Tidbits and LOLz

I've been working on three project really intensely for the past two weeks so I've been a little behind on news of the internet (which probably means I have about 8,000 stories to catch up on)...

This post will be anecdotal at best, sorry.

I've been debating with friends about facebook chat over the last week as it seems to have been released to everyone now. A select few love it and think it is the neatest thing since sliced bread, the rest don't think it is that useful and want to know how to not appear online. They are afraid people will (a) talk to them when they don't want to be chatting and (b) realize how much they are on the site being lurkers. I side more with the latter, as I've stated before. I want my online stalking of people to go unnoticed.

http://www.ncludr.com/ - quite funny parody of social networking craze. I wonder what the breaking point for these will be. At what point will you just get tired of having to update all over the place. This is probably why aggregators are getting so much attention recently. It is hard to keep up with everyone all over the internet.

My friend Heather, whom I've mentioned a lot, is usually a trendsetter among my friends as far as adoption of new things goes, but I did scoop her on Twitter. I am mad in love with microblogging though on the surface it is mostly superfulous. The microblogging bug is slowly catching on with my friends and it is making me so happy. I love little tidbits about what people do with their days/what is on their mind. I like hearing little updates about how life really isn't dull at all.

I resolved my issues with iTunes recently. It became vitally important to figure out earlier this week because I don't think I could be productive without much of my library of tunes. That being said, I had to deal with all of the craziness of DRM and only being able to share music with 5 computers (btw, LAME x∞). My old computer was authorized to play my purchased tunes along with 4 of my other friends so when I transfered all of the music to my new computer I wasn't able to play any of it. Long story short I ended having to deauthorize everyone on my account and reauthorize which is such a hassle. If I had bought the physical CDs I would have shared the music with more than just 4 friends. Also, this policy doesn't allow for sharing certain songs with one group of 4 and another song with a different set of 4. This is really ridiculous. I like to think I have eclectic taste and I want to share some of my electronica tracks with one group of friends and my folks with a differnet group. The answer is obviously that DRM is super stupid and impracticle. Music lovers will pay for the music and spread it to others who will in turn do the same.

And Finally:

Since I've been working on so many PowerPoint presentation lately... PowerPoint fails to be an effective medium of communication in my mind. I will not go so far as to think it is only good for showing slides of pictures as Edward Tufte would argue. [btw, read The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint it is a really good read. I have it if you want to borrow] I do agree with him, though, that it creates an artificial heirarchy of information and dumbs things down into incomplete sentence riddled bullet points. He claims that the audience is smarter than
we give it credit for and that PP fails to challenge the audience to think. I tend agree that templating dumbs things down and does not foster thought/conversation but I also haven't given a presentation to a group of people that might pay attention. I am interested to see everyone's presentations and how people interact with this presentation method.



Latez, Yo!
-e