't bear to wait for your stupid snapshots to load. When I put my mouse over a link, I'm expecting to see the hand cursor, with maybe a minor hover effect and a simple title, not have to wait for a preview to load. I just really don't see the point in the end. "It makes visitors trust your site". No, it doesn't. It just tells me what the site I'm about to visit might look like, because it once did. In no way does it tell me how very awesome is the owner of the site I'm currently visiting.
  • Keywords power! Some time ago, meta tags were implemented. You could fill them with keywords and a description relating to your site, in an attempt to boost your search engine rank. However, with time, people have learned that search engines, notably Google, barely rely on these at all because of how people loved to boost them with irrelevant keywords to get hit. So what do people do now? They place keywords all over the fucking place. "Dream personal site personal about me Julie Canadian girl female Asperger Syndrome Asperger's Asperger Autism autistic disease mental illness mental disease ocd obsessive compulsive disorder ocd oc disorder tutorials reviews movie reviews movies game reviews game gaming gamer gamers" would be the new text to display in my title bar. A good link to my site wouldn't show in the title something like "Dream, Julie's personal site", but rather "Dream, Julie personal site" with a million more keywords afterwards. And that just bug me. A lot. We're back to what I call cheap SEO ways. Why? Because they're not frank, in my opinion, and worse of all, they are not practical. Usability and practicability are two very fun things I wish people wouldn't forget about.