Tag: interwebs

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Typealyzer

So, I know mostly nothing about this site, Typealyzer, or how it works, but the idea is that you input the web address of the blog you want to analyze and it’ll tell you about the blogger’s personality. So, if you do mine:

ISTP – The Mechanics

“The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generelly prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

“The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.”

Then, it shows that I’ve got left-brain dominance, including Practicality, Thinking (logic, mathematics), and Sensing (order, habit, details).

Sounds accurate to me!! 🙂

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A.L.F. uses a Hulu hoop…

Digital distribution of TV shows is quickly becoming the new way of getting content to the consumer, making it less necessary to even have cable or a DVR… ABC and CBS have their own services, but NBC went with what they call Hulu…no idea what it means…

I had never tried this service before, but after the most recent PS3 patch that came through, now it is capable of using Flash 9, which is the most recent version what is required by many streaming video sites (YouTube included…) to function. Because of this, I can how access Hulu through the PS3 and stream video content to my TV without the need to plug in my laptop…which…is kinda awesome, really…

So, to test this out, I looked through the somewhat extensive catalog of shows to watch. Each one contains a few commercials, with maybe two 30 sec commercials and one 15 sec commercial interspersed at the appropriate places…far better than the minutes upon minutes of commercials you’d see on broadcast televisions, but still not as good as skipping through them with your DVR. You really ought to browse through there, because it isn’t just NBC shows, but nearly anything produced by Universal…so Fringe is on there, too…as well as movies…all for free…

Anyway, long story short(er), I found A.L.F…and Hulu has three (of four) seasons of it. I watched the first episode today and, damn, that acting was terrible… 🙂 Seriously, A.L.F. and Willy were the only decent actors on that show (with the possible exception of Liz Sheridan as Mrs. Ochmonek…and Lucky the Cat, of course…). They should have cut everyone else out of it.

So yeah, if there’s nothing on TV you want to watch, check out Hulu. (Note: this isn’t anything new…Hulu’s been around for at least a year…I just finally discovered it…)

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Apparently, Chad has one computer…

…and not “Chad” as in “a person”…but “Chad” as in “the country…

Firefox 3.0 was released mid-afternoon yesterday and the Mozilla Foundation is going for the Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in a single day (thus, it ends at 1:16 pm today). You can follow the downloads at Spreadfirefox.com.

I’ve been using the Beta and Release Candidate versions for over a month now and absolutely love it. I’d kinda like the new default theme for Vista and XP to be transferred over to Linux, but that’s a small gripe. Otherwise, it seems faster, is a smaller download (7 MB!), and is a bit less RAM intensive than previous versions.

So yeah, if you check this out before 1:16 pm today, go download it and help out! Or if you check this tomorrow, download it anyway! As of right now, they’re sitting at 6.7 million downloads!

(oh yeah…and the title reference…in the global map on the Spreadfirefox page, you can see how much each country has downloaded…and Chad has downloaded 1 copy…)

Edit: The final tally was over 8 million downloads…they were apparently shooting for 5 million… And Chad ended up with 6 downloads, in the end… 😛

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Internet Culture War

So, there’s a blurb on Slashdot mentioning this article that talks about class divisions between users of MySpace and Facebook. It kinda talks about the history of each, especially how Facebook used to be exclusively for college students and, because of this, seems to be almost more “elitist” in its constituents. For example, Facebook users hated the idea of high school students joining their ranks late last year, and even with the infusion of “younger blood,” the site still seems to contain more educated users, while MySpace users tend to be even younger and less-educated.

One of the more interesting points in the article (about mid-way down) discusses the U.S. military, and more specifically how they banned the use of MySpace, but allow the use of Facebook. This is particularly interesting because officers tend to have Facebook accounts, while lower ranked soldiers have MySpace accounts upon military entry.

So yeah, the article talks about methodology and data recovery to a minor extent, and personally I think some of the “data” may be suspect, but it still brings up an interesting point or two… On a related note, I loathe MySpace… I hate going to MySpace pages and seeing terrible web design, horrible pictures in the background that make a given page nearly impossible for me to read, and I think it’s too easy for people to be able to access someone’s page. Now, on the other hand, I think it’s quite useful for getting your music “out there,” but a better-designed web page would be more useful…

Are different socio-economic classes using each site? Perhaps… I’m not sure this site represents anything definitive, but it does bring up a few interesting points and things to think about. I really don’t use MySpace, so I can’t attest to it… Facebook, however, is very clean and easy to use. I’d almost go so far as to say “elegant.” So, my bias toward Facebook is moreso about useability and access restrictions, rather than “the people that use it” (I’d like to think). Then again, as I scanned through some user groups around the time of the last election (Fall 2006), there were a lot of poorly educated high school students making up all kinds of “science” about stem cells…let alone frequently misspelling things…

Thoughts?

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Of Generation Gaps and Twitter…

So, before yesterday, I’d never heard of Twitter…I had to learn about it from an NPR podcast I listened to… It’s apparently a new social networking phenomenon (a la Facebook or MySpace…) that tells the world what you’re doing at any given time. You can post, IM or use a cell phone with text messaging to post a short blurb giving everyone an update, and then you can subscribe to these updates by various means… For example, I could subscribe to your Twitter account and anytime you’d update it, my cell phone would vibrate and I’d receive a text message letting me know what’s up. You can write any message you want, from “looking at websites” to “eating a ham sandwich”…

According to the Wikipedia article, Twitter has been around since October of 2006… NPR and the New York Times, amongst others, have done articles about it… Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world use it, apparently…and this leads me to my point:

Why did it take until May for me to hear about it?

I guess it means I’ve reached something of a turning point… Up until now, I’ve kept up with technology and websites relatively well – Truman students knew about Facebook before it was even available for them to join, and well before news organizations jumped on it as a “phenomenon”… And I keep up with geeky things like that pretty regularly looking at sites like Slashdot and Engadget… So do we all eventually reach a point when our knowledge of the world becomes antiquated? You hear stories from parents beginning with “when I was your age…” all the time, and at some point, all of our parents probably realized that they were knowing less and less about the generation(s) that were coming after them… My generation is just barely involved in the whole “social networking” thing, but the high school students at church are all over MySpace – I simply have no interest in it. Back in college, I’d hear about stuff from friends in classes and new sites to visit, but we don’t really talk about such things in grad school…I’d assume that “real world jobs” would be similar…

I guess I just wasn’t planning on hitting this realization just before turning 25… I figured it’d happen after I had kids, and after they got a bit older and started getting into their own interests… I wasn’t thinking that I’d reach a point where I can visually see the generation just behind mine gradually distancing itself from mine…if only in this one sector of our lives…

I’m sure I’m just over-reacting, but with the world moving faster and faster and more information becoming available over the internet, it makes you wonder if the number of years between each generational shift is decreasing… For example, I’ve never thought that my sister and I (separated by 3 years) were in different generations, but maybe we are…

Has anyone else heard of or used Twitter, or is it just me?

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Net Neutrality

So, I was flipping through ArsTechnica yesterday and saw their article about a survey being run around the Senate Commerce Committee regarding Net Neutrality. From the article:

The poll also found that many Americans have no idea what net neutrality is, or why they should care; only 7 percent said that they had even heard or seen anything about net neutrality. When pollsters introduced the concept to poll takers, they described it solely as “enhancing Internet neutrality by barring high speed internet providers from offering specialized services like faster speed and increased security for a fee.” When presented this way, 19 percent of respondents said that net neutrality was more important to them than “delivering the benefits of new TV and video choice,” which received a 66 percent backing.

Now, since I know the majority of you don’t know what Net Neutrality is, let me give you the Wikipedia definition:

The phrase Network Neutrality was coined by Columbia University law professor Tim Wu to describe networks that don’t favor some classes of application (for example the World Wide Web) over others (such as online gaming or Voice over IP).

You can read the full article for further information, and there are plenty of news articles around, but here’s the key: Net Neutrality is essential for keeping the internet as it stands today. The legislation is built to allow internet providers to allot certain speeds to certain services.

Let me explain this as simply as I can. The internet is finite: there’s only so much of it. Right now, if I want, I’ve got access to 100% of the internet. If the internet was not “neutral,” as it is now, then companies like AT&T and Verizon could say: “hmmmm…let’s just allow Andy to use 20% of the internet and use the other 80% for whatever we want, like telephone and television services.” Or even better, “hey, why don’t we have Amazon and eBay pay extra so they can each have 10% of the internet, while forcing everyone else to use and share 20% between themselves.” Why is this bad? Well, because my internet will be slower, and any new companies would be forced to use that limited amount of it until they could afford the premium to venture into the rest of the ‘Net.

Essentially, using the “Information Superhighway” metaphor, it’s like letting big companies with their semis full of products drive across the country on I-70 with no speed limit, but forcing the entire US population to drive along Route 66 (including all the stoplights).

Net neutrality is an important issue. Perhaps not as important as gay rights and an illegitimate war, but important just the same. You need to vote in November so that the internet stays the way it is, rather than favoring the large corporations, thus stifling any and all creativity and competition.

I leave you with a quote from the guy running the Senate Commerce Committee, Ted Stevens:

“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

Seriously…this is they guy “leading the charge,” so to speak.

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Need A Time-Waster?

Then look no further! Joe, Luke and I make use of this page frequently when we were managers at ITS a few summers ago…? The page is known as FilmWise Invisibles. The basic idea is that you are given a picture and you have to identify the movie. The problem is: they’ve erased the people within the picture, so you have to guess what movie it is based on the scene and clothes the actors are wearing. Some are really obvious, and others are really obscure… Anyway, they have a new one posted every week…and they’ve been doing it for 301 weeks now…

So yeah, if you like movies and wanna kill some time, give these a try… They’re surprisingly addictive… 😉

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Of Facebook and Big Brother…

So, Slashdot had a posting discussing the new changes on Facebook, which many of you use frequently… As many of you noticed this morning when you logged on to change your status, there’s a new “feeds” feature that really ramps up the stalking factor to a whole new level… Personally, I didn’t really care that much, besides the fact that I can’t seem to find a way to disable it.

Well…apparently more than a few people are rather annoyed about it, pointing out a variety of privacy issues…according to Slashdot, though, many “protest groups” have formed, the largest of which has 10,000 members… I link to CampusProgress.org and a student homepage at some university I’ve never heard of (University of Mary Washington, anybody?) as examples of just how irate some people are over the changes. A few quotes from the latter link were kinda amusing, regardless:

“When we join facebook, we automatically give up a little bit of our privacy. To use Facebook has always been ‘socially-acceptable stalking.’ Now, though, they’ve just gone too damned far. No one wants their girlfriend or boyfriend knowing when they’ve commented on a photo, written on a wall, or anything else. No one wants people to see that they’ve left a group; it could offend someone. No one really wants to see the change in status of someone’s love life.”

And from the CollegeProgress article:

“A Facebook profile now displays your online social exploits since mid- August. It notes when you wrote on someone?s wall, and when you commented on a photo, along with other new details such as your responses to event invitations, your new friends, and what groups you join. Before, as many of us know, you could write on a wall in relative privacy. It could be a sneaky affair. And commenting on someone else?s photo was something that few would notice. Wall and comment communications, while public, were not advertised.

Now, every time you do anything on Facebook, you issue a bulletin for all of your friends. Now no one will miss the fact that you think you look horrible in a picture, or that you didn’t accept an invitation to someone’s event, or that you wrote what you considered to be a funny item for your list of activities (‘Trying not to incriminate myself on facebook to all my future employers’) and then thought better of it ten minutes later and took it down.”

I dunno…personally, I figure that if you’re posting this kind of information on Facebook in the first place, you’re just asking for trouble…but at the same time, I can understand where problems can and will arise. Needless to say, I’m a). glad I’m not in college anymore, and b). glad I’m married.

Any thoughts?