One new sign that I'm getting old - I just can't listen to new music anymore. I turned my iPod off for the last couple weeks, to check out what's new these days. I found that with only a few exceptions, the music was just no good.
Some of the stations, like KDKB, Mix 96.9, and the Peak play a decent variety of older music, so I could listen to those. For some reason KOOL is apparently playing a bunch of hippie music now instead of real oldies, so I never found any reason to stop on that station. Pop music these days is just awful - full of auto-tune and no-talent singers of cookie-cutter songs. Some of the tunes are kind of catchy, but after listening to basically the same song over and over, it really gets old. Hip-hop is pretty bad again, mostly fake thugs with ridiculous lyrics combined with terrible pop vocals.
Country is just a little bit better - probably one out of five new songs on KNIX and KMLE were decent. The rest were whiney or just tried too hard to be hillbilly and didn't sound authentic.
Talk radio hasn't changed at all since the last time I listened - it shuffles between two formats. The first is the non-political segment where they talk about a simple news story, and repeat themselves over and over again for the whole segment, essentially stretching a 30 second conversation into 10 minutes. Second is the ultra-political talk where they bash liberals non-stop, often spewing hateful remarks toward anyone who isn't super-conservative. They'll never admit that republican politicians are scumbag liars just as much as the democrats - they just lie about different things.
So I'm back to the iPod, which is pretty much just my CD collection and a few dozen single MP3's I've bought over the years. But I'm stuck in the 1990's and early 2000's, which means those damn kids are going to start to laugh at me the same way I used to laugh at adults who only listened to classic rock and oldies.
You've all seen the billboards, signs, bumper stickers, and car wraps. Some idiot spent too much time reading the Da Vinci Code, and thinks that he's nailed down the exact moment of the apocolypse, beginning tomorrow, May 21st, which, of course, is the 100th anniversary of the death of Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming - hard to imagine that's a coincidence.
Now I'm no religious scholar, but obviously these guys are full of crap. People have been predicting the end of the world for centuries, and most of the time they've been wrong. This joker is just another in a long line of so-called experts, who knows some basic arithmetic, a few Bible verses, and has a good marketing department.
This is such a joke. Even the guy with his finger on the button will only know a few seconds in advance. It's a ridiculous concept that this guy knows the day the world will end, right up there on the crazy-scale with killer tomatoes, chocolate-covered bacon, and Tom Cruise. It's incredibly sad that so many people fall for this nonsense and really believe the world is coming to an end tomorrow.
And besides, anybody with half a brain knows that the end of the world will happen on December 21st, 2012.
Its truely amazing how bad peoples' spelling and puncutation has become over the last 10 or 15 years. Since the invention of the world wide web, the written word have been butchered, to the point where it seems nobody, can correctly write a single complete sentence to save their life. Because of sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Twitters big draw is the fact that messages are small, allowing people to really convey they're thoughts in a condensed format, which excuses some of the grammatical errors. But simple things, like choosing between they're and their simply elude some people, causing them to mispell every other word on there updates.
Here are some of my pet peeves, make sure you follow them in all of you're writing.
Improper punctuation Nothing irrirtates me more than someone who doesn't understand the difference between a colon and a semi-colon: its really not that difficult. Also, why can't people understand that questions should end in a question mark. It drives me nut's when people use an explanation point or a period to end a question with.
Homographs Word's that are spelled differently but have the same pronounciation tend to confuse people. They just don't know weather to use one or the other. Its very frustrating and difficult to reed, and shows a lack of intelligence in sum people. Choosing the write word is something we learned back in grade school. Every time I read something with the wrong word, I want too send the person back too school.
Apostraphe's Its really not that difficult. When your dealing with contractions, use an apostraphe. For example, when you want to combine the words do and not, you remove a letter and put in an apostraphe, to end up with do'nt. Add an apostraphe and s to make a singular noun possesive, such as "The last piece of pie is your's".
Spelling Spell-check is very common these days, and many prorgams, including most web browsers, come with it built-in whenever you type in text boxes. People these days mispell even the simplest words, somthing that is just inexcuseable and a sign of lazyness.
Capitolization I don't understand people that use upper-case letters when they don't need to. Capitolized words should only be used at the start of sentences and for proper nouns; Using them anywhere else is improper. Title's also can start with upper-case letters, such as Mister and Doctor, so "Mister Smith went to the Doctor" is ok. Make sure you follow these rules whenever your writing, you don't want to look unintelligent.
I vs. me This one gets alot of people. Instead of "Me and Becky went to the store", you should always list yourself last, so the sentence should read "Becky and me went to the store". My English teachers would of flunked us if they heard the other students and I screw this up.
Date: 2010-09-05 15:30:32
Name:
Wendy E (via Facebook)
I haven't laughed this hard in a long time! Great way to start off a day!
Date: 2010-09-05 19:52:50
Name:
Melissa E (via Facebook)
Yeah. Let's not go there shall we? I'm shocked I can make it through grading papers sometimes. Just ask Andrew ;) My biggest pet peeves are the improper use of their/they're/there, and the ever expanding idea that plurals require an apostrophe before the /s/.
Just wanted to take a quick minute to rant about something that bugs me. Every commercial break on TV, there's some insurance company talking about how great their product is, based on how many discounts they offer. No mention of what the original price is, or how it compares to other companies.
Attaching discounts to an arbitrary price is basically meaningless. In my mind, it's the same as ridiculous advertisements featuring "up to 30% or more" off of the regular price - in other words, it could be absolutely any price whatsoever, from zero up to and including the regular price which is never stated.
Discounting your own unstated rates means nothing. Let me demonstrate: I will gladly insure your vehicle, and I'll offer discounts for having a job, owning OR renting your home, having children, owning a television set, being left-handed, knowing how to play poker, liking polka music, being taller than 6 feet, being shorter than 5 feet, having seen all 11 Star Trek movies, knowing how to say "Hello" in at least three languages, preferring paper instead of plastic bags at the supermarket, drinking 1% milk, knowing the difference between Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, actually liking the new Star Wars trilogy better than the original trilogy, being a lacrosse fan, knowing how to integrate a polynomial, playing the trombone, memorizing all of the state capitals, preferring Jessica Biel over Jessica Alba (warning: NSFW, PG-13 link), owning an original Nintendo Entertainment System, being able to understand Ozzy Osbourne, admitting you like Miley Cyrus's music, owning the complete works of William Shakespeare in Pig Latin, and having a pet iguana. I could go on, but I don't want to get long winded.
Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, I could make that offer, complete with a hundred various discounts, but it costs you $75,000 per month, and each discount only knocks 50 bucks off of the price. Would that be a good deal? (That's a rhetorical question, but for those of you who haven't been following along, the answer is 'no'). So when Allstate, Progressive, and every other insurance company talks about their "discounts", make sure you don't fall for their little game - there's no substitute for shopping around for the best deal.
And if anyone is interested in my insurance offer, give me a call. I'll just need your first 12 payments as a non-refundable deposit in cash or gold bullion.
Anyone who knows me knows that I may just be the biggest football fan alive - not that American gridiron thing, but REAL football where you actually use your feet. Of course, my favorite holiday season is the World Cup Finals - the monthlong tournament where the greatest football players in the world compete for the right to hold the solid gold trophy for the next four years, and bragging rights around the world, except for America, where they're too busy eating their cheeseburgers and watching TV to care about football.
Still, as an American, I had to cheer for our team, which unfortunately, didn't win the Cup this year. That honour went to Spain, hereafter referred to as the greatest footballers of our generation.
Let's take a look at some of the reasons why I love this game:
Low Score Most other sports involve an offense that scores at least once every game. This is way overrated. Football features more shutouts and more zero-zero ties than any other sport in the world. This proves how exciting the game is, and illustrates the incredible skills of goalkeepers and defenders who specialise in preventing scoring. When I sit and watch a world-level tournament game for a couple hours, I don't want to see any offense whatsoever. It's incredibly exciting to watch a bunch of guys kick a ball around for 90 minutes and never once hear "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL". Thankfully, scoreless games happened several times during this year's World Cup tournament, and those games were among the greatest I've ever seen.
Ties Not all games can end in zero-zero draws. Some games actually have some serious offense. In a high-scoring game, you may even see a one-one draw. In either case, it warms my heart to see a game end where neither team loses. It's like watching little league baseball, where everyone gets a trophy at the end of the season, because everyone's a winner. In certain games, however, ties aren't allowed, and the game is decided by penalty kicks. So rather than a team winning by playing the game they've been playing for the past 120 minutes, they start a brand new game to determine the winner. This is a great idea that should be adopted by other sports - for example, a free-throw shooting contest in basketball after overtime, a home run derby in baseball after 12 innings, or a field-goal kicking contest in gridiron after overtime.
Timekeeping Most other sports end when the timer runs out. Football is much more civilised - there is a timer, but it doesn't actually mean anything. The game ends when the referee thinks it needs to. Teams can waste several minutes just walking around, arguing with officials, or performing substitutions, while the clock continues to run. After 90 minutes, the officials determine that they should just keep playing for a few minutes to make up for those delays, instead of stopping the clock during the game. Clearly, this is a more logical way of tracking time. After all, why should the players or coaches know how much time there is left in the game? If they knew, then they'd actually use that information to see how urgently they need to score or prevent a score, and that would just be silly.
Vuvuzela Only the greatest sport in the world would feature a musical instrument known to cause permanent hearing loss. America may have the occasional air horn sound during sporting events, but only world-class football has thousands of fans demonstrating their creativity by blowing a ludicrously loud and monotone horn constantly during every game.
Using Your Head As the only major sport to not allow its players to use their hands, football requires players to use all other parts of their bodies, primarily their feet and heads, to direct the ball. This is perfectly reasonable, since scientific studies dealing with brain damage from repeated blows to the head have been inconslusive at best.
For these, and many other reasons, football is the most popular sport in the world. Nearly all countries have a national team in FIFA, with such creative and catchy official nicknames like the Australian "Socceroos", the "Elephants" of the Ivory Coast, South Africa's "The Boys The Boys", and the "Representative Team" from Slovakia. Countries are passionate about their football teams, especially the smaller pissant countries like North Korea, where beloved leader Kim Jong Il would reward a win handsomely, but punishes an embarassing loss by forcing the team to work in the coal mines.
Seriously, Microsoft? The newest version of the Windows mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7 Series, according to Microsoft sources, will not have clipboard functionality, meaning you will not be able to copy and paste text between applications. So if you need to copy some text from a web page to an email message, or copy an address into an existing contact, or copy a URL into your task list, or any of a hundred other copy/paste uses, you're out of luck, because Microsoft knows what's best for you. Their text-recognition logic is supposed to be an alternative to the clipboard, allowing you to perform standard tasks on phone numbers and email addresses, which they feel is what 80% of users actually think they need copy/paste for. While this may be useful, it's certainly no replacement.
Here's the conversation that must have taken place:
M$ Exec: So, a bunch of people have iPhones. Let's build something like that. Engineer: What features do you want? M$ Exec: I read somewhere that the first series of iPhone didn't have a clipboard. I know we had a clipboard in all previous Windows Mobile versions, but if we want to be successful like Apple, then we need to take the clipboard out. Engineer: Did you also see that lots of people complained, and eventually they put a clipboard in? M$ Exec: No, I can't be bothered to read entire articles. Besides, I already said to leave it out, and I can't change my mind now. That's called leadership. Engineer: (mumbling) What a unbelievable tool. M$ Exec: What was that? Engineer: I said that was an unbelievably cool idea. I guess that's why you get paid the big bucks. M$ Exec: That's right. I could squash you like a bug. Now go fetch me some coffee. Engineer: (mumbling) Cretinous ogre. M$ Exec: What? Engineer: Cream and sugar?
Microsoft has recently gone to great lengths to build quality products, most notably Windows 7. Even Internet Exploder has improved in versions 7 and 8, to the point where IE9 might only kind of suck. Office 2010, .NET 4.0/Visual Studio 2010, Bing, XBox, and a series of other Microsoft products have all improved, adding features that people want and need, with a focus on integrating technologies together to make life more convenient. Taking a core feature like the clipboard out of an entire operating system and office suite just doesn't make any sense. It's a decision that's going to further alienate Microsoft-haters, and piss off people that don't realize there's no copy/paste until they need it.
Tonight I watched the Star Trek: Voyager episode called Nemesis. Kind of a dumb episode, but the dialogue really jumped out. Most of the episode took place on a Vori planet, where they speak English, with several words replaced with stupider versions. Of course, they don't really speak English, but blah blah universal translator blah blah suspension of disbelief etc.
The writers wanted to make sure that you understood what these words meant in their context, by saying them over and over and over and over again. Here's the breakdown of how often they used these words in less than 40 minutes of screen-time:
I'm sure it's common to say one or two words over and over again in an episode, but this many just got ridiculous. Like: "How many will you nullify", "the Nemesis will nullify you", " never told an unkind word nor nullified an insect", "I'll nullify the beast", "Then the nemesis you nullified", "Your fleet colours will get us all nullified", and it just kept going on like that.
I've picked on Voyager once before - I don't mean to keep ripping on the show - it's really not bad, and got better toward the end of the series. But for some reason I enjoy nitpicking about this kind of thing.
Nobody has agreed on a single name for the decade from 2000 to 2009. I've seen people trying to call it the "aughts", the "naughts", the "noughts" (pronounced the same), "aughties", "naughties" (with a double-meaning based on the naughtiness of quite a few people this decade), the "noughties", the "two-thousands", the "ohs", or many others. I personally have been calling it the "zeros" since the 90's, so that seems the most natural to me.
But since we don't have an accepted name, I suggest we pick something that's truly annoying and stupid, but sounds cool when you first say it. This naming convention worked for things like "world wide web", "euros", "Twitter" (and related words like tweet), and "Houston Texans".
My suggestion: Millenios (rhymes with Spaghetti-os), as in "Uh oh, millenios". People will hate that name for many years to come.
Date: 2009-12-24 13:00:00
Name:
Cindy S (via Facebook)
I like the Oh Ohs, personally. I guess it's going to be the teens or the two thousand tens coming up. Millenios? Nah, not my pick. Hmmm... Way back when, weren't the years from 1900 to 1919 called the early 1900's?
All of our lives we have had to deal with what time TV shows air: "9/8 Central" or "8/7 Central" etc. Primetime shows during the week air between 8pm and 11pm for most major networks, with Fox airing between 8pm and 10pm. They are aired at the exact same time in the Central time zone, which means they air from 7pm to 10pm. This makes perfect sense so far.
From here, there are two options that make any sense: 1) The shows would be broadcast in Mountain and Pacific, from 6-9pm and 5-8pm. A show would be physically broadcast only once for the whole country. 2) Mountain would match Eastern, and Pacific would match Central. There would be two distinct physical broadcasts, one starting at 8pm Eastern, the other starting at 10pm Eastern.
Option #1 is no good, because people on the west coast aren't home by 5pm to watch their shows.
However, option #2 does make sense - it would mean that "10/9 Central" means 10 Eastern/9 Central/10 Mountain/9 Pacific.
(I'm leaving out Alaska and Hawaii - not that they're not important, but I'm just focusing on the 4 time zones in the 48 contiguous states).
Instead, we have option #3 - Eastern and Pacific match, and Mountain and Central match. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Let's look at an example - The Jay Leno Show - I'm not a fan of this show, but the majority of the show's advertising was based on "10pm", and it airs every day, so it makes a good example.
If you live in New York, the Jay Leno Show airs at 10pm Eastern (local time) - let's call this broadcast #1. If you live in Illinois, you are also watching broadcast #1, at 9pm local time. If you live in California, you also watch it at 10pm local time, which is 1am Eastern - let's call this broadcast #2. If you live in Utah, then it's on at 9pm local time, which is 11pm Eastern - this would be broadcast #3. If you're in Arizona in the winter, then you're on the same schedule as Utah, but here's the kicker - during the summer, when 48 states succomb to the epidemic of stupidity known as Daylight Savings Time for 8 months, Arizona still airs the Jay Leno Show at 9pm local time, but this is now 12am Eastern - now broadcast #4. There are 4 physical times of day when the Jay Leno show is aired, and they're not in the right order: CA: 1am Eastern UT: 11pm Eastern AZ: 11pm/12am Eastern IL: 10pm Eastern NY: 10pm Eastern
You'd think that if they were going to have four distinct broadcasts, over four time zones, that they could find a way to make them all the same.
Apparently the major reason for this nonsense has to do with radio broadcasts from the 1930's - seems a little outdated given today's technology. But I suppose, like Daylight Savings Time, this will probably never change.
A few months ago, I received a notice from my wireless carrier, Verizon Wireless, that they were shutting down their SMTP Mail Relay service. The shutdown occurred on August 29th.
If you're unfamiliar with SMTP, basically it's the standard that is used to send email through the internet, and requires a server that allows you to send your message (I won't get into the details, mostly because I don't know all the technical details of how it works). Normally, your ISP provides an SMTP server that you can send messages through, even if you are not using that ISP as your sending address - for example, the email address I use is joe@jtenos.com, but I send all my outgoing mail through smtp.west.cox.net when I'm at home.
Cox, my ISP, which is one of the largest providers in the country and likely the most popular ISP in the Phoenix area, does not allow you to use their SMTP server unless you are on their network, which means I can use it when I'm at home, but not from another network, such as my cellular network. This means that when I'm using my cellular phone for email, I cannot send messages using the mail client on the phone, because I can't use Verizon anymore, and I don't have another alternative.
Of course, there are alternatives, and Verizon is only too happy to tell you what you should be doing:
"Verizon Wireless considered this service, along with the needs of our customers, and decided that there are better alternatives for our customers than the SMTP Mail Relay Service."
"If your email provider does not permit you to use its SMTP mail server, other solutions include browser-based email access; check with your email provider for availability."
So I'm paying a premium for internet access on my cellular phone, signed a two year contract with Verizon with the understanding that I would actually have internet access, and with only a couple months notice, Verizon takes away one of the fundamental parts of the internet, the ability to send email, and tells me: Oh by the way, you should be using WebMail - you can receive mail using the mail client on the phone, but you can't reply to it or forward it.
Obviously Verizon is looking to cut costs by removing one of their services, saving on their hardware and overhead costs. In the long term, I'd have no problem with this if they did it the right way - if they phased out their SMTP service over a period of a couple years, and either started to charge a monthly fee or stopped offering the service on new customers and grandfathered out their existing customers at the end of their contract, it would be fine - customers like me simply would not buy their service and go elsewhere. But the fact that they stole a basic service from their existing customer base with a very short notice is absolutely unacceptable to me.
This is in my opinion the definition of a breach of contract. I signed up with Verizon for two years with the understanding that I could send and receive emails on my phone - now I can't. It would be like if they suddenly decided that you can't have call waiting or voicemail - it's a fundamental service that they had no right to take. I talked to Verizon's customer service, and received nothing but ignorance and arrogance - they pretended to know nothing about the problem, saying that it should still work, or that I can use Cox, or that I should use WebMail. I'm at the point where I'm giving up, and will be forcing them to end my contract early, with no penalty, and switching to AT&T or Sprint, where I would not be ripped off.
The absolute worst part of this change, in my opinion, is the "we know what's best for you" attitude taken by Verizon, as demonstrated in their letter, where they explain why they made this change:
"As part of our commitment to ensure that our customers are provided with the best possible user experience"
In other words, we're taking away a service, not reducing our price, and you're going to like it. I'm not buying their garbage, and I hope more people follow in my footsteps and leave.
Don't go to Sprint. They already did this 12/31/08. (see http://www.sprint.com/landings/pcsmail/)
I have Cox, too. They could easily allow us to send email over their SMTP servers. Our phones can be programmed so that they transmit our Cox User Names & Passwords so that only legitimate mail goes over the Cox server.
Recently, a new trend in movies seems to be starting: lazy titles for sequels. You've got movies where the only difference in title is the word "The". In April, we saw Fast & Furious, the third sequel to The Fast and the Furious. Later this month, The Final Destination is coming out, which is the fourth in the Final Destination series.
In addition, we've got titles that sound like they should be the first movie, but technically are not duplicate titles: Star Trek is the eleventh film in the franchise, while the first movie was named Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The latest Rocky sequel is named Rocky Balboa. Rambo was released last year, which technically isn't a duplicate name because the first movie was named First Blood, though commonly referred to simply as "Rambo".
Isn't two hours of American Idol per week enough? There has been more than one week this season where Idol took up three whole hours of TV - this is the second time that Bones has been cut out of the lineup for a special episode of AI. I realize that a lot of people love televised karaoke for some reason, but Fox needs to understand that millions of people enjoy quality scripted programming as well. Bones is just not getting any respect, even though it's one of the best shows on TV right now.
As a follow-up, American Idol screwed over millions of viewers again last night. Apparently it went over its scheduled time by several minutes, which means Fringe started late, and therefore finished late, so people recording the show missed out on the ending of Fringe. I'm not a fan of Fringe myself, but I know a lot of people who are, and are angry about this. I'd certainly be angry if this happened to one of my shows.
By the way, this also means since Idol went over its schedule, its fans who were recording it missed out on the ending as well.
Fox has the best lineup by far of any network, but they've got to start thinking about all of their audience, not just the American Idolaholics.
On Tuesday, the "Pick 3" drawing in the Nebraska Lottery came up with the numbers 1, 9, and 6. The significance of this: those same three numbers came up in the same order the previous day. According to the Associated Press, this is some kind of a big deal. And of course, where AP leads, hundreds of other news sources follow - the same article was present in many other news sources, from local to national news.
From the article: Lottery spokesman Brian Rockey says one of two lottery computers that randomly generate combinations picked the numbers 1, 9 and 6 - in that order - for Monday night's drawing. He says the other computer picked the same three numbers Tuesday in the same sequence.
The odds of such an occurrence? One in a million.
One in a million. If you read that quickly enough, you might actually believe it. After all, there's a 1/1000 chance of hitting 1,9,6 on day 1, so (1/1000 * 1/1000) is 1/1000000. But take a step back - they're not making a big deal that 1-9-6 was hit twice - they're making a big deal that the same number got hit twice. The odds of that: 1/1000, meaning it will happen on average every few years in every Pick 3 in the country. Hardly newsworthy.
If you're not quite sure, here are a couple different ways of looking at it:
----- Day 1: Suppose you draw 3-4-5 on Monday. That's a given - it's already happened. Day 2: What are the odds that you draw 3-4-5 on Tuesday? Answer: 1/1000. ----- Here's the same problem on a smaller scale: Suppose instead of 1/1000 odds of winning, the odds were only 1/10. I have two buckets, each with 10 balls. By their math, then the odds of hitting the same win twice in a row are (1/10 * 1/10), or 1/100. Suppose I pull a ball from bucket 1. What are the odds that I pull the same number out of bucket 2? Clearly it's not 1/100 - it's 1/10, since there are only 10 balls in bucket 2. -----
Now if you want to talk about the odds of the exact sequence 1-9-6 coming up twice in a row, then we're at one-in-a-million. If one individual person bought a ticket on Monday with 1-9-6 and another ticket on Tuesday with 1-9-6, then the odds from that individual person's point of view are 1/1000000. But that didn't happen. So there's absolutely nothing newsworthy about this story, other than someone is horribly bad at math. Either the lottery officials are bad at math (that's a scary thought), or the writer and editor at the AP are both bad at math, or they are having such a slow news day that they found something that they could trick people into reading.
By the way, I took a quick look at the numbers: This occurrence has happened twice in the last 3 years just in the Nebraska lottery. It's happened 3 times in the past 10 years in the Arizona Lottery. So when you consider how many "Pick 3" lotteries there are in the country, combined with how often this happens, it seems ridiculous to make this a national story.
Of course, you could say that me ranting about a non-story is just that much more meaningless. I'd have to agree with you.
You know it's funny, I actually found your writeup after doing a Google search for something like this after seeing the same story. I noticed the same thing right away. Obviously the odds of any 2 numbers hitting twice in a row is 1 in 1,000, not 1 in a million. You already know what Day 1's numbers are. You're going to know that number 100% of the time obviously... Thus the odds of whatever number that is hitting again is 1 in 1,000. Good job there AP! :)
Date: 2009-01-23 13:58:08
Name:
BluesFiddle
The AP Story is fine. It just depends on what your definition of 'such an occurrence' is.
@Brad: Thanks for the comment - I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this.
@BluesFiddle: It seems pretty clear that their definition of 'such an occurrence' is 'two consecutive days with the same numbers drawn in the same order'. With that definition, odds are 1/1000.
I can only think of two other definitions of 'such an occurrence': 1) Two consecutive days where 1-9-6 hit. But they'd run the same story if the numbers were 8-4-9 instead of 1-9-6, so that isn't it. 2) One individual won the grand prize two consecutive days - not a big deal, since the prize is just $500, but it's still cool for that one person. But even that didn't happen - different people won the prize on the second day.
I just saw something unbelievably offensive on TV. I was tuning in to CNN to see the beginning of election coverage, and there was a commercial for ashleymadison.com. Apparently this is a personals site for married people, whose motto is "Life is short. Have an affair." If you go to the site, that's exactly what it is - a service dedicated to helping married people cheat on their spouses.
The fact that this service exists isn't what bothers me. There are all kinds of things online that are disgusting, and that's just life. But to advertise this on a major news network is just wrong. It promotes the opinion that cheating is "just fine" to millions of viewers, as if it was perfectly normal. I am not naïve enough to believe that marriage is easy, or that all marriages can or even should last. But these problems should be worked out in a mature and open manner, with open communication, counseling, and finally divorce if appropriate - not by having affairs.
By the way, I'm not singling out CNN - if the site is telling the truth, Fox News also advertises their service. So you've got a mostly liberal channel and a mostly conservative channel both advertisng the same garbage.
About a year ago, I signed up for a checking account with ING Direct. At the time, it seemed like a great deal - some of the features of this "Electric Orange" account were: - 4% interest - a whole lot more than anyone else offered for a checking account, even a savings account - overdraft line of credit, which works as a fee-free credit card so you don't need to always pay close attention to your balance - free paper and electric checks - easy online balance transfers to and from traditional checking and savings accounts
Things were going pretty well - I was using this account to pay rent with paper checks, with no issues, and using the check card for some other normal stuff. Then I realized that my checking account was no longer getting 4% interest - it's now down to 1.5%. Still high for a checking account, but nowhere near where it was - definitely nothing special anymore. But I figured it was still a good account to have, so I figured I'd keep it.
This morning they contacted me to tell me about a problem. On the 21st, I scheduled my December rent check to go out. I received an email telling me that the address was rejected, so the check was cancelled. I was pretty upset, since I gave the same information as I have for the last year, and I know my landlord has not moved. So I gave them a call to find out what happened. After a lot of back and forth with the customer service rep, they finally figured out what happened: They tried to convert my paper check into an electric check.
We talked for a few minutes about this - somehow ING has my landlord's bank information on file - I don't know how, since it wasn't from me. He thinks that another ING customer has sent them an electric check, so their account is in the system. Their policy is to send electric checks whenever possible, in order to save time and money. It makes some sense - electric transfers are significantly cheaper for them, and have less chance of mistakes, when done properly. But the end result is that my rent check was not sent - had this happened closer to the end of the month, I'd be looking at late fees for the rent, and if it happened on a check to someone else, like a credit card or mortgage, there would have been additional consequences.
My problem is that I never gave ING the permission to do this. I specifically requested a paper check, which is a service that ING supposedly provides. I'm not even concerned about the fact that the electric check transfer failed - success or failure doesn't matter, since I did not authorize the attempt. In my opinion, this is absolutely inexcusable. My bank has absolutely no business giving my money to someone that I did not tell them to.
Normally when talking to a CSR on the phone and you have a complaint, you complain to a manager and hope to work out some kind of resolution. But I was so angry at this point, I didn't have anything else to say, and there was absolutely nothing anyone could say to make it all ok. When a bank is handling my hard-earned money, I need to have 100% confidence that they know what they are doing. ING lost my trust this morning, and there's no going back. I'll be closing my account as soon as possible. I highly recommend staying away from ING Direct, so you don't face the same headaches I did today.
Thank you for your review.
Sorry you had to go trough this.
I was looking for more info about them.
Seem just like any other scam in the end.
Promises not kept, putting our money at risk.
Would you have any other bank or Credit Union perhaps
to suggest ?
Thanks in advance, well appreciated.
Date: 2012-02-10 21:39:06
Name:
Joe Enos
This was over 3 years ago, so I really don't know if they've dealt with this particular problem. I probably overreacted a bit at the time - they were absolutely wrong to do what they did without asking, but I think I was a little harsh with my judgment. But even so, given the fact that their checking interest rates are down to 0.2%, and savings under 1%, I don't see any reason to pick ING over any other institution anymore. You can still find free checking out there with large banks like Chase, and probably some good old-fashioned personal service at smaller local banks or credit unions. Bill payment is pretty much a given these days, and Chase actually has a cool new thing where you can easily send money to other Chase customers using the website or a mobile phone.
There's a sign ad all over my district, for republican state representative Ray Barnes. On the sign are several things that caught my eye:
1) AMMENDMENT is spelled wrong. If you care so much about something, at least spell it right. I'll accept the argument that this is an alternate spelling in some countries, but this is America - it should be spelled the same way as it is on the Constitution.
2) NO NEW TAXES BY ANY GOVERNMENT AGENCY - all words except "agency" are underlined. Doesn't really make sense.
3) The "securing the border" section has something wrong with it. It's hard to tell from the picture, but the word "BORDER" is smaller than the rest. As you look more closely, it turns out that the word is a sticker, stuck on the sign. Most likely, it's on top of another misspelled word. So they fixed one misspelling (not very well, though), and ignored the other.
4) Several of the sections are not vertically centered.
You may think that I'm just being picky, but in my opinion, when you're in the political spotlight, things like that are not acceptable. I see one of several possibilities:
1) Maybe he designed the signs himself (not likely). Then he did a poor job, and he shouldn't have done it himself.
2) Maybe he approved someone else's work. Either he couldn't take two minutes to look closely, or he did and approved it anyway without noticing the problems. Either way, it's not good.
3) Maybe he had nothing to do with it. Then he isn't responsible for the content of his own campaign.
4) Maybe he was in a hurry, and just didn't have time to fix them. Since he's an incumbent, he's had plenty of time to think about his campaign. Failing to do so would be a demonstration in disorganization.
I can't believe I missed this one...In the '2nd ammendment' box, the word 'the' and the 'nd' in '2nd' are lower-case, while every other word in the red boxes are in caps.
Some blockhead at PC Magazine wrote an article called 21 Great Technologies That Failed. It gives 10 Microsoft and 11 Apple examples of "failures". Most of the stuff is reasonable, like WebTV and Mac G4 Cube - but they somehow slipped .NET into the list, saying everyone went to Java, and that .NET "has nowhere near the scope that MS had envisioned back in 2002". What an incredibly stupid thing to say!
.NET not only caught up with Java, it surpassed it years ago as the dominant development technology. While there is still plenty of debate as to which is "better" (.NET gets my vote for most, but not necessarily all, situations), there is absolutely no doubt that .NET is nothing short of a tremendous success. Jeremy A. Kaplan and Sascha Segan (the writers of the article), and the PC Magazine editors who allowed this nonsense to be published, should all be fired immediately.
In a newsletter I recently received from my bank, there were a few tips on how to save money by conserving gas. Most were reasonable, but one kind of caught my eye: ---------- Fill up when you're almost out - Fill up your gas tank less often and you could save $100 a month since you'll be hauling a lighter load between fill-ups. ---------- I ran a few numbers:
At $4.25/gallon, a person driving 1,000 miles per month who gets 20 miles per gallon would have to improve to about 38 miles per gallon in order to save $100 per month.
If you drive 2,000 miles per month, your mileage would have to go from 20 to 26 to save $100 per month.
I find it just a little hard to believe that waiting until your gas tank is almost out before filling up improves your mileage that much...
But if you are crazy enough to drive 2,000 miles per month and only get 10 miles per gallon, you'd only have to improve to 11.3 in order to save $100. Still probably not realistic, but it least it's not totally ridiculous.
I'm not saying that it was bad advice - I'm sure there is some truth to their tip, but gasoline only weights about 6 pounds per gallon, and there's just no way that a few extra gallons can make that big of a difference.
Date: 2011-06-29 14:37:17
Name: C. Blair
YO! Joe, I agree with you totally!!!! These kids today listen to a bunch of NOISE!!! We need to get them hooked on some Frank Sinatra or something!!