Fun Facts: That’s…

• 3 years younger than Google.
• 5 years younger than AOL.
• 6 years younger than Yahoo! & eBay
• 7 years younger than Amazon.
• 2 years older than MySpace.
• 3 years older than GMail & facebook.
• 4 years older than YouTube.
• 5 years older than Twitter.

Oh, and as for the winning name, drum roll… Llarry Spitzer.

Regardless, phones aren’t phones anymore. First you could txt each other, then we could snap images the size of a thumbnail. As time continues, I see the importance of owning a smart device. It’s just to bad most of them come equip with phones.

What makes a smartphone smart? Obviously slapping a camera and a touchscreen doesn’t make a phone smarter. Adding bluetooth and GPS is getting closer. I think is has to do less with that actual hardware of the device and more to do with the actual ease of the the software. Since 2008 there have been about 75 smartphones released with Android as it’s operating system. Granted hardware does get better as time goes on but, at the rate of 3 phones a month?

It’s really a choice of opinion of which is best. If you sip latte’s, where horn rimmed glasses, wear tight-tight polo shirts and enjoy the one button clicking style of a iMac, you’ll most likely be a fan boy of the iPhone. But pfft, that was two years ago and now your not mainstream by buying another mainstream Android. You just can’t win for losing.

Some people stay with a service provider that they feel is superior to all others. I don’t know if it’s true or if it’s all in the advertizing. You know that commercial where they show you the coverage map of one provide with blue dot, and the next map has more coverage with red dots all over it. That’s fine and all but, both maps have a dot over where I live. And all those other red dots… I don’t wanna fucking go to those places.

85% of the (possibly more) you’re going to be in range of a Wi-Fi hotspot when you’re surfing the web on your phone. Why do the cell networks have to be so damn fast? Is there an issue with not being able to support full-duplex? Yes it’s true the Internets these days are taking up a hell of alot of bandwidth. Obviously because of more streaming video. Annnd we all know what kinda video are the more popular on the Internets. And not it’s not kittens playing with each other, well, it’s kinda like that… but. Which brings me to a thought, this a maybe why smartphones don’t support Flash. Those “2 minute” videos would constantly crash a cell phone network.

So, it’s not the hardware and it’s not the network… it’s the software. The OS. The programs and data. The clicky, swip, hourglass thingie. OK, enough.

I get asked all the time which is the best. Most of the time you can’t beat anything that’s free but, since they aren’t so much, I’ll rundown my list of the top 5 OS’s you have to choose from. Not to start an argument about what OS is really in the top 5, I’m making up my own top 5 list. All other OS’s left out are then refered to as useless. Don’t feel bad, some of the one’s I’m about to talk about I feel are useless also. So, without any more delay…

#5. RIM Blackberry
First off, I hate that trackball/pad. Remember that little red erase that use to come in the middle of laptops has a mouse? Just as annoying. When navigating through any operating system, I don’t want to have to cycle past 50 other icons first. Secondly, screen sizes on Blackberry’s suck. I don’t know where they don’t make it bigger. If you need a physical keyboard on a device, make it a candybar aka where the keyboard slides out from the bottom/side. The blackberry to me really isn’t smart. It paved the way for “looking at you phone, checking email, while someone else is trying to talk to you about something that they feel is important”. Honestly, if you’re not a 65 year old white male who wears white collared/cuffed shirts and power ties to work, I don’t know why you’d own a Blackberry. What are the key features of the Blackberry? Weather data and seamless integration with Exchange? Blackberry never wow’d me. Mostly likely it never will.

#4. Windows Phone
Most of my experience has been with Windows Mobile. And if you absolutely love Windows, you’ll love this. To bad you’ll be in a small select group. Navigating the Start Bar with the very tip of your fingernail to hopefully not open some other unwanted application. Touchscreen friendly just not muilt-touch friendly. When viewing maps you have zoom in with +/- icons. If you don’t fat finger it. Now, onto Window Phone. Giant stupid squares. The plus side is that, you fat finger everything. The down side is that it’s too simplistic. I feel Microsoft with mocking me. “Here you go dummy, big fat “you-cant-possibly-confuse-yourself” buttons. (buttons aka squares on the touchscreen). I mean it’s nice. GREAT for moms. But you’ll most like still have to explain shit to her every three months. “6 buttons and you still can’t figure it out? Click and drag up to get those 3 other jumbo sized buttons.” Windows Phone would be great for an in-dash car display, but on the phone it’s just not smart enough for me. It’s the smart for idiots.

#3. Android
You know, that mobile OS owned by Skynet. I feel like I wanna like Droid alot but… I just can’t get there. I tried to turn on Wi-Fi on my friends device, I gave up after a minute. It should take you 20 seconds, if someone is talking to you at the same time, to toggle anything off/on. I see the voice recognition is very nice, chubby bunny. But sometime, or maybe most of the time, I don’t want to announce out loud, even when I’m alone, what I’m about to search for. One strong suite for the Driod are all the apps available to help you experience using the device easier. If I have to ask how to open something, then it’s just not intuitive enough for me. Everyone whats to use a wallpaper that’s interactive, which is kinda neat just distracting also. Screen on Android tend to be a on the larger size. Good for viewing non-mobile website, not good for storing in your pocket. I feel I need a laptop bag for it. All in all Droid is OK. It’s seems to me Driod is merging other key features of other OS’s and trying to pass it off as it’s own original features.

#2. WebOS
The little OS that could, but can’t get on a phone to save it’s life. Palm as been effing this ship up for some time. Only 5 devices in 1.5 years, all comparable to the original Pre. Not really pushing anyone to carry their new devices. Palm is even late to the tablet game and WebOs would be a great tablet OS. They make Chinese know-offs faster than Palm and manufacture anything. The newest versions of WebOS just make using a smartphone easy. The JustType feature. Meaning you just start typing and the phone gives you a list of tasks to start. If you typed an address the maps button comes up or if you type a name, their contact info comes up or you can Google or Wiki them. You can other website that have OpenSearch of there site so, you can just start typing food and you can find recipes. No more of that, find the app, open it, got to search, then type. Cards, for easy organizing of running apps. Stacking cards, to group related cards. Swiping is obvious. Left, right, clicking opens, swiping up discards. So easy, so simple, so useful. I fully support the WebOS community. “Home brewing” (user made apps) is completely encouraged. If you know nothing of WebOS, I suggest you watch a 5-10 demo of it on your favorite tubing site.

#1. iOS
Stupid Apple. I hate to say it but it is the best one. A monkey with one eye and only it’s opposite sided hand can use this OS. Everything is easy to navigate and find. Searching on the left. Plus it has more gaming apps than the PSP & DS combined. Playing games, 3D type games just tears up the batter. One game of football drained the battery about 20%. There’s not much more to say about iOS that everyone presumably doesn’t already know. Apple frowns on you using there device in other manner that they want, even though you bought it from them and now own it outright. That’s like the big box home improvement retail stores telling me I’m not allowed to pee in my own sink. Eef off. The only downside I have to iOS is the hardware. I have an 3G touch, meaning I have no camera and can’t use bar scanning software. When I original bought it I though, “I don’t wanna taking photos with it.” Pfft, I completely forgot about all those cute adorable UPCs. iOS is so good on it’s own without phone hardware which makes it, in my opinion, the smartest.

Chat Subject: FiOS Billing Question
Your Question: I was double charged for my FiOS Internet this month. $74 instead of $37.
A Verizon eCenter Representative will be with you shortly. Thank you. (17:19:20)
17:28:46 We apologize for the delay.You are next in the line. A representative will be with you shortly.

OK. Cool. I’ll just wait here and do other things, rather than pressing a phone to the side of my head, that usually cause sweaty ear syndrome. Plus there’s this nifty little countdown of what place I was in queue. Looks like Verizon has got it’s shit together. Can you hear me now? Ha, ha! Oh hum, lets continue, shall we?

Agent Patricia has joined. (17:28:56)
Patricia : Chat ID for this session is <some randomly generated number>. (17:28:56)

Sweet, an agent. Took almost ten minutes but it’s 5PM. I assume they might be a tad bit busy around this time of day. Annnnd, a minute rolls by. Not a peep. So, I give this pick-up line a whirl.

Boofer(17:30:13): hello?

Smooth aren’t I? Meh, I got nothing. Not until 20 more seconds later at least. Then I get this…

Patricia (17:30:33): Hello. Thank you for visiting our chat service. I will be happy to help you today. Do you have your account number please and I will be happy to check for you.

Well, that didn’t looked scripted. It must be Patricia’s first day on the job. Still getting use to that fancy keyboard. Damn you, QWERTY!

Boofer(17:30:50): <some stupid assigned number given to me a long time ago>
Patricia(17:32:41): One moment while I check for you.

Hey! She was paying attention this time. I mean, Hey! Tow minutes later she was paying attention this time.

Now, she’s going to “check for me”. Translation: she’s going to close out all those pesky windows that hide the desktop, since that’s the true way to navigate an operating system, and then double click that “billing program” icon like twelve times. If at first it doesn’t succeed, try, try again. And again. And again. That’s how computers work. If it looks like it’s doing nothing, you’re correct, it isn’t. Click, asset, repeat. I should write “Help Desk Support for Dummies”.

Looking back, I guess it all makes sense now. When people use to ask, “Wow, got enough windows open?” Umm, yea, I’m using them. It’s called multitasking. I listed it on my resume and everything. Well, I mean, it makes perfect sense to close out your browser window to get to the desktop to re-open your browser to view a different website. OK, Patricia’s back.

Patricia(17:35:56): I have checked your bills and last month you were billed for February 13th thru march 12. This month you were billed March 13th thru April 12th and April 13th thru May 12th. I can align you bill cycles so you will receive 30 billing at a time for future billing.
Patricia(17:36:33): In February you had no internet charges on your bill.

Honestly. I didn’t even bother to read or make sense of her first I.M. there. I hate doing mid month math. It even throws me when I’m watching Judge Judy and they talk about time frames. Just tell me the starting date and duration. I’ll do the math at a later date if necessary. Then I read her second I.M. I kinda remember getting away with something like that but I never bragged about it. So, I had to go double check her accusation.

Boofer(17:39:42): and I was charged twice in Jan?
Boofer(17:39:59): hence I wasnt charged in Feb

Oh snap! In your face… Pat! Wanna tell me one thing but TOTALLY not look at the month before… like I did… review all them facts, bitch!

Patricia(17:45:42): You need to contact the internet billing group at <some 800 number> so they can go over each bill with you and which bill cycle they billed you for on each bill.

Wait, what? I don’t wanna go over each bill with a fucking fine tooth comb. Nor, do I wanna call anyone. This is why I’m “Live Chat”ting with a Verizon representative. Cheese ‘n rice! So I politely say…

Boofer(17:47:43): perfect, i’m sorry this to difficult for you to handle, thanks for taking five minutes for each question to NOT help me.

I got no idea how she’d respond to this, I assumed with some pre-scripted bullshit. It’d be funny if she started some flame war with me.

Patricia(17:55:45): I am sorry I couldnt assist you any further. I had to review bills for several months to give the answers to you as I am not in the Internet billing group and had to manually go page and line by line thru each bill. The internet group are better able to assist you.
Patricia(17:55:56): Thank you for chatting with us. I hope I have resolved your reason for contacting us today. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact us again. Please complete the survey at the conclusion of this chat. We appreciate your feedback.

Well, that was worth the 45 minutes. Granted I wasn’t on the phone at all but, I was under the impression I was going to be provided a service. You know, since I provide them with money once a month. Apparently more some months than others. And that line about “I am not in the Internet billing group“, then how the fuck did I get stuck chatting with you? The website asked me specifically, what department, what topic. Alos. funny thing about checking my own bill, I too had it in an itemized fashion. Making me read and shit. Besides, the Internet group would be better to assist me? Oh right, PDF format. Stupid me.

Don’t get me started on that “I hope I have resolved your reason for contacting us today” comment, ha! Yes, again, scripted but, you think you would have different closer if you were to of no use to anyone.

Obviously there’s a lesson to be learned today. Females aren’t good with numbers, and who let Patricia out of the kitchen this morning? No, no, I kid. I guess I meant, before starting an internet dialog with any help desk rep, you should A) confirm that they are familiar with said topic, and B) ask the question, “Are you slow or something?” You don’t wanna waste any precious company time waiting for nothing. Especially when it could be better spent perusing zany YouTube clips.

“ie page flicker” took me to “Stop IE Flickering Between Pages”. OK, nice, I’m clicking, I’m reading. Turns out that IE sucks. No, really.

I really didn’t care to read into exactly what this snippet of code does. It just fixed my problem. My problem being, when submitting a page in IE the browser goes blank (all white) for a split second while it tries to load the new page. This is not an issue in Firefox.

Calling it Fajax for the mere fact it looks like an Ajax load? I guess. Anyways, here’s the HTML for your cutting and pasting pleasures.

<meta http-equiv=”Page-Enter” content=”blendTrans(Duration=0)”>
<meta http-equiv=”Page-Exit” content=”blendTrans(Duration=0)”>

I checked out all the themes. I partically like the “Terminal” theme but I think I’m going to still with “Shiny”.

One difference I see so far is that the Globex Design theme greyed out read emails. Which I personally feel is better.

I’ll though I do like the Globex Design theme. Until it can become more stable. Which should be easier to do now that Gmail has made the effort to create it’s own themes. Unless Gmail will just work their theme artists to the ground because of all the changes they make.

Yesterday, I opened a file, OK, about five that I knew that they just might be malware. Turns out, they were! So I popped Spy-Bot open. Now, in the past there have been one or two things Spy-Bot just has had no luck in removing. VirtuMonde.c just happens to be one of the trojans that Spy-Bots is hit or miss on.

Vundo, or the Vundo Trojan (also known as Virtumonde or Virtumondo and sometimes referred to as MS Juan) is a Trojan horse that is known to cause popups and advertising for rogue antispyware programs, and sporadically other misbehavior including performance degradation and denial of service with some websites including Google.

Spy-Bot wanted to stop scanning to reboot and scan then. Fine! Go reboot and scan Spy-Bot. Whatever you want. But I knew if it needed to delete files on startup, it was going to be a bigger hassle than expected. It was. During the startup scan, Spy-Bot told me it would be best to reboot and scan at startup. Nice! Here’s your cookie Spy-Bot. Now go eat it in the corner while daddy fixes things you can’t. So I run to Google looking for my answer.

After a quick stop at Lavasoft’s non-compatible with Firefox web site, I stumbled upon Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware.

Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware is an anti-malware application that can thoroughly remove even the most advanced malware. It includes a number of features, including a built in protection monitor that blocks malicious processes before they even start.

I’ve heard of it before. Figured I’d give it a chance. Turns out, it’s pretty fucking bad ass. I mean it’s not something I need to run realtime. But it came through where Spy-Bot couldn’t. It even came with FileASSASSIN as a side tool.

FileASSASSIN is an application that can delete any type of locked files that are on your computer. Whether the files are from a malware infection or just a particular file that will not delete – FileASSASSIN can remove it. The program uses advanced programming techniques to unload modules, close remote handles, and terminate processes to remove the particular locked file. Please use with caution as deleting critical system files may cause system errors.

Anti-Malware ran and gave me a report of what if found and if it needed to reboot to delete any files. I ran it three times. My fault. First run was a quick scan. Which actually was quick. Like 5 minutes. It rebooted to remove files. Then I ran full scan again. It found a couple other things. Good. It didn’t need to reboot this time so ran full scan again for the hell of it. It found nothing.

I thought I’d just install it, run it and remove it. I think I’ll keep it a bit longer.

What is sweetbeard.com? Well, thanks for asking. For those who don’t know and for those who think it’s just a place to sign up and upload a pic of your beard because other people have, you’re in for a treat. With the help of modern technology, and statue of the art imaging capabilities. You are now able to maintain a record of, or track if you will, one progression on a daily basis.

Still need help deciding? Of course you don’t. You’re not even reading this part. You’re on sweetbeard.com right now signing up. But if you’re still reading this, that means you’ve already signed up and you can enjoy some of sweetbeard.com’s BigAss™ montages.

Hase’s BigAss™ montage
WhiteOwl’s BigAss™ montage
Schmoove’s BigAss™ montage

A year ago this month a movement was born. Not a movement of base political agenda, but a restructuring of the mind. A few chose to loose the chains of oppression, breaking free that which was restrained. I write of course of the Sweet Beard. In the beginning there was excitement. New faces ready for change, new websites ready for faces, a new take on an old idea. Fresh faced in the best sense of the word, many sprang forth to test their skills in pogonotrophy, some tested many times. Now that our one year anniversary approaches, I ask the faithful to return and report in a sacred JPEG-based pilgrimage. My plan is to shave off my sweet beard and start again, to revive my faith. So: on November 15th, let the growing begin… again.
Spread the Word.

Ever get drunk and send out an email that you probably shouldn’t had sent out in the first place? Yeah, Mav! Mail Goggles is a setting in Gmail that makes you do some random mail question before submitting an email.

[quote=Gmail.com]Google strives to make the world’s information useful. Mail you send late night on the weekends may be useful but you may regret it the next morning. Solve some simple math problems and you’re good to go. Otherwise, get a good night’s sleep and try again in the morning. After enabling this feature, you can adjust the schedule in the “General” settings page.[/quote]

I know wither I’m drunk or sober, calc does better math than I do. So I don’t think this would help me too much. Unless I’m way to drunk to type in the correct numbers in the correct allocated spaces.