as I live a few more questions

Google+ is the New Facebook -- Pass It On!

I have been exploring Google's new social network, Google+, for almost a month now, and it is fantastic!  It's still in beta but it already has about 25 million members.  

If you want to experience it yourself, please click on the following link for an invitation (I've never tried this before so I hope this works!)

 

https://plus.google.com/_/notifications/ngemlink?path=%2F%3Fgpinv%3Dq0KF43JpBr0%3AaM-ILF2xqAY

 

Voice to text. It's...

Voice to text. It's the new block(?). listen Powered by Jott

I had said, "It's the new black", but voice-to-text transcription is not always flawless.  It took me half an hour fiddling with TypePad and Jott to get it working, but hooray!  It works!  I taught my iPhone how to record a blogpost, convert it from voice to text, and publish it!

This just blows my mind.  God, I swear you will have to pry this phone from my cold dead hands. 

I'm back and I'm mobile

Posting from my new toy. I sold my soul to Rogers for 3 years and now I have a shiny new iPhone, and I just installed the TypePad app.

I'm baaack...

Passing of an Era

I know, it's been a long time since I last posted to this blog.  I'm spending most of my online time split between connecting with friends on  Facebook and  exploring the explosively creative 3D space of Second Life, and in addition, I've not felt the pressing need to *blog* anything.  End of an era?  We'll see.  I'll keep this account for now.

Another end of an era:

"IST is examining the possibility of ending modem dial-up access to the University of Manitoba in 2009 on January 1. If this will cause a major problem for you or your users, please contact XY describing the nature of this problem."

Wow.  Changes are happening so fast that sometimes it makes my head spin.  I know that fewer and fewer people are using dial-up modems, but I didn't realize the decline was quite that precipitous. 

I can remember back to 1982/83, when I connected to the University to work on programming assignments using a TRS-80 Model III and a 300-baud acoustic coupler modem.  The lines of the text editor I was using, good old in-house MANTES, were 80 characters long, but the TRS-80 could only display 64 characters, so the lines would all break at character 65.  At the I'm sure I was among the first set of users to conect to the University via modem.  That was.... that was.... 25 years ago.

Holy shit!  A quarter century ago... argh.  How time flies indeed.

Five things you (probably) didn’t know about me, i.e. my 5 secrets

I have Adam Lasnik to thank for tagging me with this Internet meme.  And in return, I get it forward it to five other bloggers.

Anyways, here goes:

Five things you (probably) didn’t know about me

1. I was born during the Beatles Invasion. 

   Some people tie their birth to significant world events, saying things like "I was born during the Great Depression", or "I was born during the London Blitz". Well, I was born during the Beatles Invasion :-) On Jan. 16, 1964, the Beatles' song I Want to Hold Your Hand became the No. 1 single in America, their very first hit (it would remain #1 on the U.S. charts for seven weeks).

   I did a quick search of the Historical Newspapers database and found this advertisement for the Beatle's first American concert, published in The Washington Post (Jan. 31, 1964, pg. B27), when I was exactly one week old.

   Before I would turn one month old, the Beatles would land in JFK airport to a horde of screaming fans, and appear on the Ed Sullivan show, breaking all previous audience records with 73 million people glued to their TV sets.

   You know, I always used to pull this out to emphasize to the Baby Boomer crowd how much younger I was than them.  Now, I pull it out to remind the Baby Boom Echo generation just how much older I am than them.  *sigh*

   
   

2. I am a chorister.

   I sing tenor (first tenor, if the tenors split) for The Rainbow Harmony Project, Winnipeg's GLBT chorus. In fact, I am one of the original members of the chorus, which formed in September 1999.  I had always wanted to sing in a choir since I was a kid, but I wasn't sure if I had the musical chops to do it.  So I decided to take a chance, do something different, and I'm so glad I did.
   
   Last Saturday, we put on our annual holiday concert, Many Gifts, before an appreciative audience at Knox United Church in downtown Winnipeg (click on the poster to the right to see a bigger version).  And I should be at the Christmas party tonight, but I've got a nasty head cold and I'm blowing my nose every ten minutes, so I decided to stay home.  I have been lucky to make many good friends among my fellow choristers over the years. If you would like to hear us, go to The Rainbow Harmony Project artist page on Last.fm, where you can listen to some 30-second samples.  I will try to put up a few full-length MP3s over the holidays.

   
   

3. I have a very loud and distinctive laugh.
   
   My laugh is indescribable.  I have described it as "the laugh that can strip an oak at thirty feet".  You can always find me in a crowded play or movie theatre if there's a comedy playing, no matter how big the theatre is. 

4. I have a drag persona.
   
   As far as I know, I am the first person on earth doing bird flu public-awareness skag drag.  Meet Cora-Anne Tine, avian flu pandematrix and advice columnist to the flu-lorn.
   
   Why?  Because laughter is the best defense against the doom, gloom and pessimism of a potential influenza pandemic (I mean, aside from stockpiling food and water, practicing good hygeine and safe quarantine, etc. etc.).
   

5. I have written slash fanfiction and created Photoshop fanart for Brokeback Mountain.
   
   The fanfiction, titled Chiron (rating: NC-17/Adult), only lasted nine chapters before it petered out, but my Brokeback Mountain fanart has been very popular.  This is my most-visited picture, with over 10,000 views:
   
   

And as for the five people I am sending this on to, they are, in no particular order:

• !efatima (she's a superstar on Flickr, here's her Flickr profile)
• Aaron Edwards (and his Flickr profile)
• sbpoet (she's also on Flickr)
• chelejean, whose comments on my blog are always appreciated, and
• Pete (Alois), a contact from my Plain Layne days

...and I would have put Jeremy Wright on this list, but he's already been tagged (damn!)  We actually met each other during the brief time he was living in (godforsaken, as I believe he called it) Winnipeg.

Vox, by Six Apart

For the past week or so, I've been playing around with Vox in beta.  Vox is a social blogging service similar to Yahoo! 360, Tribe.net, etc. and I think that Six Apart has watched and learned from the mistakes and mis-steps made by many of these earlier services. 

One idea that I like is having objects (a video, an image, a song, a book, etc.) as separate from blogposts.  Blogposts can contain one or more objects (e.g. a comparison of three books on global warming).  This reminds me of the Elgg software, which was structured much the same way.

In this screenshot of my Vox blog, my most recent post is a YouTube video clip of the music video for Johnny Cash's haunting cover version of the Nine Inch Nails tune, Hurt.

Vox is due for general release on October 26th, but you can get a jump on the rest of the Internet, and grab that blogname you want... I have four invitations for Vox to give away, to the first four people who ask for them (please leave me a comment or send me an email via my Vox blog). 

On Vox: Accident Magnet

(I'm currently kicking the tires on the beta VOX site.  You can visit me there if you like.)

   
   

I've decided to start calling my car A.M. That's short for "Accident Magnet". I had my trusty, rusty Ford Festiva for 10 years, and no accidents. I've had my Toyota Echo for three years, and this morning I was involved...

   

» Read more on Vox

   

Peter Shinn + Blogspace = Neverending Commentary

Follow-up to the Salon article mentioned below: 10 pages of reader feedback.  This is like the Plain Layne fiasco times, oh, a thousand.  Simultaneously funny, sad, and fascinating in that car-wreck sort of way.

If this keeps up, "Pete" will become a synonym for "blogger who thinks an article in The Onion is real".   Or perhaps "blogger whose blogposts generate tons and tons of comments".

Pete, The Onion, and his MarchTogether.com Blogpost Comments: A Timeline.

Peggy Archer, writer of the blog Totally Unauthorized, has done us all a favour by providing direct links to the comment threads of the four idiotic blogposts made by Peter Shinn mentioned in my earlier post.

People, reading through the comments is the funniest thing I have read for a long time.  Truly priceless stuff.  Here's the timeline:

1. Pete writes his first blogpost about The Onion article.(The Onion is a well-known satirical newspaper, famous for its dead-pan humour and made-up news stories)
2. People comment.
3. Pete writes a second blogpost, still treating The Onion article as legitimate, among several other astounding lapses in metaphor detection, understanding of satire, and just plain logic.
4. People comment.
5. Pete writes a third blogpost, in which he says that knowing The Onion is a satirical newspaper is proof that "our children are brainwashed in the public school system". 
6. A lot of people comment, and this is where Pete adds his own comment: " I moved! And you can't comment!  Maybe some of you should have been aborted."   
7. Pete writes a follow-up which, among other things, declares that oral contraceptives are a form of abortion.
8. More people comment
9. Pete finally turns off the links to his comment threads, but you can still access them (and yes, you can still add comments) using the links (2,4,6,8) above.
10. Pete complains about his personal contact information being leaked to the Internet, when the idiot HAD ALREADY POSTED ALL OF IT HIMSELF on several websites.  Do a Google search for Pete and marchtogether and see how easy it is to pull up all that information.

As I said earlier: you simply couldn't make this story up if you tried, I am going to wrap this up by the excellent comment left by Peggy Archer left on a mirrorpage of Pete's blog:

It's a shame you can't see the comment threads on the original site anymore. Out of almost 2,000 comments (I think - Haloscan's counter stopped so there may be more), absolutely none read like your examples.

Admittedly, there were a few nasty comments obviously left by folks just wanting in on the internet's hottest party, but the VAST majority of the comments were written by well-educated, intelligent, articulate folks (MANY of whom mentioned being 'pro-life', BTW) who just could not believe what they were reading.

Peter came off as not passionate and driven by his zeal to serve his cause, but as a clueless and sanctimonious jerk who continued to make the same silly error even after having it repeatedly pointed out to him by hundreds of people.

On second thought, though, what Peter did really was amazing - for one brief, shining moment, people on both sides of an incredibly divisive issue came together in their disbelief of such stupidity and their relentless mockery of a man who desperately deserved it.

"I'm pro life, but sweet Jesus you're an idiot"

(found via digg.com)   I swear, you cannot make stuff like this up.  A pro-life blogger actually assumes a satirical article in the well-known online "newspaper" The Onion is a real article, and condemns it.  What follows is a hilarious stream of comments from readers who cannot believe that this blogger actually fell for it.  Be sure to read through the comments, there are some howlers here :-) from both the pro-life and the pro-choice readers.  My personal faves:

I'm pro life, but sweet Jesus you're an idiot. For your next post, how about a passionate speech on the need to immediately free Prince Albert from the can?

While I am uncertain that you have a central nervous system of sufficient complexity to register high-level emotions such as embarrassment or shame, I still must implore you: please, please, please... no matter how many people on this comment thread cast doubt on your mental capacities or call you "asshat" it is imperitive that you never delete this entry. You have accidentally written the funniest thing in history. Johnathan Swift and Voltaire working together for a hundred years could not surpass you. This must be preserved for posterity.

Dude, seriously, you need to get news from a more reputable source. Try http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/

UPDATE: It just keeps getting better (with another 200+ comments). Earth to Pete: YOU DON'T HAVE TWO BRAIN CELLS TO RUB TOGETHER. GIVE UP ALREADY.