Facebook Sucks

The last few years have been very cathartic for me. I have had to say good bye to a lot of things that I loved from the time that I was very small. My grandmother passed away last summer, just ten days before my birthday. I had to haul ass to get home to talk to her just one more time before she left and she didn’t even get to say good-bye to my children. That was how fast I had to move just to be with her. After I said good bye to her, I said good bye to the house where I grew up. The yard was overgrown, but the trees were still there and I could still see the scars on the old maple where my swing used to be. I never knew how my grandfather managed to get the swing put up there, or if he made my dad do it. When I was a kid, it didn’t matter. But then, in that moment all I could see was that the swing was long gone and the remnants of my childhood hung in that yard like ancient material, too strong and durable to give way, and at the same time so delicate and fragile that a single touch would rend all to dust.

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The Teenage Song of Despair

As a parent, I have tried very hard to make sure that I do not buy my kids clothes that I will be embarrassed about later. Still, somehow, things manage to find their way into their closets that makes me stop in my tracks in the midst of my morning routine, stare at them, and say “Oh no… you are NOT wearing that!”

At least three times a week, I say this to my daughter, who comes out of her bedroom wearing some tank top or otherwise sleeveless contraption that she wore in the 6th grade. Since she will be starting high school this year, those 6th grade tops really do not work for me and I keep trying to find them as they come down the chute and dispose of them, but somehow they keep passing me by. This morning was a shocker though. I never have to have this lecture with my son, but today he changed all of that. This morning, my son was wearing these pants that have a hole very near the crotch area. I stared at him and shook my head and said, “No, you will not wear those pants out of my house.”

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Top 10 Reasons I Won’t Give You a Twitter Followback.

For those of us that tweet, getting new followers is a bittersweet event. There is that moment when you think, “Wow! Cool! Look at this! I’ve picked up ten followers in the last 24 hours! That’s great! People really care what I have to say!” and then you go to look at the people that followed you and you find that most of them are places like JimBob’sShoeShack, or Kedida’sLovelyHandMadeHandGunSales and you know… you have been plagued by the vague, but ever present.. twitspammer.

I’m sure that top 10 lists like this abound on the internet, and every blogger that tweets has written one, but I felt that for the sake of my sanity, I had to write mine as I blocked and reported ten spammers to twitter admins today alone. One of whom, only tweeted links to his ebay sales page… and somehow thought I would be interested in an xbox 360 controller, even though there is absolutely no mention of the console on my user info, or in my tweets.

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The Case For “Shat”

It is not often that I find myself inventing new words in the English language. I know lots of people that are fond of inventing words that are appropriate to the situation. My grandmother is fond of “hookenpocky” to describe when someone is sick and you have no idea what’s wrong with them. My husband, having spent several years of his youth in the South frequently rolls out the word “aight” which isn’t really a word, but is a contraction of the two words, “all” and “right”. For years, my friends and I have used “w00t!” to express celebration, but only after someone else coined it.

I’m not responsible for coining this one either, but it makes sense and I think we should consider adding it to our mental vocabulary because seriously folks, it is a legal word and it is the past tense form of “shit”. It is also infinitely more amusing and sounds hilarious when you say it, unlike the present tense form of the word.

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I Cannot Abide Thieves

I’m not just talking about the thieves that break into your car and steal your stuff, though I can’t abide those either. I’m also referring to those who do not give credit where credit is due. If I borrow a graphic from your website, I am going to ask your permission to use it before I download it and place it on my site, and I’m also going to provide a link to your website because you deserve credit for your original works. Likewise, I expect the same courtesy from others who reference my works. I should at least get an reference in the bibliography.

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This cannot be happening!

The word has come down.

It is official.

I am horribly miserable about this.

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Regular People Do NOT Understand Geeks.

Let’s be realistic about how we get involved in relationships that work.

We find someone that we like the look of, we learn if they have things in common with us, and if we find enough commonality to build a foundation upon, we can have a successful relationship with that person. This is true of friendship, family and romance. It’s actually really very simple, but people get so wound up about romance and dating that they can’t see the forest for the trees.

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Top Ten Yahoo Searches

When I see things like this, I have to wonder what this says about America to the rest of the globe. The top ten yahoo searches of 2008 start off with Britney Spears and it only gets worse from there.

No wonder other countries hate us. We’re a bunch of losers with boring lives that have nothing better to do besides throw our money at mentally ill super stars, wrestling programs that we are well aware are fake, and of all things.. really crappy Japanese anime. (Sorry Viz, but your American production of Naruto is lame with a capital LAME).

Toyota Abusing DMCA?

I’m not sure how much stock to put into this article, that comes to you via /. But I will say this much, if this is true, then Toyota are a bunch of A-holes that are not worthy of the admiration of those thousands of folks who put up wallpapers of their Toyotas/Scions/Lexi.

I often have to wonder about the state of the world anymore, where people are constantly being forced to question weather they actually own a thing when they pay money for it, or weather they just own a license to use it. I would have a hard time spending the amount of money that it costs to buy a car, if I couldn’t take pictures of the thing and I couldn’t refer to it by its product name when telling others what I really think about it, and was only allowed to use it for as long as the company felt it was appropriate for me to use it. That would be precisely why I don’t buy songs on iTunes and why I still buy DVDs rather than downloading my video digitally via iTunes or some other service.

If I shell out money for a thing, I should be able to use it on whatever devices I choose, and fangirl about it in whatever way I find to be appropriate as long as that doesn’t violate the rights of the copyright holder. So if I take a picture of a debadged Toyota… okay, you know what, I can see Toyota pitching a beef, especially if I don’t identify the car as being a Toyota. But if I leave the badges in place and say, “This is my corolla!” Toyota needs to shut the hell up and call it free advertising.

If this is for real… the lawyers at Toyota really need to learn a hard lesson about alienating consumers and I’ll never buy Toyota again.

How my iPhone Became a 3g.

It was Monday.

Allow me to warn you, faithful reader, that no story that ever begins with the phrase, “It was Monday.” can possibly end well.

On Monday, the cable company sent a technician to our home to check out some problems we’d been having with our connectivity since Saturday night. The guy was here for a solid two hours checking over things before he finally concluded that it was our cable modem, and replaced it. But during this time, he needed to talk to my husband, so I called my husband on my precious 1st gen iPhone, that was less than a year old, and handed it to the cable guy. The cable guy gave it back to me when he was done, and thought it was in my grasp so he let go.

My baby, my iPhone, which is my entire life, hit the floor with a loud crack.

Come to find out, the cracking sound was the case that was on the phone. The screen was undamaged. The case was toast, but the screen was not broken, the aluminum back was unharmed, and it was not the first time I’d dropped the phone on ceramic tile before, so I thought everything would be fine. Then, I hit the home button.

Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

The home button is supposed to take you back to the home screen when you hit it. It’s how you close apps, access your apps during a call and it’s how you reboot the phone, without shutting it down completely.

I began to panic.

By the time all was said and done, I’d called Apple care and was told “We can either charge you 199$ to fix the iPhone you have. Charge you 199$ for a refurbished 1st gen iPhone, or you can go to your local Apple store and pay 199$ for a new iPhone 3g.” I almost told the tech on the phone that we didn’t have an Apple store, and in all reality, very few places that are not the top 20 major cities in this country actually do.

So I went to the AT&T store, the techs there looked at my phone and were amazed at the condition it was in. A guy in the store offered me to buy it off of me, even though I told him it was broken, because other than the home button not working, the phone was in pristine condition. He said he’d open it up and fix it somehow.

So in the end, I got an iPhone 3g and I have to say… I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

The previous iPhone was heavier, it felt like you’d spent a decent amount of money on this thing. There was something about that that was just, right. Especially when those of us that bought them, spent 300$ or more on these phones. The weight of the 3g makes it feel chintzy and cheap and not at all unique from any other cell phone that I’ve ever owned.

The plastic back is a fingerprint magnet. I’d wanted to get the white one, but to be honest, I don’t need 16 gig of storage, I only wanted the white one because it didn’t show fingerprints as badly. This has always been one of my beefs with Apple’s electronics too. So let me get this off my chest:

Apple, quit making color choices cost your customers a premium!

The white iPhone simply made more sense for someone like me who can’t stand smudges on her phone, but was not worth the additional price tag, and if I hadn’t had a first gen iPhone, I would have skipped this one based on that distinction alone. Black is boring, and I want to be able to choose what color I want without having to pay for the privilege.

The internet speeds are quick on 3g, but I never cared about that. People who want to tether their phones to their laptops may care, but I don’t see the need to pay an additional 10$ premium for 3g service, then a 5$ premium to add text messages (which were included as part of the old phone plan) and then spend an additional 30$ a month on TOP of those increases, to have the ability to tether my phone on the 3 or 4 occasions a year that I would actually use it. It’d be cheaper for me to pay a 30$ flat fee every time I used it.

Further complaints include the fact that I hate the cases that are currently available for the 3g. I do not blame the phone for this though, and that’s really something to write about in another article. It is larger than the first gen phone, noticeably. It feels bigger in your hand and in my hands, it feels less secure because I am not able to grip it as easily.

My biggest beef with the 3g though, is this:

It has the crappiest battery life of any cell phone I have ever owned.

I’m getting about 2 hours of talk time before the battery is drained to 20%, and then I can open a couple of apps once or twice before I have to charge the phone. Yesterday, my phone didn’t even make it to 6 pm before it complained about only having 20% battery life remaining.

After the joy of owning a first gen iPhone, this thing… to me, is really a huge disappointment.

The 3rd gen phone had better be nicer than this, because otherwise, I think I’ll skip it, get an iPod Touch and run of the mill Nokia phone. Then I will have everything I need, a great phone that gets decent battery life and the internet in my pocket at any WiFi hotspot.