Archive for December, 2009

Tiger Woods, gazillionaire golf star, has finally admitted to being a total skank and has quit golf indefinitely until all the bad jokes go away and he can come back. And I still don't care.

I don't follow golf, I don't make money from his endorsements, I'm not friends with him or his wife, I don't look to him for inspiration for my personal life. Why should I possibly care what he does, what he doesn't do, who he screws or who he screws over? If it was his wife fooling around on him, I still would not care. There is absolutely no reason for me to be interested in this train wreck of a situation, and I'm not.

What bothers me is, why is everyone else?

So some Facebook users were upset at Facebook's announced privacy policies. (Facebook is, you will recall, the massively popular online social service that allows you to easily stalk your high school girlfriend) So Facebook launched a new privacy policy today, which you know if you logged in and was immediately confronted by a new pop-up demand for clarification of what you wanted seen by whom. Now you can get much more specific on which elements of your Facebook experience can be seen by only your friends, which bits can be seen by friends of your friends, which chunks are visible to your friends and networks, and what gets hung out for the whole frickin' world to see. And yet people are still complaining!

The transition screen recommends you set your privacy settings to "Everyone" and helpfully preselected that for you in every instance, no matter what your previous settings were. You can, of course, select your old settings again and go about your merry, but many users won't bother or won't understand and will unknowingly leave themselves open to identity theft and other nasty things as their personal info gets spread across the land.

Well, yeah.

That was almost certainly Facebook's hope. They want more stuff to be open to all searchers. The more easily findable content there is, the more valuable Facebook is to advertisers. And your Wall comments going public means they can take on Twitter in the highly competitive unprofitable-online-chattering field. They want money, they do, and are in the business of procuring more of it. Granted, it's a bit cheesy to default everyone to the most open and unprivate settings possible — better to leave everyone's settings as they were and then let people open up if they wish — but if FBers don't read the rules they can't really complain when they lose the game.

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NYCMidnight started up their "Tweet Me a Story" contest again last night, and once again I'm taking a swing at it. Rules: entrants must write a 140-character-or-less story using the supplied word. Entrants had 5 hours to come up with up to three entries. My group's word was BETTER. Here's what I submitted, with titles added here for the fun of it:

Self-Improvement

“Dammit, could you be a better man just once in your life?”

"Oh, sure," he laughed, lunging for her.

“Could you hurry?” she said, and fired.

Memories

From my blanket, I watched the surf. "It doesn't get any better than this."

From his time machine, me from 2023 sighed. "No, it doesn't."

Dying to Know

"That's it, I have to know. You've been with me and with Mike. Which one is the better man?"

I smiled. "The one who didn't have to ask."

I'll keep you posted on the results, because you know you're desperate to know. And here's one that didn't make the cut:

Keeping Your Spirits Up

"Are you feeling better, hon?"

"A little."

"Did the nap help?"

"No, but finding the poison you used on me and slipping it in your tea did."

BenBella's SmartPop series is working on a book of essays about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, and they want your help. Also, your brainjuice, preferably in essay form.

We love Dollhouse. And we know from Buffy and Firefly that Joss Whedon fans are across-the-board smart, insightful, and involved.

So we’ve teamed up with Jane Espenson, Dollhouse writer and Mutant Enemy veteran, to put out an essay anthology on Dollhouse composed entirely of fan-written essays. Everyone, novice to seasoned writer, is eligible to enter; the only requirement is that you are fan of Dollhouse!

Write a great essay on Dollhouse, send it to us, and your essay could be published in a Smart Pop book edited by Jane.

They'll be using 18 fan-written essays, but one grand prize winner will get $1000!  Three first prize winners will get $250 and the remaining fourteen will get $100.  Not bad for doing what you[re already doing for free at Whedonesque.

Deadline is February 1, 2010. Check the SmartPop site for details and rules.

Even before I write this, I know what the response will be: "Dump iTunes, it's bloated and evil. Instead use [INSERT DIFFERENT SOFTWARE NAME]! It's better in a zillion different ways plus it makes kittens smile."

Which is probably true, and I probably should switch. Except I kinda like iTunes. It's easy to use, doesn't require any tweaking to get it to do what I want, and it's free. I killed the resident programs to reduce the resource hoggishness and usually it works very well for me.

Except when it doesn't, and then my world comes crashing down. Like a few weeks ago, when I updated to a new version, started it up, and clicked right on past the message that said something like "Library not found, rebuild from scratch and guesswork? Y/N" to watch it painstakingly count all my songs all over again. Honestly I didn't pay attention; I was heading off to bed and I'm used to seeing some sort of nonsense every time I update the thing as it re-evaluates my stuff in light of whatever new doodad the update added.

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Written for the "A Thank You for Dollhouse" book compiled of fan messages for the cast and crew of Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse." The book was delivered Friday night, Dec. 4, just as we were watching two of the best episodes of the season so far.

OK, maybe not everything, but it seemed like it.

According to the makers of the popular antivirus program Avast, their latest virus file update was a little too vague and started detecting malware in programs that did not actually contain malware. Fortunately the list was limited to "high-profile programs produced by Adobe, Realtek sound card drivers, various media players etc." So, no worries there.

Unless, of course, you're like me and immediately deleted the reported programs as soon as the little "Warning!" window popped up. Then you may have a problem.

I don't believe anything vital is gone – the two things that popped up didn't look familiar — but I anticipate something going hilariously wrong months down the road, so thanks for that, guys. Avast users may update their virus definitions manually to fix the last update. Check here for details.

If, unlike me, you did the sensible thing and merely opted to move suspicious files to the Virus Chest, you can probably put those back (here's how). Unless they actually are virused, of course, in which case you're on your own.

(Before I get comments on why this means I should switch to your favorite program; AVG had the same thing happen a few months ago when it decided iTunes was malware — OK, there might be some justification there — and Norton hangs my system worse than spooning molasses directly into the DVD drive.)

Citgo Sky

Originally uploaded by CABridges

The interesting thing about this picture was not the funky sky, although that's why I walked away from my car after filling the tank to get a picture, but that a Citgo employee immediately came out to ask me what I was photographing, which confused me.

I don't look especially terroristic. I wasn't pointing at anything sensitive or governmental. I have to assume they didn't want me to take pictures of their sign, which is idiotic since there's no law against it. They could maybe make a case for stopping me from taking pictures on their property, but I could have taken two steps onto the road and taken pictures of their sign all day.

Were they ashamed of their price? Were they changing it more than once a day and were afraid I'd get proof? Were they in the process of trademarking the sky and afraid I'd infringe?

No clue, and I doubt they know either. But I'm considering a new hobby of taking pictures of the Citgo sign every day.

National Novel Writing Month is over for this year, and it's time to look upon my results.

Yeesh.

Monday night I was idly wondering if I was close enough to cheat until I added up how many times I'd have to copy what I'd already written and paste it in again to win, and gave up.

My excuses this year? I was caught up just before my Save Hiatus buddy Adam Levermore showed up to stay for four days so we could attend the STS-129 Shuttle Atlantis launch Tweetup at the Kennedy Space Center, which was an amazing experience.

Plus I had to show him around a few spots in Daytona (OK, one spot) (OK, the speedway) and then I figured it would be rude to ignore him while I wrote even though a) I knew he wouldn't mind and b) at least one evening he was busy ignoring me to write his own stuff. But hey, there was a guest in the house.

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