It’s About Making Babies!

Diminutive names. Baby talk. Bobby, Tommy, Sis, Baby.

Brendan Fraser has an extremely potent line in the otherwise far-fetched ‘Blast From The Past’ movie. He explains to a friend that manners are an expression of respect. Getting ‘formal’ is not about thinking yourself above others, but treating others as being responsible, and worthy of respect.

So what does it mean, when you are on a date, and your date never uses your name they way you prefer? When you have to answer to Baby, to Sugar? Are these endearments, or signs that your date considers you a possession or barely competent? Oops. That starts looking like a red flag!

You will want to know if your prospective life mate calls everyone by name. Some people grow up making kid’s names for other people. This is often an endearment, an expression of affection. But it also establishes a responsible person relationship to a dependent person. Call Samuel ‘Sammy’, and you express a difference in class, that Sammy is lower in stature, lower in social position, is less experienced/mature. A child to be taken care of. Many families do this, teaching their kids to belittle others, without ever thinking why. Other people learn it from friends, or at school, or at church. Who has ever heard a sermon with the phrase ‘little Tommy’ when describing an illustrative scene?

So if you start catching kiddie type names, make sure that your name-caller knows when to be respectful with you and with others.

I had an interesting experience last night. I discovered Amazon.com started selling DRM-free tunes. So I visited. They want you to download their ‘MP3 Downloader’ to download the tunes.

So I did.

I downloaded the downloader, launched it, and ..

I have had problems with Amazon.com for a couple of years now. eBay.com, PayPal.com, Amazon.com, and some other sites are so .. geeky? Disrespectful? Abusive? Just plain slow?

It reminds me of the story told of the IBM System 360 mainframe computer and the IBM 3278 (text only) termnial. It seems that customers complained to IBM that at certain times that their computer slowed down. This was 1980 or earlier, when IBM was *the* prestige name in computing, most work involved a keypunch to program the machine, and every computer center (where the one or two computers the organization owned were kept) had a device for sorting boxes of punched cards.

IBM was unhappy explaining to customers that their big, expensive machine just got busy. Here the customer thought that they had bought (leased) a *powerful* computer that would take care of their needs. So IBM put a timer on the terminals. And the user got a two (2) second delay. Every time they hit the ‘return’ or ‘send’ or whichever IBM called it. That way, there was no noticeable quickness when the machine wasn’t busy, nor tangible sluggishness while processing something else. IBM didn’t explain to the customer that they just slowed everything down, artificially, so the customer wouldn’t get the feedback of how ‘busy’ the machine was. But the customers stopped seeing the changing in response time, it was always the same 2 second delay, and although that might have seemed fishy to anyone that thought about the change – customers stopped calling IBM about sluggish response times. IBM was very pleased, their customers had one less complaint.

I usually connect to my ISP (Earthlink.net) with a dialup account. For those that haven’t experienced dialup, you use a modem device that dials your ISP’s modem over the telephone line. The connection is limited to 33 kbaud (33 x 1,024 bits per second, or about 3,300 text characters or bytes of data per second) by the FCC. Which means that I get immediate, tactile feedback from a slow site. Google.com does pretty good, lots of results, few extraneous waits. eBay, Paypal, GoDaddy.com – those take a minute to two and a half minutes to load each page. Except when my computer or browser times out, and I only get part of the page, or lose everything and get a blank error message ‘timed out’.

Amazon.com promises to download a first ‘free’ song. I got the ‘timed out’ message instead. It took so long for Amazon to gather all the pieces together for my display, that my computer confused the operation with a possible virus, and stopped the operation. Well, that wasn’t so bad, I didn’t complete the installation – wait – I downloaded the software to my PC, and launced ‘install’ and got a ‘completed’ message – and then my browser was launched, blind, since I already had an ‘install completed’ box, and hadn’t started anything else. So why was my computer *halted* while the Amazon MP3 Downloader tied into the Amazon.com web site?

This morning I noticed that normal, usual pages wouldn’t load in my browser. So, just to check, I uninstalled my Amazon MP3 Downloader. Wow. Since I was trying to assure myself I wasn’t facing a virus, I had logged off my modem (remember the modem?). Only .. now my computer hung again.

The uninstaller for Amazon.com’s MP3 Downloader, installed on my PC, launched a browser window, to Amazon.com. And my computer was hung until Amazon.com’s page (remember the two minute gratuitous wait I get at Amazon.com?) told me ‘mp3 Downloader uninstalled’. Now my Add/Remove Programs app from the Windows XT Control Panel would respond again.

Is this Web 2.0? That I cannot uninstall software on my computer without waiting for Amazon.com’s web site to participate?

Part of the problem that I perceive on Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, and GoDaddy.com is all the remote feeds. Web 1.0 is based on HTML. This is the way web pages are put together. Unlike a word processor document, the pictures and various other components of the page are kept in separate files, and don’t really come together until my computer asks the Internet for each individual file and script result. Only now parts of pages come from different servers and web sites. An advertisement, a rotating banner that displays different messages each time we visit the page, the web site often takes time to figure what to ask for from the supplier for this page view, then time to fetch the view, then .. So involving additional web sites when putting your page together usually means slowing the time it takes to load the page.

Which feels really rude, if you are connected to the Internet with a dialup connection. And, no, the local cable company will *not* run a line out to me and my neighbor, some 2 miles outside Ponca City, OK. And no, AT&T will *not* provide DSL.

I heard one librarian describe Web 2.0 as ‘AJAX’ – a system of updating information on a page without going to a new page or reloading the current page. A behind-the-page interactivity that ‘static’ pages don’t do. If Amazon.com is the new wave of the future, then I for damn sure want them to *pay* me for letting them use my computer, to plant their software on.

Because Amazon.com sure stepped over a boundary with their MP3 Downloader with me. Anything that causes my computer to act like it just got hit with a virus .. well it feels really rude.

And my problem with pages not showing? That went away when I got the silly Amazon MP3 Downloader uninstalled.