Skype – Last friday night I signed up for skype service. Purchased 1 local number and paid for it. Then subscribed to the monthly unlimited USA & Canada plan. Also paid the annual fee up front.  (By the way, skype does not accept American Express. Only Visa, master card and direct debit. hmm.. I wonder why??) After I receive the confirmation email confirming my subscription and purchase, I logged in to the skype account from the skype console. It is then I realized that it shows my account $1.30 balance. I was surprised specially when I just paid for 1 year unlimited. I gave Skype aka Ebay the benefit of the doubt and decided to give it 24hrs to update their system. Remember this is on Friday night 9pm EST.

I login to my skype console on sunday morning and I still see a $1.30 balance. hmm.. I decided to wait till Monday 9am EST. May be its a weekend thing. I logged in again on Monday morning at 11:30am and the balance is still $1.30. This is when I thought that may be I will call up customer service and straighten it out. I searched and googled only to learn the hard way that skype does not have a customer service number. Everything is handled via email (hmm.. they must have off shored their stuff to Mars for cheaper labor). WTF? Ebay bought Skype. Last time I checked, Ebay is a billion dollar company. How come they do not have a customer service phone number?Any Tom, Dick & Harry knows that if you are opening a business you need a phone number so that your customers can reach you. Especially when its a phone company. To me skype is worse than those fly by night companies such as viaTalk and voip.com. Message to skype aka ebay executives: Remember you are in the phone business. You sell phone numbers. Get yourself a phone line. Listen to your customers before its too late unless you want to be the next Circuit City or CompUSA.

And the fact that they made it very hard to reach customer service aggravated me further. You can not email them directly. You have to fill out a form. I got so upset that I just decided to cancely my subscription with Skype. So I requested them for a full refund. Let’s see if I receive my full refund.

Every single blog on the web kept talking about Yahoo’s top searches for 2008. First of all, why make a big buzz about this? Do you know what Yahoo’s market share is? 10.47%! So, these stats aren’t even close to representing most of us.

And everyone is like worshiping Britney Spears because she was the top searched term for seven out of eight years. Well why wouldn’t she? She’s just so entertaining to watch. She’s like a monkey on crack. No offense, but I’m just saying.

When was the last time you saw someone using Yahoo’s search instead of Google? (Well its sad, but everyone uses Google.) Okay so what about the 10% market share? Who are they then? What kind of idiots are they? Which year do they think they’re living in?

Lets take a look at the 10 searches:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE - Who the fuck still watches this shit?
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus – Looking for her naked pictures?
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto – Is this the Asian anime porn?
8. Lindsay Lohan – People are still into her? WTF?
9. Angelina Jolie – She has the body of man! OMG!
10. American Idol

This top search result thing tells us a lot about Yahoo users, doesn’t it? I’m guessing most of them are (semi) computer-retarded, horny, lame teens and/or hilly billies. But, this is just my guess.

You wanna take a guess at what kinda people use Yahoo? Do that by dropping a comment and after that go listen to some Britney Spears while shopping for a purse.

Do you even know what bugs I’m talking about? Well there were two bugs that I found. One of them didn’t let me type in the textbox and the other one kept telling me to upgrade my browser even though I was on FF3.

So, as you’ve guessed I can now write emails and I don’t get that annoying upgrade notice anymore. But, there’s still one thing that really bugs the shit outta me. Its that huge banner at the top. I just fucking hate that!

Why would you put a giant ad banner all the way up there? It just screws up the inbox. It brings everything down. It doesn’t look proportional. If Microsoft really wanted to stick in some ads then why don’t they put it somewhere on the sidebar?

I don’t really care where they put it, but they should just take it off the top. One more thing, do they target an audience for the ads or what? Do I look like I’m interested in Disney shit? I’ve seen a lot of different ads on Hotmail and none of them seem to interest me.

And can they not add a few icons or something? It looks like someone’s grandma designed it. Like the design is alright, but seriously are they trying to copy Gmail? I think they are. They took off all the icons after the redesign. Wow. Hotmail, you faggot!

And please get a logo, Hotmail. Please. I can’t take this level of ugliness. Hey, would you get a logo if I said Gmail has a logo? Yeah that’s right Gmail has a logo. You better go get one for yourself, Hotmail.

Do you think McDonalds cares if they lose a few hundred customers? Do you think they’ll try to improve? Do you think they’ll start using real meat? Do you think they’ll stop serving food that’s gonna really mess you up?

TechCrunch… the web’s McDonalds? 1327K subscribers. Lot of readers, huh? Quality content? Not so much. Quantity of content? More than quality. Why do people read TechCrunch? Why do you people still eat at McDonalds? Is it because we tend to think that just because its big ‘n popular, it must be good?

What if you don’t want that (branded) crap? What if you want something that’s worth eating? What if you want something nice and simple? What if you want the real deal? Where do you go? Well the answer is simple. Go to a local restaurants.

Small local restaurants are like hidden gems. Its in your city, but you never knew it existed. Its got great food, but you never heard a buzz about it. You gotta work a bit to find it, but its worth the effort. Once you’ve had a meal there you’ll get hooked on it.

What’s my point? Next time when you stumble across a blog don’t judge it by the number of subscribers it has or a site by the number of users/visitors it has. Look around and see if its any good. Don’t jump off a building just because everyone’s doing it.

(I just hated how bloggers were showing off their Feedburner chicklet. You can fake it. I can fake it without anyone knowing I faked it. I just hated how people were judging blog’s by this fake number. I had to do something.)

When I first heard about that I was like “Yeah Obama’s a cool guy. He’s using the web and stuff.” But, then I questioned myself if he was doing the right thing when Allen Stern tweeted that he hated this whole thing.

First of all, it doesn’t look professional. Like c’mon, you’re the leader of a country and you’re going to use YouTube? A place filled with idiots, copyrighted videos, retarded video blogs and spam. He could instead post the videos on Change.gov or make a completely different site for this. Its not that hard to make a flash video player.

Second of all, isn’t this like taking YouTube to the next level? Aren’t they getting like an unfair advantage? Isn’t Obama killing all of YouTube’s competitors? Everyone (literally everyone) is going to use YouTube and no-one will give shit if there’s a better alternative out there. And think about all the new users/traffic YouTube is going to get.

So, what’s next? Bin Laden ranting on YouTube? International conferences being recorded live from webcams? Leaders of different nations pissing each other off by video blogging? Change…we got that. But, this? I’m not sure if this is a good kind of change.

Update: There’s a big discussion going on about this on Plurk. Some great points have been posted. Take a look.

Well I started calling Digg communist because they weren’t treating people equally. But, then I kept thinking until my head started hurting and I asked myself “are they really communist or are they just… retards?”

I get it that Digg is trying to make it a better place, but this just doesn’t seem right. You ever heard of this “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”? Isn’t Digg bringing in more of the same old domination? Now what’s left is the really strong ones (aka diggtators) and the really, really weak ones because they kicked out most of the “mid-level” guys.

And there are some scripts that won’t show up on the radar. What about them? And what if we just change the script to digg one submission per minute when we click the “Digg all” button? That will make it almost impossible for the Digg staff to find the script users.

Plus isn’t this bad for their rep because they’re just showing everyone how much of a fag they can be? Aren’t they just scaring the weak, little average diggers? Man I would be digging as slow as I can if I were a newbie. Like what if they banned me for digging too fast?

The Digg staff is just acting like a bunch of kids. You don’t just do whatever pops up in your head. You need to think about it first. Seriously stop acting all big and tough. Well anyways, its time for the million dollar anwser! So, is Digg a retard of a communist? Both! They’re a retarded commie. But wait! Lets have a little poll here: