A waste of bits and bandwidth

I’ve been here in the new place for five weeks now and I’m starting to become a little concerned that the buiding might actually be a mental hospital.

I was out hunting the homeless this morning as I do most Sundays and had quite a surprise when the elevator door opened on my floor. Now before all the bleeding hearts start to write to me and complain that the homeless are people and they have a right to live under a dumpster and bother tourists and the elderly let me stop you. First off, I practise catch and release and secondly very few suffer any permanent effects of a fire extinguisher unloaded in their face. I abide by accepted standards and always maintain an arms length distance from my quarry.

Back to the elevator. When the door opened there was a girl standing there. I think she had a pink dress on or perhaps she was naked, I really couldn’t tell you. What I noticed was that her lips were freakishly huge. Not big, not voluptuous and certainly not sexy. I just stood there and stared at her lips, making no attempt to exit the elevator as I mentally calculated what could have caused her disfigurment. “I bet she just took a dried up ball of Play-Doh square in the mouth” Snapping out of it, I left the elevator while she eyed me suspiciously. Or at least I think she did ’cause I was still staring at her lips.

The crazy middle eastern dude above me seems to have settled down a little. No crazy music and no screaming into his phone as he stands in his window and flicks his cigarette ashes all over my window and the cedar bush. He did crack one night last week when he screamed “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!”. I don’t know what his problem was. I hadn’t heard anything previous to that and when I stood up to see what was going on I saw nothing but other bewildered humans looking out their windows.

Today I was doing my laundry and an elderly woman came in. We exchanged pleasantries as I folded my clothes and she loaded the washers. Naturally the conversation turned to ‘laundry sucks’ as it often will when two strangers meet in a laundry room. She ended the conversation rather abruptly when she said “Too bad we have to wear clothes…”

Now I ask you, what kind of person says something like that? What is going through their mind when they think of all the possible things that they could say and they come up with that? It’s not just that she was old enough to be my grandmother, that fat lip chick would have gotten the same reaction (and I have yet to establish that she was in fact wearing clothes). I dunno… maybe I’m finding out why the rent is so cheap.

So I guess my neighbours are whacked. If nothing else, I would at least seem to have an endless supply of blogworthy topics.

Is it really required in this age of [tag]Web 2.0[/tag] that we share every facet of our online lives? Is the web a better place because everything is now [tag]social[/tag]? There are certainly advantages, but are you really all that interested in my calendar? “Well, he’s not very good at remembering when Lost is on…” “His girlfriend just had a birthday.” *yawn* Does it matter? Are our lives any better for it? An online calendar is a great tool but does it need to be shared?

Frankly, I’m really tired of Web 2.0 and social [tag]networking[/tag]. Don’t get me wrong, I love [tag]del.icio.us[/tag], [tag]30Boxes[/tag], [tag]Flickr[/tag] and even [tag]Digg[/tag] though the latter has been overrun by idiots so I don’t logon any more.

I think the problem boils down to the fact that no one has a decent idea. Social *buzzword* is the only thing that’s popular now, so there are hundred flavours of calendars, bookmarking sites, video services etc. Why does everyone rework what has already been done? You don’t have any better ideas? I know I don’t have any ideas but then I’m not working on a Web 2.0, social calendar, online wiki/dating bookmarking site with all sorts of fun [tag]AJAX[/tag] crapola, rounded corners and pastel colours…

Am I just being cynical or are there no good ideas left? Prediction: Web 2.0 will implode in the new year. If it lasts that long…

I noticed that [tag]Flock[/tag] released a [tag]beta[/tag] of their latest offering recently. (Actually, it was a while ago, this one’s been sitting around for a bit) I’m not really involved with Flock anymore though there are times that I think I’d like to get back to it. I was working really hard testing it up until MiHwa came in December and then I stopped abruptly for obvious reasons. After she left I found it hard to get back into but mostly I was put off by the lack of progress in the three months that I was gone. Heads would roll around my office if there was little to no progress in three months. I do feel bad ’cause Lloyd is a great guy and I kinda feel like I’ve abandoned him. I guess because I have. Not him as much as the idea.

I recall being so excited when I first read about Flock and then frustrated when I didn’t get invited to the beta. So I wrote to them and told them I wanted to help out. Wow, the next thing I know, I’m a flockstar! I spent all my evenings testing, reporting and confirming bugs. I was so deep into the forest, I couldn’t see the trees. I had forgotten why I moved to [tag]Firefox[/tag] so long ago; it’s a quick, compact and tidy little browser.

Now I’m not slagging Flock; it’s a very cool browser but it’s just gone in a different direction than I’d like to see. Social everything… All these added ‘features’ yet there’s no way to turn them off if you don’t want to use them. Really, I don’t need to be alerted when my contacts post a picture to [tag]Flickr[/tag] or updates their blog. That’s what [tag]Bloglines[/tag] is for. I like their implementation of the shelf, but not their bookmarks management.

Bookmarks implementation has always kept me from using Flock on a full time basis. In the early days there was no way to import which is a bit of a deal breaker though it wasn’t really stable enough to use daily anyway. Now that the browser has matured (and it has matured alot) the bookmaks are stored in a manner which removes any directory nesting you might have done. *ugh*

{Updated} I’ve been using the latest quite a bit lately and it’s a great browser. I’m still not a fan of how they handle Bookmarks (they call them Favorites) but at least they put the Open in Tabs button back. I mentioned that to Lloyd the last time we talked, so maybe I wasn’t the only one who missed it.

My only complaint is that it’s a bit sluggish and hard on the CPU. Other than that, it’s a lot like Firefox with some cool features (which can be disabled). Worth a look…

I was going about my business last night and decided to get the coffee ready for this morning. Filter, water, coffee *stop* Dammit, I don’t have enough beans; I need coffee. Luckily I’m three minutes away from London Drugs and I figure they must have coffee. So I run over and find they only have ground coffee; no beans. What the hell is this? Even the Starbucks coffee is ground and it’s some fruity flavour.

I decide the only thing I can do is to buy a tin of Nabob or something; it will see me through this coffee calamity I find myself in and I can buy some beans tomorrow. I return to my apartment, make the coffee and forget about it.

This morning I get up pour a cup of coffee. As I’m sitting there waiting for the caffine to do it’s thing it dawns on me that this is the best damn cup of coffee I’ve had in as long as I can remember. It’s dark, rich and just tastes great. It even smells great. All this time of buying expensive beans, the bloody mess the grinder makes, always being a tiny bit short and needing to grind more beans and Nabob, from a tin, tastes better.

The above was written a few days ago. I like to have ‘a few in the can’ but I never go back and actually click Publish. So Monday morning I’m tidying up the kitchen and actually look at said can of coffee. Decaf! I’ve been drinking decaf all weekend and seemingly, no ill effects. Without a word of lie, I was asleep within an hour. So yeah, I’m off beans but I went out and got some of the hard stuff after I woke up. Seriously.

Yeah… aren’t you glad that you keep coming back? You know you are…

Well, here we go… I actually feel like bogging. So, what’s new? Let’s see; first off, congrats to Karan and Claire as well as Fred and Krista who decided to have their respective babies this week. I didn’t realize that this was a race, though I’m all in favour of racing. One had a boy and one had a girl though I’m not going to tell who had what. See that? That’s the power of having a website of your own. It’s such an exclusive thing… Add Daymented’s baby to the mix and there are three new baby’s in my little circle of friends in the past few weeks. Well, good luck with that…

What else has been happening? Um, well I took a step towards becoming an adult which caused me to spend quite a lot of time under my bed in the fetal position. Some sobbing was detected though not reported.

Oh yeah, I bought my ticket for Korea and Japan again this year. I imagine that the humidity will kill me yet I’m still excited to be going. I love being there but getting there is kinda shitty. My agent has given me a seat on the upper deck of the plane; I don’t know what that means but here’s hoping that it’s not travel slang for a storage bin. I’m going despite Spanky threatening it trade me to Marketing in exchange for a whiteboard if I went during this release.

I’ve been fighting with my recently purchased shower massage. How nice that all the water restriction ‘features’ and the eighth inch hose reduces the water flow to a pathetic trickle. I’m all for saving water but if your shower takes twice as long, what’s the point? I feel like taking said shower massage back to whomever made it and smacking them right between the eyes with it.

Not easily thwarted, I disassembled it (repeatedly) to try and remove the flow restriction. I don’t mean taking the hose off and looking at, I mean taking it apart in a way that wasn’t intended and removing shit. This resulted in water simply leaking everywhere, eventually shooting all over the ceiling after my final attempt which involved quite a lot of electrical tape. All week I’ve been hacking this freakin’ thing, finally giving up and putting the original shower head back on and enjoying actual water pressure again.

Last night I was all about the home improvement. I hung two shelves in the bathroom as well as a new towel rack. Now I have place to put stuff besides the sink and toilet top. I really didn’t need the space but I know MiHwa will. In fact, I see hanging many more shelves in my future once she is here.

I’ve been in the new place for just about three weeks and all is well. It’s quiet, my wireless has only dropped once, I’m ten minutes from the office and I smiled quietly to myself as I wrote my rent cheque for this month. Even the fireworks crowd is basically muted by the time they have reached my building. I have a crazy middle eastern dude above me who likes to play odd music and stand at his open window while he screams into his phone. Thankfully, he seems to have enough restraint to only do this on weekends.

So yeah, no regrets.