When you see the time on the web pages, in most cases it’s actually showing your computer’s time – not the time of the StreamingRadioGuide.com’s web server.
I should have realized this a long time ago, but the web server did not have the function enabled to automatically synchronize the time with the network of time servers around the world, so the “time” had drifted to be almost 3 minutes fast, which caused the updates of the schedules and when a test was valid, etc… to be off by that amount of time.
I think that’s fixed and I’ll keep a closer eye on it.
Hey Art: check out this thread on Tree of Liberty.
http://thetreeofliberty.com/vb/showthread.php?t=160623
AOL is still in business? I was surprised, anyhoo, the are trying to censor subscribers.
Idiots, LOL
I remember AOL has a special place in your heart : )
Parrott
It would be helpful to know what he said 🙂
AOL now owns Huffington Post or vice versa.
At the time and place, AOL was my only choice to get online – and even then I had to pay long distance charges (1994ish).
Being a techie and curious about the Internet (I already knew about TCP/IP from working in Chicago – but the WWW didn’t exist then) when AOL announced their browser and peephole into the Internet, I ran right in and learned everything I could (making me the enemy of the Internet Elitists of the time – like the people on The Well who wanted the ignorant masses kept out). I started building a collection of interesting web sites, and challenged people to give something to find (this was pre-Google). I became very good at using the existing search engines to find things through practice and observtion.
My first “Aha!” moment about AOL was when I realized they were using proxy cache servers. I had been touting it as “This is great, I’m accessing a web server in Japan, and look how fast it comes up!” Eventually I put two and two together and realized people were just seeing a copy stored on a disk in Virginia and it was weeks old – and the AOLers blaming “The Internet” for having all this really out of date content, unlike AOL’s own “content”
It was a deliberate strategy to portray The Internet as a dangerous place with useless content with low quality graphics (compressed by AOL) or graphics that failed to load – unlike the “Safe” manicured orderly content of AOL. I expect iHeartRadio to follow that same strategy, locking out the people who won’t play Pittman’s game
My second “Aha!” moment was when I was having an interesting conversation with a guy would did contract programming on Windows NT – a genuinely interesting guy to me. Someone had disrupted the room, and a “Guide” showed up (a “volunteer” given a shiny badge to “police” the “community” in exchange for working for free). The Guide made some statement about some technical thing about NT, and this person said “That’s not true” and started to explain why the “Guide” was wrong. The guide issued him the standard “TOS Warning” which the volunteer guides use to maintain order. Only AOL employees had the authority to actually terminate an account. The reason given for the TOS was the guide said he was giving out “incorrect” information.
When he was really quiet, I sent him a private message asking why – he thought he was still talking to the room. He wasn’t being “told” by the software that he was muted, it was just discarding everything he said – giving him the impression nobody was interested in what he was saying. Up until that point, he (and I) didn’t know Guides had the power to “Mute” a customer or that the mute was silent, and likely also being used by AOL staff without the TOS warning at all to quietly make people “shut up”.
I tended to keep well inside the borders of TOS, although I would bait the Guides by saying things like “Anyone interested in phonography?” One of the “rules” was that you could not give out the web sites of anything “adult”…. so kids would run in and ask “What’s the web site for Playboy”…. I might answer…. Well AOL is AOL.com, Ford is ford.com….
Through many 100s of hours of observation, the pattern became clear that there were certain subjects that were guaranteed to make people vanish. Making even the mildest statements about homosexuality was the fast path to the exit door (“Homosexuality is not normal”, etc…) using racial slurs pretty much went on all the time with no consequences. Make a political statement especially if connected to Christian beliefs was another fast way out…. Instead, I would discuss things like “Was FDR a fascist?” and then have a list of things ready FDR did during WW II that were far worse than anything George HW Bush dreamed of doing.
But what motivated me to leave was that I had a forceful conversation with the hacker types that had begun to invade AOL, the precursor of the “Script Kiddie”. My phone never rings, especially not at 3 AM. I took that as a clear message that AOL had lost control of the security of its customer database and/or the “hacker” had contacts within AOL or worked for AOL, which turned out to be very factual. The “safe” AOL had lost total control over its internal systems and I had enough – so I left for a real ISP and started paving the way for those that would follow (at FindAnISP). I wasn’t encouraging people to leave AOL, just once people made the decision trying to blaze a reasonable path out.
Hi Art: I think it was the title of the thread:
‘Bullion beans and bullets’
That four word comment, posted to a Beck video posted on AOL got me a nasty gram from AOL stating that I had violated the TOS.
must have been ‘ bullets’ . They changed the name of a basketball team to the ‘Wizards’ bullets is such a no no word in the washington-NOVA area
Since we’re wandering off topic, might as well wander further….
Washington DC has had a big demographic shift since Obama took power – the city is getting much whiter – because of all the hordes of new government employees.
However, the 10,000 non-management employees of the MTA (subway and bus system) are 97% black. There are only 60 white women working there. 10% of all the existing jobs are unfilled and virtually no applicants for the positions can pass the most basic screens like prior drug abuse or criminal record and they can at least slightly read. People who actually have the skills to pass the tests are discarded for having “attitude problems”.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/27/even-with-big-salaries-metro-cant-fill-its-jobs/?page=all