The first is like the Zone. You click on it, it comes up, and in a few moments you are rocking and rolling away.

The second type is in the minority, but there seem to be more and more of them all the time. You click on them, and they lock up. Nothing happens for a long time, and if they eventually unfreeze, everything is slow. You can’t link out, the buttons don’t work, sometimes you have to bail out of the browser, or even cntrl-alt-delete. Even when they are finally up and running, they are slow and any activity takes forever. The mouse won’t click, the sliders don’t respond and the hourglass won’t go away

This second type of site usually starts giving you trouble when all those little icons for facebook, twitter, etc start lighting up. Why? I don’t do any of those things. Other times, when you finally get in, advertising starts flooding in, and it refuses to let you get any work done.

I don’t doubt this is all the result of my machine being old, or my not knowing how to configure my interface (whatever the fuck that means, and why should I bother to learn anyway?) and new media requiring resources I don’t have because of all the new types of links, content (and ads) they are trying to throw at me. My wife’s new machine is fast, and has an up to date operating system and she doesn’t have these problems, so I guess they are trying to tell me I need to spend more money. I have no intention of doing so. I know when I’m being stiffed. When dial-up got too slow I had to spend big bucks for hi-speed. I’m not doing that again. Fool me once…well, you know how that goes.

A lot of times you folks will put up a link and when I click on it I wind up in molassesland, unable to get anything to work. Other sites seem to work fine, but when they present a link I want to explore, I run into a wall again. Its like I can’t go more than one level deep without things slowing way down, or two without locking things up altogether.

I’m sure there are technical reasons for all this, and you guys will no doubt set me straight on it, but I suspect the ultimate, core cause is capitalism. And I ain’t paying. Not any more. Fuck ‘em.