Tag Archives: crap

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imagesYou know, that site where people accept each other in their “connections” without ever talking. Where peoples worth is valued on how many connections they have and not on the contents of their profiles. Where the profile feed (or whatever that thing with updates is called) is so full of irrelevant stuff that it’s beyond useless. Where you are constantly talked into upgrading to a pricey monthly fee for no useful extras and where product pages are skewered so badly that I’ve decided to rather not list any more or my products on it than have Linkedin “promote” them.

Groups

The groups I joined, some with several thousand members, are quiet. The few discussions that do pop-up occasionally are about self promoting “I’ve launched this site/product/idea, what do you think?” or are about support/tech related things that belong on a forum for the product/item.

And since everyone does that, I thought; “well that could be useful.” So I’ve put some stuff out there. My recent OmniCard plugin for example. This was last week, so far I got 3 pageviews from Linkedin and Linkedin even imported the wrong url into the post which I couldn’t correct afterwards. So the only reaction on my “discussion” was me, correcting the link. I got a few profile views. But again, nobody clicked my link.

Skills & Reviews

I did get some good reviews from people I’ve worked with or for. But only after Linkedin prompted me to ask for them.
I did get some of my skills endorsed. But only after Linkedin asked others to do so.

Where is the initiative here.

And the other way around, nobody really asked me for a review. But neither do I feel inclined to write any. There is no incentive.
I endorsed a bunch of skills, sometimes I remove a few of them because I know the person doesn’t know shit about that. But I’m sure many just click “endorse” to get rid of the question.

My Profile

I like to think that my profile is fairly complete and more importantly, true. But what’s the point if no one reads it and nobody acts on it. You may as well go to my real profile immediately and skip the Linkedin “experience.” Inmail is not free. But contacting me via my own site is… So why bother with Linkedin.

Luckily I’m in the somewhat “privileged” position that I do not need Linkedin to get me work so the lack of visibility and initiative isn’t a big deal for me. But imagine I would expect to find work, a proper day-job on there. I’d be pretty disappointed.

Product & Business pages

Maybe I’m missing something here other than an intuitive setup. I’ve made a business page on Linkedin a while ago. It looks like crap. It’s bland, boring and doesn’t invite people to contact me. I can’t really see a way to improve that.

Product pages are worse. Take the AdRotate page or Omnicard page for example. The logo… I uploaded a carefully made logo in high resolution. Look what Linkedin did to it. Pixelated and unreadable. And again, it’s a boring bland page which doesn’t invite the viewer to use the product.

Conclusion

With the growing number of people looking for work and the image that Linkedin has where “professionals” find work on there everybody now uses Linkedin. This made Linkedin into the new Facebook. Filled with uselessness and garbage.

And I’m guilty, too. This post goes on the Linkedin feed adding to the fluff. And I have a bunch of people in my connections I never talk to and so on.

A few exceptions aside of course. But overall, Linkedin has been fairly useless for me.

Note: This article is based on my experience with Linkedin and what I hear around me from other people. This article does not necessarily reflect the experience of others.

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Apparently i pissed off everyone except the ones i wanted to piss off. Yes, this is about the notorious post i wrote last week-ish :) .

I will say this about it and i’ll be brief -
I’m not apologizing. I will not say sorry for writing on my personal blog or remove the post. It’s an angry rant.

rant
verb (used without object)
to speak or declaim extravagantly or violently; talk in a wild or vehement way; rave: ‘The demagogue ranted for hours’.

So there you have it :)

As i so often am, i can be blunt and undiplomatic or unprofessional or whatever you want to call it. I will use profanity from time to time. It’s my blog after all. I can do whatever the hell i like on there. If something crazy like this would be posted on the actual AdRotate blog… Different story.
So all this fuzz and upheaval… Move on!

Now, everyone, focus on what the AdRotate and Events Plugins do best and do what you do best; Use my plugins and be the cool users you usually are.

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In my experience, a computer is as good as it is put together. In other words. A mishmash of parts put together to form a pc if done wrong is a horrible pc. Even if you got the best quality parts. If they don’t play nice with each other it’s just shit and misery.

A mate of me keeps telling me to get a pc. Even though he never even tried a mac, he seems fixated on the idea that PC’s are infinitely better because they’re “upgradeable” and are “not limited”. In his words:

Its an extremely limited and expensive pc!

Perhaps. There is not much to upgrade to the hardware. Where-as a PC you supposedly can upgrade all you want.

But then my point of view. By the time you *need* to upgrade something in your PC. All you can really do is expand the ram and perhaps add a new video card. If you want a new CPU, you’re often stuck on some outdated socket. Which is not desirable, if at all still available. So you need a new mainboard as wel. But then you probably run into a slot issue with your ram, so you need new ram, too. Making it a much more expensive upgrade. Not to mention lots of issues with your Windows license in terms of validating and re-activating. So really, is a PC a better upgradable computer? I think it’s not.

By the time your mac *really* needs upgrading it will probably either be 3 to 4 years old. And you will buy a new one. Migrate your software and done. Easy peasy. Whereas for a PC you need to check if your new parts are compatible, put it together, hope it works. It probably will. Then mess with more drivers and updates than you can shake a stick at. In that process it’s very likely that you run into issues with conflicting or crappy drivers for days before it works a 100%. Not to mention trying to keep windows alive during that mess.

And that’s just my experience with upgrading PC’s over the past 10 or so years. Every time i wanted something new i had to buy a new PC, except when it was just the videocard or harddisk. I’m sure with Windows 7 it got a lot easier. I use Windows 7 and can tell it made big advances in hardware management. Still, it remains windows… And comparing my windows ease of use on a mac compared to a PC. The mac side of the story is much prettier.

So, seriously, how upgradable and unlimited is a PC? And do you need it? Really?

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What is Buzz?
So Google recently launched Buzz. The latest and greatest on sharing thoughts on why your cat is so awesome. Why the wife smells of beer. Why you like those boots. Why the boat of your dad is painted pink for no apparent reason and why you hate your job but love the girl in the metro on the way to it.

Meanwhile, it’s just a new way of sending messages from existing networks with a twitter-ish manner of sending stuff from Buzz itself which end up in your mailbox to stitch it all together. Sounds like…. yes…! Email! And what happens with your email at Google? Indeed, they make money with it.

Reasons Buzz is failboat:
1. It’s powered by Google
2. It’s not a social network as they do suggest
3. It knows everything about you and thinks that that is cool
4. It adds nothing since it relies a lot on existing services
5. The interface is horrible

What does that mean?
1. Google is an arrogant greedy monster of a company which only goal is to “unify” the internet under their terms and rules. And they have two rules: “You click our ads! We make money!” and “Your privacy is ours!” Reason enough for me to not use anything of Google. But that’s rather dificult, sadly.

2. While they sort of suggest that Buzz is a social network, the answer to Facebook and Twitter. I can’t stop wondering why it relies on other social media like Twitter and Flickr. Make your own medium! But wait, Google owns those companies. Most of them anyway. Will they be phased out and merged under the one name Buzz? That would be pretty clever. But for now that’s not the case.
Your ‘thoughts’ in Buzz are treated as mail. Thus they’ve basically re-invented email and called it “messages” or “thoughts”.

3. Since Google is practically everywhere, collecting your every detail. It knows pretty much everything about you. Upon activating Buzz i was confronted with my ex-girlfriend and Buzz thought we should hook up by following eachother. Maybe Google doesn’t know everything after all, but it did scan my emails to find out we were friends at some point. It was highly annoying. Also most of my other “followers”; i have checked them all out, yes all 7. I don’t know these people and see no relation to why they should or would follow me or why i would follow them. Are they picked randomly because we wrote the same keywords in emails recently? Freaky! Bunch of stalkers at Google…

4. For a messaging service, which is what Buzz really is, it should not rely or hook into other social networks. It defeats the purpose of them all! But since it uses Twitter for updates aswell as Picasa, Youtube and Flickr. What’s the point? really… No point! None at all!

5. True to Google, it looks like crap. A boring white and blue layout, like Gmail. Bah! Be innovative for once! At least Facebook makes an effort with a proper site design.

Your thoughts?

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I have this old but perfectly fine PC here.

It’s almost 3 years since i bought it and i have used it well… And now, its on some ebay-ish site. I cannot even set a price because no-one wants it. So i just stated “every reasonable offer”. Which turns out is 50 euros. All together this whole rig cost me more like 600-700 euros 3 years ago.

And yes, i know the specs are rubbish… Its only a mere AMD Athlon64 3500 with a lousy 320GB Sata drive and an ATI X1650. But still, compare it to a mac’s value of 3 years ago. It’s unfair! :( Earlier this year i bought a Mac Mini 1.42Ghz G4 and those still are worth over 200 euros.