Never Buy Read Iris, or Anything Else, from Iris Link

This person isn’t the first to have problems with the rip-off/scam artists known as Iris Link. This company is well known for making software that fails to work and doesn’t have features advertised, providing extremely poor customer support, failing to provide serial numbers for previously purchased software, and much worse. In my particular case, it took over a week, plus an email and two phone calls, to provide me with the serial number when I purchased Read Iris 11 for OS X, because of what they said was a flaw in their software. I’m now having troubles with my Read Iris 12 license, and have discovered that Read Iris 12 doesn’t work quite right with voiceover, and that it has serious bugs impacting OCR quality. Iris Link released an update that fixed, as far as I could tell, a grand total of zero of the problems. Currently, OCR quality is better in Read Iris 11 than Read Iris 12. That’s one hell of an upgrade! Someone should start a class action against these people.

The original complaint that enspired this post follows:

Hi all.

On September 25th I upgraded to readiris 12 for the mac for $40. It
didn’t work with voiceover. I called iris and after trying to get it
to work for me the customer service person supposedly processed a
refund. I thought I had seen a refund come back in but I think now
that it was just the authorization expiring. So this morning I checked
my account and found that $40 from readers had been processed on
October 5th–a whole week and a half after the initial processing. I
called iris and the person who answered the phone asked for an RMA; I
wasn’t given an ram. so I was told I’d have to call back in two hours
and talk to somebody named Casey who supposedly must have been the
person I talked to on September 25th. But this person I talked to this
morning said he didn’t know how Casey would look it up if I didn’t
have an RMA. I offered to give him my order number but he refused,
saying he couldn’t look it up that way. Since this isn’t the first
time I’ve seen delays or misplacement of information with Iris I told
the man that I wouldn’t be buying from the company again and planned
to file a report with the Better Business Bureau. He told me not to
threaten him and I said I wasn’t threatening, that I planned to carry
this out. He launched into what a big company they are and how many
euros they make a year and how they weren’t interested in scamming me.
I told him that the point was that the refund should have been
processed and the money certainly shouldn’t have been finally taken
out of my account a week and a half after I had requested the refund,
especially since I filed the request the same day I downloaded. He
told me how it’s a long process to refund–funny, it’s not a long
process to charge me and I’ve seen companies refund reasonably
quickly!!! I will be calling back and talking to Casey but I’ve also
filed a dispute with my bank which temporarily credits me wit the
money while they investigate. Merchants do have 30 days to refund
which I think is way too generous at least in this case. At any rate,
since this isn’t the first time I or somebody I know has had a refund
problem, though it was eventually resolved, I won’t be buying from
this company again no matter how good their product may become. I’l
use iris 11 as long as it works on the mac and after that if there
isn’t another program to scan adequately I’ll just have to go back to
using Abby Finereader in Windows. It’s not so much the time it takes
for a refund I’m griping about; it’s the fact that I was finally
charged again on October 5th after the authorization had apparently
expired, the fact that I wasn’t given an RMA, the fact that the person
on the phone passed the buck and wouldn’t even take my order number
and try to investigate or take my number and have Casey call me back
(I know they ask for your order number to process the refund so I
doubt his claim that the order number wouldn’t have been helpful!) and
it’s the fact that Carla and I too if i remember correctly had to call
again because refunds hadn’t gotten processed correctly!!! I’m sorry;
readers 11 was a good program, but I won’t be buying from this company
again.

–

Cheryl

OS X Scanning: The Saga Continues

As readers of Thursday’s posting may remember, I was attempting to scan documents using OS X. After getting the scanner set-up and installing the correct drivers, I purchased Read Iris. However, I didn’t have a serial number.

This morning, my serial number problems got resolved. At 9:00 sharp, I called Iris tech support. I spent seven minutes and thirty seconds on hold (the exact number from my phone logs), before the system gave up on finding anyone to talk to me and sent me to voicemail. I called back again right away, and spoke to someone in sails. They told me that the serial number was included in the email with the download link. I told them it wasn’t, and read the email off of my screen. Sails decided they couldn’t help me, and sent me to support. Support also told me that my serial number was in the original email. Once again, I told them it was not. So, they read me the number over the phone. They never did explain why the system failed, and my serial number wasn’t in the original email. Oh, well! At least, after 5 days, one unanswered email, and two phone calls, I finally have my software!

Registration of the software was another process. It took three forms, a serial number, a key, and a bunch of other information they already had. But after another half hour, it worked, and I was ready to scan.

I haven’t yet, however, recognized everything correctly. I’m having problems with images getting cut-off, zoomed strangely, etc. But those things, at least, have nothing to do with Iris Read. Image Capture on OS X isn’t obeying the image measurements I type in; it only respects cropping information provided by the mouse. I’ll post when I figure this next problem out.

Scanning and OCR on OS X

I’ve had a mac computer for over a year, now. However, for all this time, whenever I needed to scan and OCR something, I’ve been using a back-up Windows laptop. Mostly, this was because I didn’t have any OCR software on the mac. I did briefly test out the scanning abilities of the mac, just to make sure things were working with my scanner, but I never seriously tried to scan something…until today.

The first step, of course, was plugging in and recognizing the scanner. I figured this would be a no-brainer; it’d been done before, and it should just happen, again. I plugged in the USB connection, and hardware growler notified me that I had connected canoscan. Yay! I figured all was still well in scannerland. Just to be safe, though, I pulled up Image Capture to do a test run. “No image capture device connected.” Huh? It worked before!

After some help from Aardvark, I found an Apple support article that told me I may need to download updated drivers from the website. I guess some update broke something, somewhere. Thankfully, the Canon website it sent me to was nearly perfectly accessible. Unfortunately, it was then that I realized I wasn’t exactly sure of my scanner moddle.

The first trick I tried, of course, was to go look at system profiler, and see if it would tell me anything helpful:
CanoScan:

Product ID:        0×1900
Vendor ID:        0×04a9 (Canon Inc.)
Version:        3.07
Speed:        Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer:        Canon
Location ID:        0xfd100000
Current Available (mA):        500
Current Required (mA):        Unknown (Device has not been configured)

Well, that was useless. The next trick: scan my scanner with KNFB Reader didn’t work, either. It told me text was cut off at the edges, but it couldn’t recognize the raised text on the back of the scanner. Oh, well. I suspect I remember my scanner moddle correctly, anyway. I just wanted to try and make absolutely sure before installing drivers. The last “trick” is to just go ahead and install what I think is the correct set of drivers.

Lucky for me, the second drivers I tried were the correct ones. After a more-or-less friendly install process, and a reboot, my scanner could be used. I opened up image capture again, gave it another test, and all was well.

With the scanner finally working, the next step was to get some OCR software. According to this guy, Read Iris Pro was the best. I’ve also read that omnipage was accessible, but it had several bad reviews when it came to OCR quality. Neither product had a downloadable demo. After some research, I eventually went with Read Iris. The online shopping cart was, however, confusing and hardly accessible. Links were unlabeled or mislabeled, and the entire purchase process was long and confusing. Anyone with a Visa card will understand the true horror of the process when I say that it insisted on sending me through the Verified by Visa program, a program that most websites (including Amazon, Paypal, and Google Checkout) all avoid because it has been proven so broken and insecure.

I did, however, finally make my way through it, and was emailed an FTP download link. Figuring that was all I needed, I downloaded the software, mounted the DMG, and moved the .app into my applications folder. To my surprise, that application was, in reality, a poorly named installer. Why it wasn’t packaged as an installer package, as is the correct procedure on OS X, is utterly beyond me. It required several mouse clicks to get through, it froze voiceover at several points, and was generally an awful ordeal. I have no idea how crap like that got through anyone’s testing process, to be declared accessible. After about half an hour of fussing, I completed the install.

When I started the application, for real this time, I was asked for a serial number. The problem is: nobody from Iris Link emailed me one! Figuring that the processing system they used was, perhaps, running slowly, I waited for two hours. When I still had no serial, and thus couldn’t get any work done, I emailed Iris. While waiting for an answer from them, I started this weblog entry, in order to kill time until I could do useful work. After getting the entry up-to-date with my adventures thus far, I did my daily work-out, and hit the shower. Still, I haven’t gotten either a reply to my email, or my serial number.

So, after a day of set-up, I still haven’t managed to scan a single document on OS X. Hopefully, I’ll have gotten the information I need from Iris sometime tomorrow. Interestingly, while searching for product reviews of Iris Read, google gave me several links offering torrent downloads of the software I’m attempting to purchase. I suspect that, if I had just downloaded the torrent, I would have my software by now. I’m not sure why Iris feels the need to punish honest customers with extremely unreasonable wait-times. I mean, seriously: they write state-of-the-art OCR software! Couldn’t they have an online activation system at least as advanced as the hobby developers selling $10 utilities? If you ever feel the need to make an online purchase from Iris, this is something to keep in mind: the company doesn’t answer emails, and at this point only God himself knows when I’m going to get the software I purchased.

TO BE Continued…

The Problem With Invisible Links

While I’m talking so much about things related to web development, I thought I’d post a little rant about a subject that’s been bothering me for a while now.

Can developers please, please, please JUST STOP IT ALREADY WITH THE INVISIBLE LINKS! I often work with people who are looking at the screen. When I encounter links that they don’t see, this does absolutely nothing but ad confusion for both of us. If a link is not displayed on the screen, it should, at the absolute minimum, be labelled “invisible” by my screen reader. This will stop me from asking sighted counterparts to, say, click the “skip to main content link, then look two or three lines down,” when the skip to main content link only exists for screen readers. This results in exchanges like this:

them: “What skip to main content link?”

me: “the one at the top of the page.”

them: “I don’t see it.”

me: “It’s, like, the first link.”

them: “No, it isn’t.”

me: “Oh, never mind. Just skip down to the main article. Did I spell all those street names right in the second paragraph?”

them: “Nope. You’ve got an extra d in Dundas. Third line. Fourth word.”

me: “Hold on. I think my screen reader splits lines completely different from the browser.”

Congratulations, everyone! We have now reached the point, in accessible technology, where it is almost completely impossible for a blind person and a sighted person to communicate with one another about a web page. If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here in the corner, banging my head against the wall. It’s more productive than trying to work with my sighted classmates, some days.

time to leave livejournal?

Why does every online service I've ever joined go to pot about 6 months later? What with livejournal starting to delete pretty much any and all journals the right-wing wacko group Warriors for Innocence (no link; the website is offensive and fulll of spyware…google it yourself) ever complains about, removing journals that have pictures of nipples (even in the context of breast feeding), refusing to allow trackbacks, constant database crashes (what is it, 6 over the last 2 weeks?), voiceposts not working and refusing to accept 1-800 calls from Canada, constant problems with LJ Bot and lj posting, ownership by the corporate androids of Six Apart, the unfair way Russian users were (and are still? I'm not Russian so wouldn't know) treated, etc, etc, etc, I am getting sick unto death of the petty games LJ Administration and Six Apart are playing with us (the LJ users) at the behest of money, political organizations, and advertisers. How long until one of my favourite syndications, bash, is removed from the website on grounds of…well, have a look at bash; I'm sure you can come up with an excuse LJ (or WFI) could use to remove them without my help. Unfortunately, I like my friends page, and my communities. I also like my entries to show up on the friends pages of all you fine folks; without that, I wouldn't have any readers. I also like the way livejournal reads with jaws. This is lock-in worse than Microsoft! But the technical problems and drama are quickly getting to be too much for me. Anyone have any ideas? I need a solution that will let me edit the template easily (unlike blogger; it's ugly, no matter what you do to it), something that can use API's to keep my livejournal in sync with the new blog, and is cheap. It would also be nice if the administration of this service would just leave us all alone, and not push us to use service updates (like that awful, awful livejournal sidebar thing) that we don't want and never will want. Anyhow, whatever happens, when my paid status expires in a few months, I will not be renewing it at any price; the journal will revert to a basic ad-free account.
Six Apart is obviously not putting the money it's getting from paidmembers into servers and stability; I don't know what it's doing with it, and at this point, I don't care.

Vampires are Stupid

First off, a warning: to those of you who hate random links, skip this entry. I've linked words without reason, mostly because I can. Yes, this is really, really annoying to read. Yes, I hate everyone who does this. But I'm doing it anyway; I'm in a quirky mood.

Has it ever occured to anyone how stupid the whole idea of vampires really is? I got thinking about this while taking a walk in the fresh air, because that's just the sort of chearful subject to lift up ones heart on a lovely spring evening, and realized how utterly stupid the entire thing is. I mean, seriously: how stupid is an evil monster who can't stand up to…sunlight? According to some authors, sunlamps will also do the trick. I guess I can see that it's all symbolic, you know, evil hiding in the darkness and stuff, but that doesn't make it any less stupid. And when you combine it with all the other crap that gets pinned on vampires, it's really quite surprising they last for more than ten minutes! Things that can damage or destroy vampires include, but are not limited to:

• stakes
• crosses (crucifixes, whatever. Same thing. Accept, you know, crosses are more chearful, what with the no dead Jesus on the front, and all. But I guess if we're talking about killing (destroying, if you *must*) vampires, that isn't really much of a factor. Anyway, Don't nitpick!)
• holy water
• sunlight
• silver
• garlic
• fire

Any monster that I can fight, all while spending less money than it would cost to buy guns and with objects found around the home, is a pretty crappy monster, in my opinion.

But as if that all isn't enough, what about some of the other crap that comes with life as a vampire? You must drink blood. You can't enter the home of someone else unless they invite you. I mean, come on! What good is it if I have to invite the vampire into the house in the first place? I guess that's why they have the whole hypnotising thing going on; it at least gives them a fighting chance. But in everything I've read, vampire hypnotism depends on you looking into their eyes. I guess I'm okay, in that case. All they really get in the plus-side is super strength, immortality (well, assuming nobody stakes them), the previously mentioned hypnosis, the ability to create vampires to serve you who will eventually turn on you and destroy you anyway, sometimes the ability to turn into a bat and/or mist, and a sort of funky blood-drinking sexuality orgasmic pleasure tie in. I think we, as a society, should spend a lot more time worrying about wearwolves and zombies; wearwolves are much harder to kill, and can become fearse killing machines whenever they feel like it. Zombies can't really be destroyed, save cutting them up into small enough bits not to do any harm. If you're a vampire, I just feel sorry for you.

Another Good Reason not to read the News

Are you happy?

A 12-year-old disabled girl, allegedly sexually abused by the crack addicts who frequented her mother's drug den, lived in squalor and rarely left the dirty
third-floor apartment in the city's west end, according to a long-time neighbour.

Well, Now you aren't. I'm really starting to wonder what the point of the news is, exactly. In this new technological age, we all know more than ever about everything. And we still can't do anything about the vast majority of it. So: what's the point of knowing? Seriously! We can't even change things in our own city; what's the point of reading about North Korea, Iraq, and Iran? Todays pointless downer moment was proudly brought to you by Freedom Scientific, Coke, and the letter “V”. I originally came in here to link to imified, but my frends page distracted me.

I'm famous!

A search for “fastfinge” on google returns 48,800 results. Based on wikipedia's article guidelines, I'm notable enough to deserve my very own article in wikipedia! If we want to follow the rules, I can't write my own; does someone want to write one about me? Then it can be marked for deletion, and we can all spend the next four days arguing about if it should be kept or not. Then someone can edit the article to say I am a drag queen living in Charlston who was arrested 79 times for shoplifting. Then all the websites that mirror wikipedia data (like answers.com) will have the database dump and spread this important information about me all over the world! woot woot!

No, seriously. 48,800 results. That's…slightly alarming. I bet you don't have 48,800 results about you, do you? Huh? I thought not, punk. But only 900 on Yahoo! search. That's a much more reasonable number when you consider how important I really am in the grand scheme of things. Why yes, this article *is* in fact just another excuse for me to attack google for something. You *can* have too much data, you know.

Google Hates Open Source

Google, in it's continued attempts to attack, undermine, and exploit the open source community on behalf of its corporate minions has launched a vicious and unreasonable attack on yet another open source project. The latest victom of the Google Terror State: Gaia, a project to create a 3d, open source method for accessing the data from Google Earth and Google Local. They have forced the project to remove all source code and downloads, and require that anyone who has downloaded the project in the past delete it. The excuse they give for these unreasonable actions is that the open source API makes “improper use of data”. This is sort of funny, as google offers a closed source API that does exactly the same thing. The only reason I can see for this that makes any sense is that they want to ensure all data users must install google spyware (in the form of toolbars and other crud). Google has been on a major kick to get this spyware on as many computers as they can, going so far as to auto-install the google toolbar when users plug in several brands of popular USB sticks and drives. Google has also given major funding to the mozilla foundation; in return, firefox 2.0 supplies search data to google (and the user can't turn this off without hacking in advanced preffs), reports every URL you visit to google (“phishing protection”), makes google the default search engine (this is more difficult to change in firefox, now, than Internet Explorer!), and sets the home page of all new firefox installs to a website with a google search box. You might as well rename firefox GoogleFox; the only reason google continues to allow firefox to survive as open source is because it allows them to exploit the free work provided by open source coders. Google also depends on this exploitation in the google data centers; they run linux and apache, do not contribute anything to those projects, and hardly ever release any useful code to the community. As far as google is concerned, all of the data in the world (including private data like your browsing history, all the files on your computer, and your email and IM conversations) belongs to them, and them only. Any user that wants privacy, or free use of information, are in violation of google's obviously God given right to know everything about everything, and must be attacked as the vile scum they are.

how to save usenet

The more I hang out on usenet, the more I realize that it has no use as a place for serious discussion. If we want to bring the golden age of usenet (1984) back, we need to take serious steps. I don't know that it can be done, or even that taking the required steps would be a particularly good idea (I suspect not). However, the following is what would need to be done to save usenet:

Crossposting has no value, and should be disabled on all news servers world wide; articles with more than one group in the header should be rejected, and the posting account should be terminated. Also, news servers should run fuzzy matches to look for near identical articles in multiple groups, cancel them, and terminate the posters account. I am also of the opinion that: people who have not been regularly downloading the headers of a particular group for at least a month, and have not responded to at least 10 other threads, should not be allowed to start new threads. All alt.binaries groups should be removed, and any post with an attachment (of whatever encoding or scheme) should be disallowed, and the poster banned. No messages with http or ftp links should be allowed on standard usenet; a separate set of groups that need these (like biz and jobs) should be created and moderated; links should be removed from the rest of usenet. No posts shorter than 10 lines should be allowed. No posts longer than 1000 lines should be allowed. No posts that are made up of over 40% quoted text should be allowed. All local groups (like alt.toronto) should restrict posting and reading to IP's located in that geographic area. All groups with less than one post per week should be deleted, and not allowed to be recreated for at least one year. All groups should have an associated owner, with verified postal and electronic address. If the owners usenet account is removed, groups s/he owns should be deleted. All usenet posts should be required to have a valid electronic address in the reply-to and other headers. All usenet services should require users to have a verified postal address on record, and verify posters identity through passport or other government document before allowing either reading or posting. The free.* and alt.* groups should be removed, as they promote chaos and stupid groups. News servers should be disallowed from inserting spam for the service at the bottom of posters messages. News services should be required to share the list of banned users, and not allow account re-creation for users who just had an account removed from another news server. Usenet2 tried, but it didn't go nearly far enough. The usenet needs to be cleaned up, so it can become a valid forum for discussion once more. Okay, I'm done ranting, now.

Canada Follows Chinese Lead

Several of the largest ISP's in Canada (including Rogers and Sympatico) have Today Opted in to a scheme to secretly block access to websites throughout Canada. The secret blacklist will be kept up to date by cybertip, an organization that is responsible to neither consumers nor the government. Thankfully, my ISP has not yet sold out; however, it's only a matter of time until they do, or laws are passed requiring them to. The excuse for this secret blacklist of websites is child pornography. However, consumers and the government are not allowed any say in the process of deciding what is and is not child pornography. Also, for website owners who have websites blocked, their is no appeal process what so ever to get these websites removed. Obviously, consumers are allowed no say into the list, as they aren't allowed access to the blocked websites in the first place. A similar list in Denmark has already been used to block most file sharing websites, as well as other websites (including various religious websites) as hate speach. One of the companies that has control over the Canadian list, Telus Communications has already gotten in trouble for blocking access to the web page for the Telus employee union during a labour action at that company. It will be a matter of days until websites like LiveJournal are blocked by this list; first, LiveJournal can be used (and has been used) to host child porn on various users journals. Second, Rogers and Sympatico both have contracts with providers of websites that compete with Live Journal (Yahoo! 360 and MSN Spaces respectively). Now that this list is in place, there is no insentive, or legal requirement, for internet service providers to allow Canadians access to websites that compete with their service in any way. Expect to see skype and other voip providers blocked, as they are in competition with Rogers Home Phone and Bell Sympatico's landline phone services. Expect to see google blocked (or redirected to msn search or yahoo search), as all Canadian ISP's participating in this filtering list have contracts with other internet search providers. Today, November 24, in the year of our lord 2006, marks the first death throws of the internet in Canada. It was good while it lasted; enjoy it, as you've got just weeks or months left.

an update

We can't have two days without an update anymore; it's not allowed. So: this is an update. I reorganized my rss feeds today, and moved all my feeds to my friends page. Now I just have to set my rss reader to get my friends rss feed; down from several feeds to one. This means less CPU, disc space, and bandwidth. This is good. Also, it makes my friends page more interesting. Check it. I was going to post an article I wrote called _how to be anoying on irc_, but it needs further editing. That'll probably come tomorrow or the next day. Also, have a link to mp3tag, a program for semi-automaticly tagging your music. Despite the name, it can do mp3/ogg/flac/mpc/etc. Looks up data on discogs, freedb, and amazon. Can get everything from publisher to copyright date to the obvious artist, album, and genre. I didn't realize you could use freedb on files you'd already ripped, but yup, you can. I wish, though, that it had support for bitzi ticket and music brains. Then the tagging datastorm of mega music organization would be complete! Oh, and mp3tag can rename files based on tags or update tags based on file names. So one could easily kill dupes with a little work. Oh, and you *can't* find metadata for indi artists (example) no matter what you do. Nobody in the entire world has published a tracklist for _ready to fly_. Type it in? Type it in? What do you *mean* type it in? If I wanted to type it in, I'd use *vinal*! It's all you other monkeys who are responsible for typing it in! That's what FreeDb is *for*: other people typing in tracklists for me.

is this a piano?

Someone just came into team talk (voicechat app I hang out on). I have never seen them before, and based on the settings they had, I strongly suspect they have never used the program before. They said: “I now have a Piano.” *plays a guitar into the input* “Or at least I think it's a piano. It has strings, and I'm trying to learn to play it.” After laughing my a$$ off, I clarified that it was, in fact, a Guitar. Response: “Oh yeah. A piano doesn't have strings.” I tried to explain about piano strings, but I don't think the concept found an understanding home. The person thought about this, and, a moment later, said: “Well, anyway, it's not a particularly good one, or anything. It won't connect to my computer with USB.” I just didn't say _anything_. For your Information, it was not an electric guitar. It was an acoustic guitar, with steel strings. It had no need to connect to the computer, with USB or anything else! After several _minutes_ of reflection along the lines of “What good is an instrument that I can't connect to my computer with USB?” the person informed me that: “I'm off to go see if I can make this do anything. I wonder how you make it run a program?” He then left. Good grief. What is the world coming to? I thought I was the most unmusical person in the world. But…I guess not. By the way, Guys, I just found this tuba, but it didn't come with an adapter! Does anyone have an extra adapter so I can plug in my tuba? Maybe I'll buy one tomorrow when I go to get new strings for my xylophone.

remember

Today is remembrance day. Remember the men and women of world war II who fought to protect international freedom, as you hand your liberty over to dictators. Remember what the American men of the civil war fought and died for, as your voting machines discard your votes and corrupt your elections. Remember why the world rose up against Germany in the first place, as you put anyone Islamic on a no-fly list. Remember the values that thousands gave up their lives for, as you exchange freedom for security. Remember the true value of what you have given up.

Also, remember that today is Rosie’s birthday. As things continue to suck on a grand scale, it’s the people around you that are most important. So: happy birthday!

no more links!

You know what's really annoying? Of course you do. Do you know what I'm really annoyed about right now? I'm currently annoyed with the plague of overlinking that seems to hit some weblogs. If you read many livejournals or weblogs, I'm sure you know of at least one person who partakes in this awful practice:
linking almost every word or phrase in the entry with things only slightly related to the phrase in question, and hardly at all related to the entry itself. Why do people do this? Do they really expect me to click on the phrase “some people” each of the nine times they've linked it? Of course not. Does anyone know where any of these links lead without clicking them?
No. Does anyone care? No. What is the point! Just because your aunt was having roofing done doesn't mean you have to link to the Tarpit, New York
Roofing Association. Nobody cares. I think we should pass a knew law
that limits weblogs to, at most, three links per post. They should be forced to explain everything else related,
and if it's not related, don't link it! Thank you. The same idea could be applied to wikipedia. It doesn't
need a page full of links. It has a see also section for each article, so why are any further links needed? I just don't understand. If you found this
post annoying, it's because I used a computer program to insert random links into the text for me. I'm making a point. No, I won't do it again.

the spam I get

Just got an ad for, of all things, a website calling itself Toronto Escort Review (no, I'm not going to link it, thanks). Yeah, it's what it sounds like. When did the word escort come to mean whore, anyway? Just figured I'd mention it; the creepyness of getting spam about the city you live in is unbelievable. Especially that sort of spam. And the creepyness of guys who register with a website to review and discuss their experiences with various “escorts” is also unbelievable. Also, since when did all of these “escorts” have websites? They all seem to. Come on! Is this something guys shop online for? Really? Good grief. Then again, you can shop online for a bride, so I guess it's really sort of similar, in a not really particularly similar sort of way. What is wrong with us!

and you thought you had stupid elections

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Loretta Nall, the Libertarian Party's write-in candidate for governor of Alabama, is campaigning on her cleavage and hoping that voters
will eventually focus on her platform.

“It started out as a joke, but it blew up into something huge,” said Nall, a 32-year-old with dyed blond hair.

Yup. Have a sideshow to distract everyone from the real issues that people should be concerned about. Good going, democracy! If we keep people completely distracted with beer, drugs, and tits, they won't have a chance in hell of becoming informed voters! Let's lower taxes and take away some more freedoms and social programs! this woman should be shot for something (treason, stupidity, immorality, or annoiance…take your pick) PS: is it just me, or is LjTalk getting slow?

The American Conservative Party is Scary

This is the sort of crap that makes it hard to be a moderate Christian. While I don't believe gays/lesbians/bisexuals are in anything like a natural state (“the way God intended”), I don't understand the hatred and fear that comes off the extreme majority of Christians over this. We don't treat anyone with physical issues, adiction issues, or any other issues but sexual ones this way. I find drinkers and drug users and smokers more unnatural, dangerous, and hateful than homosexuals; why won't we deal with them? None of those issues are natural, either. And they've caused more death and suffering throughout history than the glb folks ever have. When the rest of the world is perfect, then we can focus on “curing” bisexuals. And you know what? I bet when the world is perfect, and we're all out of asshole parents, jerk boyfriends/girlfriends/husbands/wives, drug addicted parents, poverty, and abusive relatives, we'll hardly have any bisexuals/lesbians/homosexuals left.

reflections on the two space rule

According to this article, putting two spaces at the end of your sentences is not required anymore! Huh? This is something I've *always* done. I'm doing it right now, in fact. I physically cannot type without pressing two spaces at the end of a sentence. Is this not done anymore? Really?

I mean, I was told to do this way back in the days when I was writing braille, of all things. Then when moving to the computer, my typing teachers all said this was the way it was to be done. My parents told me that's how it's done. Now, suddenly, I find a bunch of people saying that this isn't right anymore! Huh? Have I really been doing this wrong for 9 years? Are all the people on the internets just crazy? My faith in my abilities as a typest, writer, and computer user have been shaken!

thought is the 5(th) dimension!

The following was written at around 2 in the morning, when I was half asleep. It made a lot more sense, and sounded a lot more profound, before I woke up fully. It was written as a result of one of those dreams where you wake up believing you've been told the secret explaination for life, the universe, and everything. Unfortunately, despite my excelent dream recall, I always forget these types of dreams right away. Judging by my early morning rantings, it's not much of a loss. Now, here we go…

The universe is provably made up of the five dimensions of existence and the anti-universe mirror right angle unprovable five dimensions! This can be proved by experiencing fully human existence in all of the 5 real dimensions, and consideration yields another five of simetrical mirror dimentions, for a 10 dimensional universe-objecct in 13d god-space.

First, it is easy to consider the mundane dimensions 6, 7, and 8 (numbered to avoid negative dimension numbers for the anti-universe or mirror dimensions) because of easy experience. Everyone is familiar with perseption of a 3d object, like themselves. This has width(6), hight(7), and length(8). A perseption of a cubic object can also result in the understanding of the right angle universal law of dimensionality, mainly that every real dimension, including mirror dimensions 1-5, must be at direct right angles to every other dimension.

Now, time is the less obviously ninth dimension. However, it is not directly seen as all things travel at a steady state through this dimension, and nothing has protrusions for time modification. However, consider that when something is created to when it is destroyed, during this “time” it exists. Thus, everything trails and protrudes giant time-worms depending for length on creation and destruction! However, you cannot directly see the time-worm but you know it exists because you know that you existed before, or must assume that you existed before and everything didn't just start one second ago like it is now because that's just stupid. This is called “philosophy”. We can also prove the time worms are at right angles to the rest of the universe (they have only one dimension for obvious reasons) through measurement of a time worm against any other dimension. For an example, one could consider the graph of the hight of a tree against the time; as the time is longer (growing the time worm, we could say) the tree becomes taller also.

Okay! Now for the difficult part: the mysterious and undiscovered tenth dimension. It's the one we mostly use in this discourse. It's sometimes called “thought” or “thinking” and is where the human spirit is stored until plucked away from the other dimensions as they are destroyed by God. This is why God is in a 13 dimensional universe at least, but maybe 15 depending: he must tend the many 10 dimensional universe and anti-universe semetrical objects. Also, that is why the scientest has not been able to discover thought: the brain is a physical interface to the tenth dimension where the thought goes on, but thinking is not in the brain. It is measured from there, but there is no thought in your brains. Until the AI researchers look to the tenth dimension for thought, they will not make a thinking machine in only four dimensions! Also, consider the speed of thought: it is two fast to take place in only the four dimensions.

Well, ummm, that's it. Enjoy? Looks like something that should be on alt.religion, and maybe sci.physics. Hmmm…I feel a calling: I could be the next net.legend! Nah. Too much work.