Squirrelly Wrath
It's a new year, and with each new year come new annoyances. Certainly the old ones from 2004 still linger, but already new ones are cropping up to inspire my squirrelly wrath.
So, without further ado, I bring you...
Things That Annoy Me
2005 Style
The first new annoying thing of the year is...
Excessive cuteness!
To paraphrase Captain James T. Kirk, "Too much of anything, even cuteness, is not necessarily a good thing." One bubble headed cartoon is cute. I might even giggle at it. But when that one bubble headed cartoon reproduces and spreads his progeny throughout the blogosphere for months on end, he is no longer cute. He becomes just plain annoying! I respect a person's right to enjoy cuteness, but for crying out loud, learn when to give it a rest. This annoyance also extends itself to television and movies where it seems that snotty nosed children with speech impediments are considered cute. If I hear one more cherub faced brat say something like, "Mommeeee, pweeeeze!" in one of those supposedly cute nasal whines, I think I'll puke. Mr. casting director, if children like these were ever cute, they ceased to be a long time ago. Please, cease and desist!
The next annoying thing of the new year is not so new. It has been annoying me and just about everyone on the web for a very long time. I am talking about...
Spyware!
I have to wonder why anyone would want to spy on me in the first place. My internet habits are quite boring. I blog, I play a game or two, I occasionally make a purchase, always from a site of my choosing. Ads have no effect on me other than annoying the shit out of me. Annoy me often enough and you are guaranteed that I shall never give you my patronage!
There is an amusing side to the spyware. You see, the spies know that I frequent several German websites. From this they deduce that I speak German. The result...
In German!
I suppose that I could use these spam emails to learn a few interesting words...
like "penis" and "Viagra!"
The final annoying thing of the new year is...
People who don't follow directions!
I have several projects in which I create graphics for use on the web. When these projects are completed, I email them to the appropriate people or groups of people along with instructions for their use. The instructions are quite simple, either use my bandwidth (I have plenty) or save the file as the type it was created as for uploading to your server. If I tell you to save it as a .gif, I have a good reason for doing so. Saving image files as .jpg's when they contain text items often causes the text to blur, saving them as .bmp files causes them to be exceptionally large and slow to load for dial-up users, heck, some older browsers can't even read .bmp files from the web.
But what baffles me is why they are not automatically being saved as the file type they were created to be when clicked on. They should be. If they are not, then there is an easily remedied problem with your browser. Find the word "Tools" in your toolbar. Click on it. Select "Internet Options" from the drop down list. Under "Temporary Internet Files" click "Delete Files." This will clear your browsers cache. There is a bug in IE 6 that causes all images to be saved as untitled.bmp when the cache begins to approach fullness. I have no idea why Microsoft has done nothing to correct this, but clearing your browsers cache on a regular basis will prevent this from occurring.
That's it for now. Stay tuned. The year is still young. There are bound to be plenty of new things that annoy me in the months to come...
