Pet Peeve rants.

GasBandit

Staff member
Every time someone has a problem with something on the internet.

Every time.

EVERY TIME.

They call down the hallway to me, "Hey, is our server down?"

And no matter HOW MANY TIMES I explain it....

They will never understand that it's not "our server."

There isn't even a "server" for that in our building. It's just routers and gateways.

"I can't get to facebook, is our server down?"

/headdesk

/headdesk

/headdesk

THERE ISN'T A "SERVER"

THE ONLY "SERVER" YOU ARE ON IS A FILE SERVER WHICH HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH INTERNET BROWSING

"Hey, I can't get to this website, I think our server is down. I can get to these other websites, but just not that one. Can you fix our server?"

/HEADDESK
 
A user called me directly and asked if I shut down my server. Saying that I made a change to the server that caused her program not to connect. It was all my fault. And that I did the change on purpose. All this before explaining who she was, what program was not working, who she worked with on this, or the name of my server. Then when I finally got her to name the server, I connected and said the server was up. I could hear her do a few keystrokes and hang up.
 
I hate how the Steam updater always schedules my updates for hours later, so then when I sit down to play a game I have to wait. :mad:
 
I cannot stand having any unread emails. I will either read them right away, or if it'a an ad or mailing list delete right away. So sometimes when I wake up and chick my phone, I'll delete 20 or so emails straight away sight unseen.

I visited my mom at the nursing home yesterday, and she asked me to check something on her phone. She had... 2,500 unread emails. TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED. :Leyla:

Nearly all of those were ads or Facebook status notifications. I was able to get her to agree to cut out everything from last year and most of the ads. I have it cut down to ~375 unread now. Still not great, but hoo boy.
 
I cannot stand having any unread emails. I will either read them right away, or if it'a an ad or mailing list delete right away. So sometimes when I wake up and chick my phone, I'll delete 20 or so emails straight away sight unseen.

I visited my mom at the nursing home yesterday, and she asked me to check something on her phone. She had... 2,500 unread emails. TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED. :Leyla:

Nearly all of those were ads or Facebook status notifications. I was able to get her to agree to cut out everything from last year and most of the ads. I have it cut down to ~375 unread now. Still not great, but hoo boy.
Ugh, my wife is a notification hoarder. Any time she hands me her phone it drives me insane because she'll have 300+ unread emails, 87 Facebook notifications, 30 Pinterest notifications, a Twitter notification, 60+ missed calls (they get forwarded to our home phone and counted as "missed"), and notifications from every game under the sun.
 

fade

Staff member
That's one of the things I very much dislike about Android. I don't need all these notifications. "Oh, but that's the beauty of Android! You can turn them off if you don't like it! It's soooo customizable." Yeah. I can "turn off" a guy repeatedly punching me in the face, too. But I'd rather just start out in a neighborhood where dudes don't punch you in the face all the time, because who wants that?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I never seem to have that notification problem. I don't know if it's manufacturer-specific, or if I just don't load whatever software everybody else has that does it. But I have seen my grandfather's Nexus loaded down, so even a google-branded, non-carrier version can have it...
 
My phone currently shows 5100 emails.
I had it down to ~ 4000 as recently as last month.
I literally get probably 30-50 emails/day, most of them spam, but I only get to sit down and really clean 'em out once or twice a week.

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Hah, I just realized... Each of my 3 mailboxes has tons of unread messages in them. I just clear the notification, whether I want to read them or not, and it never bothers me about it again... but actually going in and looking...

My personal e-mail has 5,183 "unread" e-mails (mostly order verifications, reminders from financial institutions, and linkedin spam).
My "GasBandit" e-mail has 7,487 unread e-mails (mostly spam and newsletters and other "crap" that needed an e-mail to sign up for).
...

...and my work e-mail has 17,093 unread e-mails, because I handle all my work e-mail through Outlook when I'm at work, and thus as far as google is concerned I've never read any e-mail XD. But even in my outlook, I've got roughly 1000 unread "this is an automated e-mail you don't need to look at" messages notifying me of things like automatic spot deliveries, schedule updates, etc that only require attention if something is wrong. And I've "only" got a mere thousand of those because I did a global "mark everything as read" on April 1st, so that's all that's cropped up in the last month and a half.

Obviously, I turned off notifications for my work e-mail on my phone... that would have driven me insane.
 
I never saw the point in deleting or reading old emails. I only check my personal email about once a week, just to see if there is any non-spam in the box.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I never saw the point in deleting or reading old emails. I only check my personal email about once a week, just to see if there is any non-spam in the box.
Yeah, I just get the notifications, and if it's something I want to read, I read it, and if not, I just swipe off the notification.
 
Expanding on the notification discussion - notifications in general are really getting under my skin lately. There are just too damn many notifications and I just don't give a fuck about the vast majority of them. It's gotten insane. I was just on Expedia looking at hotels. All I wanted to do was check prices on hotels in a few areas and potentially book a room at one. What do I get? Eighteen fucking notifications as soon as I submit a search.

"Forty-seven thousand people are looking at hotels in this location right now."
"In the past 48 hours, 2 people have booked rooms at this property."
"This city is very popular during your intended stay, you should consider choosing different dates."
"33 people are currently viewing this property."
"Click on this heart to save this hotel as a favorite."

I. Don't. Fucking. Care. I don't care how many people are looking at this property - you're not going to convince me to rush my decision and book immediately. Just let me use the function of your website and be on my way.

And it's the same on so many websites these days. This website wants to know your location. That one wants to push notifications to your browser. For fuck's sake people - leave me be.

  • Facebook wants to let me know... something, apparently. But I'll never know what that thing is, because it just keeps showing me the same 5 things it's been showing me for the past month.
  • Leafly wants me to know about all of the BS sponsored articles they've published since the last time I visited.
  • Netflix wants to tell me about all of the awesome "new" shows they've added.
  • Pandora still wants me to know that by thumbing up a song to show that I like it, that means they're going to play more songs like that (though usually it actually means they're going to play that same song - maybe covered by another artist, but usually just the live version, then the mono version, then the stereo remaster, then the digital remaster, then the re-release - more frequently).
  • Accuweather is a special level of hell, because I want breaking weather alerts, but I want them to be pertinent to me. For instance, a thunderstorm warning for the Frederickson area? Important. Notification that the forecast has changed since I last saw it? Not so much. In one weekend I got upwards of twenty notifications from Accuweather. It seemed like every 10 damn minutes the notification sound was playing on my phone. And why? Because it was supposed to be windy. It wasn't - the storm missed us - but it was supposed to be. Of course, that may have had more to do with the fact that during our actual snowstorm, there were no alerts. The Accuweather forecast was entirely wrong and they didn't bother transmitting any of the alerts from the NWS.
I need uBlock-Notifications.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I'm not much help, but, I recommend...

Uninstall/Never use facebook app on phone. :p

Netflix app lets you disable push notifications. Menu button on top left, scroll all the way down to app settings, and the checkbox will be near the top of the settings window.

Ditch Accuweather and get the KAGS weather app (Ironically, not affiliated with @LittleKagsin ). It gives a handy temperature readout icon in the notification area, and only pushes updates about severe weather warnings in your area (assuming you allow it to know your location), and you have to opt-in to those.
 
I had notifications on in the tumblr mobile app. Then I posted a #GOPDND item. It's at ~5K notes after a couple of months. After a day or two of scrolling through dozens of tumblr hits to get to things like missed calls or weather alerts, I finally got wise and turned them off.
 
Salvador Sobral is still the leading news story on Wikipedia. I thought nobody gave two shits about Eurovision. But it is still the leading story when the "leader of the free world" (no, not Merkel) will likely face impeachment.
 
My sister is almost disturbingly well organized in all aspects of her life. When she saw him many unread emails I had on my iPad the last time we were on vacation together, I thought she was going to injure herself she was laughing so hard. She got out her phone to take a picture for my brother in law because she knew that he wouldn't believe it without proof. He's worse than she is!!

My method of packing for going home from a trip also warranted a picture for him :)
 
Who's talking about mobile apps? I'm complaining about all the notification spam on in-browser websites on my desktop. But yes, nothing drains a phone faster than Facebook.
 
Who's talking about mobile apps? I'm complaining about all the notification spam on in-browser websites on my desktop. But yes, nothing drains a phone faster than Facebook.
We're all over the place on notification hate. The latest conversation started with thousands of unread notification emails in my mom's mailbox. :p
 

fade

Staff member
Videos when a few sentences of plain old text will do.

Videos require me to be in a video viewing location or configuration. Text I can read in almost any way. Plus, the video-ness adds nothing to the presentation most of the time. Especially since not everyone can do non-linear editing with voiceovers on their smartphone like the nurse from Logan apparently could.
 
Yes, me too, and it's why I watch videos at 2x or 3x speed. But I've discovered a whole lot of people are actually very different than me! Strange, I know, but there it is.
 
Yes, me too, and it's why I watch videos at 2x or 3x speed. But I've discovered a whole lot of people are actually very different than me! Strange, I know, but there it is.
Oh it's not just you, I frequently watch videos at whatever the max speed I can get. After all, it's the info I'm after, and rarely the performance.

--Patrick
 
Why do people say "I like/love to laugh" on their dating profiles?

I mean, doesn't everyone enjoy laughing? Does anyone really HATE laughing? Isn't enjoying a good laugh kind of a given?
 
Why do people say "I like/love to laugh" on their dating profiles?

I mean, doesn't everyone enjoy laughing? Does anyone really HATE laughing? Isn't enjoying a good laugh kind of a given?
Actually I do know a couple of people that don't love to laugh. One, because they don't like their laugh, and one, because they have such severe chronic breathing problems that they cannot get their breath back and it scares the hell out of them.

Normal people, I think that you are correct, but you're also searching to find something to tell somebody else about yourself.
 
Actually I do know a couple of people that don't love to laugh. One, because they don't like their laugh, and one, because they have such severe chronic breathing problems that they cannot get their breath back and it scares the hell out of them.

Normal people, I think that you are correct, but you're also searching to find something to tell somebody else about yourself.
I'd say those are examples of extreme exceptions to the rule.

Then again, I also find almost every single mother on dating sites say their child is their world. Which is a nice sentiment, but it's that EXACT phrase almost every time.
 
I'd say those are examples of extreme exceptions to the rule.

Then again, I also find almost every single mother on dating sites say their child is their world. Which is a nice sentiment, but it's that EXACT phrase almost every time.
You might just be surprised how many people don't like their own laugh.
 
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