Category Archives: Technology

The Strange World of Free to Play (F2P) Games

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Lately, I’ve been playing City of Heroes, which for those who don’t know it, is a massively multiplayer online persistant world game, often referred to as an MMO, or an MMORPG (for role playing game). Years ago, I started playing the game, when I was bored with whatever other MMO I was playing at the time, and recently, I installed it again and decided to pursue its new play model.

You see, in the old days, the game used to cost $15 a month to play. Now, in order to attract more players, the game has turned into a Free to Play (F2P) game, much like the previous success of Lord of the Rings Online, which went to a F2P model in hopes of avoiding going backrupt. And it succeeded, which has breathed new life into other games that don’t want to go the route of Star Wars Galaxies (which closed shop after not being able to maintain a consistent player base.

The way a F2P model tends to work is that you are allowed access to certain areas, and maybe certain characters, but some parts of the world/universe are off limits or you have to pay a little bit more in order to access those areas or use extra characters. Not really wanting to do the barter thing with every little thing in the game, I subscribed to a VIP membership, which is essentially the same sort of $15 a month I was playing before. This gives me complete access to everything, although I have noticed that every now and then I still buy something that is “extra” in the game.

Which brings up a thing that has kind of bothered me about this model. If I’m someone who is a willing subscriber, I really should be given 100 percent access to everything. Yet, I still feel a bit nickle and dimed in this type of environment. But I appreciate the game, so I have been willing to shell out a bit more money just to contribute to the game I hope to be playing for some time.

Which brings me to how this sort of model doesn’t work. And Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 comes to mind. World of Warcraft is a pay to play game (P2P), and that’s fine. But the developers (or owners) have become somewhat greedy. They have continued to insert things into the game that they want you to pay for outside of the game. So, even though they’re making a crapload of money for their product, they’re still trying to nickle and dime people beyond the quarters they’re already getting. And don’t get me started on Diablo 3, which is a game that cost me $59.99 to buy (or was it $69.99?), and then they launched the game with all intentions of adding a “pay Blizzard’s greed” auction house, where you will pay real money to buy things in the game.

Years ago, Blizzard was seen as the good guy when it came to games, but lately, I can’t say the same. Diablo 3, for sake of clarification, sucked. It was a crappy game that wasn’t worth the money, the time, or even the energy. The fact that it had the name of two of the greatest games in history as what it was supposed to be a sequel made it even worse. Diablo and Diablo 2 were both great games. They even made the game required to be online at all times, which I suspect had more to do with hoping to get people to feel comfortable with giving money to the auction house model (single players would have never gone online where they’d have to see the auction house every time they signed onto the game) than it was for security or any other stupid reason.

A recent major name in online games is Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I played when it first released and enjoyed it for the first month or so. The game was missing a lot of needed content, so I gave up on it. Now, it’s supposedly going to be going F2P, mainly because they milked every nickle and dime they could get out of the subscription model. I doubt I’ll ever play it again, even though I had fun with it when it first released. The problem with the game was that it was completely on rails the entire time, and an MMO requires a world where you can go anywhere and do anything. That was never part of the very linear model of SWTOR.

Which brings me back to City of Heroes. I enjoy the game and play it a lot. But I fear that there’s this attempt to make all games so-called F2P, when in reality the companies are hoping to rake in dollars through this model. Bioware has announced that Command & Conquer: Generals 2 is going to be released as a F2P game, yet be online all of the time, and there will be no single player game. I suspect it’s going to be a major failure, but that’s just my opinion. I see the reason for such a release is not because that’s the way the market is going but because executives of gaming companies see this as an easy way to separate people from their wallets. Unfortunately, what they don’t realize is that most people who opt into these dynamics are of the older gamer base, and we’re not stupid or as gullible as they’d like us to be. That’s why several versions of this model will fail.

What a lot of these games are forgetting to realize is that what makes people pay to play these games is that they are designed to be fun, not because there’s a free model that they’re attracted to first. That’s why companies like Zynga and anything affiliated with Facebook is struggling these days. People don’t want to be fleeced by companies using them to make money. They want to have fun. And AFTER they have fun, if they perceive that there’s MORE fun to be add by contributing to the company, they will. But holding out a carrot and then giving nothing but expecting everything is going to be the reason why so many of these future properties fail.

And then we’ll start to read all sorts of articles about how no one is buying computer games any more, kind of like the music industry lamenting about how people aren’t buying music. They are buying music; just not from you.

And that’s our lesson for the day. Now, it’s time for me to get back to my superhero Desktop Support Girl, the savior of all broken computer systems in Paragon City.

Virgin Mobile’s Iphone Offering Could be a Game Changer

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Virgin Mobile announced that it is now going to selling an Iphone with a monthly plan that costs $30. Of course, the buy-in price is $549 for the 8GB Iphone. If you bought a Iphone from AT&T or Verizon, it would cost you only about $99-$199 but you’d have to opt in for a 2 year activation contract. With this contract from Virgin, you only have to stay as long as you want to stay because you already gave them the cost of the Iphone upfront.

The plan gives you unlimited data and text plus 300 minutes of calls for only $30. For someone like me who rarely makes a phone call, this is probably the phone for me. My Iphone package from AT&T has historically been a major rip-off, and I’ve always known that, but I wanted the convenience of that really good phone, so I stuck with it.

The really only down side to this is that Virgin Mobile is on the Sprint network, and if you’re in a location like Grand Rapids, their service is atrociously bad. I had Sprint for two months at one point, thinking I was moving up to something new, and man I was never so pissed at a phone network before. I had dropped calls constantly, and when you have very few phone calls as it is, that’s just wrong. When I finally gave up the phone, they tried to turn the blame on me and charge me some outrageous deactivation fee, which I argued with them on the phone until they dropped half of the price. I mentioned at the end of that conversation that they have become very successful at burning bridges with former customers. They didn’t seem to care.

The other downside to this plan is that you don’t that Virgin Mobile isn’t going to pull the rug from under you at any time. While the contract is month to month, that works both ways. They may pull an AT&T and then decide you no longer get unlimited data because they are the owners of the service and you can either accept their new terms, or you can pay a disconnect fee for being a bad customer. In this case, there won’t be a disconnect fee, but because you paid up front, they might just say the game is over and leave. And you’ll be holding a nice little piece of metal that doesn’t do anything any longer. That would really suck.

But on the other hand, I was with Virgin Mobile years ago when I was living in San Francisco and didn’t want to pay a monthly fee for a cell phone. It was a month to month thing, and it really worked well for me. So, they’ve proven they can actually do it. Back then, I had what was called the “Party Animal” phone, which I wrote about long ago, convinced that Virgin Mobile would discover I was not, in fact, a party animal and take away my phone. But they never caught onto me, so I was able to use it until the Iphone came along. And we all the know the rest of that story.

Author’s Guild gains class action status vs. Google but do they really represent all authors?

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There’s an interesting case that’s making headlines right now about how Google was attempting to push the Author’s Guild out of the suit to sue Google for its Google Books initiative (where they would be the end all source for practically everyone’s book material with their all-inclusive Google Library). Yesterday, a judge determined that Google can’t push the Author’s Guild out of the picture. On the surface, this isn’t all that big a deal, but there are a couple of things that are probably important to point out.

First off, most of the critics have already addressed the fact that not every author really wants to be part of this lawsuit, as quite a few independent authors have zero problem with what Google is doing. However, unless they personally choose to opt out of the action, the Author’s Guild is going to go forward pretending it has a lot more power and influence than in really does. And most people tend to ignore these sorts of things, so they’re now going to be “included” in this action even if they’re not really interested in what’s happening. This is one of those things that always bothers me with class action lawsuits because in cases like those against Apple and their antenna for the 4G debacle, a lot of us who owned Apple iPhone 4s didn’t really care that much for taking action against Apple. We were kind of happy with our products. Yet, a class action lawsuit moves forward as if it is representing a lot of people who may never actually be a part of the settlement. There’s a lot of presumptuousness that takes place with class action lawsuits, but that’s a completely different story.

A more important issue to me is the one that isn’t getting any attention yet, and that’s the fact that the Author’s Guild, a writer’s advocacy group, is an extremely exclusive club that lets very few actual authors into its ranks. According to their guidelines for eligibility, if you want to be a member of the Author’s Guild, don’t even think about it unless you have been published by an established American publisher, and I mean VERY established. Using a subsidy publisher, Amazon Kindle direct services and such, or anything along those lines, and you’re guaranteed to be turned down by the Author’s Guild that keeps a tight hold on its allowance for membership. While their elitism has dwindled a bit over the last year (Matt Paust, who regularly publishes to Open Salon, updated us with an article on April 27, 2012, in which he pointed out that their new requirements indicate that you can gain membership if you’ve received at least $500 from publishing in the last year, although their web site is still heavily leaning towards pointing out its old archaic standards of exclusivity).

As a writer myself, I’ve been on the fence about the whole Google books thing. I sell books through Amazon Kindle as well as Barnes & Noble’s Nook, so I haven’t been all that focused on Google, as most things Google does tends to be overly complicated and often unusable (like their advertising service that I finally gave up trying to figure out one day after I ended up getting charged $5.00 to make a listing that could never be approved and then left me unable to even remove the ad that wouldn’t ever run). So, I’ll be interested to see what happens with this, as I’m sure a lot of others will as well.

If You Own a Mac, Expect to be Spammed by Companies Who Claim to Fix Viruses

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I’ve just started to receive “virus protection” emails from less than legitimate companies that never could sell their business to PC users in the past. I guess they figure that Mac people are stupid because they’ve never had to use virus protection in the past. So, they’re spamming the crap out of us, convinced that we’re all morons who have never seen the inside of a computer before.

I kind of knew this was going to happen, but I really wish companies like this wouldn’t prey on people all of the time. Yes, I own a Mac. But I’m also a pc technician who doesn’t need a SINGLE FREAKING BIT OF ASSISTANCE FROM STUPID COMPANIES THAT CAN’T SELL THEIR PRODUCTS TO PC PEOPLE SO THEY THINK THEY’VE FOUND A NEW MARKET.

Here’s the moral of the story: Mac people have had it good because virus makers made their crap for PCs BECAUSE more people were using PCs than Macs. Now, the number of people using Macs has increased (not because they’re better than PCs but) because there are more people using computers today than there were 20 years ago. That’s really the only difference.

What this means is that people who make Macs will have to be a little more diligent in solutions. If not, people will stop buying Macs. It’s simple as that. Software solutions in the name of stupid companies that made crappy products for PCs aren’t going to somehow make a mint on “stupid” Mac users. They’re going to lose money in that market, too.

Just saying.

The Amazon Kindle Fire…first impressions

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Over the weekend, I went to Best Buy to purchase a new keyboard that I didn’t actually need. It was to replace a gaming keyboard I have that works great, but I decided that because their new gaming keyboard (by the same company) was on sale, I wanted to buy it. It does absolutely nothing new that the old one doesn’t already do, nor is it more stylish or have any extra buttons the old one lacked. But it was on sale, and it was new. So I went and bought it. Yes, I am aware that I am Best Buy’s proverbial wet dream of a client, and I understand that.

To make matters worse, I found my keyboard I didn’t need, started walking to the register and then decided out of the blue that I was going to buy a brand new Kindle Amazon Fire. Already owning a Kindle and having the Kindle app on my Ipad 2, I obviously didn’t need one, but it was there at the store, staring at me, so I felt I had to buy it. So I did. And then I bought the extra pack with it, that cost me an extra $100 for a $50 Amazon gift card, a case and ear phones, all of which I didn’t need either. But happy with my purchase, I took it home.

I’ve had the weekend to play with Amazon Kindle Fire, or the Kindle Amazon Fire, or the Amazon Kindle on fire, or whatever it’s actually called, and I can say that it’s kind of cool. It lets you access the Internet, like my computer and Ipad 2 already do. It lets you download your music library, which Amazon first forced me to upload to its “cloud” first, taking about a day and a half to do so. But then I got to download my music, which I already had on my computer and Ipad 2 in the first place. I mean, convenience knows no boundaries, right?

Then I downloaded some of my books which I had already bought on the previous Kindle and put them on my new Kindle so I can ignore them and not read them there, much like I did with my original Kindle. Then I sat down and read a hard copy book (Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running) that didn’t need the Kindle or the Ipad 2 at all.

Joking aside, the Amazon Kindle Fire is kind of nice. Negatives: It doesn’t have 3G, so you have to use it over wireless only. Kind of a down side. It also makes it difficult to do certain things, like add my Amazon $50 gift card. I had to actually sign onto Amazon with my regular computer to have that $50 gift card registered. There really should have been a simplistic way to do it on the Fire, but there wasn’t. Granted, there may have been some convoluted and difficult way to do it on the Fire, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having the convenient device in the first place. I certainly couldn’t figure it out, other than using their web browser, which isn’t really the greatest browser of all time, even though they called it Silk.

Positives: It can finally read comic books on the Kindle. I downloaded several issues of  Y: The Last Man and was pretty satisfied with it. Down side to that? Yeah, the text is really small because of the 7 inch screen, so I had to really struggle to read the text on the screen. Not a very comfortable way to read a comic book (or graphic novel), but sometimes you get what you get.

Overall, I think it’s pretty cool if you don’t already own an Ipad 2. If you do, then the only real advantage is that there are some magazines and newspapers that refuse to release on anything BUT the Kindle Fire, which is a travesty of an economic plan. In the end, it’s going to kill those magazines because people aren’t going to buy the Amazon Kindle Fire just because Macworld refuses to let Amazon release it to the Ipad 2 Kindle app (which CAN read it just fine). Again, the biggest draw back to the whole Amazon Kindle model is that book publishers aren’t playing along. I refuse to buy a book published by a major publisher that plays games with the Kindle at their outrageous prices of $14.99 and up. Instead, I often choose not to buy the book at all, which is why I haven’t bought the new biography of Steve Jobs, even though I wanted to read it. The publisher is being a complete asshole to readers, so they can go screw themselves, and I’ll buy it when it gets released as remainder issue stock.

Instead, I’ve been buying books that are showing up at the below $9.99 price, unless I can find it cheaper as a paperback, like is happening with The Girl Who Played With Fire, which is still being priced as if it’s a brand new hard back book for the Kindle. As long as publishers refuse to do proper business with Kindle customers, then I say they can go screw themselves and their legacy models. Instead, I bought four other books that were decently priced, and I’ll avoid reading them (due to laziness)  instead of the books I would have bought and avoided reading as well.

How the Kindle Fire Will Actually Hurt Amazon Instead of Help It

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Today, I was thinking of buying a graphic novel for my Kindle reader on my Ipad. Ever since I bought my Ipad, one thing I’ve always cherished is that I can still read e-books made for Kindle on it because of my Kindle app. However, when I went to buy the graphic novel, the first thing I noticed was that it wouldn’t let me complete the transaction because Amazon determined that I did not yet own the Kindle Fire. Apparently, in order to buy the e-book, you can ONLY buy it for the Kindle Fire. If you don’t own the Kindle Fire, you’re kind of screwed. I then started to notice that some of the magazine subscriptions were exactly the same way.

In the past, one of the cool things about having the Kindle reader on my Ipad was that I could see color books on my Kindle reader, which I couldn’t do on my actual Kindle device. However, Amazon, in their infant wisdom (not infinite), has decided it wants to force an Amazon Kindle Fire on you if you want color books of any type.

What this is actually going to do is force readers who might have continued to buy Amazon e-books into not buying them any more. Sure, it might get a few gullible people to buy a Kindle Fire, but for people like me who don’t want to lug around two devices, and seriously have no intentions of trading DOWN to a Kindle Fire from an Ipad 2, Amazon is forcing itself out of its own business.

At one point, I even thought of picking up an Amazon Kindle Fire, just cause I always liked the Kindle. But this has actually sullied my desires, and now I want nothing to do with them. I’ll actually buy the books I wanted in hard copy now, as they’ve never been available on the limited choice available through Apple’s walled garden choices.

It seems that ever company that involves itself in ebooks these days is doing everything possible to screw themselves over in hopes of achieving profits that they’re never going to get. Instead, we’ll destroy the market and leave ourselves living back in 1980 again.

Thanks, Amazon. You suck.

Netflix is the like that abusive boyfriend who thinks it’s okay to hit you because he’s sober the next day

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’ve been in an abusive relationship for many years now. I just recently got out of it, but my partner keeps calling me back, telling me everything’s okay now, that after counseling the abuse is never going to happen again. And almost like always, I go back, and a few weeks later, the abuse starts all over again. Like most abused partners, I never learn, which is why it is so easy to keep slipping into this type of relationship.

In the beginning, things were great. Netflix told me I was the only one and that we’d be together forever. Then out of nowhere a few years back, Netflix told me that I had to start paying more money to get the exact same features I was receiving before. Netflix told me it was really my fault, that I was expecting too much for how much effort Netflix was putting into the relationship, and that it was really stupid of me not to have expected the increase in fees. So, I decided that I wouldn’t see Netflix as much any more, telling Netflix, “I think we need to spend more time apart, and possibly see other people.” So, without warning, I switched from the three dvds at one time plan to the one dvd at a time plan. This took Netflix completely by surprise. He claimed I was being emotional, overly judgmental and unfair. But backed by all of my friends (who for some reason seemed to be in the same relationship with Netflix, too…why don’t we ever see these things?), I stood my ground. I figured if Netflix didn’t love me as much as I loved Netflix, then we didn’t need as exclusive of a relationship.

After a few bouts of overnighters and even a couple of nights where Netflix had to sleep on the couch, Netflix gave in and lowered his prices again. He said, “Baby, I’m on the wagon now. I know I hurt you, and I promise never to do it again.”

So, stupidly, I took Netflix back. I raised my dvd amount to three again, and we had a pretty good relationship for the next few years. Then, Netflix started drinking again. Well, that’s the only explanation I can come up with because he went right back to his abusive ways.

Out of the blue, Netflix announced that he was doubling his prices, and then as if that wasn’t enough, he decided outright that he was going to become two people, and I’d have to pay each one of them for the pleasure of his company. Right then and there, I decided, Netflix sucks, and I no longer want to be in this relationship. So I dumped him. Sent him to the curb and moved in with my mother and her three cats.

Ever since then, Netflix has been emailing me, saying, “Aw, come on Babe. I’m sober now. I mean, I’m still going to charge you twice as much, but I decided to stop pretending to be two people. So take me back. You know we had some good times together. Do you want to end up alone with your mother’s three cats?”

Like most abusive boyfriends, Netflix just doesn’t understand that when someone moves on, someone actually moves on. I’ve started dating again, having gone on a few blind dates with iTunes, Redbox and an Amazon Prime membership. But that doesn’t stop Netflix from hounding me every other day with a “hey, Babe, I’m still the best deal you’ve ever known. Stop screening your phone calls and pick up the damn phone!”

But I’m never going back. While it doesn’t mean I’ll never be in another abusive relationship again, it just means that I’ll never be in another one with Netflix. You have to live each day as it comes and relish the victories, no matter how small or how inconsequential.

Heating Up the Winter While Communicating With NORAD

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The other day, I bought a programmable thermostat. You see, this is kind of big thing for me, because you don’t know the half of what I went through to actually get this thing and then to get it installed. A few weeks ago, I honestly didn’t know anything about them. Actually, I really didn’t know they existed.

I should point out that I’m somewhat of a dunce when it comes to heating. I’m from California, and I love hot weather. I’ve tended to live in a lot of very warm climate areas, like Arizona, the desert, the surface of Mars. Until recently. Now, I live in the opposite, a few miles south of the North Pole, in some place called Freezing City, Michigan. Okay, it’s not really Freezing City, but it’s located a few miles west of Freezing City. It’s Grand Rapids, and for someone from California, that means Freezing City or any variation thereof. I think I’m getting the point across. It is cold here sometimes. And I don’t like that.

Sure, it’s not Minnesota, or Canada, or the inside of someone’s walk-in freezer. But it can be cold. When I first moved here, people told me: “Me, you’re not going to believe how cold Michigan can be. You’re leaving warm California for very cold Michigan.” Okay, no one said that exactly, but they could have. However, a lot of people in Michigan when I first moved there said: “Me, do you realize you left a very warm place to come to a very cold place?” Those Michiganders, always filled with great moments of logic.

Anyway, my first Winter here wasn’t that bad. As a matter of fact, it was the mildest Winter Michigan had in decades. I thought immediately, wow, these Michigan people are wimps. This was nothing. I’ve had Winters in San Francisco that were colder than this. And then the next year was one of the worst Michigan had in decades. I immediately bit my words and never uttered such insults again.

Getting back to my subject, I was talking to a co-worker, and she mentioned that perhaps I should get a programmable thermostat after I told her my usual habit of trying to leave my heat on all day so my house was actually warm when I got home. She kind of thought I was wasting a lot of heat (and money) by doing this. When I discovered they made such an item, I immediately decided that I had to have one. So I went to Best Buy to look for one, and of course, they didn’t have any. They could order it and have it delivered to their store in a few days, but they didn’t have any in store. Realizing I can have it shipped to my own freaking house, and not to Best Buy’s store, I walked out of Best Buy pissed off at Best Buy like I usually do whenever I go there to get a specific item that I would figure a stupid brick and mortar store would actually have on its premises (NOT SO I HAVE TO ORDER IT ONLINE).

Then it started to dawn on me that even if I got one, was I going to be able to put it into my apartment? I live in one of those management complexes that does everything for you, except anything you might actually need done. So, I called them and asked them if I was allowed to have a programmable thermostat installed. The response was as follows:

Them: Um, let yeah that should be okay. Let me contact our maintenance guys so they can set up a time to install it.

Me: That would be great.

Them: You do realize that this would have to be after hours because we can’t be held liable for that sort of thing? And I’d have to contact them to see if they could do it.

Me: What exactly does that mean?

Them: He’s not answering the line, so let me investigate this and then get back to you. Can I call you right back?

Me: (realizing where this was going) Um, sure. I’ll await your call.

Then I hung up. That was two weeks ago. Still awaiting his return phone call.

So, I contacted a friend of mine who knew someone who could put one in. Then I decided to buy one so he’d have something he could install when he showed up. That was when I read a great article in the New York Times about a programmable thermostat that was becoming all the rage.

This one goes to 11

Now, supposedly this thermostat learns as you use it, so it would do all sorts of things that you tend to do and then learns from it. The only problem I saw with it was that it wasn’t all that interested in letting you program it, but it wanted to learn from what you did, which meant instead of setting it for turning off the heat at midnight, it would want me to get up in the middle of the night (at midnight) and turn off the heat and then it would learn from my actions. Not exactly the kind of education I want to teach a thermostat, but I’m sure it has features that work around that.

 
The biggest problem with this thermostat is that it is sold out for a year, so don’t expect to actually buy one, which for me is usually one of the worst selling points. I mean, I’m willing to buy something as long as someone is willing to sell it to me, but don’t tease me with a great product and then say, “oh by the way, you can’t have one because we weren’t smart enough to manufacture enough of them.” I almost didn’t buy an Ipad 2 because of that. I ended up buying a Motorola Xoom, and boy was that a stupid mistake. Companies need to compensate for buyers like me, who makes stupid decisions because you have a horrible manufacturing deficiency.
 
So, I went to Lowe’s, and I found another programmable thermostat. This one, however, was just as good (except it doesn’t learn anything other than what I put into it) but you know, I’m okay with that. Sometimes, I don’t really want my thermostat being smarter than I am.
 
So, I got this one:
 
 

This one actually works and exists in real life

So, I had the guy install this one, and now I’m working through its minor details, like enabling certain functions that I find to be important, like actual heat. The other day, I pressed buttons over and over, launching two space shuttles, picking up three shows on HBO, relaying something called a “go signal” to some strange group in Iraq called SEAL Team 5, and changing the date from BC to AD at least twice. But “heat” seemed somewhat elusive. So I went back to the manual, read it through twice, realizing that this was the original Rosetta Stone they used to translate English to Sumerian cuniform, and then managed to finally get the heater to start putting out air conditioning, and then finally HEAT.

 
So, now I think I have it working, as I managed to get the heat to run this morning, just in time for the program to effectively turn it off for the day. But fortunately, I have tonight to play with it again when I get home from work.
 
I’m hoping to use it to communicate with NORAD this evening.

 

Reality Disclosure: The Victoria Secret Fashion Show is Really Just a Televised Episode of Nearly Naked Women Trying to Sell Us Underwear

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Attractive woman selling you stuff
Attractive woman selling you stuff

I read a lot of news. So, it came to me as a bit of a surprise that CNN has been doing nothing but trying to explain how “important” their story about the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is.  After “reading” through their article and numerous other articles that have attempted to “write” about this story, almost always with a HUGE picture of very attractive supermodels, I get the picture. There was a fashion show put out by Victoria’s Secret, a store that sells ladies lingerie to women who want to look attractive to their partners after things have already moved to the point where they really don’t have to do anything to make the mood get to the next point. I mean, honestly, if I’m in a situation where a woman is now in her underwear, chances are pretty good she doesn’t have to convince me that I should be moving to, well, for lack of better terms, the next “base”. If I read things wrong at that time, then something’s seriously wrong with me, with her, or with the human species and academic mating rituals.

But let’s break down what’s really going on with this “fashion” show. It’s a bunch of very attractive women, walking around in their under garments, trying to get people to think this would be a really good purchase in the future. That’s really it. They’re not developing a better solar panel to collect energy. They’re not helping us figure out which presidential candidate is going to lie to us more than the other. They’re not even helping us find a potential mate. They’re walking around in their underwear being gawked at by guys across the country.

Cause let’s face it. This show might be watched by women thinking, “that outfit looks nice and maybe if I buy it, I might look like that multimillion dollar an hour supermodel” but it’s mostly being watched by guys who are thinking, “man, I really should have majored in something other than sociology in college cause a girl like that is never going to talk to me and my sorry ass bank account.” And, of course, there’s a huge segment of guys who are probably watching that show alone, in the dark. If you’re one of those guys, you might have even set up your own drive in cinema screen hire to make it a more immersive experience.

But great television it’s not. It’s like watching the Miss America Pageant and saying you watch it because you support programs that provide college scholarships to enterprising young women. No one buys that. No one even buys it when the pageant tries to pretend that’s why the pageant exists. It’s a vehicle to sell stuff in the way we always sell it. With sex.

So, I’m glad the show was the number one watched show in the country, just as much as I’m glad that Twilight is the number one movie, and every top seller on the New York Times bestseller list is a young adult book because Americans have become too stupid to read books for adults.

But that doesn’t mean I’m really happy about it. So leave me alone as I turn off the lights and watch the second half of this underwear advertisement show I taped so I could watch it alone. Check back with me in about a half hour. We’ll talk about literature then.

Stupid Passwords

Social Networking, Technology, Writing, , , , , ,

Years ago, when I was first learning a programming language (BASIC for back when it was practically the only language you could learn on the first personal computer, the TRS 80), I created a program and established a password system, because I thought this would be the wave of the future, where everyone would need passwords to get into programs. Turns out I was right, even though that doesn’t mean I was really all that forward-thinking, as it did seem kind of obvious at the time. Well, my first program I designed was a computer game called U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, and part of the beginning of the game required you to enter a password (yes, really exciting gaming I was making back then). I chose something I figured no one else would ever guess.

Well, another one of the kids learning computer programming with me tried out my program, spent a few seconds thinking about me, looked at the blinking interface asking for a password and then typed OMEGA. He guessed my password on the first try. Yeah, I felt really stupid, and to this day I still haven’t figured out how he did it, other than the possibility he was actually watching me when I coded it in back when I wasn’t really paying attention to who was stranding behind me while I was typing.

The point is: It was a stupid password.

Fast-forward to today, and Mashable has printed an article telling us just that: People still use stupid passwords. Their list (from Mashable) of the top overused passwords is:

  • 1. password
  • 2. 123456
  • 3.12345678
  • 4. qwerty
  • 5. abc123
  • 6. monkey
  • 7. 1234567
  • 8. letmein
  • 9. trustno1
  • 10. dragon
  • 11. baseball
  • 12. 111111
  • 13. iloveyou
  • 14. master
  • 15. sunshine
  • 16. ashley
  • 17. bailey
  • 18. passw0rd
  • 19. shadow
  • 20. 123123
  • 21. 654321
  • 22. superman
  • 23. qazwsx
  • 24. michael
  • 25. football

Yep, believe it or not, people are still using PASSWORD as the number one stupid password. The others are equally obvious, which basically make the point for us that people generally use things they can remember to be their passwords, which means that quite often the average user, being a nimrod, is going to use something that is going to be massively easy to crack.

For years, my own password process has really evolved, then devolved and then re-evolved after one of my overused passwords got broken into, and my email sent to everyone as spam mail. It’s amazing what people choose for their reasoning behind passwords, which is why for the longest time I was using the name of a password used in a movie about computers a long time ago. I even named one of my stuffed animals after that password, and for years, I kept using that, or variations of that name, as a password. Stupid idea, and let’s just say that my eventual evolution didn’t come soon enough.

Some of the other names on that list are ridiculous, and I’m embarrassed that people would actually make such mistakes. “123456”? Really? Or “abc123”? I can see “Superman” just for the nostalgia factor alone, but “qwerty” and “654321”?

Okay, part of me also has to look at this from another angle. Sometimes, I think companies we do business with create password situations for us that really don’t make any sense. I’m a lot more careful about my email and my banking information than I am with my Netflix queue or a password I’m required to make up for a job search service I’m only ever going to use once in my entire lifetime. The other day, I was required to fill in additional information AFTER my password that was completely irrelevant to me, meaning that if I ever had to challenge my information (to get my password back), I’m never going to remember the answers to those other questions they wanted me to come up with. I’m talking about stuff like “What is your wife/significant other’s favorite color?” As I don’t have a wife or a significant other, I’m mainly making shit up there when I have to come up with an answer. In one the other day, it gave me six different questions to choose from, and to be honest, anyone who had to answer one of those questions has a much different kind of life than I do because I don’t have a favorite sports team, a significant other (which was the subject of three of the six choices I could use), a maiden name, or even the middle name of my best friend (haven’t had a best friend in quite a few years now). What would make those kinds of challenge questions better is to let me make up my own question and then present my own answer. Otherwise, chances are pretty good that I’m going to be clueless whenever it comes to trying to figure out a one-time password that I am not going to remember, and no, I don’t write them down somewhere because that’s the one thing you SHOULDN’T do with passwords.

I think I’ve said about enough on that subject. Please enter your password, writing it in iambic pentameter, to continue to my next irrelevant point.