*This post was written a long time ago when I was much younger.  Any views represented in this post may not necessarily be shared my present day me.  They are being included for historical posterity and amusement of past thoughts on the subjects of the time.*

Okay, I own an old 1978 Ford F-250 truck.  It’s a gas guzzling power house that rumbles along setting off car alarms.  I like it.  In fact I am currently fixing it up, and plan in the future to plop a 460 engine in there (400 now).  Here’s my problems.  Gas, Government, and Environmentalists.  Gas is way too expensive.  In California there is a 18 cent state sales tax, and an 18 cent federal tax on each gallon of gas.  OPEC over in the middle east basically controls the price the sell the gas at, and no one can do anything about it.  This all results in mucho gas prices and me spending tons of money on 92 octane gas (the highest available here, and most expensive).  My truck gets about 10 miles per gallon (street, 12-15 highway).  It has a 26 gallon main tank, and a 19 gallon alternate tank.  That’s 45 gallons of gas I need to put in, which is used up in about 4-5 days (because of my trip to school and back).  That’s over $100 bucks a week on gas!  This is a rip off!  The Government is too greedy, demanding heavy taxes.  OPEC is too greedy, they charge too much money per drum of gas.  And the Gas Companies here are too greedy, making huge profits per gallon.  The gas prices need to go way down.  As for the environmentalists, they, in cooperation with the Government, cause problems for the likes of me.  What I’m referring to is smog laws.  They demand that my truck, and that all cars, conform to a certain level of cleanliness when it comes to air pollution.  They have no right to do this, and it’s wrong.  Who gave the government the right to control the air we breathe?  They may take claim to the land, but since when did they own the air?  They tell people that we can’t pollute the air, and that we have to have clean running cars.  What’s next, them taxing the air if we breathe it?  Okay, that’s a bit extreme, but I think you get what I’m aiming at.  I can understand the want for clean air, but not mandatory.  The Government forces all car owners to do smog tests and make their car run clean.  That’s not fair or right.  That means that older cars which weren’t made with the environment in mind, but power.  Older cars have big, powerful, polluting engines.  There are many people who love these old cars and their engines.  The smog tests require that you have ALL original parts and stock/standard engine components.  They don’t allow modifications or improvements to the engine.  Then, they charge exorbitant amounts to either fix or replace your engine parts to conform to the required smog level.  Who is the Government to say that I can’t modify my truck or supe it up just because it wasn’t stock the year it was made.  That’s just wrong.  Government needs to just back up outta my business.  Leave car owners alone.  Lower the taxes on gas.  And make life easier for people who own cars, especially older cars.  I thought this America, land of the free.  Not America, land of the people controlled in all aspects of their life by government and paying for it.  Hey, you may not feel the same way, but if you do or don’t, write me and let me know what you think.   Peace out.

*This post was written a long time ago when I was much younger.  Any views represented in this post may not necessarily be shared my present day me.  They are being included for historical posterity and amusement of past thoughts on the subjects of the time.*

Update – August 19th, 2001: Xoom.com was completely taken over by NBC and became NBCi’s free sites. NBCi has subsequently had problems with managing their finances. This resulted in the cancellation of the free websites, and ultimately, the death of Xoom. Justice has been served.

The search for a good free website host is a hard and difficult one. You want to have a decently fast access to your site, preferably no ads or pop-ups or banners, and a good uptime (not too much a lot of space for your stuff and leniency of strictness on rules. Well, for starters, DO NOT, under any circumstances, use XOOM.com to host your site. There are others that should be mentioned in length, (Geocities/Yahoo, Spree, Homestead) but I’m gonna concentrate on Xoom. Now what brought my attention to their site was the “unlimited space” they USED to offer. They have recently cut that down to 500 mb. But soon after signing up I found out their evil plans. They disallow any mp3 files to be uploaded, no 11 mb+ file size allowed, and of course ultra strict (and even beyond) keeping to their Terms Of Service. So first this cancelled any plans to put some of my (2000+) mp3s on the site (trying to put them in zip or renaming them didn’t work). That’s sucked because I really wanted to have that available, but since finding out I couldn’t add those to my site, I discovered Napster, and if you want mp3s, go there. Next, the max file size excluded any hopes I had of putting larger sized movies on the site (some really good fun ones). This, so far was enough to put me off, but not enough to anger me or to use another (not quite as decent) site. This changed when they cancelled my site. I had just finished uploading all my stuff, had the site completed (about 6 months or so ago), and they cancelled my site. They said that I had violated the TOS by uploading a couple mp3s. This was my fault, I should have adhered to their rules. So after resigning up (they wouldn’t let me use my same user name, I had to get a new one), I tried it all again. Once again, soon after I had uploaded my stuff, cancellation for TOS violations. This time, I had done nothing. I began searching for other alternatives, but came up with only more lame sites. So once again I decided to re-sign up for Xoom. Since then, they have cancelled my site twice more, each time giving my the TOS excuse for reasons they don’t care to elaborate on. I have done nothing to violate their TOS and have been severely abused by this site. I’m very upset with Xoom, and only with I had more power to argue and influence them and cause them problems. But taking on the near 10 million user enlisted Xoom, which was recently bough by NBC, I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through to them. You may notice a counter/guestbook and chat option that I still use from them, and this is only because I haven’t found a suitable free alternative. But for anyone else who even considers creating a website, I urge you to strictly avoid Xoom.com. You will have nothing but hardships with them (I forgot to mention the constant frame ad bar they put across all pages of your site), and they are slower than just about any other site on the net. I’m using my college’s server to currently host my site and am very happy with it. Thanks for your time, email me if you got a problem or rant you’d like to see published/covered. Peace out folks.

*This post was written a long time ago when I was much younger.  Any views represented in this post may not necessarily be shared my present day me.  They are being included for historical posterity and amusement of past thoughts on the subjects of the time.*

Okay, I guess the inaugural topic should be the internet.  More specifically other mp3 sites.  These really tick me off.  Now here’s what bugs me about them, they DON”T HAVE ANY MP3’s ON THEIR SITE!  This may not bother most people, but I hate how they work.  All they do is create a long list of mp3, then link them to other people’s sites.  What it results in is that they have just done absolutely no work of their own, take no responsibility for their actions or for the integrity of the links.  Now this ain’t a big thing, just really really annoying.  About 90% of the links are the same as 90% of their other mp3 sites.  This does no justice to the people who actually have their own mp3’s on their own mp3 sites.  I’ve visited the sites with just links, and they mostly didn’t work, were in another format and required manually changing, or just caused the screen to load of symbols that made up the file (which is completely useless if you want to actually LISTEN to the song!).   But that’s not all folks, they then have the audacity, the outright gall to claim the songs as their own and advertise that their site has sooo many mp3’s.  I mean they say they have thousands of mp3’s on their site on a 10 gig server.  This would be great if it were true, but it’s totally bogus.   They do have a couple thousand links to other sites, but that’s including the ones on their sites, and the hundreds of other mp3 sites they link to, and the ones they link to.  Okay, take away all these shortcomings I’ve mentioned, and what’s left is a horrible unfriendly interface.  You have to wade through a billion pop ads for other sites, go through a series of links to vote for this site at another one, and then in some, exit after all that because of the adult ads if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to see that stuff (like me).  This is really messed up here people!  Something stinks in the state of the Internet!  Looking back at this and it doesn’t seem like much, but darn it, that felt good.  Okay. There it is.  Take it for what it is.  Come back soon for a better edition of RANTS.  Oh, hey, if you got your own complaint then send them to me.