Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Another pet peeve

I hate it when video, audio, and slideshows are used when text will suffice. I like text news articles the best. Text takes less time to load, is easier to search, and often contains more relevant infomation. I can read text a lot faster than an actor reading the same text out loud, so it's faster for me to read an article than to listen to the audio. When I want to be entertained, an audiovisual experience will do fine for that purpose. But when I need to be informed, text and the occasional photo gets the job done.

Here's an example. It's a story about internet acronyms. This could have easily been a quick, informative, text-based article. Instead I have to wait for each damn photo to load as I read the article. I have a cable modem but even it can get slow during peak periods. I'm suddenly nostalgic for the late 90's again, when websites adhered to the KISS principle.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Pet Peeve

When I use my 5 disc CD changer, I want to listen to uninterupted music for several hours. I don't want to listen to commercials, and I don't want a couple minutes of silence either. This is why I hate "hidden" songs on CD's.

Remember when you left your CD player on with "Dookie" by Green Day in it? You might having been all by yourself when you heard Tre Cool singing "All By Myself". Completely by accident, you have found the hidden track. You've just stumbled on the biggest secret since Paul McCartney died shortly before impregnating Mama Cass.

It was cool when they did it in 1994. It is not cool after 14 years of different artists and bands doing the same gimmick over and over. CD's are going to have to come up with new tricks in order to compete with MP3's.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

What is a bigger hassle than spam?

Capchas are bigger hassle than spam. I just had to type in a captcha to send a blasted email from my Yahoo account, and it actually takes me longer to enter the code than it takes me to type the email. This is supposed to prevent spam, but it is more annoying than the annoyance it is designed to prevent.

Sure, I use word verification on my blogs. But that is to prevent porn ads from being posted in the comment section. I'm trying for a PG rating on this blog. Porn ads in my email inbox I can just delete.