Tag Archives: stupidity

2006 Us Too Father’s Days 10K

Well, that could have gone better.

I didn’t suck as badly as I did in the 2005 Great Race, but I’m not thrilled with my performance in the Us Too Father’s Day 10K. I placed 15th out of 22 men in the 20-29 age group and 179 out of 277 finishers with a time of 58:29. That’s a pathetic 9:25 pace. I’d hoped to finish under 45:00 if possible and definitely under 50:00. I think the biggest think that hurt me was the heat. It was a humid 80+° morning and there weren’t many water stations.

The insufficient water was my only major beef with an otherwise well-organized race. There was a station at about mile 1 and then another around mile 4. There might have been a third that i’m forgetting, but the point is that water stations were few and far between. The Great Race last year was a scorcher, but there was plenty of water along the route. Having so little water on such a hot day strikes me as pretty irresponsible. To make matters worse, by the time 10K racers were finished, 5K racers and their friends/families had taken all the bottled water. All that was left a guy pouring from a gallon jug into the same tiny cups used at the water stations. *grumble*

I’m still on the lookout for July and August races. If you know of any good ones, please let me know.

P.S. "No strollers" means "NO FREAKIN’ STROLLERS, @$$#*%&!!!"

How Do I Loathe AOL? Let Me Count the Ways

1 Reply

I doubt I could have expressed my loathing of AOL any better than Dan Tynan of PC World did.

"How do we loathe AOL? Let us count the ways. Since America Online emerged from the belly of a BBS called Quantum ‘PC-Link’ in 1989, users have suffered through awful software, inaccessible dial-up numbers, rapacious marketing, in-your-face advertising, questionable billing practices, inexcusably poor customer service, and enough spam to last a lifetime. And all the while, AOL remained more expensive than its major competitors. This lethal combination earned the world’s biggest ISP the top spot on our list of bottom feeders."

"AOL succeeded initially by targeting newbies, using brute-force marketing techniques. In the 90s you couldn’t open a magazine (PC World included) or your mailbox without an AOL disk falling out of it. This carpet-bombing technique yielded big numbers: At its peak, AOL claimed 34 million subscribers worldwide, though it never revealed how many were just using up their free hours."

"Once AOL had you in its clutches, escaping was notoriously difficult. Several states sued the service, claiming that it continued to bill customers after they had requested cancellation of their subscriptions. In August 2005, AOL paid a $1.25 million fine to the state of New York and agreed to change its cancellation policies–but the agreement covered only people in New York."

"Ultimately the Net itself–which AOL subscribers were finally able to access in 1995– made the service’s shortcomings painfully obvious. Prior to that, though AOL offered plenty of its own online content, it walled off the greater Internet. Once people realized what content was available elsewhere on the Net, they started wondering why they were paying AOL. And as America moved to broadband, many left their sluggish AOL accounts behind. AOL is now busy rebranding itself as a content provider, not an access service."

"Though America Online has shown some improvement lately–with better browsers and e-mail tools, fewer obnoxious ads, scads of broadband content, and innovative features such as parental controls–it has never overcome the stigma of being the online service for people who don’t know any better."

The rest of "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time" is worth reading as well.

The Da Vinci Dog

6 Replies

Priceless!

"If you know someone gullible enough to take a pulp airport novel as ‘evidence’ that Jesus Christ was not divine—but rather a horn-dog rabbi eager to “hook-up” with a former hooker, in order to father a race of bumbling French kings…do you really think the answer is to argue with him? Using, you know, reason? You might just as well pick up the book, smack him on the nose and say ‘No! Bad! No! Very bad!’ That’s likely to be more effective, and a heck of a lot more fun."

(Fedora Tip: Dom Bettinelli)

Internet Exploder

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I really hate Internet Explorer. It’s a web designer’s nightmare due to its lack of CSS standards compliance. If anyone has had or is having problems viewing my blog with IE, I’m sorry. I simply don’t have the time or the inclination to tweak my layout until IE doesn’t choke on it. If any of my readers wants to try their hand at fixing things, they have my blessing. Drop me a line via the contact form if you get things to look right (or fix the annoying stac overflow problem I’m having). I can’t give anything in return except a public thank you. Perhaps you’ll shave off some purgatory time for your efforts. 😉

Investigating NFP: Bovens’ Bovine Excrement

Ales Rarus

A Rare Bird, A Strange Duck, One Funky Blog