Sad to say

I feel it’s sad to say that I don’t think our current leader understands the power of the brotherhood of some religions.  Seems there are other leaders trying to tell him but he must not be listening. 

If he understands the power of the elite and rich “good ole boy” network, then I would hope he sees that this is something much much greater than that.  Something that knows no boundaries – just as we are seeing in the news.

I don’t even keep up with all the political goings on but can see this power from observing people in public. 

My view is that there is a power of religion going on and we are being pulled into someone’s or some peoples’ religious battle.

It appears to me like some sort of ‘Hatfield and McCoy’ like feud.  Motivated not only by land battles, but religious viewpoints.  Appears that we are being pulled in to fight someone elses battle or at least contribute to the support of their feud.  As if they could be saying… ‘Hey Mikey, let’s get the Jones to do it for us!’  …coming from both sides. 

Some further information on IE security.

http://browsehappy.com/why/

Looks interesting.  I think I will have to check this out.

Are we alienating people with too much technology?

Watching the local news one night, I took up the offer by the local TV news station here in St. Louis to go to their website to ’see more on the story’.  As soon as I went to the main page all the popups flew out.  Even a man popped up and starting telling me about his product…. like a live video.  I thought wow, what a way to bait the viewers into seeing all those ads. 

It was a cluttered webpage that was overwhelming.   After tracking down the story line I was interested in… and shutting down all those annoying flashing popups…  I saw the ‘watch video’ and thought, wow, that would be neat to see the news video online.  

I’ve viewed many of the ‘fun’ family and teen ‘entertainment’ videos on the web, and thought why not watch the news online too.

After hours of downloading and installing the software to get my system up to the lastest plugins and trying to get the news video to run there was a tremendous amount of frustration and thought, “is this really worth it?”.

I saw the video play link popup in a separate window, nervously accepting all the activeX control warning that took over my browser window (and whatever else I gave it permission to install on my system).   I was getting excited that I was finally going to view the video.  The bottom of of the video viewer read ‘ready’.  I thought, where is the video? 

I just sat there in front of a blank video screen, wondering if it was still loading.  I gave it a few more minutes, as I checked out the further enticement of the other available news video picks. 

I knew at this point my parents and most other computer intolerant people would have shut the whole computer down and just walked away.  

After gazing over at the DSL modem, I noticed, no flashing lights, as if the video finished loading.  With the video screen still reading “ready”, I finally clicked the arrowed play button.   The response was as follows: “opening media…”, “connecting to media…”, “ready”  but the video never loaded. 

I checked the station website to lookup the common problem log, but my issue was not addressed.  Having some experience in computers I tried to solve the issue on my own thru the security and proxy settings, even totally shutting down my firewall.  Still the same messsage: “opening media…”, “connecting to media…”, “ready”  but still no video load.   

Upon notifying the station directly, the man answering the phone said I needed to talk with the ‘computer’ person.  Another man gets on the phone and says the problem is on our end.   So he checked a video while on the phone and said nothing is wrong.  He stated there could be lots of things causing the problems and that no one else has complained so he could not help me.

Just baffled at the lack of customer service, I was thinking what happened to the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) “methodology” in IT.

I don’t think I’m the only person in society that cannot afford the latest hardware and software.  I wonder how many other people are still on win98SE as myself that are getting alienated from the web.  I also wonder how many ’special needs’ or “disabled” people are getting alienated by the high tech web world.

In addition to having problems with the kmov.com website, I’ve even found that the Charlie Rose webpage is also an alienation.   Disappointed to see a highly educated man as Charlie Rose, whom seems to like to reach all age levels, having a technically over complicated webpage.

There are organizations available to help developers reach the maximum audience but it looks as though the developers are failing to use them. 

I was really impressed to see the St. Louis County Library website offer a simple link for those users that can’t afford all that technology or just don’t want to deal with the activeX technology.  (or maybe it’s there for the “disabled” users. )
http://www.slcl.lib.mo.us/textonly.htm

For those developers out there reading… checkout  http://www.w3.org/.

For users that don’t find it necessary to view all the graphics and popups, I ran across this product that the county library once used as a demo.  The product is called “liftassist” by UsableNet Inc.
http://demott.usablenet.com/tt/

There has got to be a better way to reach audiences without the end users having to make a major time, software and hardware investment. 

I think too much technology just alienates market share and viewers. 

What’s wrong with the going back to the K.I.S.S. methodology? 

If/when I find the way to turn off activeX on my blog site, I will turn it off.

Arghhh!  Technology can be such a waste of time.