internet

Yesterday I read an article on how to turn the Nintendo Wii into a media center. Now, remember, this isn’t a real media center. The Wii has no hard drive, it doesn’t play DVDs. This was essentially a way to stream the media on your PC to the Wii. I tried it, and it actually does a pretty good job. The video quality is less than stellar and if I had a lot of videos on my PC and it wasn’t in the same room as my Wii, it might be worth it. There is one thing I would love to see working on the Wii, Hulu. The flash version with Opera isn’t compatible with Hulu. It needs an update of the flash player, which as far as I know, you can’t perform on the Wii. Hopefully an update will be available soon, because I will stream videos from Hulu. I’d love to watch Monk, Psych, Chuck, and other shows on the TV instead of the computer.

And when will Mario Kart Wii come out? Come on already!

I really hate websites that only offer a part of their post in their feed. I know why they do this. They do this so you have to visit their site in order to read the rest of the story. The more visitors they get, the more money they make. Here’s the problem though. The reason I am subscribing to your site is that I don’t find it useful enough to actually take the time to visit it. Most of the articles are a waste of my time but there are a few shining nuggets in there that made me want to subscribe. Whenever I subscribe to a feed and realize that it’s a partial post feed, I immediately unsubscribe. Why? Because I know I’ll never click on the link to continue reading the post. I don’t want to visit your site, that was the point of subscribing in the first place and making me visit it isn’t helping your cause. So for all you people out there that insist on making people visit your site just so you can generate a few extra cents of ad revenue, is it worth it? You’ll lose people like me. Who knows, I might have become a regular viewer of your website if you hadn’t driven me away by not providing the full text of a post. That’s been known to happen with me before.

There is something I don’t quite understand. Maybe someone can explain it to me. A few months ago Google gave IMAP support to Gmail. Everyone was happy to have this sought-after feature enabled finally. In my opinion, it was a few years too late. I never use desktop mail clients anymore (except when I was working for a technology company and we used Exchange). For something like Gmail, I just don’t see the point. The only thing I use a desktop email client for (and I use Thunderbird for this) is to back up my Gmail accounts. I don’t send mail from Thunderbird and I don’t read mail in Thunderbird. Maybe I would use a desktop email client if I used a different email service. I like Gmail’s interface too much to do that though.

Recently, Newsgator released their popular NetNewsWire and FeedBurner desktop RSS clients for free. You no longer have to pay for them. Again, I don’t understand why people would want to use a desktop RSS client. Sure, it can synchronize all your feeds so even if you aren’t at home it won’t give you the same feed as unread over and over. But you know what else does that? Web-based feed readers, such as Google Reader. Why download something to read when you could just as easily open up your browser to read it? Chances are, you’re already going to be on the net anyway.

Another thing I never understood was using things like Microsoft Live Writer and other such desktop blog publishing software. Why work with desktop software to publish to your blog? I know a few people who do that, but for me, writing in the administration of my blog software is perfectly fine. I don’t need to write my post in a piece of software that wasn’t even specifically designed for the blog engine I use.

Thankfully I’ve never used Network Solutions. Before I started doing a lot of website work I just had one domain, this one. I registered it with Namezero way back in high school, I think. After becoming more familiar with the internet, I moved it to GoDaddy. I knew, even way back then, to stay away from Network Solutions. The company I worked for in college was the sister company of a Web Hosting and CoLo facility. They always had problems with customers who registered domains via Network Solutions and NetSol support, to be honest, sucked. Well, recently another piece of information has hit the net on what a crappy company Network Solutions really is. They will steal your domain name ideas. Check out this post where the author even runs tests to confirm the rumor that was going around.

The short of it is, you have a great domain name idea. You check it on Network Solutions’ website to see if it’s available. Instead of buying it right then and there, you decide to think it over a bit. Well, if you do a WHOIS on the domain or visit it, you can see that it has been registered by NetSol and not only that, but they will sell it to you for a lot more than you should have to pay for a domain. Bottom line is, stay away from these scammers.