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vent unrelated to finance

June 7th, 2013 at 06:25 am

it's the heat. I was going to rant but by the third sentence I know someone out there would take offense whether any was truly meant, so here's a vent. This has nothing to do with anyone that I know of on SavingAdvice. You'd have to be a misanthropic hostile hypersensitive fragile person to take this personally.

I resent having now to pay for content I didn't have to pay for 10-20 years ago: Usenet, region-restricted content, virtual private network subscriptions so I can see region-restricted content.

Naively I did not mind using hotmail and gmail for accounts because I thought that ads were used to make $ for the cost of the e-mail accounts. I had ad-blocking software so who cared. Then the government, who hates whistleblowers and anyone trying to get from point a to point b without having a GED failure in uniform and gloves clumsily making doctor-touchy moves, collects cellphone data (I don't care so much: the US govt can't collect my Canada-phone data) and who knows what from our e-mail accounts.

So I head to TOR. I get Vidalia bundle, and think oh maybe a tormail account too. But the Thunderbird mail reader from Mozilla does not work when I use TOR's help instructions. I try binreader to read usenet for free, but binreader isn't working for the same reason Thunderbird isn't: something about proxy server connections being refused even though I checked my firewall settings and allowed each new program to pass the firewall, and usenet isn't much for free anymore. All the info is scattered in internet forums.

And I'm sick of the "like us on Facebook" requirement for sweepstakes companies used to just have us mail in for. I have only one person on my FB friendlist, someone who lives in another country (not Canada) and I've had great conversations and a lengthy (25-year) friendship. No companies, no fan pages. Just trying to be ultradull.

I used to be all up in the net. For twenty years maybe. Now I think I either want to be on the Canadian spying side of it, or mostly out of it. Or maybe I want to know how to configure SSL, know my transport layers and protocols and ports, port forwarding, encryption, VPN tunneling, and go übergeek so I can talk to smelly, fuzzyfaced Utilikilt™ dweebs uncomfortably at schmoozing parties and they wouldn't talk to me anyway because my center of gravity has changed and I have boobies and a ring of gold on my left hand. I hate how much I have to learn to rise above the teeming mass of "data" and reclaim a moue of the fun and information I used to have back when the internet was cool.

Oh and if you've read this far today: almost had a no-spend-day. Splurged on frozen custard. I did not have any caffeine today and oddly my body has not suffered from withdrawal. I guess if you have half-cup four times a week before 10 am you're not exactly a jitterbug.

5 Responses to “vent unrelated to finance”

  1. My English Castle Says:
    1370609881

    I'm pretty fed up myself sometimes. I like and unlike within seconds. Which reminds me, I'm going to the credit union today. My bank wants me to like them, and mostly I growl at them.

  2. PauletteGoddard Says:
    1370616320

    @MyEnglishCastle you're switching to a credit union today? Does your bank want you to "like" them for no good reason, or are they offering a weak "$2 off coupon to some waterpark" if you like them?

  3. LuckyRobin Says:
    1370660027

    Liking someone on Facebook is the equivalent of writing "Have a nice summer," in a stranger's yearbook in high school just because they asked you to sign it. It means nothing and I'm getting tired of seeing "Like me on FB," everywhere.

  4. baselle Says:
    1370662246

    I'm laying low myself. I have pointedly not created a fb account. I remember when the Internet was not the web. I remember Archie servers. I remember showing someone back in 1990 how to get online - we into college servers in Colorado, and in London. I remember teaching someone how to read a bang path, and how to ping. I remember horse and buggy fun and how wild west the whole scene was.

    God, I'm a coot.

  5. PauletteGoddard Says:
    1370670846

    I don't want my surf adventures tracked and sold by FB because I am a friend of an international person. (!Hola Advertisenors! This 101-year-old Romanian lady here she likes Jumex and Huaraches and Citgo oil and shopping at Chopard!) I use Ghostery, DoNotTrack, Facebook Disconnect, and a couple of region unblockers as browser add-ons and extensions.

    Am thinking of going really old school and paying for a UNIX shell account so I can do command-line niftiness with mySQL and even visit gopherspace (how's that for old, baselle? I remember archie, veronica, NeXT machines, ftp sites...). I am a contrary oddball.

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