Less than 12 hours after opening, the Obama administration’s “virtual embassy” in Iran was blocked by Tehran’s digital gatekeepers on Wednesday. [...] White House spokesman Jay Carney condemned the blockage in a statement Wednesday evening, saying the Iranian government had “again demonstrated its commitment to build an electronic curtain of surveillance and censorship around its people.”
Two days in a row the daily woot has been an HP desktop computer. Kind of makes me wonder if everything they sell is complete shit nobody wants. I thought most of it was just stuff they got cheap.
I'm trying to download a file from rapidshare and they're making me solve a CAPTCHA. That's okay, but check out the CAPTCHA they gave me:
This is a sample CAPTCHA image from Rapidshare.
Today, I tried to buy some DVD+R DL media from Newegg. It's not like it's a major sale, but it was lost because I couldn't use their site. I enabled javascript for newegg.com, but there was no shopping cart button, and when I backed up to the shopping cart page, the cart didn't work. Even the FAQ is Javascript-based and doesn't work here; I was unable to read the FAQ. Because they're on the west coast, I'd have to wait two hours to place a phone order, and I don't want to wait.
Today while trying to figure out how to use two graphics packages, I discovered that people without internet connections apparently don't deserve documentation. I am still ignorant of how to rotate shapes in both Inkscape and Xara LX (two programs that will never ever challenge any real vector graphics software) assuming it's even possible, because the documentation is provided as a web link.
I signed up for Callwave because I wanted to try out their new, beta "Vtxt" feature, which will read your voicemail and send you a txt with the contents. However, as I ended up missing voicemails because there was no notification, I decided to cancel.
Any of my frequent readers are likely to know that I am a slashdotter. Slashdot, for all its faults, is still by far the finest geek-oriented news aggregator and forum around, at least in English. Slashdotters have long had a battle with Slashdot over story submissions. Duplicate stories abound, and so many press-releases-as-stories have shown up over time that a term has been coined for it: "slashvertisements". The result was that Slashdot introduced the Firehose, in which users (paying or not) can vote for or against story submissions and mark them with descriptive tags.
When I started reading the firehose my first reaction was one of revulsion. Are people really this stupid? Absolutely tons of the submissions have no link, and of those that actually have them, most of the links are absolutely atrocious. This and several other typical failures of story submissions prompted me to write a Slashdot journal entry entitled Slashdotters need Help with Story Submissions in which I railed against poor HTML link etiquette and other issues. Obviously I have some extra time on my hands.
Copyright © 2025 Martin Espinoza - All rights reserved
