the mofo with the info.

Refresh… Eat… Refresh… Eat…

The saddest thing is that I’m not only watching the apple announcements like a total psycho, I’m also streaming the important stuff to my friend Lin’s phone, who is waiting for a plane right now and doesn’t have internet access. Sometimes connectivity is a bad thing.

I read up on Google’s latest mind-boggling project, Google Secure Access, a free, secure wireless initiative, and prepared to get geekily excited about it until I found the increasingly common “(Windows XP and Windows 2000 only)” disclaimer. I thought back to the recent offerings from everyone’s favorite Mountainview mothership, and couldn’t help but think, “Why does Google hate me?” As a home Linux and Mac OS X user, I have gotten by pretty well lately, playing some cutting-edge games (ok, game), finding most new hardware to be OSX/Linux compatible, and using the commodity standard Microsoft Office platform; things were looking pretty good for a lowly Linux/BSD/OSX user such as myself. The systems were finally making inroads to the non-tech crowds, too: my technophobic brother was asking me serious questions about the Mac mini, and I hear you can get a free Linux box with the purchase of a qualifying rifle at Wal-Mart[1]. Just as it looked as if the Redmond beast might have to deal with some serious competition, opposition came from the unlikeliest of places: the company that Microsoft identifies as its biggest threat.

Though the first line on Google’s company overview page smugly declares that the company’s mission is to make information “universally accessible and useful”, a glance at Google Labs is enough to turn a *nix user green with compatibility envy. Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, Google Web Accelerator, Google Video Viewer, Google Talk, and now Google Secure Access are six projects recently released into beta or production through their lab, and all are currently only compatible with Windows systems. Though Google Talk uses open standards for the bland text chatting protocol, the real meat of the service is its VoIP client, which currently only lets you talk to other boring Windows users. Even Gmail, the nothing-short-of-revolutionary webmail client, went into public beta without Safari compatibility (though they are now Safari compatible, advanced features such as Rich Text formatting still only work in IE and firefox).
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The Pos told me that posting a friendster screenshot on flickr is very post-modern. I told him that he’s adopted.

If you’ve been living under a rock like my friend E-*, then you don’t know about the “Viewed My Profile” feature on Friendster, also known as the most unwanted feature in the world. This is demonstrably true as the first thing that anyone will you do when you tell them about the most unwanted feature in the world, the first thing they ask you is how to turn it off. Go to “My Settings”, and set “View Profiles Anonymously” to “Yes”

You’re pretty lame if you haven’t heard about this yet, because even Business Week has picked up on it. I mean, I know that Friendster isn’t cool anymore, but do they have to rub our faces in it?

My friend Rob is an internet meme… and not one of the dirty ones!

He made a trailer for a contest, in which he had to re-cut a movie into a misleading trailer. The result is just awesome (mirrored here if the ps260 server gets hosed again). After he had submitted the original entry to the contest (which he won), he sent this link out to a few friends. We all thought it was pretty funny and forwarded it on, and now, maybe a month later, he’s all over the place. Check out links 2-10 on the first page of hits on Google Blogsearch.

As an executive producer for Rob’s student movie (this means that I had to go to the vending machines to buy diet sodas for our actors), I can’t help but feel proud.

UPDATE: It’s gotten crazy. Last night, The New York Fracking Times ran an article on Rob. We had to go over to his office to help him deal with the vapors. I’d make sure you watch the actual video before reading the nytimes article, because they kind of ruin the whole joke. And no, it’s not my blog they’re talking about, they’re talking about Dustin’s Xanga. I only posted it after it went hollywood.