Jonathan's Musings

Now I know this is old news, but I came across this site when doing some browsing today, which I just had to share with you!

It's a child site of Annotated Rant entitled Fuck the South.

It's about the American elections of 2004 (Bush vs Kerry) and the ensuing debate and contention that arose between the "Blue" states and the "Red" states.

I was in America shortly after the elections in Nov 2004 and it was one of the hot topics of conversation. The overwhelming opinion that I developed at the time was that all the "normal", well educated people (you know, the type that are aware that there is a world outside of America) voted for Kerry (the Blue States), while all the inbred, gun-toting, pickup-driving yaks in the middle of America voted for Bush (the Red States).

Fuck the South is a New York citizens rant about the situation and the Red State's citizens smugness at winning. It is crude and blunt, but hilariously funny if you have any context about the election at all ;-)

PS He also has another rant entitled President Bush is a Fucking Moron which you might like to check out as well.

The inequalities of life, constantly surprise me...

While those that educate the population of tomorrow get paid something near minimum wage, the world's elite are willing to spend $1200 USD per hour for "companionship" (with a 2 hour minimum).

Granted this is with an arguably gorgeous woman who I am sure is an expert at what she does, but come on! Even at one "appointment" per day of minimum 2 hours means that said call-girl would clear $14400 per week (assuming a "rest" day on Sunday) for 12 hours "work".

Just to bring that into perspective for my local brothers and sisters, that's the rough equivalent of R100 000 per week!

Not to mention what good could be done with that money which a potential suitor is willing to fork out for a moment's pleasure!

Such inequalities of life don't really amaze me anymore. I know that they are there and am at peace with the fact that life is not fair in many regards.

It always strikes a chord though, when I find one so obvious...

PS I know that you are all wondering, "Where did he find this call-girl who charges $1200 per hour?". Well, all I can say is, start doing a bit of blog-hopping and it's truly amazing, and highly entertaining, what you will find ;-)

There are so many great web services out there nowadays with the advent of such services as YouTube, Flickr and my new personal favourite, del.icio.us.

In case you're not aware of what del.icio.us is all about, head on over to its page on Wikipedia.

I have know about del.icio.us for some time, but haven't been actively using it. That changed a few days ago when I decided to get with it and give this blog a kick in the pants, register on Technorati and other such techi things.

I have since converted all my bookmarks in Firefox into del.icio.us bookmarks and will the help of a great Add On for Firefox in del.icio.us Bookmarks am loving my new found bookmarking heaven!

I hate it when software companies feel the need to take a good product which serves a need, and try to make it serve every (even loosely) related need and screw it up in the process!

ZoneLabs has a great firewall in ZoneAlarm. As a firewall it offers everything that a regular user could want with a clean interface and both network and application protection. I love if both for its ability to keep my PC protected from outside attacks and also (perhaps more so) to stop some of my programs doing unwanted or unnecessary Internet requests. And best of all... it's free!

I got a notice today however, that ZoneAlarm 7.0 was available for download.

Being the software freak I am, I always try to keep up to date with patches, new versions etc. so I dutifully downloaded the new version. I saw that it was 3 times bigger than my previous version (6.5) which gave me pause for thought, but I installed it nonetheless.

After installation and restarting, my first annoyance came with extra popups which I didn't want and hadn't expected. After giving those the bat, I opened the program to see if there where any significant differences. Nope. None that were apparent.

Then I was assaulted by another popup from Outlook and was surprised to find that ZoneAlarm had installed a mail filtering add-in to Outlook! I had not expected this, nor asked for it, nor being told about it anywhere!

I consulted the change logs and documentation and saw no mention of this. I also found no way to turn it off, which, seeing as I already use SpamBayes to fulfil my SPAM Filtering needs, was rather unacceptable!

I searched the Internet for clues to this predicament and found no end of complaints about this problem. I did find a solution for disabling the plugin but by that stage I had already decided to roll back to the previous version.

This whole process involed about 1 hour of my time what with downloading, restarting and installing, and now I am back at square one and have to "teach" ZoneAlarm all over again because it deleted all my settings in the rollback process.

My Conclusion:
ZoneAlarm 7.0 (free) seems to represent no significant improvement upon ZoneAlarm 6.5 (free) and is 3 times the size, indicating uncontrolled software bloat. It also includes this unnecessary mail filter component which requires more hassle to disable than what it's worth, and is not as functional or configurable as other mail filter packages out there.

My Advice:
Stick with ZoneAlarm 6.5 (free) for your firewall needs and use a separate software package for your mail filtering needs (I suggest SpamBayes for advanced users). When a new version of ZoneAlarm comes out, wait a few weeks and search for any forum postings about it. Only if there are no untoward issues reported during this time, then install it.