Thoughts and Musings

Yes this is one of the most infamous lines from Family Guy but it serves such a great purpose for me right now.  So onto my gear grinding….

It just amazes me that at this point in time that we have people that are so caught up with the instant access of broadband that they are looking for a browser that can load web pages almost instantly.  When a download is slow at 250MB/s!  I mean COME ON.  Really?  Is it that bad?

My goodness.  Why is it that people today are so impatient?  Why must everything be done at the blink of a eye?

So many of these people would not have made it even when i was a child and the internet was just a thing that was just starting.  Using 9600 BPS, that Baud per second Bing it for heaven’s sake, modems that took a minute to connect to AOL and 5 minutes to load any web page with a picture.  Heck if a download was more than 5MB in size you had to leave it on overnight!

Why is it that i see reports out there now of things like Google Chrome being the faster browser on a Windows 7 machine and people are craving it?!?  We wonder why as a society we have people falling over themselves to get items like the iPhone so they can get on to sites like Twitter just to “Tweet” that they went and took a piss!  So they can update their Facebook page at 4AM when they are working overnight at their job to change their status to “At work”.  Really?  Who in their right mind is up at 4AM on Facebook that CARES what your current status is?  Do you really have that many friends that they need that update 3 hours BEFORE you leave work?  Like they were wondering where you have been for the past 5 hours?

I remember having to actually go to the Library to get BOOKS (you know those things that had paper in them with words PRINTED on them) and read Encyclopedias and do research that way instead of using Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and other sites dedicated to your research topic.  When you actually had to go to a place and MEET people face to face and not behind some online handle sitting at your computer desk with a picture of some ¾ naked women set as your desktop background.

Dont get me wrong.  I love the internet as much as the next person.  So before people read this and say “Well if you hate it so much why are you on it?” the reason is simple.  It has allowed me to do what i enjoy as my hobby.  It has allowed me to earn my MVP with Microsoft for 3 straight years.  I go to forums, facebook occasionally and do mingle with people that i would have never met if it wasnt for the internet.  But at the same time it is not my lifeline to the outside world.  It is not the only way i communicate with people.  I have patience and i can wait more than 5 seconds for a web page to load.  When people start to gripe that their internet is slow when it takes longer than 10 seconds to load a page that gets to be a bit much.

If it wasnt for the internet i wouldn’t have been able to do what i love so much.  I love working on PC’s it has been a great hobby of mine for many years and someday i hope to make it more than a hobby.  I do hope to make it my profession.  But i am not blinded by the blistering speeds that are out there now and can live with my measly 4MB download.  Yes i know some people are sitting there going “Whoa 4MB.  Why not use Dial Up instead if you are so patient?”.  There is a reason for that as well.  Almost everything i do with my MVP revolves around me downloading 4GB files from Microsoft.  Cant be done on a dial up connection in sufficent time without being cut off.  So yes i have broadband but nothing like FiOS that offers 50MB packages.  I dont even have the top tier package from my ISP.  I have the lowest.  Plus to have dial up, you have to have a landline, which i do not.

So there you have it.  I know if anyone reads this it will cause a lot of grief among readers for the sole purpose that it seems that i am contradicting what i am gripping about.  But it is not that way.  I am gripping about those people that are so oblivious to anything else in the world but the technology available now.  Those people that are so shielded by technology that they have no patience at all.  These types of things translate into other aspects of our life.  From our jobs to our family these things carry over and they affect everyone who has contact with these people.  It is like they say, it rolls downhill.  Even i have it in my life.  My wife has no patience and neither does my child.  Something that wears on me greatly at times as i have to deal with it being the patient one in the house.  Yes i lose my patients at times as well.  We all do.  But over something as trival as a web page loading, that is silly.

~Mak

So today as i was surfing the web doing my usual thing, support via M$ Answers, i noticed that my Resource usage was massively high.  Check it out and sure enough, Firefox was using almost 750MB of RAM with 3 tabs open.  I don't know what is going on but that is a serious memory leak.  It was still climbing!

I closed out Firefox and went to Ie8 and sure enough my Resource usage dropped drastically.  With the same tabs open IE8 was using no more than 100MB.  650Mb less than Firefox.  It is almost enough to make me install Chrome or Safari.

For a program to use that much is just insane.  I have never seen it so bad before.  I can't figure out why it always seems to be so bad with Firefox.  I have never come across such problems with any other browser.  Mozilla has claimed that they fixed this bug with version 3 and yet using the 3.6 Beta 1 i still find it present as ever.  I have seen the same behavior in all versions.  Granted it isnt that big a deal when i have 4GB of RAM and a 64 Bit OS.  But there is no reason that a browser should have to use that much on so few tabs.

Time to seriously consider Chrome or Safari as a alternative.  I would go back to Opera, but that doesnt work on the 1 major site i need it to!  Even asking in their forums provided no help what so ever.  All i got was a conspiracy theory that Microsoft did this on purpose.  Even though Firefox, their biggest browser competitor, works just fine.  When i stated that, of course there was no rebuttal. 

Just frustrating.  A clean install of Win7 from 2 days ago with only Firefox installed and i get this.  Now i have to go back to my old ways and install 4 browsers to find one that works right for me.  I may just stick with IE and forget all the troubles...

~Mak

So for everyone that things being a MVP is all fun and no work let me tell you that isnt true at all.  Yes there are many benefits to being a MVP.  But the truth is if you wish to continue being a MVP you have to work at it.  You have to stay active within the various aspects of Microsoft’s doings along with making sure that you stay up to date with the products being released and all available information.

Just to give you a hint about what i am talking about.  Windows 7 released 6 days ago today.  Now with that the Answers forum has been active as all can be with topics, questions, suggestions, feedback and everything in-between about Win7 and all that it entails.  Now while i am scouring the forums looking to see where i can assist people i have my browser open.  Either IE8 or Firefox as they work best with the Springboard Forums.  Now within the browser i have at least 10 tabs open if not more.  1 for the forum and the question i am looking at and another 9 for reference material, Bing, Microsoft Search and much, much more.

Now the reference material that i have bookmarked in total is now up to 150 sites, pages and so on.  That is a lot of things to look through to provide important information.  Along with that i have 64 documents that were released to us to read over so we can provide better information to the members.  So right there is about 640 pages as each is at least 10 pages long.

Add into that another resource that we have which contains 6 full books.  All of which has to be read in order to be able to understand just 1 single product in order to provide the best advise and support that can possibly be given.  That doesn’t include any other Microsoft product other than Windows 7.  There is more to read when it comes to Live Essentials, Security Essentials and Office.

So for those of you out there that think being a MVP is nothing i beg to differ.  Just trying to keep up with the amount of information presented to us and to know it, read it, and be able to recall it at any time in order to provide support is a daunting task.  It isnt that i am not up to it or that i think it is to much.  I just find it odd at times when people ask me what i do to be a MVP and when told they just shrug it off thinking it is no big deal.  “I can go through the forums, newsgroups and various sites no problem!” is the common answer.  Yeah, but it is what is behind that which makes you a better MVP. 

I have been fortunate to be a MVP for 3 years now and working on my 4th.  Some people are a MVP for only a single year while i know several that have been for a decade or longer.  It is amazing when i think of how much effort these people have put forth for free.  Being a MVP we get perks for sure.  But we do it all for free and out of the goodness of our heart.  We dont have to be on these sites offering advise and support.  But we do it cause we want to make everyones experience the best we can.

I recently said on a site i regular that being a MVP and a Beta tester is a task that is not given it due credit.  To be a valid and useful Beta tester you have to really to love what you do.  Most people want the Betas to be part of the “In” crowd and to have the latest and greatest but dont want to problem solve or figure out how to make things work.  They want someone else to find the solution and tell them. This is part of being a MVP as well.  While there are those out there that do submit bug reports and their findings, which is appreciated by the way, there are 5x as many that just want it to say they have it.  I just wanted to give a little inside peak as to what it is like to be a MVP for just a little while.  While it is not a constant thing with as much to read, the work done on the various sites is.  Having to try and read what these issues are and not having all the important information needed it is a tough task to do online support.  I do it cause i love it and it is my passion.  If i wasnt doing this i probably wouldnt be into PC’s as much as i am.  I dont know what drives me to do it, i just know that i do it cause i want to.  Even with the occasional person that lashes out at me for whatever reason.

Food for thought…

~Mak

Well here it is straight forward.  I know my site wasn't getting hits.  I had a total of 3 comments from people other than spammers.  So i just flat out decided to get rid of it.  Stop spending the money on hosting and domains when they are not being used properly.  I had ideas, but it wasn’t happening fast enough and I didn’t have the ambition to get it done.

So I just deleted it all.  Without making a backup, nothing.  There are plenty of free services, case in point what I am using right now, that can be used to Blog and get my ideas, thoughts and musings out there with.  So i am going to use them.

I will put up some tutorials for Safari, Chrome and other browsers, give updates on things like the ongoing MSE (Microsoft Security Essentials) Beta and Office 2010 Beta that is starting very soon now that Windows 7 has hit the streets.  For me it will just be easier to work with what is already out there than to try and push my site.  At least with this there is already a photo gallery, upload space for files and blog.  All of which I can use desktop software to do this with and not worry about my browser preference at the time.

I know that some other sites are now talking about closing their doors for the duration.  Sites like InfoByte (Formerly Beta-Place); TheTechArea.com (Formerly MsBetas.org and always will be to me) are just 2 sites really starting to feel the pain of the lack of members who contribute.  The sad fact is that with the age of technology that we are in now, people can get access to just about anything and everything they want.  While that is great, it also secludes us from others.  There is very little contact online now with the use of forums, IRC, Chat Rooms and such things.  Now it is Blogs with comments and retorts.  Very few people want to sign up to a forum now, contribute and get questions answered.  They don’t want to take the time to actually get to know something about the people they are helping and would rather just leave it as anonymous as possible.  I will admit that yeah i like keeping many things from the people I know online.  But the fact is that you don’t know who you are giving this information out to.

But that doesn’t stop me from learning a thing or 3 about someone and forming a real relationship with them.  I have a lot of friends that I met through online activities and keep in contact with even offline.  Phone Calls among various other things have been exchanged.  They know some real and personal information.  All of it was possible cause of the effort put forward to actually take the time to contribute to these sites.  But sadly now it seems everyone is only focused on them self and want their information given to them without them having to give anything up…

Sorry this wasn't supposed to turn into a rant.  But I am back to Live Spaces for a long time now.

~Mak

A.K.A. Alex T.