J.F.: a. send me sum chips plzz hun
A.W.: hahahha no
J.F.: ok
J.F.: fuuck you than
P.W.: charming
A.W.: done it j
J.F.: ty hun
J.F.: no you hav not
A.W.: il try again :|
A.W.: its not lettin me j
J.F.: is ok hun
J.F.: cum in a room wiv me and fold

That boy needs a beat down with the manners-stick.

I had originally an account with Myspace [notice I'm not linking to it] that was only used for obtaining pictures of my favorite bands. I never took full advantage of the site by making friends with everyone. I was happy using it for my own needs. After receiving many emails regarding friend requests that nearly all involved some scam to send traffic to either sex or pharmaceutical sites, I had enough. Feeling empowered during Simon Owen’s International Delete Your Myspace Account Day, I mad my request to close the account and life was good.

My membership to Last.fm was in part due to experimenting with the many features that Banshee had to offer. Banshee is to Linux what iTunes is to the Mac, minus the iTunes store. One of the features it had was a plugin to “scrobble” your tunes to an account at Last.fm. This gives you the ability to keep track of music you’ve just played, share them with others, and learn about bands that might appeal to you that you may not have known to exist. You can also join groups and be-friend other users, but with an apparently better class of people than you’d find at Myspace. This you gives other sources of music you can have streamed to your player and enjoy what others are listening to. All around, a win-win scenario.

From there, I joined Twitter. Twitter was founded on the idea of supplying a personal feed to users to share what they were doing through the course of the day. Posting “tweets” throughout the day, your friends could follow your experiences while “tweeting” back to you about what they were doing. The infrastructure has found other uses by coordinating people’s experiences during major events like the recent rampage through the city of Mumbai.

Personally, it was fun for about a week. It’s a novel idea and it has certainly found a niche that many people find useful. I can’t find a need for it that anything else I already use couldn’t perform the same functions. I also don’t need to know what others are doing in real time. If I’m not there to share the experience with them, then they can tell me about it the next time we visit.

Then came Facebook. Oh a whim I gave it a go. I was immediately surprised to find family members that also had accounts there and be-friended them quickly. They introduced me to some of the activities, applications as Facebook calls them, which helped to immerse myself into the Facebook world. However, it weren’t for the applications, I would probably have gotten bored with it soon after joining.

The part of Facebook I find most troubling is how advertisement driven it is. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it’s great to see a company supplying an entertaining social environment for free and having it fully funded through advertisements. But, a lot of those advertisements are the same annoying ones I find elsewhere. They’ve also engineered a few adverts to seem as though they’re another Facebook application. There was IQ challenge that was making it seem as though a friend had initiated it. After the fifth page of bypassing special offers just for me so I could see my IQ score, I finally gave up leaving the test a bit wiser than before.

So with that, I learned to discern and ignore the advertisements, or at the very least make sure I don’t visit with a browser that doesn’t utilize an ad blocker and/or script blocker. With the said sad ads now blocked, Facebook is much more enjoyable and easier to navigate now that there’s less load on the browser.

So in the end, I still use Last.fm. I’ll find a use for Twitter some day, just not anytime soon. And Facebook has some addictive games to play with friends. I found a lot of other great online games to play, but I’ll save those for another day.

And with that, I place the final nail in this coffin and live on.

MyBrute sets you up with your own personal warrior to go at it head-to-head ala Thunderdome style (“Two men enter. One man leaves.”) You type in a name to generate your warrior. You can change its appearance and coloring to suit your own taste. Then the battles begin.

It’s as easy as it’s entertaining. You pick your opponents, then sit back and watch as they take turns punching, kicking, stabbing, hitting until one of them is critically injured. As you gain experience from the matches, you gain extra strength, agility, and speed. You also obtain weaponry and special skills.

You also get your very own unique mybrute.com address in order to access your warrior and gain recruits which help you build stats.

Facebook came with the surprise of finding other family members there. Making friends with the family made it easier to explore what Facebook has to offer. When you boil it all down, it’s really nothing more than an advertisement server. They entertain the Internet public while getting the opportunity to serve that public ads that make them money. This isn’t much different than the strategy television networks have been subscribed: free entertainment as long as we can pitch some products to you in the meantime. “Here’s a word from our sponsors.”

Twitter is going to take some time to get used to. I’m still not sure how I’d want to use it. Besides announcing a random thought once in a while, I don’t have much need for it. I do like the ability of following others’ feeds so that they all collect on your Twitter home page. I follow Senator John McCain from Arizona, Tim Buckley of Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and Ryan Sohmer of Least I Could Do. It’s entertaining and with this market you couldn’t ask for more.

I still can’t bring myself to go back to MySpace, though. It doesn’t appeal to me anymore. So, I’ll play around with these and see what I can make out of it all. If you’re at all interested, the links are located to the right and at the bottom of every page.

At first I thought there was an update to Firefox that changed some locale setting. But then I noticed I had the same issue on every computer regardless of which browser I was using. I assumed it had to be a problem with Google in relation to my IP, but I couldn’t find any confirmation until just today.

In a Google Groups discussion, a lot of users were reporting the same issue. One was able to get information from Google and relayed it to the group. Google uses location files to keep track of where an IP resides in the world in order to provide region specific services. Apparently, the files are not perfect and fortunately Google has provided a form in order to report any issues that are found.

http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=ip

If anyone else is experiencing this strange phenomenon, let Google know so they can correct it. Even my brother on location in Afghanistan was being redirected to www.google.de.

And while mankind can not control the awesome force of a hurricane, we can still develop better ways to track and predict where a hurricane may strike populated areas in order to issue fair warnings so that people can seek safety or shelter in time. When Gustav was still a major threat, Google put together a meta-page in order to track it and help with any recover efforts. One of the most interesting links from that page was the Hurricane Tracking Map that StormAdvisory.org maintains.

Powered by Google Maps, you can select any or all of the hurricanes from this season and see their path from life to death. Different stages, or way-points, are detailed to show date, time, and wind-speed and are color-coded according to each storm’s severity. Current storms also give projected paths. Whats even more intriguing is that StormAdvisory even has a drop-down menu where you can see the paths of every hurricane known to exist as far back as 1851. Of course, accuracy begins to decline the further back in time you look, but it’s still cool to see.

• Feel her womb entrance with new length [Sexual Enhancement]
• Cheap Price degree/Bacheelor/masteerMBA/PhDD certificate srhrs 0x6e [Online school]

• Apple iPods explode while charging – Software industry sues eBay for not controlling piracy [malware - flash update]
• Lost writers wrapping up hit series – American athletes denied Chinese visa and are unable to compete in upcoming Olympics [malware - flash update]
• new Olimpic china collection – luxury stuff for Olimpic games. aspecial models with hundred discounts. [Cheap crap / possible Erection Pills]
• Medic assistance share! – Beer is a silent killer? [unknown, but funny]
• SPECIAL OFFERS-Pharmacy Online July Sale 70% [Viagra & Copyright 2008 Microsoft?]
• Bartender Gettts $10,000 Tip on $26 Tab [Sexual Enhancement]
• New recipe for successful love [malware - flash update]
• new sports watches models for Olimpic games [Erection pills]
• Try also each time new unforgettable impressions [bay.liveefilestore.com known spammer]

I think I do pretty well with controlling spam, so if I’m getting these emails, I know other computer users are certainly getting them. And that means I get to recite my usual warning:

If you don’t know the sender of the email, don’t even bother to read it. And for God’s sake, don’t even bother clicking on any links or visit any site contained within the emails. For those times when you think you know the sender, use caution and pay attention.

If some site is asking you to update your Flash player software, don’t use their supplied updater. Go to Adobe’s website and get it straight from the source. Chances are, you already have the latest software.

I’m still laughing at the first listed spam title. “Feel her womb entrance with new length.” Whoo hoo!