Home alone, but...

[altivo]

Valentine Day gift Gary gave me this adorable tiny Clydesdale. Plush equines are hard to find, but Clydesdales are almost impossible.

Supposed to snow, but not happening yet. I'm being bad and reading a book instead of doing anything useful. Well, I'll be writing a review of the book, but still.

Comments

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

Is that a Webkinz? You so have to join the cult online world of fun!

Not that I have one. I wouldn't spend the money.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's a Webkinz. As for the online cult, well out of curiosity I did take the little tag off and try to log in. The website is all Flash-based, so it's useless as far as I'm concerned. So slow it never even finishes loading. Not even at work, on a T1 line. The latest Flash plugin crashes everything on Linux, too.

I dunno why people keep pushing Flash at us. It's an unmitigated disaster.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

Hmph, most developers seem to imagine that everyone in the world is running Windows Vista with Internet Explorer 7, a big screen, a gig of ram, a high-speed internet connection, and unlimited drive space.

Of course, the target demographic is young children, most of whom would have close to the abovementioned stats. It's usually the older people who have 400MHz systems or worse.

Anyway, Webkinz are notorious for having their tags stolen, because that's what people want. If you just want the plush, and you don't care to immerse yourself in a children's world of flash-based games, I'm sure there'd be lots of people willing to buy the code.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Really? In my experience, the kids in the family usually get the hand-me-down computer.

It does seem like brain-dead marketing when developers just "assume" that everyone has high speed internet. US Census figures show that simply isn't true, even in the US itself.

The deficiencies of the Webkinz site though have more to do with the server than anything else. At work I tried it on a machine with a 3GHz processor, a gig of RAM, and a T1 ethernet connection. Windows XP, latest flash player, and (yuck!) Internet Explorer. Should be what they assume "everyone" has, but it still won't load and run.

Why I refuse to be bothered with Second Life or WoW, too.