Yep, Still Blah

So it's two weeks into the new job. I was right, I don't really like it. I'm bored and I haven't worked for minimum wage in 30 years. There's really no motivation to get out of bed.

Everything else is still a mess. Go me.

Blah

That one little word says it all. Ok, maybe almost all, it could use a little help. *insert profanity here* blah. There, that about covers it and pretty well describes how I feel.

Ever have one of those days where you just plain can't be bothered to give a damn, about anything? That's what I'm having except it's been going on much longer than a day. I don't seem to care about much of anything these days. I've lost all interest in the projects I started after I lost my job. I've not worked on any of them for weeks, none of them are finished and I don't really care.

The only thing I've really paid any attention to at all is getting rid of the weeds in the lawn. It's a nice mindless job pulling out crabgrass and nut sedge. I can't even begin to guess at how many hours I've spent sitting in or crawing around on the lawn. A lot of it comes back because I never seem to really get all of the roots so I just pull it again next time around.

I start a new job in just a few hours yet I feel zero excitement about it, it will be just another day where I'll wake up, do something to occupy my time, eat dinner then be bored by television or internet until I fall asleep. My life has become boring beyond belief, I look forward to absolutely nothing and have no motivation to do anything. I just don't care.

I need out, but that would be a decision. All this free time has left me a lot of time for thinking and I've realized that every major decision I've ever made which has had any meaningful impact on my life has been the wrong one, so I'm not real keen on trying another. At least I'm consistent! Of course deciding not to make a decision would probably be a wrong decision too. It may even be a good thing that things have unfolded in the way they have, it has relieved me of the responsibility of making decisions so that's less chance of making yet another wrong one. There's that silver lining I was looking for. Woot!

I've lost all confidence in my ability to recognize what's best for me, or even good for me, which makes me wonder if I'm anywhere near as smart as I thought I was. I've missed clues to things which I should have seen coming a mile away yet didn't, though in hindsight some were so obvious that a blind man would have probably seen them.

Maybe I'm just having a mid-life crisis. I'm 45 and accomplished just about nothing, maybe that's messing with my mind. There's got to be more to life than this.

Is It Really Music?

If you've never heard of Nora the cat you can check out this Wikipedia article about her. I'd seen a YouTube video and just figured she pawed at a couple keys once in a while but apparently there is more to it than that, even scientists are interested and her behavior is unusual.

I know people can beat, blow or stomp on just about anything and call it music so I really shouldn't really be surprised that some consider this cat's playing deserving of that term. Hell, maybe on some level I don't understand she's actually a musical genius and her compositions are technical masterpieces. I've never studied music theory, what do I know?

Is her playing good enough to warrant being featured in her own concerto (or catcerto)? It seems the answer is....... Yes!! The first minute or so is fairly boring, mostly all orchestra and no cat but it gets better. Take it away Mindaugas and Nora!

Supersized Blueberries

I have once again won my annual battle with the catbirds, go me! Every year it's a struggle to keep those feathered pests away from my blueberries, they are determined little buggers and usually manage to find a way through, under or around the netting I use to cover the plants. I only caught a couple intruders this time, so more berries for me.

For my efforts I was rewarded with enough blueberries to completely fill a half gallon pitcher, with a mound of berries on top. That was just the first harvest, I'll be picking more over the next few weeks as the rest continue to ripen. One plant in particular had huge fruit, some of the biggest blueberries I'd ever seen. They taste even better than they look, so I'm off to eat more.

The coin in the pictures is a US quarter for comparison.

The Demise Of Free Internet Radio

It looks like the days of free internet radio are numbered, the major players are already starting to charge and it probably won't be long before more of them jump on the bandwagon. Some are charging pretty reasonable rates, others not so much.

last.fm is still free in the US, UK and Germany but if you're anywhere else in the world you'll have to pay €3.00 per month to continue listening. They are owned by CBS radio anyway, the same group who recently ruined Yahoo's LAUNCHcast radio when they took over that service.

XM have completely lost their minds, they expect you to pay $12.95 a month for an online radio subscription. That's $155 a year to listen to the radio! No thanks.

Even Pandora is starting to charge fees now. Users are allotted 40 hours per month, if that limit is exceeded there are three choices. 

• Do nothing and wait until the following month to resume listening.
• Pay $ .99 for unlimited listening for the remainder of that one month, you will still have limited skips and you will still hear advertisements.
• Buy a premium Pandora One membership for $36 per year. That's unlimited play, unlimited skips and no ads.

I suppose Yahoo's LAUNCHcast is still an option, but since CBS took over you no longer have your own customized station, all the time and effort spent on ratings and preferences to customize your own personal listening experience were wasted.

The royalty rates which internet radio are forced to pay per play per user was just cut roughly in half, so there's still hope that the industry itself won't disappear completely. There's going to be some stiff competition from new tech gadgets so it's still not going to be easy for internet radio to survive. Devices like the Aluratek USB Internet Radio Jukebox sell for less than $40. This particular device looks like a USB thumb drive, you simply plug it into your computer USB port and it's own launcher and micro-browser take over to give you access to 13,000 radio stations in 300 countries. You can search the radio stations by genre, state, or country, and you can even create favorites lists.

I think the idea of charging radio stations to play music is an asinine thing to do and I'm sure it's motivated purely by greed. FM radio doesn't have to pay royalties to play music, and satellite radio pays much lower rates than internet radio although that gap has been all but reduced by the new arrangement. I listen to far more radio online than I do on an FM receiver, and very rarely listen to any satellite. Almost all of my exposure to new music comes from internet radio which influences almost all of my decisions to purchase a CD yet artists and record companies demand payment for that exposure. Personally I think it should be the other way around.

So what do you think, will free internet radio survive or do you think it will go away completely? Do you use a free service not mentioned above, and if so which one?

Wife + Pasta + Disposal = *@#$&*!!

What happens if you leave a bunch of plain cooked pasta sitting out? It turns into a big, sticky mess unless you've kept it wet. That's pretty much a given, the high starch content makes it the next best thing to glue.

Apparently my wife was absent the day this little gem of knowledge was taught. A rather large pile of leftover spaghetti noodles had been in the refrigerator for a couple weeks, definitely not high on my list of edibles at that point. Sunday night she thought it would be a good idea to stuff it all into the disposal, run it just long enough to clear it all out then turn off both the disposal and the water. That left the pipes full of ground up pasta, which as it turns out is the next best thing to dumping a bag of Quikrete down the drain.

So Monday evening comes along, and after working outside in the yard and the garden for a few hours I am a filthy mess. I come inside, turn on the water and start washing my hands and arms. Next thing I know the sink is full of filthy water, and it's gone through the connecting drainpipe between the two sinks and started filling the other one too. So now I had two sinks full of dirty water. I get out the little plunger, cap one drain opening and use the plunger to try suctioning the clog loose. That was a waste of time and effort, not to mention pretty damned messy. Then I had two sinks full of even dirtier water which looked like it carried the remains of a drowned maggot infestation. *insert cursing here*

I figure I'll wait til after dinner to give it another go, then head to the bathroom to finish washing up. While I'm in there the wife has her second bright idea and pours in a bottle of drain opener. Now I had two sinks full of filthy water, shredded pasta resembling drowned maggots and caustic chemicals! Happy happy joy joy. *insert even more cursing and profanity here*

I hoped that it would clear with time. No such luck. I took off the traps under the sinks hoping to find the clog where it would be easy to get to. No such luck. So today I went to Home Depot and bought 25' pipe snake and spent the afternoon trying to twist and shove the damned thing down the drain pipe. After about an hour and a half and ending up covered with sweat and nasty, stinking, black drain pipe slime I finally got through the clog. Can I get an amen and a big ol' hallelujah?

Happy birthday to me! Now I'm off to shower again so I'm able to tolerate my own smell. Remember boys and girls, pasta + drain = DON'T EFFING DO IT!

Yahoo!icide

Yahoo! is continuing their never ending quest to render themselves obsolete.

For reasons unexplainable by me they continue operating with the philosophy "Less is More." Services and features continue to be cut back or eliminated altogether, usually leaving their users with no choice but to go somewhere else altogether. They seem to be intentionally weakening their own customer base while simultaneously strenghtening that of their competition.
 

Y! Games are ancient and have undergone no significant changes in play or appearance for over a decade. Meanwhile, game sites like Pogo are on a level so far above Yahoo! that the big red Y! will probably never catch up and never measure up.

Y! Photos was discontinued, leaving users with two poor choices. Users could either switch to Flickr, an unbranded (but Yahoo! owned) service which was more difficult to use and offered considerably less than what they were used to unless they paid for a premium account, or they could switch to another service not affiliated with Yahoo! at all. Bye-bye users.

The Y! Briefcase service was discontinued and no replacement offered. Users now have to go elsewhere for any photo or document storage. Bye-bye users

LAUNCHcast radio underwent major change, removing the ability to create or maintain custom stations which play music defined by the listener's specific preferences. Bye-bye users

Yahoo! 360° will soon be put out of its misery after years of neglect during which it never functioned properly. No replacement is offered. This completely removes Y! from the social networking market, one of the biggest markets on the internet. I can't even begin to fathom the reasoning behind this decision.

The new "universal profile" is a bug laden disaster almost as unusable as 360° often was. A large percentage of users aren't even able to access their own profile to make changes, so it broadcasts updates about all of their activities on Yahoo! to all of their contacts without their permission or control. The developers of this new profile are themselves unsure of what purpose it is supposed to serve, they continue to add features and functionality which make it usable as a stripped down social networking site while all the while claiming it's not supposed to be. Bye-bye users

GeoCities is the next to be shut down. Users who have had personal websites hosted on GeoCities for a decade or more will now have to go elsewhere. Yahoo! will have no free website hosting features anymore. Bye-bye users

Yahoo! Answers is a disaster. It could have been a worthwhile property but due to incompetence, lack of foresight and lack of any sort of user control it has turned into a giant game, a pre-teen Dear Abby and rate my pic site, a cesspool of hatred and a haven for spammers and malware distributors. Yet Yahoo! still has no restrictions in place to prevent ill intentioned users from sitting down at their computer and creating dozens upon dozens of back to back accounts which they then use to blanket the site with spam and malware. Malware alone has continued unabated for over a year, with the only control in place being the herculean search and report efforts of many of it's users. Even then Y! refuses to give them the tools they need to do the job properly, and keeps breaking the one ineffective tool they do have.

Then there's Yahoo!'s crown jewel, their "Customer Care" division. I doubt there has ever been a more incompetent, ineffectual, self-defeating customer care department than the poor excuse offered by Yahoo!. Instead of working to keep their users, they continually cause them to leave by way of horrible service and attitude. Contacting them about anything only begins a chain of copy and paste responses, most of which don't even address any point made in the original contact. They may as well just respond to the first inquiry with a simple "Fuck you, we don't care." At least then the user gets the idea the first time instead of dealing with the frustration and aggravation of multiple communications over an extended period of time while their issue remains unresolved. On Yahoo! it is totally possible to lose your entire account and everything in it for no reason at all without ever being given a reason, especially if you participate in Y! Answers.

Personally I think Yahoo! totally blew it by not selling to Microsoft. They have cut back their staff and services to the point where none of their new products work and nobody there can fix them. I honestly see no reason to even use Yahoo! for anything now aside from Messenger and for some, e-mail. I won't use Y! Mail myself for the simple reason that I could lose it at any time due to unexplained account deactivation. The one service I still use is Messenger, because it's free. I will not pay them again for the use of the Phone Out service because the last time I did they stole the remaining prepaid balance when they erroneously deactivated my account. When they realized their mistake and reactivated it the balance was gone and they refuse to reinstate it. So, screw 'em. So what do you think, will Yahoo! survive and regain it's former status or will they continue to decline to the point where they are irrelevant?