Internet Laziness Abounds (Rant)

Google is Your Friend

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Introduction

Ah, the internet, that thing we all have and use in our daily life, that thing we take for granted every single day. That thing that is there for us, whenever we want to see the funniest memes, to look at people’s pics on Instagram, to see the daily lives of friends and family on Facebook and Twitter. We can do all that, and more, but you know what apparently lies beyond the brink of utter impossibility? That one thing that is just so far above and beyond what someone can be asked to do? That little thing that would be so helpful, provide so much utility and usefulness, but we just cannot do? Using fucking Google.

The Problem

To put it simply, there is way too much of people going around asking for links to shit that they can dig up on Google in about 5 seconds. Seriously, these ass holes will post on public forums and ask for links to shit that is widely available and merely one search away. I could understand it if it was something obscure, and you tried to get your hands on it, but couldn’t, then asking for a link is totally valid. But when you seriously cannot type something into a search bar and hit enter, you have issues.

The Past vs. Present

The Past

I grew up in a time where there was limited internet. I didn’t even know about it until probably age 10 or so. It wasn’t used in my school at the time, and I had nothing to do with it, didn’t realize it was something I even wanted to try, it just wasn’t a factor in my life at all. Computers were, but not the internet. To be honest, I don’t know what changed, I don’t know what inspired me to explore this thing they called the internet, but I did. I was about 12, and I remember the day pretty well. My mom and brother wanted to go see a movie, I talked my mom into dropping me off at my dad’s while they did that. He was at work, and there was a computer there that we didn’t have at my mom’s place. I decided to try to get online, but I had no way of knowing how to do this. There was no internet in my life, I didn’t know about the predecessors to Google, search engines like Lycos, Dogpile, and Altavista. I knew the very very basics, that you needed a phone line connection to your computer, that you needed a number to dial and that once your computer dialed in, you would have access.

I took the line that went to our land line phone and hooked it into the port on the computer. I opened the dialing program, and put in the number, which I can’t remember how I even found that. The computer produced a dial tone, and then a variety of harsh scraggly noises, and then it stopped. Once that was done ,I was online. But holy shit, I was online, but what does that even mean, what do I do? It’s like a huge theme park, what ride do you go on first? I had a chance to explore something larger than anything I could even conceptualize. I knew one thing, I knew the network I used to watch as a kid, Nickelodeon, had a web site. I think it was just www.nick.com I went there and holy shit, it was flashy, there was stuff all over the place. The fact that it took like 3 minutes to load up never even crossed my mind. I looked at everything, played all the games, and it was glorious.

I felt like a pioneer, exploring this huge universe all its own. Never mind that others had been there first, I felt like the hero of an epic tale. And I spread out, looked at different sites, and then I learned about the search engines, and from there, I really just sort of went everywhere online.

I used to play games online from a site called Pogo. My favorites were High Steaks Pool Pogo Bowling, and High Stakes Poker. These games were very graphical, and the first time you would go there, it would take a solid 10 minutes to load in. After that, since things were cached, you might be able to load it up in 1-2 minutes. These games were fun because they seemed like they were physics based. The pool one had you lining up a shot, then putting a spin on the ball, then using the mouse to pull back and release. The bowling one had you aiming and then setting the rotation and using the mouse for power. That stuff was fun and fulfilling.

Then you had AIM (AOL instant Messenger) Ah, the hours spent there. I have a buddy, who, at the time, lived about 35 miles from me. We used to go to the same school, but he went off to a different school district, and I was held back in the 5th grade. So now we almost never got to see each other. So, AIM was nice because we would talk on there. I found chat rooms, and I was online before parents knew what that meant. I got raw, unfiltered access to the net. thankfully, and this is another topic entirely, but thankfully, my parents raised me with enough common sense to know when something wasn’t right, and I’d leave.

I had dialup until 2003 or so, when I finally paid for cable, since I had my own money at that time, my dad canceled the cable in favor of OTA antenna since money as tight. My mom moved back in a year or so before, so I gave her the money each month, and she had the account in her name. But before that, yes, dial up was what I used. I would listen to the dialup noises and I learned them. I would know what kind of a connection I was going to get before the metric showed up on screen. IF it didn’t sound right dialing in, I would disconnect and try again. I thus managed to avoid the mediocre to low speeds. Even though we had 56k modems, our actual speed was closer to 48k, above 50 was excellent, I got 53k a few times and that was awesome. Also keep in mind that this is kilobits, not kilobytes, when you translated that down to actual download speeds I would see, it would be around 3 kilobytes per second. I’ve seen it as high as 7 or so, but it would never hold steady there, always either jumping back and forth, or settling around 3. Sometimes, with a good connection and downloading from a good server, you might see steady speeds around 4KB/s, but not often.

Now, let’s discuss another aspect, the phone. You see, with a connection between your computer and the phone jack, you can still have other phone jacks in your house connected to phones. However, if all those are on the same phone line, you will have problems if someone picks up the phone. Often times, it will disconnect you, most of the times it will do that in fact. Every so often though, it will hold on and they will put the phone down and your connection will hold. You could start a download that would take hours, only to have it ruined by someone picking up the phone or having the phone ring. We did have download managers then, and so, downloads could be paused and resumed though, but I often times didn’t use things like that. I did partake in things like Napster Kazzaa, Limewire and so on though, and I could lose a song or movie that was being downloaded. So from the user, the phone is the enemy. For the user of the phone, the net is the enemy. My mom used to love to be on the damn phone for hours, which pissed me off to no end. We were always fighting over it. Keep in mind that while cell phone technology did exist, it was a very luxurious type of thing and not a consumer or common thing. The most common type of phone you would see would be a car phone, and even that is something that is not common and is more among businessmen of the time. So people would be using the land line phones, or no phones at all.

So basically, you had to dial in, listen to the connection, redial if you got a bad one, do your thing, and hope to hell no one tried to use the phone. The net was super slow, pages took anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes to load. The higher of course being interactive and graphical content like games. Audio would sound like garbage, and there really wasn’t much video at first. A lot of sites were light on graphics in favor of faster load times. But you really didn’t care about load times, I mean, sure, you might wish it was faster, but it wasn’t, so you lived with it.

The Present

OK, now that we’ve taken a trip down memory lane, and hopefully didn’t bust our ass in the process… Well, if you did, you can get back on your own, I ain’t got time for none of that bullshit, we can move on. In today’s world, you’re always online, and if you aren’t, things bitch at you. I’ve even noticed certain things on my computer take longer than normal, when I investigate, I find that my net dropped out. Everything’s always phoning home, sending endless streams of data. Some of us have programs on our computers that have a sort of background net connection that are always looking to do stuff, like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and so on. We expect pages to load in about 3 seconds or less, and in fact, on that same score, I switched to Chrome and have not gone back to Firefox mainly because Firefox loads pages too slow, taking a second or more to load basic pages, and up to 5 to load full featured sites, where Chrome might take a tenth of a second at minimum, and 3 seconds max.

We’re so used to flitting about the net, going from email to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on. We live in an age where we have an overwhelming amount of information right at our fingertips, literally, it is so easy to type something in, and get pages of results. We have phones that have more computational power than some PC’s. These phones are again, always online as long as you are in coverage, and unless you don’t specifically turn off wifi and cell data, or turn on airplane mode. And unless you restrict access to certain apps, or all apps, you’re going to be getting notifications, probably quite often. Oh, and when you do, you must check it, check it now! If you don’t, it will burn, it will burn and you will check it, you will. So we do have addictions related to over use of this type of technology now, addictions to social media, and so forth. It’s almost as if people didn’t integrate technology into their lives, they discovered technology, and allowed it to integrate itself into their lives.

Take a minute to reflect on how things are now. Realize how much you use the net, how much you just expect it to be there. If you do, you’ll see that it is literally a part of your life that you probably would not be able to live without. Even if you take out any use of technology you must use because of your job, or educational requirements, and stick to personal use, its still such a large part of your life. I mean, let’s think about it, if it wasn’t, would you really be here right now reading this blog post?

The Rant

Alright god damn it, now you really live in such a time and you can’t even be bothered to take the fucking 5 seconds to fucking type a god damn query into fucking Google, are you really that fucked? I guess so, because I see this shit all the time. Again, I’m not targeting people who have tried first, either its to find something, or asking for clarification, or how to do something if they’ve literally tried to figure it out for themselves, including searching for it. I’m after the fuckwhits who literally are so fucking god damn spoiled and entitled that they’re asking for shit all the time. Also, not really asking but in most cases demanding, or at the very least, taking it for granted that someone will give them a link. Fuck you, use the power you have available to you, if you don’t, you’re a fucking jackass, and you shouldn’t even be allowed to have internet access.

Laziness as at a new height if people can’t literally type something in, and within the first 5 results, find what they’re after. Most of the time, its the first, or maybe second. Most people don’t look to the second page of Google because if its not on the first page, it probably isn’t there. Seriously, use it, fucking love it, because before the net, you’d have to take your happy ass down to the library and actually read fucking books! You’d go in there, go to the card catalog, start flipping through the bitch. You’d better fucking know the Dewey Decimal System to at least have a place to start or you’d be fucked. As a blind person, you’re going to be spared even this because the librarian will help you find it. Even so, you’re either going to have to find someone to read the bitch to you, or you’re going to have to scan it in.

This is what pisses me off about this shit, the fucking gull these ass holes have that have it so fucking god damn easy, and all they want to do is act like complete douche bags and demand links. Bitch, find it your fucking self. Most of the time I see shit where people are asking for links to shit, I will google search it myself and come up with the result as the top one that takes me directly to the page. I just sigh, then shrug, then fucking ruminate on how people are so fucking dumb and lazy and assholish. Also, one thing I forgot to put in the past section is that browsers didn’t really have tabs, you’d be on one site, then you’d have to vacate that site to go to a new one. Now, you can just open a new tab and type in a URL. SO you can be doing something, open a tab, do a quick Google search and be back to what you were doing in no time at all.

Conclusion

If you know one of these people, or see someone who does this, you should give them the link to this post instead of what they were after. Though, due to the short attention spans of people nowadays, they’d probably just leave it without ever reading. People really do have it so easy now with technology, and they’re not taking advantage of it, they’re acting like children, give me this, give me that. I say, take the 5 seconds it takes to type something in, and browse through the search results. If its not in there, try to refine your search a bit. Doing research does take time, yes, especially if you’re running into a complex issue, but the problem is, if you had to do it without the net, it’d take a lot longer, trust me.