BrockLi Soup

Has anyone else been using this Twitter business? It seems like a cool idea, I just can’t seem to get the damn thing to work right.

The basic idea is that you post what you’re up to - mini blog posts, if you will. You can do it over the web, via IM, or by SMS. And if your friends have requested notifications of your updates, they get an SMS message when you make a post. This (or something like it, with a couple more features) could easily be used for local event notifications - “I’m going to a move tonight, who wants to come?” sort of things.

I’ve only played with it a little bit, but I sent invites to a couple more people so I could have some friends (I’m just so lonely on the Internet). Of course, I can’t even log in to the web interface right now; it was fine this afternoon, but now when I try to get in, it asks me to finish creating my account, and then tells me that my phone number - which isn’t a field I can change at this point - is already in use. I did some looking around online, and it sounds like a lot of people have been having a variety of problems, including this one. Hopefully, the support folks will get me straightened out soon. I can still update it by phone, but I think I’ll use the thing more once they get some bugs fixed. You can play along on my Twitter page.

Dear Internet,

Could you all please get the hell off iTunes Music Store so I can get the second season of Always Sunny?

Hearts, Brock

Just so we’re all on the same page:

Facebook has implemented new features. These new features quickly tell you what updates your friends have made lately.

Everyone is freaking out about it.

In a matter of six hours, I’ve become so tired of hearing about and being invited to groups condemning it that I’m ready to forego the “Poke” feature in favor of the “Punch In The Neck Even If It Means Driving Nine Hours To Your House” feature.

Seriously, if you’re that worked up about it, DON’T USE THE SITE. The collective sense of my generation would make me weep for our future, if I were the weepy type, or if I thought it had a chance in the first place.

Apparently Google Maps pulls from more than one source, because these two come from TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ (click for the bigger version). I was looking for the Trader Joe’s in Alexandria and tried to figure out if I could get there without a car, which led to the smaller map in the window on the left. That one is the walking map provided by WMATA’s Trip Planner, while the bigger one is from the regular Google Maps site. I was trying to figure out the discrepancy in Tivoli Passage Alley, and wouldn’t have noticed the different sources otherwise.

Anyone know what’s going on there? I did a little looking on Google, but I don’t really care enough to devote much time to it. I can’t help but wonder, though, how many different places are ambiguous like this, and if it contributed to the three months I spent driving around this city with no idea where I was going.

Just for the record, I was humping trucks WAY before it went mainstream.

Earlier this week, Google announced that Google Chat logs would be available in GMail, and that chatting itself would soon be possible as well. And a day or two later, it was. I haven’t used it much - Sharon’s about the only person I ever see on there, and she’s always on AIM anyway - but I’m expecting more people will start making use of it.

Like Rho, for example. Her away message during the day usually says she’s at work and can’t chat, but e-mails are welcome. This morning when I was checking my mail, she was one of the two people online in Google Chat.

A lot of companies block the ports used by AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and the like. There are ways around it, of course, but a lot of people in a business environment aren’t aware of (or capable of) doing it, so simply blocking the ports takes a significant chunk out of messenger usage. How long will it be before offices start blocking access to GMail too? I have to wonder if Google even considered the effect this could have on GMail usage; the first tab in any Firefox window I’m using is always GMail, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Thankfully, my office is laid back and we’re all on AIM all day anyway, so it won’t be an issue for me, but I’d be willing to bet that people will be losing e-mail access any day now

Remember my brilliant Shower Whiteboard idea? Sumbitch done stole it!

Today I received spam asking me to further finance spam.

Becouse of a lot of complaints about our malings we need to buy expensive balk bullet-prof hosting for our sites. It costs a lot, please, send us small donation to: Nordea Bank AB, Sweden, Surte, SWIFT: NDEASESS to Isa Dzhabrailov, account number: SE 163 000000000 6510032599 Remember, that only our sites provide you truth news. You can easily find our sites by request “Kavkaz Center” in any search engines - google, yahoo etc We can’t provide you direct links in this message now, sorry for inconvenience.

I’ve been known to confuse Sweden and Switzerland, but you should probably get them straight when you’re setting up a secret bank account.

Who’s with me?

Kick. Ass.

Technorati may serve its purpose, but I’m thrilled about the new Google Blog Search. You can use the blogurl: option to specify a URL, which means you can easily search your blog or LiveJournal. Every week or two, I go digging through LJ looking for a post I remember making a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, it only goes back to June or so (according to the FAQ) but they’re working on that. I imagine this will come in real handy.

(from LJ Nifty)

A note to fundamentalists everywhere:

Blowing shit up will not gain sympathy for your cause.

I mean, come on guys. Attacking your enemies - the people you’re actually fighting with - is one thing. But killing innocent people on public transportation isn’t going to make you any friends.

Days like this remind me how great the Internet can be sometimes, in between the 14 year-olds trash talking each other and ridiculous Flash animation. A group has already been started on Flickr - right now, there are 279 members and 465 pictures. Even on the other side of the pond, we can see what’s happened far before the news can tell us, and offer our condolences to those directly affected.

Can I get a moment of silence for my Control Panel?

Thank you.

I decided to launch another offensive on my Powershot problem. Apparently I’ve still got Canon drivers installed somewhere, so I wanted to try again to completely remove them. When I plugged in the camera and tried to open the Control Panel so I could get to Scanners and Cameras to remove it, explorer.exe crashed on me. After a reboot (and repeating this process 2 or 3 times), I decided all is lost. I have no idea what’s wrong with it - there was an error message the first time it happened (some missing DLL, maybe), but who the hell reads those? Looks like I’ll be re-installing XP AGAIN.

Either way, I found that Picasa does a pretty good job of importing photos from a camera, so I’m just going to use that from now on. I’ve been mounting a share on my desktop from my iBook and copying photos through the Mac, but it’s just a pain in the ass. I import everything into Picasa anyway, so it makes more sense to just start there.

Now, I just wish Google had bought Flickr so I could upload photos from Picasa. Stupid Yahoo.

Also, my two free Pro accounts have been claimed by Jym Bob and Sarah, respectively.

…and I am a man who loves muffins.

As you may recall, I upgraded to a Flickr Pro account a couple weeks ago. I received this e-mail this evening:

Hi BrockLi! You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it’s true! And since you’re one of those lovely people, here’s a little something to say YOU ROCK! 1. Double what you paid for! Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 2 years, and your new expiry date is Apr 4, 2007. 2. More capacity! Now you can upload 2 GB per month. 3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends! This won’t be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you’ll see a note on your home page telling you what to do. Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we’re in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today. Kind regards, The Flickreenies.

Furthermore, they’ve lowered the price for Pro accounts and improved free accounts.

I really love those guys.

Around the end of my senior year, I registered for free web hosting. This wasn’t my first web site: a year or two prior, I had decided to make the biggest joke collection ever. Then I planned to expand it into an index of the Internet - like Yahoo!, but all mine.

Five years ago, these goals were realistic. At the time, the entire World Wide Web consisted of Yahoo!, AOL, and 46 home pages with distracting backgrounds and obnoxious animated graphics.

I started the site and dubbed it BrockHaven (this was right around the time I started calling myself Brock). I had never heard of a “weblog,” and I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. It was, effectively, the first blog I’d ever seen, and lasted a full six posts (three times the average LiveJournal account).

I’ve gone looking for it now and then over the past several years, just to see if it was still up. Until a few months ago, it was. When I couldn’t get to it sometime during Winter quarter, I figured it was gone forever and lamented the fact that I’d never backed it up for nostalgia’s sake.

For some reason, I was inclined to look for it again today. It was back online, with the counter reset to 0. I saved all the pages, removed the banner ads the server added, and now, against my better judgment, I give you BrockHaven, the very first blog in the history of communication.

Please note that the “days till college” counter says I’ve been in college for 1,318 days now. This fact makes me feel older than I thought it would.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that I found Lickr on the del.icio.us popular page. It’s a GreaseMonkey script that replaces Flickr’s flash image with a regular JPEG image and text links for the tool bar. Apparently there’s a bug in Firefox on Mac OS X that causes Flash movies to “disappear” if you scroll the wrong way. My options seemed to be converting to Safari, or removing Flash so I could at least view the images sans tool bar. With Lickr, I get all the options and a shorter load time.

Sometimes the Internet gives me things that make me happy. Like this. And porn.