Today I’ve alienated hundreds of my most active readers on this blog.  Please accept my apologies if you are among them.

This site was never expected to draw much interest, outside of what a few friends chose to give.  From the beginning, I’ve been clear it is presented by me for others to take from it whatever they will.  The recent scaling up of participation and broadening of readership was quite unexpected.

I know the importance of being open minded when you take in the reactions of your audience.  Yet I suddenly found these very personal values being tested daily by many of my new readers.  Maybe I can’t even explain it in a way that leads anyone to agree with my decision.  Perhaps I *have* acted hastily, and I will see that in time.

After all, it really wasn’t so bad.  Xigidib’s comment on the “Amazon Customer Service”  post about male enlargement pills made it’s own logical points.  Although I didn’t apply the strategy in own my life, perhaps following their advice *would* help somebody to get better phone support.  But Haojipisippuz’s tersely written contribution on pharmaceuticals seemed to have missed the original spirit of my “blue screen of death” post on the US economy entirely.  In short, these new arrivals didn’t fit in with the existing community very well at all.

I’m not trying to be a tyrant and censor real discourse here.  Sometimes you have to make hard choices.  You learn to get past your initial fear of loss of readership.  It’s not something you had ever planned to do, but sometimes it’s best for everyone just to part ways as amicably as possible.  You have to foster the belief within yourself to know you’ll gain back much more in the future than was lost today.  Yet I wonder if I can really be so sure that the ultimate project goals can be realized without their many contributions.

So as I say goodbye to my hundreds of Spam-bot commenters on this blog, hopefully we all can one day see this parting of ways as having been for the best.  I’ve installed the WP-SpamFree plugin and there’s no looking back now.

1,057 comments pending moderation:

You probably won’t be thrilled if you buy these things either.  I think that my Amazon Review (and I consider Amazon to be innocent in all of this) says it all:

I want my 6 hours over this last week back. Buying this was the one of most frustrating wastes of time I could possibly have orchestrated for myself. 

Yes, these things did pair easily with my wireless phone. Too bad they are completely fugly (sagging around the ears and generally not flattering the human face), and add a constant bright flashing light to the side of your head. Great I suppose for attracting insects or directing aircraft, not great as a stylish accessory. I knew in advance that I wasn’t willing to wear these things in public, so they were basically useless for my cell phone. 

So the real reason I bought them was to have wireless stereo headphones on my Vista computer. Naturally there would be some installation process, but I had no idea that it would be so long and so very fruitless. 

Pairing the device with my Vista PC’s bluetooth adapter was the easy part. Then came the fact that Vista didn’t have any underlying driver support for the Bluetooth protocols needed to do things like, um, pipe stereo audio to these stereo headphones. No driver disc came with the headphones, and no drivers were available on IOGEAR’s website for this product. So although I was being prompted for drivers, none were available. 

I contacted IOGEAR’s support department via their website chat. BIG MISTAKE. The poorly trained moron I got obviously had never even touched a pair of these headphones (and possibly not a Vista PC either) and proceeded to walk me through the exact steps I had already completed in the manual to pair the headphones with the computer. I completed these dutifully through a 30 minute chat, and at the end, it once again prompted for drivers. The moron tech support person mistook my “it didn’t work what else can we try” for an invitation to end the chat while telling me that they were “glad to have been able to resolve the problem”. So IOGEAR obviously spends the big bucks on hiring competent support companies that are worth talking to. (not!)

Moving on, and trying not to give up too early (elapsed install time over two hours now), I went to the web to search for options. It turns out that Vista doesn’t have a very full featured Bluetooth “stack”, and you need to upgrade/install a new one to resolve the missing Vista Bluetooth protocol issue. By the way, this Vista Microsoft Bluetooth issue seems like the kind of thing the IOGEAR tech support moron might have known about, right? Well they didn’t. So I followed the advice of a tutorial, paid $5 extra for an updated Bluetooth protocol set from a software vendor that Microsoft seemed to endorse, and the saga continued. 

Of course the damn things still did not work. Even in the ‘test audio’ area of the Sound Hardware control panel app the sample sound effect would only play for about .5 seconds in the headphones before cutting out. This was consistent with what happened when I tried to play audio from any source on the computer: iTunes, windows media player, etc. 

So I dug deeper into the tutorials, and many suggestions abounded. Perhaps these headphones did not support encrypted bluetooth audio. So I followed detailed instructions to disable encryption in the driver settings in about 12 registry entries. Reboot, try again, of course it doesn’t work. So then the tutorial suggests that the headphones may not be compatible with the built-in Vista Bluetooth stack at all (even with the paid for protocol upgrades). Maybe I would need to disable & uninstall the Microsoft Bluetooth stack entirely, and completely replace it. Of course, there didn’t seem to be any clear options that worked well with 64bit Vista. 

So I’m done with these things. A normal product I would return with a bit of a sigh. These things will be burned. 

Do not buy unless: 

A) You don’t care how you look in public using them with your mobile phone

-or-

B) You’re willing and able to spend even more time researching the very technical process of getting these things to work properly with your computer than I was.