Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Seattle Alt.Net Open Spaces - Why I hate you all

I'm going to try not to be bitter and ranting about this, but I already know that I'm going to fail. I do not care. I think this needs to be said.

First, let me just say that I have not registered because the event is full. I'll return to this subject later, but I want to point out that not being able to go to this event is NOT what is pissing me off so much and is NOT the point of this blog. My life will go on if I don't make it to this event. I won't cry myself to sleep at night. I won't send hate mail to any of the organizers.

First, to register, I need to have an openid. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?????? So now I have to have yet another ID that I have to remember on the internet. That means now I have about 76 different logins and passwords that I have to manage instead of just 75. Great. So even though in the first HOUR of registration being open they went through half of the slots that are available, the other half of the slots must have been waiting for all the other people who have to create an openid to register. I can't just enter my email address. I can't just create an account and register on the fly in about three seconds. I HAVE TO GO THROUGH A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SITE TO CREATE SOME ACCOUNT THAT I'LL NEVER USE AGAIN AND THEN GO BACK AND REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT WITH THAT ID.



So, I look at this openid thing anyway because I'm being forced into using it for something that I want (sound familiar? I can't think of anything else that does that). It says it's the "last id that I'll ever need" so that's nice, isn't it? We've never heard that before. So what other sites does it work with? After browsing the first three pages of the sites that they list, I couldn't find a single site that I'd even heard of, much less used. I can sort the sites by name, but that's useless since they have names that are cool, hip, web 2.0 names that don't actually reflect ANYTHING about what the site is, like "ficlets" or "pibb" or "snipperroo". I'm not saying those are bad sites or anything, but what the hell are they and why do I need an openid to use them?

It doesn't work for any of the forum sites I post on. It doesn't work for any email services that I use. I can't use it to pay my electricity bill online. I can't check my 401k balance with it. I can't use it to log on to my computer remotely. I guess what I'm saying is that it's useless to me. Oh wait, I'll be able to register for a single event that I want to go to. Great. That's so worth it and I'll use that all the time </sarcasm >

So now this brings us to my second point: It's first come, first served. Unless you have an invite. Wait, so that makes it first invited, first served, then whoever else comes, served at that time, unless someone with an invite shows up then they'll be served before you so if they take up one of those slots, then you won't actually get a slot because they're more important than you for some reason.

So I guess by "open" spaces they're not referring to the website because that doesn't sound very "open" to me. Even though the event is full and I want to go, I can't, because they only let 150 people in. But wait, it's not 150 after all. It's 100. Why is it only 100? Because they gave about 50 invites. That's 50 people that are somehow more important than me and anyone else who didn't get an invite. I guess this event is "open" but for some people it's more open than others.

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