Photo?

I haven't touched Photobucket in years! I remember when the coolest thing on forum boards was the ability to post offsite images and animated .gifs. I was so proud. Time went on and I used it less and less. I eventually started looking around for a photo album organizer for the images on my harddrive. One search later, I find Picasa. A Google product you say? Hmm... Fucking sold! Admittedly, I was much more excited back then. I'm still figuring the program out. Every time I start it up, I find a new feature. I really like how I sync albums online, and they appear in my smartphone automatically.

Although I don't use Picasa terribly often, I do still make great use of it. These days I mostly use Imgur almost exclusively.

Delicious.com? More like... Dry-and-stale.gross

I started using StumbleUpon YEARS ago, but haven't used it for about a year. I was actually kinda surprised to have it as a topic in class. I still have the little SU button on my browser, untouched for quite some time. So I opened it up the other day and it's just like I remember. They updated the graphical layout of the Chrome version of the toolbar and made some decent changes. Overall, it feels exactly like it used to and none of the appeal is gone. Remembering back a few weeks after I set my mom up with the StumbleUpon toolbar, she exclaimed to me that it was "fuckin' awesome" and "StumbleUpon is the shit."

Delicious though, I had only heard of and not actually used. My first thoughts upon finding out what it does were to the effect of, "This was probably great a few years ago, but this is pretty useless now.." and "WHY??" I put aside my biases to give it a try and see what it's all about, and imported my Chrome bookmarks, well, tried to at least. I selected the .html file and uploaded it, and was told "This may take awhile. You will receive an email when it finishes." I thought to myself(and whined aloud to my wife..) "It's an .html file.. It's literally just TEXT. It should take seconds at most.." Here we are almost a week later, no email, nothing has been imported, and Delicious and proved itself to be completely useless to me.

YOU DID IT! GREAT JOB!

Dark side of the Twittersphere

I'll just come right out and say that I don't like Twitter. I don't mind it, and I check it sometimes when I feel like reading a text wall or I'm waiting for a bus. But I just plain and simple don't like it. I started an account on Twitter to follow Notch and keep up to date with the latest development news on his game, Minecraft.

Much time has passed and Notch is no longer in charge of development on the game, but remains the most worthwhile person in my Twitter feed. I rarely ever make tweets myself and just stick to following people I'm interested in, such as Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I also follow some of the guys from roosterteeth.com, but I'm not missing much by not reading their tweets. Like my brother, they just say stuff to the public without filtering their thoughts first.

On their podcast they had a moderately amusing discussion on how there's an unspoken follower:tweet ratio, an if you tweet more often and have almost no followers, you're automatically labeled an asshole who just wants attention. Like all those spoiled girls you'll see, complaining about how hard their life is because they didn't get the right color iPhone from their parents. Disgusting examples of humanity. So I seldom enter the Twitterverse, as there is nothing there for me anymore.

YouTube. Emphasis on YOU!

Well, my work here is done. I got my vlog up, and scraped together a wiki entry. It makes me sad to do the minimum work required though. Especially since we're talking YouTube! I use it SO much! I haven't monetized anything yet because I'm still getting used to how copyright works with YouTube, but my passion is making videos, and they all go up on my channel.

However, this week was insane and I'm still winding down from it all. I have a raging headache that wants to migraine, and my health professor tells me I probably have carpal tunnel syndrome. I really wanted to put more work into my video and write a kickass tutorial for the wiki on how to make YouTube bend to your will, but I have neither the time or energy. I'll have a lot more to say on next week's assignment, but for now I just have to deal with what's already on my plate.

I HATE EXCUSES! I also hate apologies. So here's a promise instead. I will do better!

Facebook, is it really?

I remember when I finally caved into the pressure and made a MySpace account. I never did truly like it, and I thought it was a social cancer on the way in which people interact. It felt so watered down, but I used it. I had little choice, that was the only way to reach people anymore after all. I will admin that I had some fun designing a personal page, and that was my first intro to HTML and coding. But then Facebook entered the scene and after awhile everyone abandoned ship. EVERYONE! There was no more MySpace! Nobody talked about it, and I had no idea what happened.

So I made a Facebook account. Why not? I never cared for it either. It didn't help that at the time it was still fairly primitive as far as social networking is concerned. Although it seemed like Facebook and MySpace were almost mirrors of each other a lot of the time. Like there's some clearly defined model of social networking that all sites adopt and conform to. And this model kept updating! As soon as one site changed, the other would do the same. Facebook started having status updates post on a wall and forced all "friends" to see.

I had no interest, but I had little else to do. I lurked a lot before I started actually posting. Facebook just never got me excited. But then, Google was rumored to be starting it's own social networking service. That got me excited. I love Google services, and how they all working seamlessly in conjunction together (Much like how Adobe programs have become.) I was blown away by the thought of having a social media/networking site that tied into all the services I already used on a daily basis. I even got accepted into early beta testing for Google+.

Google+ in the early stages was BORING. So empty and bland. The features were cool, if you had other people to use them with. I still use Google Hangout for video chats every once in a while, but mostly stick to my TeamSpeak 3 server. Sadly though, Google+ came out and never quite caught on. People still stuck to Facebook and worshipped it religiously. Like an Apple fanboy buying the newest iPod for the updated firmware and redesigned charging port, claiming it's a gift from god and not realizing he spent too much money on nothing more than a software update. Google+ accounts you see are mostly just businesses and business folks trying to cover all the web bases. It's a shame it never took off like they intended to.

Widgets are for kool kids!

I just edited the class wiki and added the "Embedding via HTML" section. Widgets are all kinds of useful and neat, but embedding html code allows for so much more. Youtube, any Google service, Twitter, Facebook, and many other big sites offer the ability to generate a code to embed their interface into your own blog or site. I love it.

I had made a Google Docs form of just silly questions and answers and disguised it as a legit survey by saying it was for school. (I'm such a bad boy!) Trouble is, I never did anything with it. So I thought, why not embed it as an example to show my classmates what fun can be had through embedding and widgets.

For my next trick, I'm thinking about embedding a relevant RSS feed. I make massive use of RSS feeds through Google Reader, and have a GReader widget embedded on my homepage, iGoogle. That's how I get all my news of the world, cause I don't trust or care about anything said by corporate owned media. I like to pick and choose what's delivered to my internets.

Sociopathic Networking!

I personally use social networking a lot. Some forms way more than others. Facebook, Twitter, (MySpace lol?), they're pretty great and all. (Except for MySpace) But I find myself on Steam and Youtube a LOT more and it's not the interpersonal interaction I care about. I love playing games to entertain myself, and watching videos to pass the time and absorb the knowledge it holds.

Being a full-time student, I don't have much time for games, and the interest for such things come and go with the holidays when all the good new games are released, loved, played, beaten, hated, then finally forgotten. So, as I have already beaten Bioshock: Infinite, I'm on a break from Steam for awhile.

I still post updates on Facebook, but not often. I just don't have anything to say to the countless mass of the Facebook universe. Nothing I haven't already said, anyway. As I type this, I'm in a TeamSpeak server voice chat with my most regular friends and family.

My biggest venture for social networking these days is Youtube. You can see some of my videos in the previous post. I don't post as often as I'd like, cause good videos take time to make. But even though I don't contribute material goods, I watch and leave comments! I watch "Let's Play" game playthroughs from a few of my favorite personalities, but mostly educational snippets, and generally anything I can get new information from.


As well as some less educational, more ridiculous things...


Aside from that is just no time for keeping current with everyone I pretend to care about.

I know a lot about Web 2.0 technologies, and strive to utilize them to the fullest. My favorite example is Google. Google offers so many services that make my life so much easier. I use Google Calendar to organize my school schedule, sorting through homework by due dates and keeping everything connected with all other Google services as well as being able to access it all by phone any time I need.