It’s official! Steve Ballmer has gone insane. I’m sure of it now. Beyond a doubt!

What planet or alternate reality is this guy living on? Is he on crack? Meth? What??? And I definitely don’t want what he’s smokin!

I’m reading an InfoWorld article in my Firefox browser decked out with all kinds of extensions that suit me just fine.  The article headline reads: Ballmer: Microsoft ‘interested’ in open source browser.

All well and good, and sound interesting.

Well, someone in the audience in Sydney where Ballmer spoke at a Power to Developers event, asks:

“Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?”

Great question!

But here’s what Ballmer says in response:

“Ballmer began his answer philosophically, saying Microsoft will need to look at what the browser is like in the future and, if there is no innovation around them, which he thinks is ‘likely,’ Microsoft may still need its own browser because of proprietary extensions that broaden its functionality.”

Does anyone else find something wrong with this statement?

No innovation around browsers likely? EXCUSE ME? Might I call to your lame a** attention to Firefox? Firefox extensions? Google Chrome? Apple Safari? No innovation?

If anyone lacks innovation Mr. Ballmer, it is Microsoft and you!

I cannot believe the crap that comes out of this mans mouth! It’s unbelievable to me.

Does Steve Ballmer live in a Microsoft reality and Microsoft bubble? Nothing in the freaking world exists outside of Microsoft?

What kind of innovation are you looking for Ballmer? Something centered around your “proprietary” Highness? Or is the term, “proprietary” Dictatorship?

The article goes on to quote Ballmer as saying,

“What gets Steve Ballmer excited when it comes to new products? Well, there’s Steve Ballmer, the user and Steve Ballmer, the developer evangelist.

“From a user perspective I’m excited by Windows Mobile 7 and the next release of Windows Live at end of the year,” he said.” (Page 2)

Obviously Mr. Ballmer isn’t a real user of his own products like I and most of the people I know, because nothing makes me cringe more than having to use a Windows POS software. (Piece of S*$#)

If I could afford a Mac, I’d be using one right now! (With security and AV of course!)

But since I can’t afford one, I’m getting my partition set up for Ubuntu. It’s the only way I can get out of this nightmare called Microsoft.

Maybe it’s just me, but every time Ballmer opens his mouth I want to slap him.

Is it just me, or do the rest of you think he’s somewhere off in outer space? Does this make sense to you? Am I the only person who feels this way??? Your comments are more than welcome!

If you are a heavy user of Twitter, you may have found out about Adobe’s free software called TweetDeck.

And if you use it with as much regularity as I do, you may have become annoyed with the limits of the tweets. If you receive 100 tweets in one hour on the TweetDeck, you will get a “rate limit exceeded” message in the status bar of TweetDeck and it will refuse to update.

What’s annoying about this limit is the fact that if you are following a lot of people - like many people are - this could be a HUGE problem!

Since the interface counts a tweet as a tweet, you are not in control of the 100 tweets per hour. So if you have over a thousand followers (I’m not there yet!), and they are all twittering like mad, you will exceed your limit whether you tweet or not.

And you have to be really careful about how many hours you save the tweet information.  If you have it set for a 24-hour period, you may hit the 100 tweet limit upon opening the deckfirst thing in the morning.

But, if you can excuse this fundamental flaw and use it anyway because of its ability to update regularly - as opposed to you having to manually update the twitter page - there are a few other issues I’ve encountered with great annoyance.

TweetDeck locks up my WS_FTP application every time they are both running at the same time. Don’t know why, and don’t care. It just does. Usually I keep the TweetDeck minimized in the system tray (near the clock) but something about the two programs do not like each other. And I’m on a dual core processor with 2 GIG of memory. It’s not like I have a slow machine nor am I incapable of multi-threading.

The next issue I have with it is that it crashes when I’m using my ShortKeys software. For those not familiar with the shortkeys application, it enables you to save text that you use repeatedly. It’s great for programming and for teaching online.

Again, I usually have the TweetDeck minimized to the system tray but every time I open my shortkeys, TweetDeck crashes and I get the infamous Windows application crash notice.

Overall, TweetDeck is an awesome application but the little quirks are getting annoying.

Maybe sometime soon they will fix these issues? We can hope.

TIIM* Note: Any review of a product mentioned in this post is an unpaid review including the links to the specific software. The links do not include an affiliate link nor do we profit from this review in any way.

*TIIM: Truth In Internet Marketing

P.S. If you want to follow me on Twitter you can do so here: twitter.com/debbiemahler