Head Fi update, full blown advertisement site

Kindly come clean the coffee off my keyboard as I go rinse my nose... Thank you.

 

I don't have too many funny IT related stories, mostly because I'm just a hobbiest (who got really good at googling troubleshooting solutions). I slightly familiar with various tech issues, moreso on the "normal consumer" level hardware side of things. Lots of my friends know me as "that guy who can also build you a computer."

My only real "my brains are going to leak out of my ears please excuse me for 3 days while I find an empty cave to scream in" moment was when I had to patiently explain to somebody that I can't just upgrade a motherboard for free without a replacement being already there, even though I do the work for free. I understand that some people don't know the difference between software and hardware, but...

It was in person.

They literally thought I could just sit down with some pliers and a screwdriver and make their computer better.

It was not a short explanation.

 

Huh? What you talking about? Just walk out to your magical Motherboard Tree and pick a ripe one, then bolt it into the case. Easy.

 

I hate to be the cranky old "get off my lawn" guy. But I am very underwhelmed with the update at Head-fi. At minimum it was rolled out very badly. No heads up for the community at large or even the moderators as far as I can tell.

Looks like I will be spending more time over here for awhile.

I am sure it will improve over there but until then...

 

The new Head-Fi site prompted be to install three new adblockers! After reading this thread, I whitelisted SBAF on all of the adblockers, and donated another $20 to SBAF.

 

In fairness, they did have banners up saying "you can't post, we are doing site upgrades" for most of this week. Of course people were posting anyway.

I actually think the new site is better than the old. The ads aren't really "worse" now. They were everywhere before, and they were janky looking. I prefer the less janky aesthetic. However, the ad selection is comical. I also got the ad for the 2015 film Demolition, and the only tie in I can think of is that Gyllenhaal is wearing headphones in the banner graphic. As if the ad itself must have a "headphone" tag and was promptly directed to HF.

Anyway.

I suppose this diminishes HF's relevance for me a little more, but it was already so low. I don't think people will flood here. Call me a cynic, but most users get what they want there, and won't find it here.

Also, anyone who gets to the new site and remarks "goodness! this has suddenly become an ad factory!" has not been paying attention for the last three five seven[?] years.

 

Exactly, he can lead you to all the good internet porno.

 

Oh, for god's sake leave Neil Young out of this!

And before we leave the IT-stupidity stories behind, I want to confess that It is not always other people.

So... I was a tech-support person. And I call out to my manager that my terminal isn't working. He's busy with something, which is lucky, because by the time he is ready, I've noticed that the brightness knob was at zero. And don't even ask about all the stuff in my life that turned out not to be plugged in. At home and at work. Oh, there was that time that, in my early days at that lark, I was trying to get two machines to "talk" to each other across a cable. They were both connected. But, as I found when I eventually thought to pull on one end, not to the same cable.

Apart from Unix (IBM AIX, in the end) I specialised in a particular off-the-shelf accounting package. I knew its data structure: I could do clever stuff to export data that went into spreadsheets. But don't ask me to do any accounts. I'm as numerate as brick. if I post a journal, it will get reversed out for corrections six times.

I did a lovely job of writing a program to convert the European branch ledgers from local currency to Euro. When I had something to show (off, I thought) to the accounts boss, he looked more and more puzzled as he looked at sample transactions. "It's all wrong. WTF did you do here? Oh wait... I see it: you multiplied when you should have divided and divided when you should have multiplied."

At least it was an easy bug to fix!

 

Yes, that kind of stuff happens to everyone in Support. But, and this is the key, you have to be smart enough to not ask for help BEFORE you do your own due diligence. If you are any good, that saves you 99.99% of the time. I can't count the number of stupid things I have done testing networks issues in the lab. But, no one ever found out about them, those mistakes never happened twice, and they made me a better support person in the process!

 

It's amusing (to me, at least) seeing all the trade offers/interactions on the new HF being done as Public Messages (PM) as opposed to Private Messages (PM).

Not sure if it's the lack of awareness of their visibility or some of the chronic lowballing I'm seeing, but it's almost like watching a train-wreck.

 

That's not only a horrible idea, that's a dangerous idea. I can imagine people just getting bullied or peer-pressured into accepting an obviously bad deal.

 

They're supposed to do it with private messages, which would be "Conversations" on that (and this) platform. But the HF site is such a mess I don't think most of the people doing it have realized that "PM" is just old terminology and they've gone down the "Public Message" route instead. As you've no doubt seen, we occasionally get people here that'll make a profile/public post to the effect of "Can't figure out how to send a private message ... can I get a Roon Code/SDR Mod?".

 

Ok so here is a 'prank' that once enabled would result in hrs and hrs of frustration for any and everyone involved.

This was especially effective on old 286-386 based pc's running DOS or very early versions of winblows.

While in an app of your choice (a word processor seemed to work best),
change the background/foreground colors to black and all text to black.

Walk away and feign ignorance.

Major havoc and hair pulling ensued…

JJ

 

Non-IT incident of notable stupidity I was reminded of by your post.

I was working at Tower Records in the 80s. A customer came in and asked,

"He's Black and he plays saxophone. Do you know whom I'm talking about?"

 

Only about 57 faces popped into your head!

 

Ouch, user "asspells" is spamming Head-Fi now...

 

@Out Of Your Head


3 lines from the top: "$40 Signal Cable Magic Power Cord"

6 lines from the top: "Black Magic Specialist Baba"


You can't make this stuff up...

 

Out of morbid curiosity took a look. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot that is too much.

It loads too slow with all those banners and advertisements and your first impression/sensation is literally information overload.

When I checked the screen shot I just made, just too much so lurkers and newbies will be very confused from the start.

 

That's Koth Ganesh's favourite Babu again.

lol: Arse Spells. Magic farts!

Looks like they really just threw stuff together... and went live. Oh well... their headache.

 

I don't know, it kind of depends on the yardstick used to measure these things. The new Head-Fi site looks very slick and magazine like, kind of what I would expect from a commercial/retail site. That's not the kind of site that I want for interacting in this hobby. But who knows, some people probably like all the gilt and glitz. And there's no accounting for stupid.