You know what's funny? A lot of people like to accuse me of being brainwashed by Microsoft. Have I been brainwashed? Not likely. (No, definitely not.)

I know first-hand that not only is it possible for people to be brainwashed by anti-Microsoft propaganda, it's fairly easy, too. Hell, there are tons of anti-MS fanboys at Berkeley. And when you listen to them spew their anti-MS propaganda for days on end, you start to believe them. And that is brainwashing.

And then one day I realized, why am I listening to the opinions of others and forming my opinions based on their opinions? No, I should base my opinions on cold, hard facts. (And incidentally, I rarely hear anti-MS fanboys use facts. Mainly, they just make a blanket claim about how Microsoft is evil, and when they are asked to support their claim with evidence, they turn around and accuse the other person of being brainwashed by Microsoft.)

But yes, I will admit that I'm slightly biased in favor of Microsoft. But in a world where it's so easy to be an anti-MS fanboy, is that really such a bad thing?

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Does anyone use this thing anymore?

It seems that these days, both (personal) blogs and e-mail are getting usurped by Facebook.

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People say Microsoft's software is buggy, but apparently, AOL's software is a lot worse. In the last three days, AOL Instant Messenger has lost my buddy list TWICE. (And it's happened at irregular intervals over the past half-decade or so, too.)

I've never had this problem with MSN.

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I've completely lost faith in the W3C. (You know, the guys who do all the standards for the World Wide Web.)

Actually, it began a little over a year ago, when I first read the XHTML spec and discovered that the U tag wasn't supported anymore. What gives? EVERY rich text editor (be it Word, OpenOffice, or Xanga) supports B for bold, I for italics, and U for underline. And now W3C is just gonna pull that out from right under us?

It gets worse. There is no standard for JavaScript.

(Well, there is, but it's called ECMAScript, and it's blatantly incomplete.)

Recently, I learned JavaScript to further my own development as a developer, only to discover that it was ridiculously hard to get JavaScript to do what I wanted it to do in all browsers. And this was because for anything sufficiently interesting, there's no JavaScript standard. Even something as simple as getting the mouse coordinates from a mouse click event is totally non-standardized.

You know what I think? To hell with standards. Apparently, the W3C is living in the past, working on the internet of the previous millennium. Pretty much everybody that does anything interesting with the World Wide Web no longer follows the standards. Google uses plenty of stuff that isn't in the standard ('cause you know, they use JavaScript and AJAX and all those buzzwords). Firefox implements plenty of stuff that isn't in the standard ('cause you know, they implement JavaScript and AJAX and all those buzzwords).

Anybody who actually cares about the standards should wake up, 'cause they're living in a dream world. For all intents and purposes, there are no standards. Not in today's World Wide Web, anyway.

To recap: I've completely lost faith in the W3C. Writing JavaScript will do that to you.