Someone hit me over the head and then I was twittering all over the place

Microblogging, huh? I don't know about this...doesn't anyone value solitude anymore, rather than sharing every small detail of their life? People can't stay disconnected for more than 5 minutes..sheesh. Cynicism aside, i can see how this could be addictive. I found Spider-man, and decided to follow his exploits. Who knows? Maybe I'll see what he's up to, and I could go help him fight crime. This might have a practical application for libraries. I noticed, for example, the learnandplay twitter account mentioned a library branch closing. Perhaps it could be used to keep employees and patrons in the loop. There's already a wealth of ways to communicate on the net, and this seems like kind of a cross between forum posting, and instant messaging. So to sum up...I do see twitter having practical applications, but for people just telling people what they are doing every 5 minutes...well people already do that with their cellphones...I could see how it could be amusing though. What would be cooler is if tracking devices were put in everybody and twitter would constantly update us with what they were ACTUALLY doing. No...that would be wrong..

...


twitter name: Snowdenslove

Library Thing

I've seen these kind of sites before and have never been interested..but I see how it can be addicting. You add books, and you can even add your own knowledge to the pages dedicated to the particular books, or get involved in discussions. One reason I don't get into these kind of sites..sad to say since i work at a library..is that I don't read that much. However..I do have good taste..if i do say myself. Its just..with reading its very hard to tell if you're going to be wasting your time reading a book by reading crap...and there's so much of it. Yet, I suppose that's why sites like this exist. I just don't want people to see what limited amount of books I've read. But this thing is cool I guess. WORD. Or words rather...Words are what you read in a book..yeah..that's what i mean.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/snowdens

thingys that appear in front of your eyes maker thing

Yeah..I somewhat knew about these. I played around with the "Dub your own chinese movie" application..but not too much as I've already played around with stuff like that. I instead quickly came upon the most appealing image generator which was the "Make your own movie poster" application. Good fun. I hope Billy Bob Thorton isn't mad that I said he I wrote and directed my movie. Pfft..whatever..I can know other Billy Bob Thortons!


http://bighugelabs.com/photos/a6c2db87c75993ca711bc1fa109fff0f/poster4306414

Searching RSS Feeds

Out of all the search tools, I found the bloglines searchtool the best. I think I searched for news on any new spider-man movies (apparently Sony has snagged Toby Maguire, and Sam Raimi for Spider-man 4 and 5...whoa!). Topix.net I found wasn't useful because keyword and phrase searching isn't very helpful when you are looking for a particular subject to be constantly updated on (I want to find a newsfeed about Sour Cream, instead they bring something up about chili which you can put sour cream on...go figure!). That's the one interesting thing as in terms of feeds, as it's hard to find specific feeds, more often you'll find a feed that includes the topic you were searching for. Syndic8 I thought was mostly useless. User submitted stuff is always iffy. I only searched for gas stuff, and it came up with something, but I still don't like the layout of the search engine. Often feeds seemed to be in the process of being evaluated to determine whether they're worthy of being part of Syndic8 or something...

Weblogs..pretty easy to find stuff but the information I found seemed to be limited and not very informative..short little blurbs...it was hard to tell whether the blurbs were summaries or whether there was a way to access the full blog. I did however learn about Ps3's Life program that it is part of the most recent firmware update...apparently you can access it through Folding_Home which is a program that uses PS3's to help Stanford scientists do protein folding simulations to help research diseases like cancer and stuff. The life program lets you view the the earth..zoom in on particular cities..get the weather and news...much like the Wii allows you to do. Word.

Newsfeeds, and stuff.

I like this newsfeed business. When I was initially reading the concept I was like "ummm, browsing the internet isn't that hard..do we really need to add another layer of convenience?" but it's actually really cool. After creating my account on bloglines I added some newsfeeds to my account just by clicking on stuff I'm interested in. That gave me a lot of newsfeeds so then I just simply deleted the specific newsfeeds I wasn't interested in. This is a great tool for information junkies. I like the idea of not having to go to all these different websites to see if they've been updated or not.Internet has always had the stigma of not being the most reputable source of information, but rather just having a large wealth of it, yet this tool does well at whittling all that information down. Of course most people would probably just suscribe to the kind of opinions and information that confirm their biases, yet, for example, if one were to suscribe to several different newsfeeds covering a paticular topic, it might be a way to add more balance, as well as reputability, to one's source of information. i would of liked to have this feature at the beginning of my career as a political science major. cauuuse...I didn't really read the newspaper like they encouraged.

Who I'm kidding? There are more time wasting things to do with this. Like subscribing to Penny Arcade...or Elmo's Weekly Sockpuppet review....(I made the second one up...obviously).

A technology related post in which I talk about one of the less practical applications of technology

I have spent much of my natural born life playing video games. I aspire to be a musician, but half the time I'd rather kill things than write music. In fact, when i write music it is usually a concious effort to pull myself away from a game to write a song. In a ways, it turns music making into something like a job. I have to be like "okay, if do some work, you can play a game." Sad thing is I haven't made a cent for this work.

anyways...

Video games have become increasingly more complicated, and sometimes less accessible to those who haven't grown up playing them. The exception to this of course being the Wii, which has brought gaming to a wider audience; still though, a lot of that wider audience includes players of Wii sports, where you do some virtual form of a activity you would do in real life. That doesn't really encapsulate the so called "hardcore gamers". I'm not denegrating this kind of gaming, its fun and social, but I'm just saying it's a different kind of animal. Those that are really involved in video games spend countless hours getting involved in a story line, building up a chacter, looking for hidden stuff, or whatever. The point being games are more an investement of time than ever. Which brings me to my actual point. The more complicated games have become have made them more prone to problems now than ever. Back in the days of Nes and cartridge based systems, these things never failed except for the occasion of having to blow dust out of game. Now, video game machines have the same problems as pcs, because video game machines increasingly aspire to be pcs. You can look to the Xbox 360's ring of death that has plagued countless gamers for an example of this.

My experience with this has been my ps3. Grand theft auto 4 in particular. I had no problems with my ps3 until this game. This game froze in the beginning of the movie first time i tried. I trieeeeed countless things to try to get it to work. Reinstalling the game (that's something you do with pcs!) disconnecting the internet from the ps3, all kinds of things. After extensive research online, i came to realize that certain batches of ps3's have a hardware defect that hasn't been exposed until gta4. sooo, since my system was out of warranty i had to do a lot of complaining to convince sony to replace my console. I'm awaiting ups to deliver the "coffin" that i will be sending my ps3 in with. Soooo, hopefully all goes well. And hopefully they don't send back a crappy 40 gig which has no b/c (ability to play ps2 games, and ps1 games) and no wifi since the 60 gig i have is not produced anymore......

See all of this? This is the bad part of modern gaming, where you look more ridiculous in the eyes of others because you invest all of this time just trying to get a damn game to work. JUST WORK WELL VIDEO GAMES...WE DON'T WANT ALL OF THOSE JERKS WHO THINK GAMING IS A WASTE OF TIME TO SHAKE THEIR HEAD SMUGLY AT OUR PLIGHT.