Entries from August 2006 ↓

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 Web 2.0 that we share every facet of our online lives? Is the web a better place because everything is now social? 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 networking. Don’t get me wrong, I love del.icio.us, 30Boxes, Flickr and even Digg 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 AJAX 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…

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, social, networking, del.icio.us, 30Boxes, Flickr, Digg, AJAX

I noticed that Flock released a beta 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 Firefox 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 Flickr or updates their blog. That’s what Bloglines 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…

Technorati Tags: Flock, beta, Firefox, Flickr, Bloglines