Tag Archives: windows live

Another Glorious Microsoft Sunset

Posted by on May 9, 2019 1 comment

I remember when Microsoft discontinued Live Spaces, which held my blog.  Obviously, I’ve been happily living in WP Land since them.  I remember when Microsoft discontinued MS Money.  I switched to Quicken and eventually switched back and lived with the limited functionality provided in the sunset edition.  I remember when Microsoft discontinued Zune.  I enjoyed my devices until the point that a Windows 10 update disabled the syncing capability in the Zune software, then they were thrown away.  I remember when Microsoft discontinued the MS Band.  I used it for another year after that and for whatever reason, I just started feeling jaded while wearing it.  It sat on the shelf for months and eventually got thrown out.

It was only a couple of months ago Microsoft decided to discontinue the software that drives the Band.  The hardware is useless without the software, so even if I did still have and want to slap the Band back on, I would have no way to use it.  Along with that discontinuation, they are shutting down HealthVault.  That is a major capitulation.

HealthVault was where the band stored all its data.  It created nice graphs and charts and had the capability to hold all your medical history and data.  It was the data repository for a lot of actual medical devices like scales and glucose meters and heart monitors.  And it’s all going away.  I took a look at my old data before it all disappears.  It looks like my two MS Bands recorded data between 7/17/2015 and 1/28/2018.  All my walks, all my sleeps, some random exercise sessions, and my daily step counts.

And this is something I want to say over and over and over.  FUCK THE CLOUD.  FUCK IT TO HELL.

The fact that you can’t own anything anymore is absolute bullshit.  Let’s look at my history.  Live Spaces was free and it was taken away.  I was able to preserve my data my moving it to WordPress, which is also free and could disappear at any time.  True, but, I can install WordPress on my own web server (and I do have an instance running on my web server!) and it will never go away again.  MS Money was not free and was discontinued.  I was able to keep using it afterwards.  This is how things should be.  MS Band was not free and was taken away.  Microsoft offered refunds to recent Band purchasers, but the point is, the maker should not determine when you will stop using something you paid for.  And all this cloud-powered bullshit, there needs to be an offline version available.  Is there anything that can function anymore without being online??

And this whole, giant, disgusting concept of “it’s free as long as we want to make it available” has got to stop.  It’s only a matter of time before people get burnt enough that they will refuse to use your products at all because it’s a given it will disappear at a random future date.  Make a product, sell the fucking thing, and let people use it.

If This Matters

Posted by on December 26, 2017 No comments

For people that love anniversaries, it’s going to be a good couple months.  I got this notification from WordPress today:

image1

It’s a fucking ACHIEVEMENT – it says so right at the top!  Time has gone by and I am to be commended for that.  This is truly a fantastic day in my long, illustrious Internet history.  I have a few words I want to say in gratitude of this prestigious honor.

First, all you young little shits don’t know how good you have it.  You have so many fucking people on the internet now, you can get followers at the drop of a hat.  All you need is a bunch of “Dunk Memes” (Dark?  Derk?  Dank?  Whatever.) and you’ll skyrocket to the top.  You also have the ability to install a bunch of “plug-ins”, which are like air fresheners for your blog.  I see where they got the name from. They’ll keep your blog theme fresh and new for all your attention-deficient and fickle followers.

Me being me, I’m not here to make friends (but I am loyal beyond measure to the few I have).  I just put this shit out here and see what happens.  If nothing else, I have a record of what’s happened in my life.  You might notice I’m being vague here, but I have a second anniversary coming up and I’m going to get really stupid on that one.

Now, back to being crotchety.  Second, punks, I’m older than a lot of you.  So, if you think you’re going to catch up with me and beat my seven years of WP tenure, think again.  No really, think.  Because that’s how time works.  You’re going to hit seven years, I’m going to be at seventeen.  In your face, maggots!  Of course, in ten years, I could be dead.  Then:  Maggots, in my face!

So, how did I get here?  I owe it all to Windows Live and Microsoft’s shitty decision to continually sunset any product I enjoy using.  Remember what Live Spaces looks like?  The Internet does.

image2

That’s about all I have to say about blogging right now.  You’ll just have to wait for the other anniversary for the self-indulgent hit parade.

A Nose For News

Posted by on January 23, 2017 No comments

Update: Now with even more noses!

Before I updated my phone to Windows 10, I used the Microsoft Money app for news.  It had a glitch where if a photo was a certain size, it would zoom in on a smaller portion of the photo.  This resulted in an article thumbnail image that really had little to do with the story.

I don’t have this app anymore, so I present to you: My archive of noses:

wp_ss_20160613_0001 wp_ss_20160613_0002 wp_ss_20160628_0001 wp_ss_20160630_0001 wp_ss_20160706_0001 wp_ss_20160714_0001 wp_ss_20160720_0001 wp_ss_20160811_0001 wp_ss_20160816_0001 wp_ss_20160819_0001 wp_ss_20160823_0001 wp_ss_20160823_0002 wp_ss_20160826_0001 wp_ss_20160829_0001 wp_ss_20160905_0001 wp_ss_20160913_0001 wp_ss_20160914_0001 wp_ss_20160914_0002 wp_ss_20160916_0001 wp_ss_20160922_0001 wp_ss_20160922_0002 wp_ss_20160928_0001 wp_ss_20160928_0002 wp_ss_20160929_0001 wp_ss_20161004_0001 wp_ss_20161006_0001 wp_ss_20161006_0002 wp_ss_20161010_0001 wp_ss_20161012_0001 wp_ss_20161020_0001 wp_ss_20161028_0001 wp_ss_20161107_0001 wp_ss_20160227_0001 wp_ss_20160323_0001 wp_ss_20160324_0001 wp_ss_20160329_0001 wp_ss_20160330_0001 wp_ss_20160330_00021 wp_ss_20160403_0001 wp_ss_20160407_0001 wp_ss_20160412_0001 wp_ss_20160412_00021 wp_ss_20160413_0001 wp_ss_20160414_0001 wp_ss_20160429_0001 wp_ss_20160503_0001 wp_ss_20160525_0001 wp_ss_20160527_0001 wp_ss_20160527_00021 wp_ss_20160606_0001 wp_ss_20160609_0001 wp_ss_20160610_0001

My New Child

Posted by on February 6, 2014 No comments

Yup, I have a kid.  I hate children, too.  Let me explain how this happened.

I do the finances for a non-profit organization.  It’s brand new and doesn’t have a ton of structure yet, so pretty much do-what-you-want.  So as part of my duties, I decided I’m going to start emailing members when their membership dues are due.

I have an email account for the org’s domain, but the email server doesn’t have any contact management.  No problem, I’ll create a Windows Live account for that email and use the People function to store the addresses.  Works fine, since Windows Live Mail uses People as the contacts.

So I start the process to create the Live account.  During creation, I am prompted for my date of birth.  I’m not going to use mine, duh.  I could make one up, but this should be something that anyone in the org can remember in case they need to reset a password or something after I’ve passed the reigns.  So I use the date the org was formed: 10/1/2013.  I click Save.

Now, to my surprise, I am told that a minor cannot use the Live services without parental consent.  Damn it.  This account now belongs to a 4-month old.  So, without thinking much, I logged in as myself to authorize.  Congratulations to me, I’m a parent now.

It would be easy for anyone to create two accounts and authorize one from the other, so there has to be a way to prove that the “parent” account is really an adult.  How is this done?  By charging your credit card, of course!  A minor can’t possess a credit card, so that’s foolproof.  Or something.  Cost to have a kid: $.50.  Some of that gets donated to charity, which I suppose is great.

So I figure I totally own this little shit now.  After all, I paid for it.

Distributed stupidity

Posted by on March 7, 2008 No comments
I recently decided I would put my Zune tag on my Live Spaces page. I used the HTML Sandbox gadget to place the HTML on the page. In IE, all is good. In Opera, it wouldn’t show up.

First thing I checked was my Allow Plug-ins settings for the site. I leave it off by default because Flash is just too overused by ads anymore. It was off, so I turned it on. Still nothing.

Then I started looking at the HTML source of the page. The HTML sandbox uses an IFRAME. Hmmm. So I right click the place for my Zune tag and choose Frame>Open in new tab. Its address is not spaces.live.com, it’s start.com. I don’t have anything in Opera saying it’s ok to have plug-ins for start.com. So I add the entry for start.com and allow plug-ins. Now my tag shows up.

Because everything is so distributed anymore, it takes a lot of investigative work to discover why things don’t work. It’s no wonder that so many people can’t run in a more protected mode – like in my case, disabling all plug-ins by default – because to have any decent usability, you have to have so much technical understanding about how to troubleshoot isolated issues.