Internet

You are currently browsing articles tagged Internet.

Farewell, Packet 8; You Rocked

July 30, 2008 | No comments

Well, we finally bit the bullet and dropped our landline. A little over a month ago, we all got cell phones; instead of immediately dropping our landline, we wanted to try the cell phone thing for a while to see if we’d need the landline or not. We didn’t. So, as of yesterday, we have no “regular” phone service.

We had our landline through a place called Packet 8, a VOIP / internet telephony place that one of my uncles tipped us off to. Until his recommendation, we’d never heard of them, and truth be told, I’ve still never seen anything about them in any form, online or off. Despite the fact that I’d never heard of them (something which always gives me a bit of hesitation when it comes to service places), they ended up being quite excellent. $30 per month for unlimited calling anywhere in the country – not bad at all. And I never had to call them to say “hey, something is broken” – we hooked up their converter box, plugged it into our phone, and forgot about it.

They were able to impress me once more yesterday when we called to cancel our service – they didn’t harass us to stay. They simply asked us why we were cancelling and we answered with the truth. The lady said, “Okay, that’s fine”, and went about cancelling our account. I recall when we cancelled our service with Verizon to switch to Packet 8, the Verizon rep. practically offered us his first born to get us to stay, long after we’d made it clear we were switching.

So, kudos, Packet 8. You guys rock, and if we ever have need of a landline again, we’ll be in touch. :)

Tags: , , , ,

Used Books: One Internet to Find Them All

April 6, 2008 | 1 comment

I seem to go in cycles; I’ll go for a long period of time not really thinking about the internet and how it’s changed things, and then out of nowhere, I’ll get a slap of reality. My cheek is still stinging a bit from earlier this week.

I recently was hunting a particular book, Russisch ohne Mühe, or Russian without Toil. It’s one of the older courses made by a company called Assimil, and is supposed to be far superior to their modern, “updated” Russisch ohne Mühe heute (Russian without Toil Today). This particular book was first printed in 1971, and as far as I know, Assimil no longer publishes it; they’ve abandoned it entirely in favor of their updated course.

Furthermore, it wasn’t exactly at the top of the bestseller lists when it was new. Let’s face it, the consumer demand for a product which teaches Russian with a German base can’t be that great. :) However, it actually surprised me just how few copies are floating around. WorldCat, while certainly not exhaustive in regards to libraries, lists a mere three copies worldwide.

However, despite its relative rarity, as I type this post, the book is on its way to me. It’s coming from a small bookseller in Germany, who sells at a site called booklooker.de. I found her and booklooker.de via bookfinder.com. Finding the book was only the first step though, of course; she of course had to be paid, too! Being in Germany, she obviously wanted to be paid in Euros. I was able to do so by paying her via PayPal; they took care of the conversion stuff for me. Instantly, of course, with no charge added.

All of this sounds rather run of the mill for the internet, which, ultimately, I suppose it is – but when I stopped and thought about what I was able to do and how easy it was, it made me shake my head. Before the internet, how in the world would I have found a now out-of-print book in Germany? If I had been able to find it – which is unlikely to begin with – how long would it have taken? How long would it have taken from the beginning of my search to me actually getting the book? For my recent transaction, assuming the book doesn’t get lost and shows up in the approximate timeframe given, the entire process – from finding the book to it showing up in my mailbox – will amount to a couple of weeks. Two weeks to find a rare book and to have it delivered from over 4000 miles away isn’t too bad at all!

This whole experience has also brought to my mind a big question which I touched on above: before the internet, how did people find rare or out-of-print books? Were there services that would contact a range of used book sellers to find out if the book was available? Did you have to do this yourself? Did you just not get the book, period? In the case of this book, I think even if book-hunt services existed, it would have been difficult to get the book. There were two sellers at booklooker.de who had the book; the one I bought from, while she had 15,000 books listed, specifically stated that to stop by her place and see her books required an appointment, which leads me to believe that she just has a bunch of books in storage, rather than a physical shop. The other guy? He had 3 items listed; he wasn’t really a shopkeeper of any sort, just some guy who threw a few items online to try and sell them. In either case, I think they would have both been overlooked by a book-hunt service.

Tags: , ,

MetaFilter is not 911 or Poison Control.

March 21, 2008 | 2 comments

I was just digging through some old post drafts, and found this at MetaFilter:

I just mixed bleach / vinegar / salt / and liquid dish detergent in hopes of creating a super weed killer. I mixed the stuff in a fairly well-ventilated room, and then sprayed it on some weeds outside. Now I just read about chlorine gas resulting from the mixture of bleach and chlorine, and I’m suddenly feeling light-headed (hypochondriac). Am I going to die?

I’m kind of curious if the whole post was meant in jest, or if they were serious. If they were serious… well, they’ve got me puzzled; hopefully not many people think along similar lines as him/her. As others in the MetaFilter thread pointed out, MetaFilter is not 911 or the Poison Control Center. If you’ve done something that you think might be dangerous or fatal, particularly if it involves poisonous gases, probably the last thing you need to be doing is hopping on MetaFilter and writing a post. Okay, well, maybe the last thing would be to stand in the room where you mixed the stuff and inhale deeply, but you get the point.

The post makes me wonder about how often people turn to the internet when perhaps another approach would be more practical or effective. I know I’ve caught myself bending over backwards trying to find a local phone number via Google, when I’ve got a phonebook 20 feet away in a drawer. I’ve also – yes, I’m ashamed! – poked around on amazon.com, trying to find publishing information or some such about a book that is on my shelf upstairs in my room. Admittedly, I usually do that when I’m downstairs, but still, it’d probably be faster to just walk upstairs and yank the book off the shelf. But alas, turning to the internet for information is such a strong habit, it’s hard to break.

I haven’t, however, turned to the internet for emergency help. If my house catches fire, I won’t be posting to MetaFilter, asking what the best course of action is. :) That’s taking things a bit too far.

Also, a comment from the thread I linked to:

Dear Metafilter, I think I may be dying. Can you tell me if

Heh. :)

Tags: , , ,

Delayed Unsubscribing from Promotional Emails

January 31, 2008 | 2 comments

I recently unsubscribed from Barnes and Noble promotional emails, which I was getting, I think, because I signed up for a Barnes and Noble membership card the last time I was in Columbus. That’s the best guess I can make, anyway – I’ve never purchased anything from their website.

When I went to the unsubscribe page and submitted my email address to be removed from their list, I was shown this:

Your email address has been successfully opted out from Barnes & Noble promotional e-mails.
Please note that this change will be in effect within 10 business days. Thank you.

Is there any legit reason for it taking up to 10 business days? Technically speaking, I don’t see why it would take more than a few minutes, at most. I would assume that the email addresses are stored in a database, and when it’s time for a promotional email to go out, their system pulls the addresses out. While I’ve only dealt with MySQL databases, I can’t imagine that a database system which required 10 days processing time to remove one entry would be very efficient!

I suppose the reality of the situation lies in one word of that sentence: business. By telling their advertisers they’ll keep email addresses in the loop for 10 days after someone requests to be removed from the list, Barnes and Noble is probably making a heap of cash.

Oh well – certainly not a big deal, but it is something to chuckle about. I note that it doesn’t take 10 days for the ad emails to start showing up after you’ve signed up for a service of some sort. :)

Tags: , , , , ,

I broke the internet.

November 4, 2007 | 7 comments

Or at least my little corner of it. I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1, and am getting some really cool errors up at the top of my page (just look up above, and you can see them for yourself).

I know what’s causing the problem, though: tagging. I’ve been using the Simple Tagging plugin for a while now, and apparently, it doesn’t play nicely with 2.3.1, because 2.3.1 comes with its own tag functionality built in. I suppose if I’d read up on the latest version of WordPress before upgrading, I would have known that. Alas, I like to live dangerously.

At any rate, I’m now left with a crappy selection of choices:

A. I can leave the error up above and continue to use Simple Tagging (basically not an option, because that error is pretty yuck, and I like things to work smoothly);
B. I can lose all of my tags that I’ve applied, and start over from scratch.
C. See below.

I know, there are some of you in the crowd going, “well, just import the tags from Simple Tagging, and then get rid of the plugin.” A fine idea – I’m just not sure that’s possible. It appears that Simple Tags is the successor to Simple Tagging; Simple Tags works with 2.3.1, and Simple Tagging does not. So, I’m now poking around, trying to figure out if there’s anyway for me to keep my tags, possibly by installing Simple Tags, importing my tags from Simple Tagging to Simple Tags, and then importing my tags from Simple Tags into the top-level, WordPress approved tags area.

Simple my ass.

So – if my system here explodes and you see bits of my blog floating around on the internet, you know what happened.

Update: All fixed. I wasn’t looking in the right area in WordPress for the tags importer. I found it; imported; and now all is well in the world – at least in my little digital corner of it.

P.S. WordPress makers: why, oh why, will you not make TinyMCE’s Full Screen function part of the standard offering on the editing window toolbar? Why?

Tags: , , ,

« Older entries