Two Slashes

If it’s easy to pull the wool over your eyes, Wednesday was probably not your day.  If you’re Kathleen Danielson, for example, you avoided any links lest they end up Rickrolls.  I feel that April Fool’s Day is a pretty amusing (and dangerous) time to be an Internet…well, addict, I guess, and it’s a day I particularly enjoy.  (The danger is only compounded if you were spending your day in the fetal position worrying about Conficker, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

Compared to recent years, I think that this year’s bag of tricks was relatively tame.  DeviantArt (at least, as far as I know) wasn’t propogating 4chan memes (mudkips, anyone?) and the most YouTube did was flip videos upside-down.  Sure, ThinkGeek had bacon paste (but who doesn’t love bacon), and it sounds just believable enough that it might end up like their 8-bit tie from April Fools’ past.

I thought this picture only added credibility to my April Fool's joke, even though it was only by coincidence that Rose happened to tag me right after my status change. Apparently I was the only one to think so.

I myself decided to participate, though I didn’t really come up with my pranks until five minutes before midnight.  For starters, I was uncreative enough to be one of the dozens of people changing their relationship status on Facebook.  And, in a stroke of luck, a friend soon tagged me in a photo that made my status change almost believable.  Alas, I didn’t hear anything from my friends when I changed my status to claim that I was in a relationship, but a few friends started an uproar on the return trip.

The other trick started off on a new site of mine.  At the recommendation of Rachelskirts, I purchased the domain ShouldIUseComicSans.com to match a similar offering (thanks, @EricVictorino) only a few hours before, then decided that it changing what it said would be an excellent joke (but for one day only).  People fell for it, too.

I’m trying to come up with even better pranks for next year, though I’m coming up short.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as I have 363 more days to dwell on it.  (Suggestions are most welcome, though it might do better to e-mail them so there isn’t a public record to ruin the surprise.)

The corporate giants with the practical jokes weren’t the only people headlining on April 1, though.  Conficker, the latest worldwide scare, managed to slip through the day with very little fanfare.  Of course, there were isolated incidents, like my college campus blaming an outage on the worm, but on the whole I didn’t see too many news articles regarding the blasted thing.  Some people seem to think that this is exactly how it should be, though (and I agree).  However, you can’t deny that the Internet is still wholly intact.  (After all, you’re able to read this post, right?)

And, on a completely unrelated note, I decided to mess around with my dust-collecting Tumblr account.  There’s more information about that posted on the blasted thing, though, so I’ll let you visit if you’re interested in the matter.  (Hey, it could use the traffic anyway.)

Oh, and one more thing:  I’m in a relationship…alright, I don’t think you believed that for a second.  I don’t blame you, though.

Yesterday, I was messing around with Facebook and ended up stumbling into what I thought was a bit of a privacy leak.  I wrote it up, and it’s now available on the Writeups page or at this link.

I’m still doing some small edits to the article, but I wanted to make sure I got this notification post out before midnight so people would take it at least mildly seriously.  (Tomorrow’s April Fool’s Day, remember?)

Read it, pass it along, try it for yourself…ignore it.  It really doesn’t matter.  I just thought there might be a few people who wanted to know.

Feel free to leave feedback about it in the comments, including any suggestions you have on how to improve the content.

I was talking on IRC with a friend a few weeks back when he asked me to remind him of the URL to this blog, as he was having fun looking up the Google PageRanks for various websites.  Considering the length of time since I last checked (as I don’t really care), I checked myself and was surprised to find that I’ve managed to reach a 4 (yes, I double-checked that).  In the past, this blog has typically hovered between 2 and 3, so this was unexpected for both of us.

I have no idea how this happened...

Immediately after this magic number was revealed, the topic quickly turned from PageRanks into how I could be making money from my blogging thanks to said PageRank.

<Number_5> dude you could be making 7500-12000 a month
<Limp_Trizkit> who, me?
<Number_5> yeah you…
<Number_5> with the right SEO and good keywords
<Number_5> you could make a great full time income
<Limp_Trizkit> lol
<Number_5> you laugh i’m not joking

I have plenty of respect for the people who can successfully make a living off of their blogging, but blogging has never been something I’ve been able to see myself doing for money, even if it came from advertisements or endorsements.  I write because I enjoy writing, and while some money would be awesome (*cough* college student *cough*) to keep things running (like the server), I would feel rotten trying to make money off of something I tend to put onto the back burner quite frequently.  (Yes, I’m thinking of the entire lifespan of this blog, with the exception of February.)

I can think of and sympathize with the few instances where ads might be worthwhile or useful, but for the most part, I find them annoying.  I guess you can say that I see peoples’ contributions as payment for all of the things they get out of this vast intercontinental library, in a way.  Collecting $12,000 every month would be alright phenomenal, but I can’t justify “whoring” my personal projects out in any way that would feel “right” or reasonable to me.

Of course, none of this stops people from calling me out for keeping AdBlock running.  Besides using it as a useful toolkit for hiding parts of websites I just don’t want to see, I will admit that I take advantage of the Firefox plugin as it was intended to be used.  (Didn’t I just say that I find ads to be mildly annoying?)  But, is it really that big a deal that I don’t want to see ads for male enhancement just because you used the p-word word once?  I get enough of that every time I check my e-mail, thank you very much.

If you're a student in Britain, chances are you'll be sending messages like these at some point. (Oh, who am I kidding? They'll all read "@somefriend Wanna hang out?" instead.)

Math, literature, gym, and history.  These are all staples of the education system no matter where you are.  America, Spain, Russia – they cover cover all of these topics at some point.

If you’re of school age and happen to be living in Britain, it sounds like you might be adding a more thorough understanding of computing and the Internet to your curriculum.

TechCrunch is reporting that skills and tools useful in an online/social networking context, a la tweeting, blogging, and podcasting, are to be added to the elementary school curriculum to bring kids up to speed with the Internet their older counterparts are already experts at abusing.

I remember my computing classes back in elementary and middle school (at least, I remember some of them).  There really wasn’t any point to the class, as most of the work assigned was either grunt work or designed to benefit the teacher more than the student.  (Yeah, it happens.)  There’s only so many times you can print greeting cards or type up the same lame one-page story up before you’re an “expert” at using the computers, and as most of these classes, at least the ones in elementary school, were held using near-antique systems (I mean this in terms relative to when I was 10, mind you), they weren’t even relevant when I was attending them.

But while my youth may have been wasted away word-processing tales of dinosaurs and making birthday cards for my teachers, it seems as though somebody’s finally figured out what all that computing time could be used for.  However, I’m not entirely sure that Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites are the things to be showing first graders around.  (I’m not entirely sure they’re for older people, either, but that’s a discussion for a different day.)

Let’s think about this for a second.  Companies still add legal disclaimers to their television advertisements telling kids to ask their parents before they go online.  This isn’t just to make sure mommy and daddy sue the company for telling their kid to rack up dial-up charges (heaven forbid they’re still on dial-up), it’s to remove any liability that they might have as far as disturbing and obnoxious people who might appear on the site.  It’s not a possibility that they’ll come into contact with some unsavory character; it’s guaranteed to happen at some point, and with the state of things, almost daily, too.

I also didn’t bother with cell phones until I left for college.  Now, considering little Timmy and Tori over there are probably already text messaging each other hourly, I can see how showing them things like Twitter might seem to be a natural extension of what they’re already doing.  However, factor in that little kids tend to be incapable of discretion, and all it takes is one misplaced “I’m at the park!” for things to get ugly.  (No, I’m not talking about that.  I’m saying that it’ll be extremely easy for mom and pop to pick up on where their offspring has been recently.  Alright, maybe your idea is more valid.  Much more valid.)

Most of the Twitter arguments work with the general blogging case, too.  Unless these schools are intending to be putting up their own copies of Laconi.ca and WPMU for the students to mess around with explore while making sure the general public doesn’t get to cause too much trouble as a result of what’s posted, I have some major issues about letting these kids loose on the web.  (TechCrunch also mentioned podcasting, but I’m not entirely sure that such an endeavor is feasible enough to be worrying about it.)

Yeah...this seems more like an elementary schooler to me.

There is a positive effect to the (micro)blogging idea, and that would be that students would be encouraged to write and proofread their work (well, unless they default to “wrtng lke thyr n a phn”).  Microblogging would also be a great way to train students in how to “trim the fat” from their writing because of the small character limit.  However, I don’t see these as pros that outweigh all of the cons.

In short, I find the cause to be noble, but a school with limited supervision is not the time or place to be letting kids explore their social life, even if it’s a Web 2.0 social life.  So let them deal with their reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, because that’s all they should be working on at their age anyway.

Lady Ada

It’s not well-known, but today is a day that most geek calendars include.  Today is Lady Ada Day, named after Ada Lovelace, recorded in history books as the first person to write a computer program.

There’s a giant roster of people who are supposed to be posting about a female figure in the tech industry today whom they admire as a “Modern Ada.”  Considering the long time it’s been since I managed to put in some posting time on here, I figured I would take this challenge up.

Me?  Well, I never was one for following memes (which I consider this to be), and I can’t think of a woman in the tech world I really admire.  Well, that, and I’m not one to play favorites.

Sure, I could talk about some of my fellow university students and the impressive work they’ve completed, but that would get boring to everyone who has no idea what school I attend.  (And I appreciate my privacy in that matter, thanks. )  And, to be honest, that would probably be creepy for anyone to read, most of all them.

I could always cheat and pull some random tech employee’s name out of a hat, but that wouldn’t work either.  Not only could I not name-drop any reasonably-well-known females in the tech industry, but there will probably be countless other blog posts drooling about how attractive/intelligent/rich/attractive said woman is, which makes picking anybody of note instantly a poor choice.

However, I think I have a solution.  Rather than write one more post about whatever useless tech journalist/CEO/evangelista the rest of the blogosphere is, what about taking a second to thank all of the female bloggers I know for doing their thing?  After all, in a loose definition, they’re pretty in-tune with technology themselves (even if their blogs let on otherwise).  Right?

So, with that said, I’m going to suggest you spend the rest of your Lady Ada day appreciating not just female software developers and company CEOs, but female bloggers too.  And you can start with those I have in my sidebar.  That’s right, tonight looks like a great night for you to check out Keri’s Curious Cloud, daigakudeki, Geekin’ Out, Rachelskirts, Snubs’ personal blog, Splendid Mishap, and maybe even mosey over to Brooke’s or Gretchen’s blogs if there’s time left.

(There are more, of course, but seeing as even I have not talked with everyone in the universe yet, it’ll have to do.  Also, I should probably do some housecleaning, because there are a few stale links in my sidebar.)

I’ll admit:  Skittles rank pretty high on my list of treats.    I’ve been known to cough up a few dollars at a time for those colorful candies without too much thought about what they might be using that money for.  After being directed to their “new website” today via Twitter (thanks to Keri from Curious Cloud), I have since been considering a boycott. Why?

This is what you get greeted with when you first visit the new Skittles website. It's quite the warm welcome, isn't it?

Frankly, you should take a look for yourself so you can get a thorough firsthand experience of the horror, but to save you the torture, I’ll cover it with as much detail as possible.  Essentially, your first visit to the “redesigned” Skittles.com website requires you to fill out a form stating that you’re of an appropriate age (which they don’t explicitly state) and that you agree that you can’t hold Skittles responsible for anything you see.  Wait, what?

Getting past the age request (or, amusingly enough, looking to what’s behind it, as it loads in the background before you confirm that you’ve agreed to Skittles’ usage policy), you notice that you’ve been brought to Twitter’s search portal, where (of course) “Skittles” has been pre-entered for your enjoyment and there’s a floating Flash movie in the corner for you to use for navigation.  Flipping through the various options on the top of the panel, you quickly find out that the only reason Skittles.com seems to exist anymore is as a quick access station for Twitter (Home and Chatter pages), Facebook (Friends page), Wikipedia (Product Information page), Flickr (Media page), and YouTube (Media page).

And although I typically tend to blow by the idea myself without consideration (though I might have a little more of an excuse than a company), I don’t think the site design offers itself well to people with disabilities.  As I recall, Flash doesn’t cooperate well with screen readers, and the fact that the website is more or less a terrible mashup of every major social media platform with extra navigation doesn’t do too much to suggest they’ve taken this into consideration themselves.

No offense to Mars, Inc., but I can just as easily go to Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, or YouTube without any help from you (or that annoying Flash panel).  In my opinion, what they’ve done feels tacky, and I can’t help but make the assumption that someone’s cousin’s friend’s son got paid for this mess.  (“Bueller?”)  For future reference, here’s a hint:  When you’re a multimillion-dollar company, you don’t skimp on your advertising and presence budget.

I wonder how many other people are making the same face that this gentleman and I are sharing.  It’s quite becoming, isn’t it?

Excuses, excuses.  I was in the middle of writing this post when I was commissioned to sit on the phone keeping people awake on their train ride home, causing me to seek refuge in silence away from a computer.

With a little nudging from Nick S., who’s busy at work on The Next Big Thing™, I ended up keeping tabs on the press conference (call) Facebook held earlier today regarding their ever-changing service agreement.  If anything, it gave me a better idea of just how generally clueless some of the people running the scenes (and even some who are not) are.  Of course, this all comes after a giant uproar over Facebook changing their terms of service such that it read that Facebook now owned any user-submitted content.  Permanently.

While I don’t have a personal issue with Facebook utilizing the content I have uploaded to the service (namely, the same image of myself you can find on this site or any other service I use), I have several friends with interesting and original content who might be offed by just how many rights the social networking site was granting itself with the new policy (in theory).  I know that they wouldn’t like having their content ripped off, and I’m sure most of the people reading this would have similar issues.

I find it funny that people are willing to put up with all of these antics, though.  I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised given that people deal with the Fail Whale, tolerated MySpace’s surefire “Oops, we had an error!” pages, and can generally use the Internet without the requirement of a computing license, but it still amazes me that people can be so blatantly ignorant when it comes to the things they share with other people and the methodologies they employ in doing so.  It’s because of stunts like these (alright, that’s the number two reason behind the fact that the services are designed that for reason) that I post pictures to Picasa, videos to Vimeo, and generally harbor my content all over at sites that put the creator’s rights before their own.  Besides, it’s not a wise idea to put all your eggs in one basket.

Facebook seems to be trying to take  recent events into consideration, as their latest blog post states that they’re going to try a more democratic system for some of the policy changes they enact across the site, in particular anything that might cause controversy.  Nick and I both came to the immediate conclusion that this may not be the best policy, as you’re asking the same people who have no common sense to vote one way or another.  It’s like giving a six-year-old a Presidential ballot (the fact that this is unlikely notwithstanding) – they’re ill-informed and incapable of making a sensical decision based on knowledge or reasoning, so their vote could more or less be attributed to pseudo-randomness.  Unfortunately, it’s a first-hand chance to fight for proper rights provided by few other platforms.

Like I said already, the conference didn’t exactly show a stroke of genius among either the reporters asking questions or the people in charge over at Facebook.  As an excellent example (and to end the post), I leave you with this short, unrelated question and the nonsensical answer provided straight from Facebook’s founder.  What a bright bunch.

Stacy Kramer (Paid Content): How important is this financially?
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook): This is all about trusting our users. And it will result in the best outcome: the best community.

One of Chicago’s many iconic structures could be getting a makeover, and it isn’t the bean.  If you were thinking of the Hancock or Aon Centers or Prudential Plaza, you might also want to be think taller.  You’ve got the Sears Tower on the mind?  Excellent – and keep it there.

I was going through my unread items in Google Reader and came across a blurb from Gizmodo (who got it from the Chicago Sun-Times) that the Sears Tower might be “going green” by, err…going silver.  That’s right – the Sears Tower might be getting a new coat to match the bean sitting in Millenium Park.

(Mockup stolen from Gizmodo, who stole it from the Chicago Sun-Times. Hey, there's no honor among thieves. Usually.)

It’s cool that the owners are trying to decrease the impact of the building on the environment, though they seem to believe that the only environment worth preserving is the natural environment.  What about the living and working environment of Chicago residents?  Doesn’t that count for something?  I don’t know for sure, but something tells me I wouldn’t be able to stand living around a giant metallic obelisk for too long.

If they were to go through with this plan, I wonder just how much it would backfire.  Depending upon how reflective the building ends up, I could see it as a potential nuisance for other buildings and/or the traffic below because of all the light bouncing around.  Sure, some of the other buildings are reflective, but they’re also tinted and don’t glow like they’re a more powerful source of light than the sun.  (If it were really painted to match the bean, I could definitely see this as happening depending upon the weather and time of day.)

And let’s not even get into the economic impact of having to pay for the repainting.  According to the Sun-Times article, one of the (main) reasons for the futuristic styling is to attract new tenants.  With this economy?  Good luck. Instead of stuffing away the money to repaint the building, why not put it towards the tenants’ rent so they can actually afford to take up office space?  Perhaps some interior renovations (again, something other than silver paint) are in order?

I feel as though this plan brings Chicago one step closer to becoming the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (metaphorically speaking, of course).  It’s already a mythical wonderland of entertainment, playful rivalries, and industry, and it’s a common setting for movies as-is.  The black color is recognizable (though I’m sure the silver would probably take over as the “most distinctive feature” everyone describes it by) enough.

Flipping the memory card out of and back into my Treo the other day to swap some pictures and music in and out, I was reminded of the fact that there comes a point where things are just too small to be usable.  And, almost annoyingly, it’s the direction that everyone wants everything to be going in.  Phones, portable media players, computers…everything you can think of.

While it’s a novel thought to be able to cram in all my data into something the size of my fingernail, it’s also quite unwieldy when it comes time to transfer that data to something else by swapping cards around.  And this is considering my small hands.  Yes, I’m talking about MicroSD cards (for lack of anything else I feel like ranting about tonight).

The original SD card was reasonably-sized to begin with, at least where I’m concerned.  It wasn’t bulky, and I could hold it in my hand without worrying about either breaking or dropping and losing it.  MiniSD was alright too (for the same reasons), though it wasn’t widely adopted (or that much different in overall size) so there wasn’t much of a point.  But MiniSD annoys me like none other (hence this last-minute post?).  It’s not like we’re talking differences in thickness here, either, as the only real dimension changes (at least, the ones I’m concerned with at the moment) are the length and width of the card.

My previous PDA, a Tungsten|T2, had a full-size SD card slot.  It didn’t add anything to the thickness of the device, and it wasn’t annoying to use, as you could actually grasp the cards when you were inserting or removing them.  Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the MicroSD-based devices I’ve had the misfortune to use.  And, even more unfortunately, it’s not going to change in a way that makes me any happier, either.

Expandability, especially in terms of storage, is a concern for most people (*cough* except iPhone users *cough*), but considering your cell phone doesn’t have the size constraint of a fingernail, there isn’t a reason why you have to pretend the extra storage you use for it has to follow such a constraint.  Why, then, do phone manufacturers think they need to blindly obey?

Forgive me for being boring and ranting about something nobody in their right mind would care about, then forgetting to schedule the post.  You can run along, now.

I don’t typically enjoy Facebook/MySpace/blog memes, but this one is more or less related to something else I wanted to discuss, so I figured I would give it a shot anyway.  And I hope I’m not going to be penalized for being a little late with the post; I just finished helping someone put together a computer science project at the last minute.

Meet Poppendorf, an alternative rock band from Chicago, recently noted for releasing their debut album, To Speak In Public.  Known for their witty lyrics (hence the name), Poppendorf has already released two singles off the album and is gearing up for a nationwide tour this coming summer…

Alright, so perhaps I suck at coming up with descriptions for bands you’ve never heard of (seeing as they don’t exist).  It’s hard enough for me to come up with a description for bands that do.

One of my interests outside of the technology world is music.  I don’t compose it – I don’t have that kind of creativity – but I do enjoy a little background noise while I’m doing whatever.  There’s the widget in my sidebar attached to my Last.fm account (that needs fixing at some point…) to prove my point.

Of course, I like a little variety in my music, and my moderately-sized collection shows it.  But getting to that point has taken some time and trial-and-error, and I don’t always find some of the stuff I like on any sites people have ever heard of.  Because of this, I figured some people might be interested in some of the out-of-the-way sites I use to find music I like.

• Magnatune – I think I’ve mentioned this site before, and even if I haven’t, it’s not a bad place to look.  While a lot of the offerings are not up to snuff, I’ve found the occasional buried treasure hidden deep within the track listings.  Magnatune even lets you listen to the entire track before you decide whether the music is worth your money, a fitting feature considering their slogan is “We are not evil.”  (Some of you might know what a full-length track preview might be good for, but I do not condone stealing.  Especially from independent artists.)
• Jamendo – Jamendo is another great hole-in-the-wall for independent music.  Originally shown to me by friend and co-host Steve from TechCentric (or at least, I think it was), Jamendo has some interesting content to offer no matter what genre you like.
• Seeqpod – Seeqpod is intended more as a search engine/playlisting site than anything, but the live search viewer is a cool way to see what music other site users are into.
• Harmonize – I probably shouldn’t be mentioning this one since it’s in private beta right now, but Harmonize is a cool way to check out some of the music your friends have an interest in.  It’s tied to Facebook, too, so any friends from the social networking site who use Harmonize are automatically attached to you.  (For those wondering, I have no idea when it goes public, though, and I can’t help you get an invite either.  Sorry.)
• Hype Machine – Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator.  What could make it easier to find something you like than a site that slaps you in the face with it?

…and for the usual (shameless) plug:

• Sweet Cinnamon Wontons – Described by my friend Don (the author) as “satisfaction for your earhole,” the music posted is definitely worthy of checking out.  Of course, I have the majority of the stuff that’s been posted already, so I wonder if he’s been leafing through my catalog…but that’s a story for a different day.

Of course, all of this discussion has left me with a single question:  Where do you get your music (and/or suggestions)?  Indulge me.  (Please?)

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Alright, so maybe I didn’t follow the directions for that mock album exactly as written.  It’s not like you can do anything about it.    Oh, and the image source might be a good thing to credit.