Squiggler

Are you too old to have an Internet account?

This morning, I read an article posted on BMEWS that is so incredible and so irritating, I am finding it hard to respond here in any type of polite language. The gist of the article is that an Internet company in Britain is denying service to anyone over 70 unless they bring a younger person with them who can explain the fine print. In that case, their ability to get an Internet account can be at the discretion of the company. This is the most ludicrous and blatant prejudice and age discrimination I've ever heard about.

My Mother was 85 when she purchased her first computer and went online. In the nine years before her death, she mastered CAD software, Photoshop, and a host of other things that brought joy into her life. She began to do all her shopping on line, she belonged to an online bridge club, she played email Scrabble with me and 2 others I know about, she kept in touch with many old friends, some dating back to her childhood. She typed up all her handwritten journals and helped an older cousin compile his life history into book form. She began to make all her own greeting cards. She used accounting software and began to track all her finances, keep her bank account, and her stock purchases on her computer. She tracked medical records and test results for her friend who had diabetes. She planned a trip to China and Japan (much like the woman in the article), only she used online resources, and then booked all her travel through online agencies; she was 88 years old and I have pictures of her hiking along the Great Wall on her 89th birthday. She considered her computer the best purchase she ever made. When she discovered Amazon.com, she thought she'd died and gone to heaven. I still remember the day she called me long distance to tell me about this wonderful book service she'd discovered online. She loved the computer age.

And think about it ... if this 70 year old rule had been in place, Ronald Reagan would have been barred from using the Internet while he was president. Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Anthony Kennedy, and John Paul Stevens, current Supreme Court Justices, would be barred from using the Internet. John Glenn would have been barred from using the Internet when he made his last trip into space on the Space Shuttle. Ted Kennedy, John Murtha, Diane Feinstein and Robert Byrd would be barred from using the Internet (something that wouldn't bring tears to my eyes, but makes my point nonetheless). Basically anyone alive today born before Sept. 2, 1936 would be barred. John McCain, Donald Rumsfield, Robert and Elizabeth Dole, Warren Buffet, the Queen of England, PM of France Jack Chirac, and Barbara and George HW Bush would be barred from using the Internet now. On the celebrity side there would be Burt Reynolds, Mary Tyler Moore, Kris Kristofferson, Woody Allen, Julie Andrews, Charles Grodin, Judd Hirsch, Diahann Carroll, Pat Boone, Sophia Loren, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, Robert Wagner, Ed McMahon and Joanne Woodward, just to name a few. I'm sure readers can list dozens, maybe hundreds more.

Sorry, You Can’t Have The Internet…
You’re Over 70
_{(DAILY MAIL-UK) - 2nd September 2006 - 10:00pm GMT}

After walking the Great Wall of China and making plans for a trip to Russia, Shirley Greening-Jackson thought signing up for a new internet service would be a doddle. But the young man behind the counter had other ideas. He said she was barred - because she was too old. The 75-year-old would only be allowed to sign the forms for the Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk phone and broadband package if she was accompanied by a younger member of her family who could explain the small print to her.

Mrs Greening-Jackson, who sits on the board of several charities, said: “I was absolutely furious. The young man said, ‘Sorry, you’re over 70. It’s company policy. We don’t sign anyone up who is over 70.’ “Later a young lady said company policy is that anyone over 70 might not understand the contract. She said, ‘If you would be prepared to go to the shop in town and take a younger member of your family we might give you a contract.’

“I have just completed a visa form to go to Russia. Last year we did one for walking the Wall in China and here is this person saying I would not be able to understand a basic form - and it was basic. It is pure ageism. “Somebody has decided when you turn 70 you lose a lot of your mind. I find this is ridiculous.” When her case came to light on Radio 4’s You And Yours last week, Carphone Warehouse admitted it had adopted an over-70 rule.

Why I never use Google as an exclusive search engine ...

I use Dogpile. Dogpile searches all search engines and gives you the results in a list by engine. I never search on Google exclusively and here is a good reason why as detailed by Wizbang's Lorrie Byrd:

Google Games

By Lorie Byrd on Media

Reader Larwyn told me that if I enter the word "failure" into Google I would get President Bush's biography page listed as the first result and that if I entered "liar" I would get Tony Blair's. Of course I had to try it and sure enough, that is the result I got. I remember a slew of these "Google Bombs" a while back, with some liberal bloggers organizing to manipulate the results of Google searches. I still don't understand exactly how Google works, but I thought something had been done to the system to make such manipulation more difficult. Evidently, it has not.

IBM PC - 25 years ago

This was not the first PC I owned, but it is the first PC I ever worked on. Now I feel really really old.

Happy Birthday, IBM PC!

A post by Maynard

Wow, it's been 25 years since IBM introduced the PC (on August 12th, 1981) and changed the world. The original PC box, costing slightly over $1500, had 16 megabytes of memory and a tape cassette to store digital data. A floppy disk drive cost extra, and hard drives weren't available.

Interesting web trivia

I am sometimes asked if I've made a typo with my ICQ number because it is so low and contains so few numbers. Mine is 480,168 and they are now assigning numbers over 312,400,000. When I first started my online odyssey, there was nothing called the World Wide Web, there was nothing called Windows, no mouse to point and click, and there were NO browsers. I had been participating through bulletin boards and early Compuserve access for several years before we, as non governmental/academic users, could go WWW. Back then, according to the following article, it was believed that a web that could service 4 billion would suffice. Seems extrardinary even now, that 4 billion number. But, not so fast. We are running out of space. How does one even say this huge number?

340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 new web addresses created by internet chiefs . . . so we won’t run out of space soon, then

By Jonathan Richards  

TO THE lay observer it seems like an infinite network of computers, servers and cables stretching around the globe.

But the worldwide web is filling up. So quickly, it turns out, that programmers have had to devise a new one.

Of the internet addresses available, more than three quarters are already in use, and the remainder are expected to be assigned by 2009. So, what will happen as more people in developing countries come online? The answer is IPv6, a new internet protocol that has more spaces than the old one: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 spaces, in fact. “Currently there’s four billion addresses available and there are six billion humans on Earth, so there’s obviously an issue there,” said David Kessens, chairman of the IPv6 working group at RIPE, one of five regional internet registries in charge of rolling it out.

Every device that is connected to the internet — websites, computers and mobile phones — needs an “internet address” to locate it on the network.

When the internet was developed in the 1980s, programmers had no idea how big it would become. They gave each address a “16-bit” number, which meant that the total number of available addresses worked out at about four billion (2 to the power of 32).

But as use grew, it became clear that the old protocol, IPv4, wasn’t big enough, so a new one was written based on “32-bit numbers”. That increased the number of available addresses to 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion — enough for the foreseeable future, Mr Kessens said. ... MORE

ess.tv and "24"

Sometimes I think I'm the only one in the blog world who was not a "24" fan. It wasn't that I didn't like the show, I had never watched the show. There was a conflicting show on in the "24" timeslot that I always watched, so it wasn't until that show went off the air, that I finally tuned in to "24." What this means is that I missed the entire first five years, except for the final 4 episodes. Well, I have now joined the rest of the world and become a big "24" fan. And now, I can catch up. Thanks to a friend who turned me on to ESS.TV. What a great site and for a measily $5 per mo. subscription fee, I can stream all the old episodes of "24" and watch them straight through, no commercials. I'm about halfway through Year 3 at the moment.

But, but ... it isn't just "24" ... they have tons of other shows, from the Simpsons & Southpark to CSI or old episodes of MacGiver. Check out ess.tv.

Net Neutrality -- don't let your eyes glaze over, read this ...

If you are like me, every time you see a blog post with Net Neutrality in the subject line, your eyes glaze over and you skip to the next message. This morning, the Skipper over at Barking Moonbat Early Warning System (our #1 favorite blog) has taken on the job of explaining it to people like us.

First, let me introduce the two “gals”. On one side we have Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Disney, Amazon, and Apple. This group is known as the CBUI (Coalition of Broadband Users and Innovators). On the other side we have the Bell telephone companies, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter and all the major access providers. I shall refer to them heretofore as the APG (Access Providers Group).

Second, let me explain in simple terms what the two “gals” really want.

• The CBUI group wants “net neutrality” as they call it. This is a term that is confusing to a lot of people so The Skipper will try to explain it for you. The term is used to describe a socialist approach to the internet - one for all and all for one. Everybody has equal access to everything. The internet should be non-discriminatory and everyone gets an equal slice of the bandwidth pie. All internet packets are equal and no one should have to pay more for a particular type of content. The CBUI wants to keep the internet “neutral” by (are you ready for this?) getting Congress to pass laws regulating and mandating this one size fits all approach.


• The Access Providers Group is crying “foul” and saying that we need a more capitalistic approach to the internet. They want to charge different prices for different content being pushed across the pipes - and they want Congress to mind its own business and stay out of the internet. They say they need to be able to charge more for things like streaming video, high-definition movies and other similar content from companies like ... you guessed it ... the CBUI group. The APG says they need to let the internet function as a free market so they can offer different pricing models and can thereby afford to upgrade their pipes. The charges would be mainly paid by the content providers in the CBUI, thus their resistance. ... More

Go on over and read the full article, especially his conclusions. Although I didn't come onboard until 1987, I too started with a 300 baud modem at Compuserve and with a computer that didn't even have a hard drive. I remember the day I upgraded to 1200 baud and thought, "it doesn't get any better than this!" Of course, it did, because within a year or so, I was upgrading again, this time to 2400 baud, then 5600, then my first cable modem and broadband and now wireless (an amazing thing this hi-speed wireless access). Back then our choices were Compuserve or Bulletin Boards and in 1991-2 I signed up for my very first Internet account using Chameleon and then a beta version of the first Netscape. I stuck with Compuserve until about 1994 and then moved exclusively to the Net and learned how to design web pages. Back then we didn't have Windows or even something called a "mouse." It was DOS and Unix commands and women were few and far between. Since I am 100% self-taught, I loved being one of the few women ... techy guys were very willing to help some dumb broad who didn't know a thing about electronics. My mentor was Dick Eastman, today of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, he was the founder of the Compuserve "Roots Forum," and sometimes the techs on the old Zenith forum. The Skipper is "old school" and I've always found him willing to give this dumb ol' broad a helping hand. I trust his judgment on this subject, even though I only know him electronically.

Works for me ...

Web media is the dominant at-work media and No. 2 in the home, according to a new report from the Online Publishers Association.

The Web also ranked as the No. 1 daytime media.

A research project, conducted by Ball State University's Center for Media Design, tracked the media use of 350 people every 15 seconds. The subjects represented each gender, about equally, across three age groups: 18 to 34, 35 to 49 and 50-plus. The people were monitored by another person for approximately 13 hours, or 80 percent of their waking day.

"Someone actually came into their homes and workplaces and had a handheld computer, every 15 seconds registering their media consumption and life activities," Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association (OPA), told CNET News.com.

According to Horan, this is the first type of study of its kind. Previously, consumers were monitored for media usage by phone survey or diary method.

Not surprisingly, newspaper use peaked in the morning; that print media was consumed by 17 percent of the subjects between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. When this media was combined with Web consumption, the potential reach for advertisers climbed to 44 percent. During the same morning period, the number of consumers using magazines jumped from 7 percent to 39 percent, and from 44 percent to 62 percent for television.

"The point is that there is an incremental reach that someone can gain by putting together a multimedia campaign," Horan said.

A conservative estimate from the study says 17 percent of overall media is consumed via the Internet, and Horan notes that other researchers like Forrester have placed that number even higher.

The OPA-commissioned study also used census data to determine the spending habits of its 350 monitored subjects. Web dominant consumers' retail spending averaged $26,450, while the TV-dominant group's spending averaged $21,401.

Yet, studies have shown that only about 8 percent of advertising goes to the Internet, Horan said.

"I hear more and more from marketers that they have shifted their business to be more responsive and realign. There is an active movement by traditional advertisers to be able to explore platform strategies," Horan said. She believes that research studies are attracting the attention of advertisers and media buyers and may result in a faster shift in advertising dollars to match the actual statistics of consumer media usage. [CONTINUE READING HERE]

As an Internet store owner, I wish there were more affordable ways to advertise. And, so far, at least, I don't see much pay off for ads run on blogs, either to the advertiser or the blogger. I am, however, constantly amazed that little ol' middle-aged middle-America me often posts news on this blog days before I hear the story on the TV news.

The saga continues

I have had a world of hurt in the past ten days with my regularly running web sites that are outside this blog. It all started when I logged in to make a change and found some very strange things going on. After multiple phones calls, mega multple email exchanges, and a blood pressure reading in the stratosphere, I finally took the drastic step of cancelling a nearly ten year association with the hosting company iPowerweb.com and I'm moving my entire site and operation to another host called bluehost.com This transfer should be complete and the urls resolving by late tomorrow. We can only hope that everything goes smoothly.

So, if you are trying to acces http://www.pal2pal.com, http://www.pal2pal.com/genealogy or http://seniorpal.pal2pal.com please be patient and give the transfer a day or two to resolve properly. Once everything resolves, you should see an index page that says Under Construction as that will be my cue that the site has resolved properly. Once that comes up, I will replace it with the right index file and, fingers crossed, all should be back to normal.

We have tried to keep up with the current affairs driving the news right now that we usually write about here at The Squiggler, but all these hassles and the time it has stolen from me to get to today, have cost The Squiggler in new posts and cost this blogger her patience to deal with outside "stuff."

Thanks for your patience,

Sara, a.k.a. The Squiggler

PS: I know that this site is loading very slowly and this is also a new development within the last couple of weeks. I have not had time to find the culprit that is holding things up in the loading process, but it is on the list.

Having a "rolling eyes" moment ...

If you think this is a good idea and want one, go to the Think Geek site for the rest of the story ...

                                                                      

Zoom

Your Desktop Fun-without-the-sun Buddy

Here at ThinkGeek, we fully understand the sun isn't always your best friend.  But, unlike vampire rats, the sun is not PURE evil.  It does have a few redeeming qualities. Like sunspots and eclipses.  It's also used to grow your own 1up Mushrooms. Some people even tunnel sun rays through a magnifying glass to set leaves, insects and ladyfingers in a glorious blaze. One of the strangest qualities of the Sun, however, is that it can make the color of your skin change. And while it is very dangerous to the cells in your epidermis, this practice of changing ones skin color purportedly makes you more socially acceptable in general and desireable to the opposite sex. What geek doesn't want that?

Hat tip: My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

       

Catching Up

I need to play catch up. Each of the last few days is what I call a "bear of a day." First, my ISP started going flaky on me. I'm on Adelphia Cable and although their central office said "no problems" reported in my area, my connection was down for nearly seven hours. When it finally came back on, it has been flaky ever since. Yesterday, it was touch and go all day long and by last night, I was down again. I finally gave up and went to bed. On waking this morning, I found that it had come back sometime during the night, but none of my filters were working anymore and my inbox had over 150 spam posts in it. It is as if my spam catching folder just up and rebelled and downloaded itself.

My other problem has been my wireless connection. Suddenly, it was working only one way. I could download, but not post here or upload email. Yesterday was one of those days from hell where I had to talk not just to one tech support, but three. That meant spending hours on hold, twice getting disconnected after holding 18 and 24 minutes respectively. Then after finally reaching someone, having to sit on hold again as they transferred me to someone else. I had to do this with Adelphia, with Linksys, and later in the day with iPowerweb. I waited until after 11 pm to talk to iPowerweb so I got right through and for the first time that day, got a tech support person where English is his first language. What a treat! There is nothing more irritating than starting with a problem and after carefully explaining it to someone, realize that she didn't hear a word I said ... well, they heard me, they just didn't understand the words. Worse, I couldn't understand them either. I have not been one to jump on the bandwagon of complainers about outsourcing, but after a day of pulling my hair out in frustration, I think I'm going to start some kind of English only movement for techies. And whoever invented the press "1" for sales, press "2" for tech support, press "3" for XXXX, press "5" if you are a dummy and don't know what kind of help you need and if you are really really dumb press "9" or stay on the line for the next available operator system. If I ever find that person, I refuse to be held responsible for my actions.

Grrrrrrrrrr!