So a couple weeks back, an anonymous troll in Canada took issue with my railing on Sprint for its utter, dismal failure as of late, saying that he “Never even knew there was SO much deception on the internet.”

Well, I hate to burst his innocent little bubble, but there’s PLENTY of deception on the internet. You just won’t find it here.

Proof? Sprint just gave up on the Nextel merger, and wrote down the Nextel merger and posted a loss of $29.5 billion.

In response, [CEO Dan] Hesse said Sprint is taking steps to bolster its financial flexibility, by saying it won’t declare any dividends in the forseeable future and letting its $6 billion stock buyback plan expire. But the business is in such disarray that he’s taking his time to consider what needs to be done. “Internally, we have rolled out a unified company culture focused on accountability and on providing a superior customer experience,” he said Thursday. “We plan to share some of our initiatives for improving the customer experience and operations next quarter.” But, he cautions, “Strategic assessments and changes may take longer to complete.”

The problem with this “taking longer” is that Sprint has been in what it claims to be turnaround mode for years now. There’s a limit, and then you hit bottom. At this point, I don’t believe there’s ANY way for Sprint to get out of its mess other than to be bought out or liquidated. It’s just taken too long, an frankly, I don’t know of anyone in the know – customer, investor, or tech guru – who has real confidence in Sprint.

Anyway, I think this is vindication for me. Though it is sad to see a company I admired a while back to be in such a sad state.

My God. It’s full of Geek!

This is a textbook case on how NOT to get a date on a dating service. This poor fellow sadly sealed his fate the moment he opened his mouth. Then, he just wouldn’t… shut… up.

Geeks, observe and learn! If you find yourself in the unfortunate position where you must do the dating service thing, DO NOT DO THIS!

Amazingly, today is finally the day that US cell carriers are no longer required to offer traditional analog cell phone service. You remember analog service, right? Back in the day, there was no such thing as surfing the web on a cell phone. Nor was there text messaging. You could just make calls… for about 30 minutes before the battery required a recharge, that is. How boring is that?

Anyway, analog service became the albatross of big carriers like Verizon and AT&T, whose parts have been around in some form or another long enough to have offered analog phones and services at one time. The FCC had mandated that if at some point you offered the old analog service, then you HAD to keep it running. Until today.

It should be pointed out that the FCC is not ORDERING that analog service be shut off. Rather, today was the “sunset date” on an old FCC requirement that cell carriers who once offered analog service continue to offer it. The FCC is simply dropping the requirement to keep analog service running, and carriers can leave it on or turn it off as they see fit. Still carriers like AT&T and Verizon, who are consistently hungry for any scrap of bandwidth they can get, are surely going to take advantage of this and shut analog down.

T-Mobile customers should be completely unaffected by the change, considering there was never any analog service to be had on that network. The same mostly goes for Sprint customers, though Sprinters who are used to roaming on analog networks might see some of that roaming coverage suddenly disappear.

For the most part, those who will be affected most by this are the technological stalwarts who still have old style bag phones or brick phones, and have refused to upgrade. Though, AT&T’s old TDMA customers may also see their phones go dark soon too, as they use similar switching gear. AT&T has been making the announcement about the shutoff for quite some time now, encouraging people to upgrade to a modern phone. They’d even charged customers of the old cell tech a $9.99 month-extra fee for the privilege of using those old clunky phones. Clearly AT&T wants out of the analog business!

Some enthusiasts have set up a death watch using their old cell phone gear, but have discovered as of this writing the end has not come so swiftly just yet, and people can still get an analog/TDMA signal. We’ll see how long that lasts!

Lately, CNN.com has been trying really hard to drive up demand for its web-based video content delivery system… often times, to the point of sheer annoyance. There are plenty of times when perhaps I’m on my lunch break or otherwise have a little time to kill and want to check up on the news, only to find that the stories I’m interested in can ONLY be accessed by video, and there is no text version as an alternative.

Aside from the fact that CNN’s video format shuts Mac users out unless they install 3rd party video components and leaves out linux users completely, sometimes I just really would rather read some quick text on a screen to get the jist of a story. But no… news stories that get top billing on CNN are increasingly video-only, and you also have to sit through a loud, obnoxious commercial that plays for 30 seconds BEFORE you can see what the hell’s up with this stupid story. You can’t skip or fast-forward through the ads, and by the time they’re done, you end up questioning if if the story you wanted to see was REALLY worth the time you wasted. Thanks, CNN.

But the joy doesn’t stop there. Even text-based articles have accompanying video content, and sometimes, the tags they use are, well… less than enticing.

Take, for instance, this tragic story about an illegal street race in Maryland, where 7 people were killed when a car slammed into a crowd of 50 onlookers. Here’s what CNN thought would be an awesome tag to get people to click on the vid:

Oh yeah… that’s gotta be some gripping, compelling footage there. There’s no other way I’d rather spend my morning than stare at a screen of corpses in white sheets. That’s sure to win some awards!

[Note: CNN does tend to quietly “modify” their content when criticism comes to their attention, and they DO trackback blogs, so in case the content changes, here’s a screenshot of what the page originally looked like… bad taste in journalism, preserved for posterity.]

I’ve been surfing the web since Mosaic. Yeah, maybe that dates me, but believe it or not, the first news site I stumbled upon back in college, on that Sun workstation, was cnn.com. And since then, I just kept going back because they seemed to be the least sensational and least busy of the web sites. But lately, this has begun to change. Video is great and all, and my job even relies a lot on video, but if you can’t do it right, you shouldn’t be doing it at all. CNN? NOT RIGHT.

So, I think I may finally have to find another news site to get my daily general-headlines fix.

So it’s Valentine’s Day. A frilly little holiday where Hallmark, Russell Stover, Harry & David, and various other greeting card/confectionary companies get to cash in while males across the globe are motivated to spend on gifts for their significant others, or face the wrath of Being Called a Jerk.

Except for Saudi Arabia. Where Valentine’s Day is a lustful, scandalous, forbidden holiday! Ye Gods!

Saudi Arabia has asked florists and gift shops to remove all red items until after Valentine’s Day, calling the celebration of such a holiday a sin, local media reported Monday.

“As Muslims we shouldn’t celebrate a non-Muslim celebration, especially this one that encourages immoral relations between unmarried men and women, ” Sheikh Khaled Al-Dossari, a scholar in Islamic studies, told the Saudi Gazette, an English-language newspaper.

Every year, officials with the conservative Muslim kingdom’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice clamp down on shops a few days before February 14, instructing them to remove red roses, red wrapping paper, gift boxes and teddy bears. On the eve of the holiday, they raid stores and seize symbols of love.

Okay, I just don’t get how ANYONE would think that some overpriced chocolate and teddy bears would lead immediately to unmarried buttsecks. I mean hell, a lot of marriage proposals tend to happen around Valentines Day. Marriage is moral… right?

Eh, I guess it’s pointless to try to find any reason in a country who also feels that displaying of women’s ankles is also obscene, and thus also leads to the aforementioned unmarried buttsecks.

Yet somehow, we must play nice with these people, because they own all the oil. Ugh.