There Is A Reason That AOL Users Are Associated With Eternal September

There Is A Reason That AOL Users Are Associated With Eternal September!!

There I said it!! I didn't think people still used AOL...apparently some people still do and I was wrong. So what is this Eternal September thing I am talking about? This is from Wikipedia's Eternal September page

Usenet originated among universities, so, every year in September, a large number of new university students from the Northern hemisphere acquired access to Usenet, and took some time to acclimate themselves to the network's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a month or so, these new users would theoretically learn to comport themselves according to its conventions. September thus heralded the peak influx of disruptive newcomers to the network.

In 1993, the online service America Online began offering Usenet access to its tens of thousands, and later millions, of users. To many "old-timers", these "AOLers" were far less prepared to learn netiquette than university freshmen. This was in part because AOL made little effort to educate its users about Usenet customs, or explain to them that these new-found forums were not simply another piece of AOL's service. But it was also a result of the much larger scale of growth. Whereas the regular September freshman influx would soon settle down, the sheer number of new users now threatened to overwhelm the existing Usenet culture's capacity to inculcate its social norms

Why am I writing about this? It is because my wife had to email someone two pictures of our twins so that this person could use those in a school book. My wife emails the pictures and the person claims she can't open the pictures because they are not in jpeg format.
Interesting because I remember the pics being in jpeg format. So then I tried and emailed my wife the pics, she opened them fine,I then told my wife to just forward them to the person. Same reply from the person, she can't open them. Then I asked my wife what email the person had......it turns out it was aol.

Now I remember about 10 years ago someone went through the same thing.....if you attach more than one item aol zips it up into one attachment or something like that. So I told my wife to email her the pics in two separate emails and the problem was solved. I didn't even try asking the person to unzip or unrar the attachment because then I would have to explain how to install winzip or unrar.

Really how can you still use aol in 2009? I don't care that you use aol as your ISP but use gmail or yahoo as your email. I also remember a while back when we were looking to interview people at a previous job and they just eliminated all the resumes from people who had an aol email address. The reasoning was that if you had an aol email account you could never be a serious programmer, little harsh I know but that was what they did

So, do you know anyone that still uses aol?

The Madoff Tax Advantage, Some Good News For People Scammed Out Of Money

The Freakonomics blog has a nice article explaining that people who invested with Madoff can deduct their loses as theft, this has a more favorable tax treatment

Taxpayers who invested in Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC directly, or through a fund of funds, have a loss that is most probably categorized as a theft loss for tax purposes. This loss has a more favorable tax treatment than theft losses of personal non-business property. Theft loss is determined and applied to get you back taxes for the current year of loss and the three years prior. These losses remain available beyond that four year period, and they can be carried forward for 20 years…

Read the whole article here: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/the-madoff-tax-advantage/

I am sure it won't make up for the loss completely but something is better than nothing when you are a victim of a Ponzi scheme

How come liberals are so conservative with fuel and conservatives are so liberal with fuel?

All the people I know that drive a hybrid car are liberals or lean towards the left, all the people I know that drive trucks and Hummers are conservatives. Go to Whole Foods , watch the granola types as they park their Prius, you can easily tell that they are Liberals because of all their stickers on their cars. Now go in front of a gun shop, the stickers on the cars there will be more right wing oriented; the cars themselves will also have a much higher MPG. Maybe someone should come up with some new bumper stickers:

Liberals: fuel conservatives, Conservatives: fuel liberals

Now I called people driving a Prius and shopping at Whole Foods granolas. For some of you who do not know what I mean by that here is how Urban Dictionary defines granolas:

An adjective used to describe people who are environmentally aware (flower child, tree-hugger), open-minded, left-winged, socially aware and active, queer or queer-positive, anti-oppressive/discriminatory (racial, sexual, gender, class, age, etc.) with an organic and natural emphasis on living, who will usually refrain from consuming or using anything containing animals and animal by-products (for health and/or environmental reasons), as well as limit consumption of what he or she does consume, as granola people are usually concerned about wasting resources. Usually buy only fair-trade goods and refrain from buying from large corporations, as most exploit the environment as well as their workers, which goes against granola core values.

BTW this wasn't meant to offend anyone, I was just in a funny mood today. Must have been that Whole Foods 365 brand cola junk

Whole Foods 365 Brand Cola Sucks

So my wife the health nut decided to bring this junk home when I asked for some cola for my bambus.




This stuff is just horrible, for one it doesn't taste as good as Coca Cola and second it doesn't NOT have ricking caffeine. Might as well drink a Shirley Temple in that case. So I told my wife never to buy this crap again.