You Mean I Have to Share the Road with THIS Jerk??

This photo hardly does justice to the subject, but as you can tell, the circumstances were far from ideal: It was 7:29 this morning, there was a misty-drizzly action going on, and the light at 37th and Minnesota had just changed to green, meaning that the driver of the Volkswagen Beetle in front of me was compelled to floor it in order to, I dunno, get ahead of all the Saturday morning 7:29 a.m. traffic you see here.

Nor is the angle as advantageous as I would like, but perhaps it’s enough to set the scene: A few blocks farther south, this Beetle came flying past me in the right-hand lane. The speed limit at that point is 35; this driver was doing at least 40, maybe 45. Which is fine, except that the driver had to be about as blind as a blindfolded bat. You see the condition of the car’s back window? Well, except for a porthole scratched out in the side window and another on the driver’s side of the windshield, all of the car’s windows were in like condition.

Annoyingly, a few blocks north we encountered a southbound police car, but there was no joy there: The officer seemed not to notice that the driver’s field of vision was seriously compromised (a fancy way of saying nonexistent), and that he or she was continuing to drive in the 40-to-45-miles-per-hour range when the posted speed limit in this stretch is a mere 30 miles per hour.

Upon some reflection, I think I’d rather take my chances with a texting driver than this one.

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No Worries! AOL Is Watching Out for You!

Well, they're at it again.

A couple-three years ago, my e-mail to friends and relatives who are still benightedly using AOL as their internet provider began to bounce. After some detective work, I deduced that AOL didn't like one or more of the links I include in my outgoing-mail signature. These included my e-mail address, my personal web page at Geocities (which they seem to hate), my genealogical page at FortuneCity (that seems to be the one they really hate), and gifs that link to Thunderbird and Firefox.

For a time, I gamely deleted the signature from AOL-bound e-mail, but never without a feeling of resentment. What business is it of AOL's if I want to put a link in, say, my correspondence with my cousin? Seems to me that that's between him and me, and AOL's paternalistic "at least one domain in your email that is generating substantial complaints from AOL members" is neither here nor there: I'm not e-mailing those whiners, I'm e-mailing my cousin!

And of course there would be those instances where I'd forget to delete the signature, and the e-mail would bounce back, and my resentment would increase, etc.

But then one day it seemed that there was no problem anymore, and my e-mail was making its way past the Moral Guardians of AOL Customers with no untoward difficulty, and life was good, or at least not too crappy.

Until this weekend. AOL is back to "protecting" my cousin--who is well into his adulthood, mind--from receiving any seditious materials from me. My cousin doesn't have any say in the matter. I don't have any say in the matter. AOL makes the decision for us, pre-emptorily, supposedly because of "substantial complaints" from members about other communication, having nothing to do with me or my cousin, they appear to have received from "one or more" of the domains referred to in my e-mail.

Get that: I'm not SENDING from a blacklisted domain. I'm merely referencing an address they don't like in my e-mail to ONE person who, foolishly, is a customer of theirs.

Yes, I'm working on the cousin to dump AOL. But of course it's a hassle to change ISPs, and I can't blame a guy for being unenthusiastic about it.

In the meantime, though, I find myself pretty peeved at the high-handedness of AOL.

But that is nothing knew. I recall a certain brouhaha some years ago when the media caught wind of AOL's having dumped a customer because she began some kind of online support or information group for survivors of breast cancer--and had had the nerve to use the B-word in the group's name, and in referencing the disease, and so on! Everyone knows that br**st is a dirty word, and so AOL, in its best Big Brother mode, blocked her from their network for the benefit of all. Until, that is, it hit the media, and AOL looked both stupid and paternalistic.

Obviously, the corporation learned nothing from that episode, and is once again setting itself up as the arbiter of what people may or may not read, and the Great and Wise Protector of All who might be exposed to such atrocities as

wjreynolds@yahoo.com
http://www.geocities.com/wjreynolds
http://wjra1.fortunecity.com
http://williamjreynolds.blogspot.com/

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Oh no! Your eyes, your eyes!!

Keep it to Yourself!

What in the world would give DeepDiscount.com the idea that I upon visiting their web site, would want to be startled, by George Strait's voice suddenly and uninvitedly "welcoming" me and asking me to buy his new CD?

I have whined about this in the past, but apparently my wisdom has gone unheeded.

And it isn't just me. Ken Magill, writing in the latest issue of Direct magazine, hilariously details his experience with "one of the most ignorant e-mail campaigns in the short history of the medium":

It came in the form of spam from Bing energy drinks, pitching delivery service to offices in Denver.

It's bad enough that the receiving e-mail address is not used for commercial purposes — so the address was clearly harvested — and that Direct's offices are in New York.

Clicking on the unsubscribe button spawned a pop-up window that had audio.

A friggin' surprise talking pop-up window in my cubicle.

"Hey, this is Jeremy from the Dom and Jane morning show and I want to tell you about a product I've been using for a little while," said my computer out of the blue. "It's called Bing. It's a brand-new energy drink that's out there, and it's made from black bing cherries, hence the name."

Magill concludes:

Message to marketers: Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. If you want to make a sales pitch on my computer, especially the one at work, please shut up unless I indicate it's cool for you to talk.

I would extend that advice to webmasters as well.