2012 Olympics - Open

It's that time again... athletes from around the world, competing to show that they/their team/their country are "the best".  Good luck to all involved!

Of course, after China's spectacular to open their games last year, I had to see how the UK would handle their opening ceremonies, especially considering how disappointing their portion of the closing ceremony of the last games was.  Thankfully, they didn't embarrass themselves... it was genuinely entertaining, and my only quibbles come down to matters of personal taste (excess use of pre-filmed clips and popular music from decades back, mainly).  Still, for me, the highlight had to be Rowan Atkinson's part in the ceremony this time around... so, yeah, "spectacular" isn't the word I would use to describe it.

Another no-buy... Cisco/Linksys (updated)

So, I posted a while back that, while I was leery of Netgear and their equipment, it didn't rise to the level of needing to never buy their equipment again.  In contrast, let's look at Cisco and their Linksys brand... looks like they auto-updated some of the routers they sold, requiring existing users to set up a "cloud" log-in with them to get access to the features they had previously... and, in the process, decided that they could snoop on any of those users' network traffic, and lock out their access for any of a number of reasons, including porn (link).

Now this, this rises to the level of "never buy again"... I've had and enjoyed Linksys equipment in the past, but, especially when it comes to security hardware I've purchased, I'm not OK with either snooping or getting in the way of my access to features I paid for.

Update:  So, a positive sign... Cisco appears to have recognized their error, and is going to make their "cloud" service optional (link). In my opinion, that's how it should have been to begin with... so, now I can list them as just "questionable", instead of "avoid like the plague".  I'm still quite glad that there are several other vendors to work with...