I Feel Like Ctrl-Alt-Deleting Myself

Another Reason to Like Facebook

You can post on your WordPress.com blog from within the Facebook site. I love it when technology conspires to let me do more things from one place.

The app could be better. For instance, I can’t control how many comments and/or posts display on my profile. Seems like a no-brainer there. What would also be nice is having the rich text editor like the WordPress.com GUI in Facebook. I can do HTML easily, but it’s nice to have tools that let me think about the post more than the code.

Twitter! Flickr! YouTube! Get on the ball, here! Let me post from Facebook!

Booking a Face

The MySpace thing is kind of cool.  But all the poorly designed pages makes my (elitist and snobby) brain hurt.  Is it really worth having bad HTML to get people to learn HTML?  Plus, I don’t find it to be very network-y.  Just there for collectors of friends.

Enter Facebook, which actually makes finding friends and customization easy.  They also opened up their API so that developers could create new applications that you can use on your profile and do really cool stuff like throw food or show everyone who visits where in the world you have been. Useful? Maybe. Fun? Definitely.

The clean interface is worth a lot in my book.  Easily seeing what all of my friends are up to is even better.  There’s a lot of potential here and it’s being realized quickly.

The only drawback is not having many people I know use it yet.  So here’s a link to my profile. If you use it, stop in and say hello.

Table Art

If you know anything about HTML Tables, you’ll probably appreciate this:

Who needs a graphics program?

Farewell Mr. Wizard

Science became slightly less cool today.

I never had cable while his show was on, but we watched episodes from time to time during classes and I caught many reruns once we did get cable.  A great show that was fun and inventive.

The world lost a man who made learning fun today.  We are blessed to have many more with us still, but not quite the same as before.

Google v God

Some folks were comparing Google to God this week (i.e. Google answers all questions whereas God usually doesn’t or at least takes much longer than Google).

An email thread between some folks generated the following snippet of strangeness from my mind:

And on the night before he was to be deleted, the son of Google took his data and exported it saying,”This is my data, exported for you. Take, each of you, and parse it.” In a similar fashion, he took his AJAX frameworks and APIs and compressing them said, “This is the basis of my feature-set and those to come. Consume you all of it.”

I was encouraged to share.

Future of the Web is a Beam, not a Tube

The Worldbeam.

Very cool idea.  However, from this description, we’re already there.  At least, I am and many others.  I don’t store anything locally, really, except financial data, a few of odds and ends, about 6GBs of (legally purchased) music, and the video games I’ve downloaded to my Wii and Xbox 360.  I get my news via RSS feeds that I’ve chosen and are tailored to my interests.

What’s new about this?

Verizon Wireless Doesn’t Want My Money

Verizon Wireless has always given me great customer service in contrast with their land line brethren.

Last night, I went to a store to purchase a Motorola Q. This is a smartphone that would be useless without a data plan, so I was planning on signing up for a new contract with a new plan. I was ready to pay them $150, plus tax and double my cell phone bill each month without having to be convinced by a sales pitch. What commission-earning sales person wouldn’t jump at that?

Apparently those that work for Verizon Wireless.

Turns out I’m not eligible to sign up for a 2-year contract since I’m still in the middle of a previous contract with them. Nevermind that I can change my pricing plan any time I want during that 2-year period. So, while I’d get special pricing if I were to agree to pay money to Verizon Wireless for two more years of my life, Verizon Wireless doesn’t want anything to do with that and sent me on my way.

I know this makes sense in a strange, bureaucratic way of making people stick for the full two years of their contract before they extend it another two years. Still, why keep your customers from agreeing to remain customers for any amount of time? Sure, they’d lose out on a year of my current contract, but they gain at least a year of my money (at double the rate, remember) and breed customer loyalty. Now, they’ve lost my loyalty so they could get the last six months of my current contract.

There’s little stopping me from switching to Spring, Cingular/AT&T, or T-Mobile when my contract expires this November. They had their chance to keep their claws in me until 2009 (and probably much longer) and they blew it, for now.

Computer Supported Tree

Read this.

I wonder when the computer will have a puppy in place of the tree.  I mean, if you’re going for the emotional response…

Of course, I know at least one person who would be tempted to use as much energy as possible to see the result, tree or puppy.

Constitution 2.0

This was done as a 4/1 joke, but it’s still funny.

The Constitution of the United States as an End User License Agreement (EULA).

I didn’t read it.  Who does actually read the whole EULA before clicking the Accept button?