Archive for the ‘Browsing’ Category

@minnesotian > Hey, how's everybody doing? Temp's dropping like a rock here.

@heapless_in_seattle > Here, too. No bright, fluffy snow, just slush slush slush.

@bostonbeaner > Snow's five feet deep. I'm kinda trapped at the moment.

@cabridges > Hi from Florida! Supposed to get cold this week here, not looking forward to it.

@heapless_in_seattle > How cold?

@cabridges > Down in the 40s, maybe 30s. You know what it's like, having to deal with that?

@bostonbeaner > Um…

@heapless_in_seattle > Um…

@minnesotian > Running out of food, really don't want to go out in that. It's snowing sideways.

@bostonbeaner > The dog was just out for 30 seconds tops, and all his whiskers broke off.

@minnesotian > Ow! Poor thing.

@bostonbeaner > He's huddled by the fireplace now. I think part of his brain may have frozen.

@heapless_in_seattle > Try holding his head in warm water, thaw it gently.

@heapless_in_seattle > With his nose and mouth OUT! boston? boston?

@bostonbeaner > He's OK, I think. He just keeps wandering in tight circles. We're supposed to get three more feet of snow tonight.

@cabridges > Just came back from walking my dogs around the park. Getting serious, I think, I'm going to have to consider putting on a long-sleeve shirt if this keeps up.

@bostonbeaner > Mom just came back inside, car wouldn't start. Looking around kitchen for food.

@minnesotian > Really getting cold, now. Wind is blowing and I think the carport just went over.

@heapless_in_seattle > hey guys? I can't see out of the windows anymore.

@minnesotian > So cold, so cold. Fingers burning. Mom breaking up computer desk for wood.

@bostonbeaner > No food. Thawing frozen tree branches we can reach from the upstairs window for the leaf sap.

@minnesotian > Boston? How attached are you to your dog? I mean, meat's meat, and if the dog is brain-damaged anyway…

@cabridges > This is agony. I actually had to dig out my hoodie and wear it this morning with my shorts. Back up in the 60s by lunch, though, so walking to the deli was no prob. Roast beast sub! NOM NOM NOM…

@heapless_in_seattle > Neighbors banding together for protection against lower east side gangs. I'm the 2-3am lookout for our apartment building. Killed a man yesterday, got 1/2 a Snickers bar.

@bostonbeaner > Cuddlebear will keep us alive for another week, with luck. Good dog. Good dog.

@minnesotian > Front door doorknob just broke in my hand. Entire house frame is frozen solid, starting to crack from the weight of the roof. May God have mercy on our souls.

@bostonbeaner > So sleepy. I'm warm when I sleep.

@cabridges > Just posted pics of our day at the beach. Little chilly to swim, but we did anyway. Can't wait for the warm weather to come back, you know? Guys? Guys?

I'm still deep in the "add 5 cool apps, delete 4 after trying each one once, immediately add 5 more" phase of my iPod Touch love affair. My little mini-desktops are constantly spinning with apps that zoom in just long enough to wiggle the others aside before I bore of them and consign them to iTunes hell.

And yet, even with the amazing time-wasting bonanza available to me through the iTunes store — and that's not even counting the new world open to me if I ever hold my breath and jail-break the thing — there are still whole categories of applications I can't find. So, with a hopeful hint to restless programmers who just need a direction, here are the apps I want.

RealTip

I want to enter the total of my dinner and get the amount of the tip. But, and this is important, only after I check off boxes to describe my waitperson's performance, which would then positively or adversely affect the amount of the gratuity. Did she smile and remember everything, but spill ketchup on my wife's head? Was the food present, warmer than room temperature, and more or less on the plate? Were we treated to unwanted dinner theater involving our waiter and his ex-girlfriend-who-still-lives-with-him? Were we left waiting less than the time it would have taken to hunt, kill, and prepare the food ourselves? RealTip should take it all into account and give me a total I can live with.

GeoPerv

Not sure about your new neighbor? Shivering whenever you walk by your new babysitter? Wondering why your date seems so creepy? Snap a surreptitious pic of him and GeoPerv will instantly compare it to the local sexual offenders database (determined by geolocation) and "To Catch a Predator" reruns.

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Watch the People's Choice Awards last night? This year they added a great interactive feature where you could go to the cool flashy voting thing on their Web site and cast your vote in four categories, with votes being tallied all the way up through the first half of the live awards show itself. Sweet!

Of course, two of those categories were never, at any point, expressly mentioned during the telecast. Those would be Favorite Online Sensation and Favorite User-Generated Video, the online-only awards, which apparently were popular enough to drum up some Internet buzz and traffic for the PCA site but not enough to, you know, explicitly acknowledge on camera in any audible way.

This follows the pattern set by last year's Emmy Awards, which included an online-only poll for people to vote for TV's Most Memorable Moments, winners to be shown during the Emmy broadcast, only none of them ever were, probably because they barely had enough time to cram in all the long, cringe-inducing bouts of reality-show-host banter as it was. Why show a moment from the history of television which touched the hearts of millions when you could just let Howie Mandel rant aimlessly for another 10 minutes?

(Of course, it could be a conspiracy. Joss Whedon's show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" won the "TV's Most Memorable Moments, Drama" Emmy last spring and his "Dr. Horrible" won Favorite Online Sensation last night; maybe there's some sort of legendary Hollywood prophecy, whispered amongst the ancient executives, that California will sink beneath the waves if someone is ever foolhardy enough to hand him an award?)

So we're good enough to fan the flames of buzz, give marketers something to do and make the awards shows seem marginally more relevant, but we don't get to sit at the big kids' table at the ceremony. Fair enough, fair enough. Especially since I don't watch the awards shows on TV anyway.

They're a lot better online.

In user-edited 2-minute ad-free only-the-best-line-of-the-night all-the-boring-banter-chopped-out clips on YouTube.

After all, those are the people's choice…

You may be getting a lot less social soon if the economy keeps de-bubbling.

LiveJournal, home of diaries, dreams, daily ruminations, and eye-watering slash fan-fiction for a decade, just laid off a buncha people (early reports said 20, LJ says "about a dozen").

LJ was one of the first sites to include social networking as a major component of their operating system and for many, many people it's still the place to go if you want to keep up with your friends' lives without being blasted with blinking neon ads for the latest Hollywood pablum or having to decide how to respond to a virtual vampire attack from the guy you barely know from Human Resources. But it's looking like their tiered payment-and-ad-supported system isn't making the beans it should. How will the economy affect other social networks?

Facebook (which just announced this morning that they hit the 150 million user mark) is ad-supported, with reasonably unobtrusive ads popping up on the side. MySpace went the hyperactive-used-car-lot route and plastered ads on every available surface of your profile. They and other community sites will probably weather the storm; adversity draws people together, and they'll need somewhere to share their pain (Mood: Homeless).

But what about Twitter? A micro-blogging-and-SMS service with no ads, no membership, no fees? I don't know what's keeping it going now, much less how it will survive when grocery stores begin holding customer gladiator fights for the last pound of ground chuck. Twitter lives on nothing but starlight and moonbeams, and about a zillion tweets about Obama. How will it survive?

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Yes, I followed the crowd to www.faceyourmanga.com and created myself. Just like I previously used trendy web services to make myself into an M&M, a dancing avatar, a zombie, a rotting pirate, a Simpson, some sort of weeble thing, and whatever else someone with a dangerous amount of Flash know-how could come up with.

And, like the others. this one fails to adequately capture my thinning, graying hair, although unlike the others it did offer my usual shirt of choice. Face Your Manga does have a nicer selection of options than most of these things, although to be truly manga I really should have the option to give myself giant grinning teeth, a helmet of some sort, cybernetic implants, and an impressive set of Asian girl-grabbing tentacles. Maybe in version two.

I will not be using this everywhere, as so many are right now, mainly because I like my Save Hiatus avatar better.

Maybe I can get Adam to add some tentacles…

Here's what I've become so far:

Welcome to MegaCon

Originally uploaded by CABridges

Hey, one of my con pics was chosen to illustrate Schmap's page on the Orange County Convention Center.

Which means that people from around the world, hungry for travel information, will gaze upon my skilled photographic handiwork as they devise their itinerary and think: "Huh. A comic convention."

Come on, people! Friend me! How else can I judge my worth?

In return I promise not to send you endless messages about my great real estate opportunities, my seminars on how to feel really good about yourself, or offers of pictures of me that "MySpace won't let me post." I won't post animated graphics in your comments. I don't have MySpace's IM service installed, so you're safe from me there, too. Any bulletins I send will be rare and relevant. My own page will neither blink excessively, play any music at all, or contain color combinations that cause cancer in rats.

Which rather begs the question, what do I use MySpace for, anyway. But the answer is clear.

To collect friends. So get going.

Updated: I hit the 1,000 mark. And you can really tell the difference, I actually feel more loved. I'm all shivery now.

Teresa has decided to become a full-time groupie.

Not just the type who gushes about her band online, pins posters around her room and writes "Mrs. Bon Jovi" on her notebooks, although she does that too (not the Mrs. part, she said she has no interest in leaving our marriage or breaking his; I believe she has in mind more of a sophisticated arrangement, like a time-share). No, she plans to be the one who follows her band, concert to concert, city to city, country to country, becoming friends and confidant to the road crew. The fact that we're broke has no bearing on this. You can't deny your calling. She has already begun looking into which countries allow you to sell your children.

Yesterday, on an extended and carefully planned last minute whim, she flew to Boston to see Bon Jovi in concert. She's even now in the air on her way back, possibly without waiting for the plane. With her are the well-wishes, advice, and (in some cases) open envy of the other ladies on the Bon Jovi forum she frequents. They have kept up on her doings from other forum members at the concert who are calling in song-by-song updates, and from me, as I've been hearing from Teresa and posting on her behalf with her account. (I am, apparently, "Mr. Teresa.")

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Firefox announced today that their bid to secure a Guinness World Record for most downloaded software was a success.

Mozilla today announced it set a new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours. The record-setting 8,002,530 downloads coincided with the launch of Firefox® 3, Mozilla’s major update to its popular and acclaimed free, open source Web browser.

I fully expect all of us to be named and credited, making the 2009 Guinness Book of World Records the largest book ever offered for commercial sale. Which would be another record, so they'd have to amend it and release it again. And that edition would then break the previous record…

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Joss Whedon likes to create things. He likes to share things. He especially likes to create things that become obsessions with lots of people. And recently, he started thinking about how to create and share things without having to deal with any of the big studios. What he came up with, with the help of his briothers and fiance-in-law, was "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog."

It's three minisodes, designed to be posted online. It stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, and Nathan Fillion. It's a super-villain musical. And it's coming online for free starting July 15, with new episodes every couple of days, and then paid downloads and an upcoming massively-packed DVD. All without studio involvement.

What it needs now is attention. They have the website, the MySpace page, the Facebook page, and the Twitter account. They have banners and buttons. They have a Digged page climbing higher in the ranks. They have T-shirts on the way. There will be a Dr. Horrible panel at the San Diego Comic-Con. There will be a comic coming from Dark Horse at their Dark Horse Presents page on MySpace. And they have Joss waxing hilaric about it.

All they need now is for you to tell everyone you know (but not in a stalkery way, unless they're cool with that). This will be huge, and fun, and gioofy, and a slap in the face to the networks, and none of that is not fun. Spread the word, my people!