Showing posts with label ads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ads. Show all posts

Friday, September 18, 2015

5010 More rambles.

Friday, September 18, 2015

"Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth."
-- Lillian Hellman --

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A township truck came through last night spraying for mosquitoes.  I haven't seen that since the '50s.  There have been a lot of dead crows, evidence that some nasty disease (I forget) is getting spread.  They've found it in captured mosquitoes.

I forgot to cover my tomato plant, so I'll have to remember to wash the tomatoes well before eating them.  I don't know what they sprayed with, but the crickets don't seem to be affected, they were still singing loudly two hours later.  I also doubt that the spray penetrated as far as back yards.  It looked like it just came straight out of the spray pipe and fell on the road.  I'm sure it got nowhere near the pond out back, and I'm absolutely positive it didn't hit the marshy/swampy area two streets over.  Well, at least the township can claim they tried.


I personally won't notice any difference, because mosquitoes don't bite me.  They hover around me like they're looking for skin, then they give up and leave.  Those tiny black bitey bugs that form clouds around your head don't like me, either.  Pretty much nothing does except ticks.


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 I don't have an ad-blocker, so I get a lot of pop-up junk on the screen,  Even with an ad-blocker, I visit a lot of sites that would like me to subscribe or register, and they put up pop-up requests.  I used to not mind them, just closed them without reading them.


Remember when the "X" to close those little windows was always in the upper right corner?  Not any more.  Now you have to search for the darn things.  Some of the "X"s don't show up until you pass over them with the cursor, so it's a physical search.  Piss me off!  And there's one ad company out there that covers the text on the screen and doesn't even provide the "X".  The ad sits there covering text until it decides to leave.  Snopes.com uses that ad company, and I go to Snopes several times a day.


Even worse are the videos that start up with no encouragement.  I'll have five tabs open when suddenly sound starts up, and I have to scroll up and down through five tabs to find out where it's coming from.


I give up.  I guess I'm going to have to install an ad-blocker.  Any recommendations?


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A study has found that the higher your education level, the better your chances of recovering from brain injury with no disability.  (http://www.indianalawyerblog.com/2014/05/education_helps_protect_the_br.html)  Interesting article.

One theory is that the more mental exercise you get, the stronger your brain is.  The other, of course, is that the higher your educational level, the better able you will be to afford top-notch care.  Heh.


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Speaking of brains, back when Jay was getting all those MRIs, I always asked to look at them with the doctors, and they were always happy to accommodate me.  One day we were looking at one, and I observed, "You know, it's no wonder people think about sex so much.  There's a naked woman climbing right into the center of the brain."    The doctor looked at me, "What?  Where?"  I pointed to the structure in the middle, the thalamus is her head, the midbrain is her upper back, the pons is her rear end, and the medulla olongata is her right leg.  Her left leg is bent high up, stepping into the brain and raising and rounding her left haunch, her left arm reaches out to the left side.  He suddenly saw it clearly --- and here's the surprising part, he'd never noticed that before.  Turns out none of Jay's doctors had.  


This is a random scan from the internet, not Jay's.  See if you also see the lady.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

3700 Stupid programs

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.
-- Einstein --

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Some people are worried at the evidence that "someone" out there is watching over our shoulders, whatever we do on the internet, and then targeting our "interests".

"They" know where I am.  The info is used in side-column car insurance and mortgage ads which claim to be specific to my state or my town. They are annoying and look painfully obsequious.

I bought a toddler pedal car for Nugget's 2nd birthday (next month) on Amazon.  Now every time I turn around, I'm getting ads from toy stores for toddler pedal cars.  How many of them do they think I'm likely to buy?  They are pissing me off more than attracting me.

Youtube keeps track of what I watch, and then when they make recommendations of what I might like, the list consists mostly of videos I've already watched.  That is obviously stupid.  They've managed to put together a list I'm pretty much guaranteed NOT to be interested in seeing.  (Watch out for the Eastern Europe trap.  Once I watched a Russian video, and for the next week all the recommendations were Russian!  I didn't even know what they were about!)

EBay likes to take something you bought, then make recommendations of other similar things you might like.  That might be useful to your shopping, but the execution is very annoying.  You just bought a unique handmade item, and eBay informs you that "Others who bought this [photo of your unique item] also bought this, this, and this [photos of other unique items that are still for sale]." It's obviously a lie!  No "others" bought any of those items!

Ok, maybe computers are getting smarter, but programmers are getting stupider.  I don't think we need be worried.
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