The internet seems to like noticing something it thinks nobody else has. It's good for that. Let's take a shelackazoid, or more precisely Everywhere Girl, a girl from a stock photo image. Why did they catch onto her? Because she is on so many sources? Probably just because someone thought she was hot.

What I would like to see is an article where 20 people you have seen in picture frames in Walmart and Blacks and any Umbra store, the aforementioned shelackazoid are interviewed. April 11 08

Long posts here are usually rants or complaints or lame attempts at reviews. How about something positive? Inspired by 100 THINGS WORTH DOING, I give you "100 Fond Memories & Good Things" -- Pt. 1.

1. That green velour shirt Mom got me when I was 4. It felt good and I felt I looked good in it.
2. Sitting upside down in the backseat of the car with my X-Men comics while on a Sunday drive.
3. Cuddling with Marmy in the backseat of a car while driving back from Louisbourg, even before we were officially dating. She's still the best damn cuddler I know.
4. The first time I opened a D&D box, I was mystified and excited about experiencing something I knew had so much more potential than the boardgames Risk and Monopoly I was currently playing.
5. Puppy smell. I slept for a week with a puppy on my chest every night. I don't know what that smell is but it is good memories to me.
6. Fruit Wars. A friend and I, in about grade 4, drew sheets of fruits & veggies having a war with sweets & candies. I can remember the glee of coming up with creative ways for them to wreck each other like muffins rolling watermelons off cliffs and grapes smashing candy canes. Today, a kid would be carted off to the psychologist for such violent imagery but then I was just seen as creative.
7. Yellow lollipops. I don't know why but I only like yellow.
8. Getting my mom to draw stuff for me. In my early years, i knew my mom was a frustrated artist who had to spend more times around her kids then her drawing. So I would get her to draw things for me and marvel at the stuff that came from her pencils.
9. Dad & oak sawdust. Dad was a carpenter and the best smelling cut wood was oak.
10. Rabbit runs. At my littlest, I loved to crawl through the rabbit runs in the woods behind my house. I could get quite the steam up crawling through pretending to be chased by ogres. I always got away.

It's titled Blogs can kill brands and it's about how one blogger hoped to damaged the reputation of a car dealership due to a bad experience. But no, it's about more than that, it's about how blogs can actually effect sales and standing in the business world. Unfortunately I think the writer has been drinking the koolaid of how great & powerful blogs are.

There is no doubt that the internet, and blogs specifically, is having an impact on the way people do business. Companies are shilling to popular bloggers and hoping their product will be highlighted on a personal blog, with favourable intent. But how much of a real impact is it having? If you are not selling a product that will make or break on the selling to internet savvy people, does it really matter? Having a thousand bloggers post a good review of your new web toy is likely to have an impact. But 5000 bloggers complaining about a car dealership is not likely to have an impact unless someone at your local news outlet picks it up.

The fact is that in today's world the little person doesn't really have a voice. The days of customer service managers accepting letters of complaint and responding and doing something about it are over, IMO. There are just too many people out there responding to good advertising and they outweigh the revenue lost by losing customers. February 28 08

A list of things I have DLed lately and enjoyed. Being addicted to fast connections and free things is morally degrading me. I think I will kick puppies next.

• Doctor Who, seasons one & two, TV -- Marmy wanted to catch up on the episodes we missed while not remembering when it was on CBC. Catching all the missed references to Torchwood are fun.
• Torchwood, season two, TV -- We are watching these as they become available and enjoying them as much as we did first season. Jack's innuendo and sometimes not-so-much-innuendo still cracks me up.
• Denno Coil, anime -- a great anime for kids about a cyber world within a cyber world. Kids get glasses in order to see the cyberworld, have cyberpets, call up HUDs, etc. but there seems to be a definite reference that this is only one layer of many.
• Iron & Wine, music -- I just got the entire collection and I am moving slowly through it with my barely-one-day of use on my iPod. Recharging every day bugs the shite out of me.
• City and Colour, music -- Ditto as above but not started yet.
• The Invasion, movie -- Bodysnatchers remake that moves much much quicker than any other version and adds the idea of a quick response when people start acting weird. But the ending flops.
• The Golden Compass, movie -- An Oscar "for your consideration" copy and really, you don't often notice how they re-do the colour of a movie until you see such a grand scale film. And this was quite grand but unfortunately, like the Narnia movie, fell flat for me. I liked it as elements but as a movie, yawn.
• Good Luck Chuck, movie -- A whim DL to waste some saturday morning time. There was a decent date movie hidden in this pile of crap, deeply hidden. Why do current comedy movie makers always have to include the What About Mary? crassness in a cute comedy?
• The Simpson, movie -- DLed but not watched yet; why not?
• Stargate Atlantis, season 3 -- This show started as my guilty pleasure, as it was not available in Canada. But with Season 3 starting on Space this year, I decided I wanted to catch up and see Season 4. I can safely say this was the "we are settled into it" season for this show, well done and character driven.
• Stargate Atlantis, season 4 -- Completing season 3 while I was down & out in flu's ville, I began grabbing the current season. All caught up now. I am somewhat disappointed that Dr. Keller is turning out to be another Rodney-wimp. We only need one.
• Band of Horses, Cease to Begin, music -- One of a handful of bands I am listening to because they played live of MTV Canada. This was the best.
• Wintersleep, Welcome to the Night Sky, music -- Another MTV Canada band, this time from NS. Not bad but not a favourite.
• The Gossip, music -- Ditto but not from NS. Pretty damn good but not listened to enough. The danger of non-tangible music.
• There are more and I will update this when I get the chance...

So I was playing with a new version of PhoToast, which looks like half-assed crap right now so don't bother looking for a link, which would use static sized pages -- ala a scanned notebook. I was also using it as a method to learn some about the new MT4. Nice interface but they killed pop-up comments. And without them my new design style would not work. So, back to the "let's play with a new blog software" drawingboard. October 05 07

Everything being built on the web these days is all about the community. Where do the loners fit in with all these cliques? When I started on the web, it was all about personal websites. YOU had a site where you put all your stuff. Hell, even when blogging took off, it was about personalized blogs on YOUR site. I think that was the main reason I stayed away from Livejournal, even though i had an account when they started. But now everything is community driven this and community building that. Everybody is Facebooking and MySpacing and TubingYou. They are counting beans ("friends") and using templated personal sites. I am about to re-design some of my own personal brands on the web and I realize that I am back to being a lone voice in a 40 visitors a day world, a highschool loner, in a 500+ friends world. How about all us loners make a community? September 19 07

This idea of email bankruptcy is a fascinating meta exercise in today's connected world, one I had not heard before an overheard conversation on the subway yesterday. I am one of those people who rarely replies to email which is assisted (or made moot) because outside of work, I rarely get any email. At work, I have to respond -- it's one of the prime elements of my job. But at home, very few require a response and I usually do reply quickly to those that do require a confirmation or answer or whatever. I never get any postcard-style email anymore, you know, those kinds of email asking how you are, what is happening, how are things? I probably stopped getting them because the answers are usually in my blog. Or because I didn't ever answer them.

What I want to do is declare Pop Culture Bankruptcy. Can I get rid of all the junk I have and start over again? Can I sell all my music CDs, delete all my MP3s, sell all my DVDs, toss out my videotapes, sell or give away my books & RPGs & comics and basically clean house? Consuming is fun, retaining is a hassle. May 31 07

I saw this recently on Flickr. WTF?

P.S. It led to this. April 04 07

Really, at what point in Search Engine history will the majority of search hits be to other search engines' results? March 02 07

I was wondering. I imagine this has been wondered before. But it's my turn to wonder. I am allowed that. Do other people see The Web as a big glossy magazine, no, a glossy magazine store? Or at least a dentist's office table of offerings. Think about it, you browse through the selection getting caught by pretty pictures, jokes at the bottoms of articles, sidebars and sections dedicated to blurbs. Occasionally, depending on your personality, you might dig deeply into a meaty article about Environmentalist Heretics (i do imagine we are going to have to soon change our mind on environmentalism from stop doing this to start adapting this) or Diversity at Web Tech Conferences (is it just me or are all these conferences the new weekly meeting that exist for themselves not for the possibilty of contributing to the tech community). Some people go for mainly entertainment and pop culture magazines while others like light news & technology mags. Then there was Wired, the magazine that seemed to invent the overuse of blurbs, reducing columns to paragraph bites. Now, who brings The Web into the toilet with them? February 28 07

Sometimes when landing on a link, it's fun to trace the path back to how you ended up there. I asked myself, "Does the US have it's own loonie and how often do people use them?" I came to that question because I saw someone had a stack of dollar coins in their pick on the Engadget Flickr Group. I had recently joined in order to enter their digital camera contest -- it seems that until i actually can afford a real D-SLR, I wouldn't mind collecting P&S cams. I entered this contest because it was mentioned at the end of their xBox 360 Contest, which BTW, was really difficult to figure out how to actually enter -- you just add a comment to the stream; I am somewhere in the 3000s. I ended up at Engadget today because of the steampunk LT in the previous post. October 13 06

LicketyShip is the new local (west coast local) small package delivery service that is web-based. I guess the only thing that makes this different than the dirty, rude and usually inebriated local couriers that go to The Store's backdoor for local package deliveries is that it is web-based. I also envision they are focused on picking things up for you at a grocery or convenience store and dropping it off to you at home. I guess most people just ask a taxi to get it for you. Or as they do in Quebec, you can call the dep and a guy on a bicycle (that seems made for this express purpose, excuse the pun) shows up at your door with your beer and cigarettes. My short time on the plateau told me that these guys usually brought beer and cigarettes, sometimes lottery tickets, sometimes dirty magazines -- not much else. So, here's what we do. We rent a couple of abandoned shops in major college areas of Toronto and buy/steal a bunch of cheap bikes. We install a server in one, a handful of PCs in the others and run a shop that delivers like a depanneur, works like a Likety Split. We create a new Toronto tradition. October 11 06

So I started at the post concerning someone asking the CRTC about Blocking content. The content sites in particular are American-based racism sites with loud & often violent calls for action against a human-rights (and a bit of a loud & opinionated one himself) lawyer, Richard Warman. I noticed in the comments that a post by Bill White was removed by the owner of the blog. He is, "Commander of the American National Socialist Workers' Party" and basically a right-wing, neo-nazi group. I then googled Richard Warman and came across a number of other sites that mention him also with ambiguous organization names such as "Canadian Association for Free Expression", another basically racist group spouting about the rights to free expression but really just wanting to yellow about evil Jews, poor trod upon Ernst Zundel and how bad whites have it in North America.

Bleah! Why is it that these fucking wingnuts believe they deserve the right to be loud mouthed, hate spewing pigs but don't seem to think that anybody other than a shaven head, blue eyed, white skinned person also has the right to these same freedoms? And they don't come right out and say they are White Supremists, just bleat about it behind the guise of censorship and whatnot.

The other thing I noticed when googling some of the names around this case was the prevalence of seperation groups. Quebec has long wanted to seperate from Canada and has the culture, background and distinction to make their case worth listening to. And of course Cape Breton deserves their godgivenright to cute the Causeway and float to Bermuda. But why would Alberta need to seperate other than to keep their cows and their oil to themselves? And BC?!?! Man, I can understand the reefer heads wanting a freezone for weed but racist denial of the rest of Canada? I think they should stick to weed and stay away from political activism.

Weird world out there and only just in Canada. August 26 06

Yes, these are my Five Quotes, a meme.

• "That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another...."
  Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown
• "If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going."
  Professor Irwin Corey
• "Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life."
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "I'm actually equal parts cynicism and apathy. I'm always willing to believe the worst as long as it doesn't take too much effort."
  Dennis Miller
• "May God defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from only my enemies."
  Voltaire

I finally understand the whole reason behind the site being called Boing Boing as I boinged from a Daring Fireball post to a Silicon Valley Watcher post to a a Scobelizer post about GeekBrief.TV, a video podcast with a cute girl talking about tech stuph. Really, if you want your tech segment to be watched, have a cute girl do it. Not a stunning, why-isn't-she-in-Hollywood kinda girl but the kind of girl that your development team only wishes they had the nerve to ask out when she actually understands what they mean by Ruby on Rails. Really, we all know that geeks are no longer just satisfied with dating/marrying/becoming-obsessed-about the girl who just is willing to sleep with them or is only the girl who turned them down in highschool or is able to talk Dr. Who & X-Men (grant morrisson run) & XML with them. The geeks are now making enough money AND can dress themselves. You cannot rely on the old standards of an overweight geek shilling your tech product OR the pretty TV personality who can read a teleprompter but asks you how to watch a podcast. No point, just an observation. June 11 06

Of course you know a part of me is focused on that part of her " It's a bad time to start a company" statement saying, "Everyone's gainfully employed, and fielding several offers." That is, everyone who has a current skillset. I wonder how many people are floating in the same boat as me, one of expired skills because you had to work elsewhere in order to pay for groceries? I am sure, if my recent interviewing experiences have been similar, that when you post a position you still have hundreds if not thousands of people applying. The schools are still churning out candidates without any experience and probably sub-standard skills. Maybe the programmers with the Hot Skillz are already snatched up but you already know they were the first to be re-employed after the bubble burst and they are nervous about leaving their stable little company job for another potential burst of the bubble. Sure, everyone wants to be offered 100k for their job but no one wants to be looking for work three years later when the wonder snazzy everyone-will-subscribe Web2.0 tool turns out to be just another bad Flickr clone.

Bitter? Not me.

Speaking of, I have actually met someone who is even more bitter about this than me. She is from the previous generation of IT people, someone who never actually had any programming or technology skills but ended up in middle management managing workflow. Her job required to repeat what she was doing and never update. Once unemployed she had nothing to market and still bemoans the fact today some 6 years later. March 25 06

I do this occasionally. I ended up at Adam Curry's Weblog, a who started MTV.com and I believe, when he gave it to MTV, an old boss of mine started the whole MTV website. I was brought to it by his own post about editing the Wiki entry about podcasting, in which I didn't know he was involved at the beginning. Workbench (hearing myself think, "i really hate it when someone has a domain name that is catchy but the website is called something else; oh wait it is his NAME.") brought me to that with his own post about the editing. Someone in the comments points out that Cadenhead and Dave Winer (blog whipping boy from the old days) work together and Winer & Curry have a beef, probably from their early days doing podcasts stuph. I got to that page from the sidelink at Airbag. And Airbag has this neat skin for the (recent gen) iPod called iPod Tattoo, inspired by/for some HP product. Kottke got me to Airbag. December 06 05

Everyone knows I miss the original format and people of TechTV, not the watered down G4TechTV and I am so glad I found Robert Heron and Patrick Norton doing a downloadable TV show at DigitalLifeTV.

OK, the story is about how Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot. For those of you who are not techheads, Slashdot (or /. if you like) is the ultimate in geek discussion sites. It is basically weblog styled with daily posts and a bid for comments. At times getting "slashdotted" meant getting thousands of people hitting your site at once. Digg combines the idea of "social bookmarking" (bookmarks stored publically instead of on your own computer) with the discussion blog. So you read a story and then "dig it" adding it to your own list of kewl linx.

Now it's not the tech that catches my attention but the person behind it. At the Wired story, there is Kevin Rose's little face attached. In my opinion Kevin Rose is the first true webgeek celebrity, combining cred with a personality made for the media. He's everywhere instead of fading once his on-air Screensavers / AOTS exposures went south. Most saw him leaving those shows because they lost the credibility and most would expect a geek who left TV to disappear. Nuh uh, he's out there and still making quite the name for him. If I was 14 he is who I would like to grow up to be. November 17 05

When I watch two BitTorrent downloads going along, both for the same thing but from different sources (as in different files names) of which I institued to grab the first one that completes, when one stops and the other starts up again, could I be seeding myself? November 12 05

This makes me frown. The problem with letting the entire domain of the internet pretend they are experts (ala Wiki World) is that many of them don't have a gorram clue about what they are talking about. The dolphin chick attitude in How to Exercise an Open Mind annoys me. Essentially it is just telling us to "try new things" over and over and over. And of course their response to my opinion of this posting would be, "Well you obviously don't have an open mind." *grump* November 03 05