smart computer use?

I’ve been relying on the internet now for a while for both my career as a web developer and also as a source of information and entertainment. Good times…

Average Internet Usage

I probably spend a lot more time online than an “average” internet user… but that could all be relative. What is average internet usage? Hard to say probably. I’ve seen polls and studies that eluded to the fact that average Internet users use the Internet from maybe 2-3 hours per day.

That’s not too bad. Plenty of time to read some news, check email, maybe browse around a bit, and so on.

Now… I look at how long I am online each day… at least 8 hrs on most days, mainly due to work and extra-curricular Internet activities… but mostly from work.

Anyways, all this time online has given me a pretty focused list of the top things that annoy Internet users. This list might be tilted towards my own usage and experience, so feel free to comment and add anything that you might feel annoys you about Internet use.

Ok, Here’s My “Top 5 Things That Annoy Internet Users”

#5 – Email SPAM

I’m starting this off at #5 because SPAM can be addressed somewhat easily these days with some of the better SPAM filtering services that are available. But it’s still out there.

SPAM is something that I have to deal with every day. My clients SPAM problems even get to work their way into my life as they seek me out for info on how to stop SPAM.

Luckily I’ve found Gmail to be rather good at helping me filter my SPAM. The SPAM folder in my Gmail account, which pulls in email for around 10 of my email accounts, hovers between 2,000 and 2,500 SPAM emails that have been filtered out on average over the 30 span that Gmail keeps SPAM in the SPAM folder.

Good stuff. Glad I’m not manually trying to handle all that SPAM anymore.

#4 – Pop-up or Annoying Ads

I don’t think ads are bad as a whole. People need to make money on the Internet and ads help do that.

What I don’t like is the highly obtrusive ads that either pop-up or have other highly annoying behaviors. The wrong type of ad implementation, even on a good web site, can just flat out kill the user experience.

I would guess that you probably feel the same!

#3 – Hard-to-use Online Forms

How many times have you tried to fill out a form on a web site to register for something, only to commit a validation error somehow (not putting enough characters in your username, forgetting to fill a required field) and end up having to either re-fill a bunch of fields or somehow manage to erase all the stuff you just entered?

Many web sites have horrible form usability. Some forms don’t tell you what is required or what is valid data to enter. Some do but it might be unclear as to the specifics. Some forms have wacky tab ordering, so that when you hit the tab key the cursor doesn’t jump to the next logical field. Some forms somehow manage to erase data that you took 5-10 minutes to fill out if you don’t correctly hit the back button or something.

I don’t know how many times I’ve become frustrated with the usability of a web form. Usually it’s the larger forms that kill me when they don’t work right, but any size form can set me off if it’s unusable. Granted, there are many sites that handle forms great… but there are way more that will do something to test your patience.

#2 – Too Many User Accounts and Passwords

I have a spreadsheet (yes, a spreadsheet) to manage my various Internet accounts and passwords. This spreadsheet probably houses over a hundred different username/password combos that I need to remember for various web sites… online banking, eBay, blog site admins, forum accounts… and the list goes on and on.

Google kinda helps me out by letting me use the same username/password combo for all their services such as Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Adsense, and the like. But that is a very small chunk of my total password collection. I’m sure there are people out there that have user account collections that dwarf my measly 100 row + spreadsheet.

#1 – Connection interruptions and outages!

There really is nothing more annoying than your Internet connection dropping when you are needing it to work. Considering the short attention span of most Internet users, I would say that even 5 minutes of downtime on an Internet connection is enough to drive somebody insane and crazy. Especially when you are trying to do something urgent or are feeling very little patience on the day as a whole.

As I type this I’m even battling with a spotty Cable One internet connection. “We love to make you smile” I think is their slogan. Yeah right. If a bad Internet connection makes me smile than good job CableOne… but it doesn’t.

A bonus CableOne rant…

Plus, while I’m on my CableOne rant… I don’t even feel like calling support anymore because they always make me un-plug and re-plug the modem and also disconnect all my cabling to the modem and then reconnect it (huge pain in the ass).

They make me do this each time I call in, even when I call in repeatedly over several days due to something that is not my problem. It’s like they don’t even have a log that says I called a few times and they already made me unplug my modem and take all my cabling apart a few times over the last few days. Cripes.

But, I guess I’m not the only person who is dissatisfied with their Internet provider. CableOne probably works good for some folks too. But not me.

Peace.

My primary computer at work is running Windows XP. It is a workhorse machine. If it goes down, my billable hrs drop instantly and my workflow is horribly interrupted.

I need to make certain decisions to make sure that this machine keeps running at optimal levels at all times.

Today, I was prompted to install Windows XP SP3 (Service Pack 3). I declined.

Why did I decline this particular Windows update?

The first and foremost reason that I declined this update is because about 2 weeks ago a client called me. He asked me if I was able to help him get his computer working (I’m not a computer tech, I’m web developer, so people think that I am a computer tech sometimes… common mistake I guess).

I really didn’t have any insight, and considering that he lives about 1 hr away, there really is nothing I could do. When a computer doesn’t start, there could be any myriad of problems, none of which can be solved over the phone by a busy web developer in a short amount of time.

But, I figured I’d at least give it a quick run, seeing if maybe I could help him out, planning to quickly tell him to find a local computer tech if it sounded like I was going to get nowhere.

I first asked “Did you do anything recently install anything new on your computer?”.

“Yes, I installed that new Service Pack 3 update this morning… and when I re-started my computer it wouldn’t start!”, is what he said.

Nuts.

I knew right away I wasn’t going to be able to help him. But, I still asked “When you boot your computer, does anything show on the screen at all? Does it prompt to go into safe mode or anything?”

“Nope, I just get a black screen, nothing…” he said.

And that was about the point where I proceeded to explain that I wouldn’t be able to provide him with an effective solution to his problem over the phone. I explained that he should get in contact with a computer tech to see what they can figure out.

Now, back to my decline of Service Pack 3…

So yeah, that is the first thing that popped into my head when I got prompted for Service Pack 3 for Windows XP.

Then, when I clicked the Windows Update icon I got a prompt that says “Back up all files… blah blah blah”…

The first thing I told myself was “I don’t need to go through with this… my machine works fine and is up to date other than SP3″.

And I hit cancel.

I don’t need any troubles from a Windows Update, especially when it has a bit of a bad reputation on the internet:

“My external disks are having trouble starting up, which results in Windows not starting up,” complained user Michael Faklis, in a post Wednesday. “After three attempts [to install XP SP3] with different configurations each time, System Restore was the only way to get me out of deep s**t,” said ‘Doug W’.

Another user said the service pack prevented him from starting his computer. “I downloaded and installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals,” wrote ‘Paul’. “Now I can’t get the computer to boot.”

It’s actually pretty easy to find more comments like these.

Maybe another day

I still might consider eventually running the Windows XP Service Pack 3 update, but it’ll need to be a day when I have time to do a complete Windows backup (not just my files) and then also have extra time to kill just in case the update fails or crashes my computer.

Haha. I don’t know why this one made me laugh. Once I noticed it, I thought it was quite hilarious.

The funny thing is this:

• I am first told that the message is exactly 2148991 characters long. This is a very specific and large number. This computer is showing me that it knows insane details that a mere mortal human should not care about.
• I am then told that a certain amount of characters from the beginning of the message are being shown to me. 106496 to be exact. So exact, that the computer adds “or so…” to the estimation of characters that are being shown.

Come on.

Don’t think that I don’t know what you are up to, you program. You are a lot smarter than you lead us to believe… you can’t play it off.

I usually take a quick browse through my spam about once a day, just in case something that I need to pay attention to has been dumped into my spam folder. It does happen from time to time. Gmail does a nice job of filtering spam accurately, so I don’t have too much of a problem with various spam or non-spam getting labeled incorrectly, but it does happen.

Hard to pay attention

I pretty much never read any spam mesages, or much less pay attention to various spam. There are many funny spam messages to be found, but that is another story.

The one that got my attention

The only spam message that got me to open it recently was this: Personal jetpack made affordable.

Sounds interesting enough.

Better than the usual pharmaceutical offers I find the spam archives. This is unique. After reading the contents of the message, however, I no longer believed that the sender of the email could deliver on the promise of an affordable personal jetpack.

I’ve recently run into an issue with Gmail (only on one of my computers) where the font type changes after I click any link in Gmail after viewing my inbox.

When I load my inbox initially, I see this style of font, the standard Arial Gmail font at it’s normal size:

But, after I click on anything… viewing a message, archives or anything else, the font style changes to what looks like Tahoma:

As I mentioned this only happens on one computer, in FireFox. I’m not sure what is causing this. I’ve cleared my cache a few times, tried messing with FireFox font style settings, and also restarting my computer. No luck yet.

Hopefully I figure this out before it drives me nuts… Any input would be appreciated if you happen to run across this blog post and happen to know what I am running into here. But that occurence would be a great coincidence, right?