Nerd. Knitter. Gamer. Geek.
“The Habs defeat the Los Angeles Kings, four games to zero, to win the 1993 Stanley Cup.”
It was four games to one, Jack, though they did win four games straight. (And somehow couldn’t win the first game, during which Wayne Gretzky inadvertently scored on his own net.)
Really? Not all people who wear glasses are nerds? Not all nerds wear glasses? Really? Really?
The truth is I’d feel like a bad nerd if I didn’t wear glasses, but that’s just me. This is probably because I’ve been wearing glasses for 15 years (that’s nearly 70 per cent of my life) and I wouldn’t feel like me if I didn’t wear glasses. So there.
Furthermore, Renée is pretty sure the exultant outburst at the beginning of the Frog’s Theme portion of the Chrono Cross/Trigger suite is her, and she doesn’t wear glasses…
(Unrelated: ¡Olé, olé olé olé!)
Understanding the universal truth that hindsight is 20/20 (and often quite entertaining), Wired has dug out the advice it gave Apple in 1997 while the company was fledgling and presented it as a companion to its cover story on the company’s success.
It’s really quite funny.
At the risk of completely alienating the city I live in and half the people I know, thank goodness for that. Not because I don’t like the Leafs (and I don’t), but because Montreal always succumbs to Toronto for some reason and the only thing worse than having it matter whether Toronto beats Montreal in their two final matchups would be having Toronto barely edge its way into the playoffs in eighth place and have Montreal finish the season in first place and watch helplessly as things go horribly wrong from there. (Run-on sentence, but hey, it’s late.)
Let it never be said that I’m not a big-picture sort of person.
Four jobs I’ve had
1. McDonald’s
2. A dry cleaners
3. The Eyeopener
4. Encode/design/write
Four movies I can watch over and over
1. Psycho
2. Murder on the Orient Express
3. Star Wars (x3)
4. Amadeus
Four places I’ve lived
1. Laval
2. Mississauga
3. Toronto
4. The Eyeopener
Four TV shows I love
1. Arrested Development
2. CSI
3. Frasier
4. …
Four places I’ve vacationed
1. Florida
2. New Brunswick
3. Nova Scotia
4. Prince Edward Island
Four of my favorite dishes
1. Ginger vegetable stir fry
2. Macaroni and three cheese sauce
3. Baked sole
4. Salmon teriyaki
Four sites I visit daily
1. CBC News Online
2. Technorati
3. Wired
4. Facebook
(among many others)
Four places I would rather be right now
1. Sleeping (sleeping is a place!)
2. London
3. Starbucks
4. With Jonathan
Four bloggers I am tagging
1. Jen
2. Josh
3. Alex
4. Karon
I imagine I’ll write something intelligent when something comes to mind.
WordPress is also far better equipped for mobile blogging than Blogger is; this will come in handy on the trip. And people laughed at me when I said I’d never need a Blackberry! Ha!
I’m completely embarrassed to report that I got 9/10.
I found this on Flickr and deemed it worth posting. Forty-nine nerd eggs? Works for me. My favourite is the RSS feed egg (fifth row, fifth egg). The Flickr egg (fourth row, second egg) is also cute.
I wish I could say I did something delightfully nerdy for Easter, but the only delightfully nerdy thing I did was post this photo that someone else took. If I only I were creative enough to create such a thing…
Speaking of creative, I have some ideas in the works that I probably shouldn’t discuss right now. Suffice it to say that they are more along the lines of what I should actually be doing with myself. I know that sounds needlessly cryptic, but I don’t want to jinx anything. If only being needlessly cryptic could actually help avoid jinxing things.
For Alex’s benefit (I don’t have 10. I’m sorry):
5. Mr. Blue Sky — ELO (not that it was intended to be taken seriously anyway).
4. Word Up — Willis (not so much “killed” as “made impossible to hear without mental pictures of Wallace Langham doing the robot, not that there’s anything wrong with that”).
3. Outside Chance — The Turtles (it’s ruined for you too, now, isn’t it?).
2. Who Are You? — The Who (entirely because of that charming shot at 0:26).
1. Sweet Jane — Lou Reed (nothing on YouTube, but believe me on this one).
There, I said it.
Before the big announcement came, one site or another (I think it was Wired but I can’t remember) posted something about Facebook possibly offering “widgets.” Now, “widgets” — in the WordPress and Technorati senses, are neat. “Plugins” — in the Firefox sense — are also neat.
Facebook applications are useless.
It’s worth saying again: Facebook applications are useless.
What could have been a neat way to add RSS feeds and other useful things to one’s profile wound up nothing more than a way to determine what kind of zombie one is. (Useless.) Back in the day, we had sites like Tickle for that kind of stuff. If you wanted to find out which Friends character you were most like, you took a quiz on a website and then posted the results on your blog where people could skip over them if they wanted to. The chance to annoy your friends was limited entirely to e-mailing a link to the quiz to anyone you wanted to, and who did that? Nobody. There was none of this inviting everyone on your contact list to add some ridiculous application that’s become so rampant that a Facebook group demanding the banning of application invitations has garnered more than a million members.
Then things like this happen and people start spazzing. Techcrunch is correct:
It is failing in a very public way. This is the risk big brands take when they put an app on Facebook. It had better work or else the world will hear about it.
Facebook is a handy tool for keeping in touch with people, sharing photos and videos and links. The applications that either started out with it or were introduced shortly after its rise to prominence — photos, video, events, posted items and groups — are its best features. Even the somewhat more tolerable third-party applications, some of which I’d added myself before deleting them, made me shake my head. And let’s not forget that the most popular third-party Facebook application led to a lawsuit.
Web 2.0 is an amazing thing. Facebook is handling it badly. There’s a place for bits of script that tell you whether you’re a Jedi master, but this isn’t it.
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