Mamarati

I swear, some days I cannot even believe that Charter is my Internet service provider. What the hell are they thinking?

We got one of those letters a while back about them sucking up and selling all our private information. I seriously thought it was some kind of joke. Boyfriend just sent me this from the Washington Post that says that they are going to stop it… but I don’t believe it. Sounds to me like they are just going to look for a way around it that doesn’t “possibly violate federal law.”

Charter also pisses me off because in Firefox, you can use the address bar to type in one word — like Nabisco or Dayrunner or any other damn word — and it will automagically take you to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” result. I like this feature because I’m lazy and now, after God knows how long that I’ve been using it, it’s a habit ingrained in me harder than brushing my teeth or flushing the toilet. Now, however, Charter has HIJACKED MY BROWSER and instead of getting lucky, I get a gigantic page of worthless crap:

I mean look at that. How many damn sponsored results need to appear before something actually relevant that I might actually WANT. If what I WANTED and EXPECTED happened instead, I’d get the Wikipedia results for just putting in the word chocolate, and that suits me just fine.

Oh, but noooooooooooooooo.

So, I know there has to be a way to disable this EVIL, HOSTILE TAKEOVER of THE BROWSER THAT I PREFER AND INSTALLED ON MY COMPUTER instead of my request being REROUTED TO ADVERTISEMENTS on a SERVICE THAT I PAY $130 A MONTH FOR… But I haven’t found it yet and so I’m using the BlockSite add-on to manage this so I don’t have to see the AD RESULTS PAGE AND START THROWING THINGS AT MY COMPUTER MONITOR. Now all I see is this:

I know, I know. I could get another ISP. The only other real choice where I live, however, is the NSA AT&T.

And you know, if Charter were providing a free service, I might say, OK, fine. Serve me up your little search results page. I’ll play along for a freebie. BUT I PAY FOR THIS BULLCRAP AND IT AIN’T CHEAP!

It’s not even that great otherwise, either. Dismal upload speeds, constant downtime (including 2 hours yesterday), the digital phone service sounds like crap if anyone is doing so much as checking email or looking sideways at the router and the DVR is doing this absolutely annoying pixelization thing on everything that we record unless it’s in HD. Even if we’re just watching a show and we rewind it, it will be pixelated from then forward unless we fast forward to live TV.

Anyway, I just installed Firefox 3. The beta kept crashing on me, but so far this seems stable… so hopefully with all the new features, I will be able to find a work-around that helps me function like I used to rather than just using BlockSite. (A good add-on, though, and has password protection if you’re trying to keep your kids away from any sites or whatnot… And of course, if you have Charter, just put in http://*.charter.*)

Grr.