I post large images, therefore I support the oil industry. Or something.

[kjpepper]

Does it make me a bad person that i get vastly annoyed when people post large pictures on LJ? a large picture meaning:

a) not behind a cut
b) greater than 600 px wide
c) with no knowledge whatsoever as to how to properly and efficiently use JPG compression?

This mostly exempts folks actually on my flist, btw, y'alls mostly know better. Besides, it's a bit less annoying when folks do it in their own journals. It's people that post things to comms, like fliers for club nights and shows that were obviously scanned at some ridiculously unnecessary resolution, saved with no resizing and with the jpg compression shoved all the way to the right, so that it's a jpg in file extension only practically. Am I being an elitist bitch when I consider that a complete an utter waste? Of bandwidth, screen real estate, and time I could spend downloading... i dunno, something other than your useless college party? Am I the only person disgusted by the trend in web pages to be bloated with unnecessary, inefficient, proprietary and just all around BAD code and larger than necessary images because people can't be bothered to learn how to deal with either of them correctly because OMG nobody uses dialup anymore why should we care whether a user has to wait 15 minutes for my badly scanned image to download? it only takes 3 on a T1, LOLfuckyou.

an image should be downloaded and forgotten in less than 15 seconds. If it takes over a minute to download and you're on broadband, we've got some issues.

I don't know. Maybe I'm getting overly huffy about what essentially translates to ones and zeros transferred between one machine to the next. But the thing that bugs me is that it is really wasteful. I mean, the bigger an image, file size wise, the more time, space and electricity has to be spent in storing, sending, and downloading it. Maybe now the technology is fast enough so that the waste can be accomodated, but when I think of how much faster and more efficient this stuff could be if people tossing up web sites and images actually did their homework, learned what they were doing, wrote clean code, and knew enough to not save a photograph of a landscape in autumn as a 256color GIF file. I mean... ultimately that translates to demand for electricity and overall fuel usage. It may be more subtle than, say, driving a Prius instead of a Yukon, but it's along similar lines.

Besides, ridiculous though it may be, I enjoy the idea of getting the same amount of ironic humor from a person who drives a hybrid and yet designs web sites with Front Page as I do from folks who drive Suburbans with environmental bumper stickers.

In other news today was quiet and a little strained, but overall a better one than most, probably due to the three hour nap in the middle. Had dinner with captainlove down in South Hadley, which was tasty, and was also treated to a rather unexpected guitar solo. *jaw drop* I've always admired actual guitarists, as opposed to just chord players. I mean, Stanley introduced me to such fun stuff as Joe Satriani when I was smaller and occasionally I've been known to listen to a bit of Django Reinhardt though I haven't in a while. Plus classical guitar? Murderous vile stuff to play, even if it sounds gorgeous. Anycrap... sheesh. I love that about people sometimes - you think you know them and then suddenly you discover something completely unexpected about them that just makes you go "Gfugrah??" I like being surprised.

Came home to find that morlock had expiated the past couple of days worth of yuckiness. I am no longer the only member of the amoeba without a Batman themed shirt, because now I've got meself a Nightwing logo shirt. Yeah baby!! So that made me squee like all get out, and the cats probably thought I'd gone insane or something. Though... honestly the squeeage and the accompanying tearing up probably had more to do with the note he'd tucked into the packaging that contained a world of much needed sweetness. Whatever fuckupery's going on right now... we're gonna get through it. I just need to be reminded of that every so often, I guess.

Evening was rounded up with WWE Smackdown and much to think about. Tomorrow work, possibly Hedwig, then Squillage party.

Comments

[nireena.livejournal.com]

hee- like your icon. i get annoyed at bad webpage design too, partly from a geek perspective and partly from a localization perspective. poorly designed webpages are also harder to localize as well as to view in English. i think it's just the growing pains of a relatively new communication medium. in printing, people know about print quality vs cost; you don't print the weekly coupon flyer on the same quality stock or with as many colors as you would national geographic. in radio, people know about the dis/advantages of AM and FM, power vs range, etc. this stuff still hasn't really been hashed out yet for the internet. yes, us geeky folk know and have known for quite a while about image compression, download times, etc but it takes a while to trickle down to the point that it becomes common knowledge.