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.
vent unrelated to finance
June 7th, 2013 at 06:25 am
June 7th, 2013 at 01:58 pm 1370609881
June 7th, 2013 at 03:45 pm 1370616320
June 8th, 2013 at 03:53 am 1370660027
June 8th, 2013 at 04:30 am 1370662246
God, I'm a coot.
June 8th, 2013 at 06:54 am 1370670846
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.