You read on it, you hear about it, you try to ignore it but when you’ve been a PayPal user for a long time you’re bound to encounter one of their famous horrors.This particular horror didn’t really affect my PayPal account as much as it did my Steam.

Two weeks ago, I bought Battlefield Bad Company 2 (pre-purchase), for some reason PayPal went mental a few minutes after the purchase and locked me out of my account until I changed my password, security question and verified my e-mail half a dozen times again. The payment was marked as “suspicious” and went into the resolution center.

I wondered what it was all about, for about a week or so it said “Waiting for response from vendor”, and I figured once they said something the whole thing would go away. Well, it didn’t; yesterday they reversed the payment and I saw in the resolution log they apparently contacted me three times. I checked all possible e-mail accounts, their spam folders, their inboxes, their deleted files, everything. I wasn’t contacted once.

Obviously Steam isn’t happy about payments getting reversed, and my account is now fucking disabled; yes, I am extremely unhappy about this. Over the years I bought a lot of Steam games and now they’re all lost because of one administrative failure. Obviously I opened a ticket at both sides, I’ll let you guys know the outcome.

Chrome is what it is: damn great. It currently has around 5% of the market (source, source 2) which doesn’t look like much, well until you see the time it has taken Google to reach this market share: less than two years, and it’s bound to rise even faster with the recent addition of plug-ins and the overall performance upgrades.

Firefox, once the lightweight version of Mozilla, has become a dinosaur; it puts a great load on your system and has serious issues running on low-end systems while Google Chrome runs like a cheetah on speed, even on the popular net-books. An example; at the moment I am running Firefox with four tabs, memory usage is 187mb. If I open the exact same tabs in Chrome, memory usage is 44mb. That does make a difference on systems with 512mb RAM available.

The overall performance of Chrome basically beats up all the other browsers, big time, remember the CNET benchmark that probably shocked the developers of all other browsers? Chrome keeps running fine under all circumstances, the only crash I’ve ever had was in the very beginning, while Firefox does crash sometimes under the load of Javascript.

But obviously Firefox will remain important for quite sometime, but unless they clean up the performance issues and get on the same level as Chrome, they should prepare to be kicked out of the market. My personal opinion on this is quite utopian: Chrome should completely kill all versions of Internet Explorer and share the market with Firefox, so all webdevelopers and designers can sleep at night again, the IE nightmare has taken long enough.

Which browser do you use and why?

Long post ahead! I’m going to give a few examples I use in my PHP code, mainly when it’s not intended to be viewed by many people or just to confuse the hell out of my teachers (it’s not very nice on the eye). Click read more to continue reading…

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I seriously tried to avoid spreading my opinion about this device but Apple’s decisions in this matter are so extremely disappointing you just need to say it out loud (as if you weren’t thinking it already unless you’re a hardcore Apple fan willing to welcome every “invention” by this company as a miracle): the iPad is the biggest piece of shit since Nickelback, and that’s saying something.

Apart from the obvious lack of multi-tasking, the insanely high price, the sad specifications and the need of having four hands to type something at a reasonable speed when there is no table in sight, it has a horrible DRM and no camera whatsoever. I’m wondering when they decided it was a good idea to put less and less features in something and charge more for it, the Apple logo can’t be worth all that much, can it?

I don’t even care if they put all these features and a possibility to play Crysis on it after all the negative feedback received by the rational people; it’s too late now. Apple just showed how they think about their average fan: a retard with money running down his nose.

But hey – Apple couldn’t care less, they know this thing will sell millions and every hardcore Apple fan will be amazed by it and recommend it to their friends who will be just as happy having bought a notebook for half the price with four times the power and possibilities.

To all the future iPad owners: have a great time in the iPhone App Store, which is censored by Apple.

As I’m “between projects” at the moment (have a nice one in mind but it’s a hell lot of work) there isn’t a lot of news, so I’ll just post a picture of a cute panda cub. That should work.