Not A Player Character

test?

2007-11-22T19:50:00.000-08:00

For some reason I think my blog may be down. Some reason being entering the URL 404s me.

Flock

2007-10-19T20:51:00.001-07:00

I'm writing this post from inside Flock 1.0 beta. I'm not sure how I feel about the whole program yet I really do like my Safari and Vienna sorta works for me. But after Scott Kurt's twitter kept evangelizing Flock I thought I'd give it a shot. Here's my thoughts so far:
Hits-
+Facebook integration makes sense and has many useful features for my pokewars and messaging
+Automatically grabs log-in data, no need to fill out a separate plug-in form
Misses-
-The GUI takes up a lot of space, I'm on a 13 inch Macbook and value my screen space,
-I can't figure out how to manually refresh my RSS feeds: as a political science major I need to say on top of current events and if the RSS reader can't handle +100 feeds (Vienna can but with slowdown) then the reader is worthless to me
--Vienna reads some posts that I can't figure out how to get Flock to refresh and show,
-I can't get rid of the notifier of direct twitter messages, yes I know I have them and I read them on my phone months ago, I shouldn't need to waste my time removing them from my account so that the notice goes away,
-I can't pull up a list of my tags in the blog editor, that makes it hard to use the same tags for a topic and thus they lose any value they'd have,

Conclusion: Beta software for sure. Until I can get my feeds refreshing and my twitter icon to stop saying I have direct messages there's no chance that Flock can replace Vienna for my rss reader and there goes a lot of the draw of learning a new web browser. I'll give it a try again when it's out of beta maybe the issues I've outlined above will be fixed by then.
Try it for yourself and if you can get any of my issues solved maybe I'll go back to it.

Confirmed Travel

2007-10-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

Just going to briefly post an update. Obviously I've been busy lately. I have my travel plans confirmed for the next semester though. January I'll be in Japan for two weeks, in March I'll spend a week in Germany and Austria, and then I have a week of Mexico in June. Getting all this and moving sorted out has put me behind on my homework so I haven't had time to post updates to here. With a bit of luck I should be posting more frequently from now on though.

Urban Bunker

2007-09-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

This is the basement of the UC. I took this while taking refuge from a storm yesterday. The funnel cloud didn't actually touch down but it was a pretty near thing. The result was everyone in the building being crammed into this hallway to hangout for a bit over an hour until the worst of the storm had passed. By the end of it I wanted nothing more than to simply get away from people for awhile.

At First Ave.

2007-09-18T22:31:00.000-07:00

I went to a show "tonight". When I bought tickets it was with my then girlfriend at the time. The tickets were for Cartel, with Nightmare of You slated to open with some other band; subject to change.

Well, it changed. Nightmare of You, the band I wanted to see since I first heard them over a year ago wasn't at First Ave for this show. Instead I was treated to some of the most horrible noise to ever pretend to be music. Then Cartel played.

Cartel live is like going through puberty, but without any of the fun parts. Awkward, unsteady, and full of vocal fluctuations. I left before they finished and I only regret that I stayed as long as I did. All in all, my first experience at First Avenue was a disappointment just by the music. The rude staff, and the fact I was there with my ex don't even need to factored in to say that my little bit of fun time was everything but that. Here's to hoping the next show I go to is substantially better.

Peanut Gallery

2007-09-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

The other day I came across an interesting opinion piece. Full text here.

One thing it didn't quit get right is that there is one other way for the auction to end; the "winner" must outbid the "loser" by a dollar and hope that the other side is rational enough to see that this way both sides go home to lick their wounds. In the grown-up word this is known as a compromise. Unfortunately, with the conflict in Iraq neither side will allow a compromise to expedite the ending of this vile affair.

At this point pulling out of Iraq would be disastrous for two groups of people; the people opposed to whichever force gains power in Iraq if it is indeed a violent force, and the Bush administration for losing their prize. So with the only sure losers being the ones that started this whole mess the chances of things ending cleanly are gone for good.

Also, the troop numbers from the "surge" in Iraq are now going to be reduced to pre-surge levels. The program wasn't effective according to officials in Iraq but the military claims it was; the administration gains from this ploy. By reducing the troop levels now there is effectively no nominal change in troop levels yet it looks like the administration is actually listening to reason and reducing the troops in a withdraw plan. The cynical part of me wonders if the surge was designed to never succeed at all but rather to allow a win to be claimed followed by a reduction in troops, filling both sides of the chart for voter approval.

Take your artificial win if you must Mr. President but grow up and stop throwing our soldiers into a cruel situation to die just to appease your stupidity.

Classes

2007-09-07T15:06:00.000-07:00

My classes for the first "week" of the semester are over. Week is in quotes due to the half-week nature. Anyway, a few thoughts about my classes.

Japanese- it's different, I'm learning a whole new alphabet. At least I found this program to help me along. I'm really enjoying the class even if it is full of nerds and poor hygiene.

Karate- Also completely different. And as usual I few out of shape from a physical activity class.

Micro Econ- I think I'm the only senior in the class. The professor has an accent that is initially difficult to understand. However the class itself should be simplistic and an easy A.

World Econ- takes everything that was said in micro and says "Ok that's all going to be ignored" It's going to be more work than micro but it should also be more interesting.

20th century political philosophy- easy, easy, easy. I know the professor's style. Should also be interesting.

Senior Seminar- when every part of the grade for the class is based on one paper you know you'd better have one hell of a paper. However, I have no idea what I'm going to do mine on. It's going to be a beast and a lot of work but it should give me a chance to show off, I like that.

Critical Mass

2007-09-04T22:26:00.000-07:00

Brief musings on Critical Mass.

I find it interesting that at least 3 arrestees have been removed from the Public Information Report.
Also of interest is the fact that only one victim is cited and one police victim. Both victims of Disorderly Conduct. Yet several people were arrested on weapons offenses. Also, only one witness.
The most common charge was Rioting.
Police action for the time being is further investigation.

Not trying to make a point, just thinking out loud but how does an alledged riot get only one person's attention, harm only two people, and result in records of exactly who the police were attempting to arrest that supposedly sparked this riot being completely incomplete?

Mark Zuckerberg Or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Not Love the Facebook.

2007-04-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

What I am going to attempt to brief describe are present problems with Facebook, and how this social networking site is flawed to the extent of becoming unusable for small-town college students.
Disclaimer, any evidence given is based on my own experiences, your life may vary, satisfaction not guaranteed.

Let's take what we know, facebook is a social networking site that was originally a college exclusive and then opened to the wider population. It is in a direct compitetion with friendster, Hi5, myspace, and other "general use" social networks.

All of these general use social networks use the basic idea of a profile page. A user is free to modify large amounts of this profile page but in the end the same goal is for them to convey fairly basic ideas about a person. They also all offer varying degrees of "privacy". More on these ideas later.

So here is the main point, from it's original use for small-town college students, facebook has lost usability. River Falls is a small town, it is far enough away from the Twin Cities that you can not simply take metro transit in for social happenings. With respect to this the opening of facebook to the larger populous, the addition of global groups, and the back-lash to the news feed have all had horrible effects on building a facebook campus community.

Opening facebook has had the affect of raising security concerns while at the same time alienating the previous core-user base, the college student.

Global groups have resulted in lowered membership in local groups, this directly effects small campuses where members of a local group would recognize other people from the same group, now with it being common for groups to be over several hundred members such an event is rare if not outright impossible.

There was tremendous backlash to the addition of the facebook newsfeed. Because of the factor of the newsfeed itself not providing aggregation for all of one's friends' changes and the backlash which resulted in many users disabling the newsreeder from ever displaying an update in addition to limiting profile access even more the present state of facebook is created.

Presently facebook is a collection of profiles linked through real life acquaintances and online groups. Profiles are generally banned to anyone that is not a friend of the profile and thus losses it's usefulness. Your friends already know the info in your profile, it's pointless. The security options have resulted in greatly reduced usability for the whole of facebook. The online groups are limited discussion areas where people across the globe can interact. Unfortunately, you will not go out and party tonight with someone in Detroit unless you are already in Detroit.

Because of these global tie-ins, facebook has become a social network that promotes a pseudo-social user base. The users are encouraged to trade ideas across the globe while overlooking their current location and the community suffers.

I don't think there is anyway to reclaim facebook for the campus community. I don't think facebook is in anyway more special or unquie than myspace or vox, or friendster, or hi5. I don't think I have much use for facebook anymore. I had some great times with it two years ago when it was a campus only thing, but it feels my time with Facebook is past and nothing will bring it back.

nothings.

2007-03-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

I'm running my computer on 64-bit Ubuntu now. It is interesting although lacking in usability. At the very least I have come to the conclusion that my next computer will be an Apple.

Blogger 2.0

2007-01-27T22:33:00.000-08:00

What's new here, what can I build here?