Pet Peeves

GET OFF MY LAWN!

Attentive readers know that I maintain several email accounts to categorize my contacts and anonymize myself.  I mostly keep them with Yahoo since Google data mines the contents and sells it.

“Oh, there’s absolutely no way to pick up personal information out of our aggregates.”

Bullshit.

The acceptable inconvenience I tolerate for my privacy illusions is the necessity of renewing with activity each account every month.  If you don’t show up and at least read your mail Yahoo flushes you and recycles your user name.

What I find unacceptably inconvenient is their persistent and arbitrary upgrades despite your expressed desire to simply keep your current service.

It’s planned obsolescence of the worst sort, change for the sake of nothing.  There is no improvement in functionality, no new features, they just shuffled the skin to make it harder to read and less intuitive to use by putting your most common tasks several more button clicks away at the bottom of layers of nested menus.

Together with the new News format it causes me to despair of computing altogether (despair of computing) and want to bash rocks against each other to create glyphs and pictograms.

Hey, at least it’s aerobic exercise.

2 comments

    • RUKind on June 29, 2011 at 23:12

    I like: ~OO~ or ~00~. One is more Dogbert and the other in more Dilbert.

    It’s the pointy-heads who enforce te unnecessary and arbitrary changes. It’s usually called product differentiation. Developers call it a fucking waste of time.

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