that's it.

I'm making a new "google: try it some time" icon.  Just gotta go searching for the right image...

I've come up with a caption (should i decide to animate it to fit it all in...) : "my google-fu is superior to yours...but it shouldn't be."

i'm not quite this extreme...

...but I almost feel the need to be.

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Don’t be a Facebook whore - Cringely on technology:

There’s my money quote for FriendChat, PeopleRadar, RateMyEverything and a hundred other similar sites: “Rate my friends? That’s stupid” – Bob Cringely.

Keeping up with Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook is bad enough, but I now sense that really ugly things are happening to those platforms making them less and less useful to me. It’s the rise of the social networking application.

You know what I am talking about, those applications that are built by third-party developers to take advantage of the social network ecosystem the companies are so proud to create but we all come to hate over time.

My friend Ira is a Facebook whore. He signs-up for every cause, group, or application sent to him by, well, anybody. Then what’s even worse is he expects me to sign-up too so he can send me whatever crap is the specialty of that subgroup.

I love you, Ira, but I just can’t do as you ask.

This is nothing more than social networking spam, folks, and it is sucking the value out of social networks just like mail spam sucked the value out of e-mail. And to those venture capitalists who see all these applications and rejoice because of the added network volume, which they think translates into higher valuations, understand that this very volume will eventually KILL every one of these companies, making your investment in them worthless.

If you think Facebook is immune to this effect because of its success, you are wrong. It’s very success makes Facebook even more likely to fail as a result. It won’t happen right away but it will happen when we’ll all jump overnight to some other platform whose only advantage over Facebook is that it lacks such sludge.

So if you are in touch with me for any reason please understand that while I will become your friend or contact on these services I will NEVER join a group, NEVER join a cause, NEVER accept an invitation (even if I actually end-up attending the event), NEVER become a fan, and NEVER, NEVER, NEVER install third-party applications.

Lest the reminder (again) be necessary: I'm not joining any causes, I'm not playing any games, and I'm kinda tired of the virtual "gifts" thing. Most are blocked, and the rest will likely be soon. I'm on FB because I am able to use it to keep in touch with people I've otherwise lost touch with over the last 20 years.  I'd rather read what people say about themselves and feel at least a small sense of restoration of what the deeper friendship was like all those years ago (or even today for my current local friends and family) than get "share a drink" notices 12 times a day.  I don't want a virtual drink - I want to keep in touch with people in order to some day coordinate meeting up for a real one.  I don't want virtual faire favors - I want to meet you all at a renfaire and if you feel like giving real ones, great, if not, love you anyways!

(I'll leave ghetto gifts alone, thank you all for not sending me any... :) )

I'll play with some "gifts" for the novelty factor, but once I get more than 3 a day?  That's it, it's getting blocked.

Let me describe how much I play computer games: I don't have a Wii.  I don't have an XBox.  I don't have a play station.  My last "console" game was Nintendo.  The FIRST one.  And it wasn't even mine as my parents got it (for my brother and father) while I was away in college.  I haven't played a game on a regular basis since network changes caused my last company's "Half Life" connections to be too slow to bother with.  That was in 2002. My computer hardware has ALWAYS been 1 generation behind "latest and greatest", and even today my main video box is feeling the strain when dealing with current Xvid standards (though I probably should just wipe the drive and reinstall everything from a clean slate).  If I play another game between now and the next palindrom year, I'll be surprised.

And you thought the Skins were bad this year?

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: The Lions' Perfect Season:

Once it became clear, after just a few games, that this team had actually regressed, I was rooting for an 0-16 season. If you're going to suck, suck on an historical level.

saving the stupid from themselves...

...or "why the hell am I a nice guy?"

So we're at the Sprint store in Charlotte and I check out the other smart phones including the current Centro set-up (they had the lime-green variant of my new phone) and I check out the Facebook for Palm app and what do I find?

Someone left themselves logged into Facebook.

Yes, a "public" phone and she's still connected to it, with full access to changing her profile and status, full access to wall-posting her friends, and full access to LOTS of details of her friends' profiles (including any phone numbers).

Being the nice guy that I am, she's now got this likely confusing FB message from herself suggesting she not do it again (that's how I used to handle it on the vaxen back in the old days), and yes I logged her off.

I don't what to know what a total asshole might have done...I get enough "I found pictures of you at [insert random porn url here]" as it is.

a rare moment - 2 2/3 years ago, I predicted the future...

Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk - And the winner is...:

So keep an eye on the studios or the retailers, because the independent device makers are going to make stuff that supports both and to hell with the jerks who can't make a fucking decision. Any big player studio (Disney, Fox, Columbia/Tristar) or retailer (Walmart, Blockbuster, FYE, Tower, Borders) announce that they are going to pick one and only one format and you'll see that format the winner. It won't be the market, it just won't be in the hands of the hd-dvd makers.

They gave up their chance to have a monopoly early and are forcing themselves, and us, to waste 50% of our money (and them facing sadly low sales in the holiday season because nobody wants to take that risk), when they could have had it all...

If you want to end this war quickly, write to Walmart or Disney today and tell them to pick one and only one.

The end-game for HD-DVD came when Disney

1. chose to be exclusively BluRay
2. released Pirates of the Caribbean

The latter became the best-selling high-def release of any type, outselling the then top-selling HD-DVD (The Matrix) 3 to 1.

In short, I actually called it right - when Disney picked one exclusively, it set the standard.

my fav "geek" humor posts of the last 3 years...

XM Geeking Goodness and Badness:

The Good: we have 9 different means of getting XM Music channels in this house (XM Roady, XM MyFi, DirectTV high-def receiver, DirectTV Normal receiver, and 5 computers capable of playing windows media at a decent clip).

The Bad: if we were to turn all 9 of them on at once, none of them would actually be in sync with each other.

geeks - an easily detected design inference...:

When the spelling checker built into the new Firefox 2.0 passes "Grokked", you know the geeks are in control...

(warning: bad math pun follows):

So Kate Bush this past year finally returned to the limelight and released her first album since '93, Arial. What I've heard is not bad at all, but XM's Fine Tuning keeps playing a particular track, "pi", where she actually sings the digits of pi in order.

My thought? The song starts out pretty strong, but gets less and less significant as it goes along...

for best results, let a computer read it for you...:

On the package of CostCo pure maple syrup, the following can be easily read...NOT:

"For best results, use by 0C/12/2008".

yes, the month value was rendered in hex.

I finally had to use this one just now...:

"Dude, quit trying to tell me how the internet works. I was posting on Usenet before you were born."

Yes, I verified the age in the profile.

Oh, and I counted about 4 times where I commented that somebody has been updating their icons that day...