Random Stuff

1. I had dinner last night with someone I hadn't seen in about 20 years. I'm still trying to figure out the exact date. Randy Barris. I had a really great time. He came over around 515pm right after I got home from work -- a good 30 minutes before I figured he'd get there -- and we talked until around 630, then we went to dinner. We had a decent meal at Macaroni Grill, and then talked until almost 11pm -- me, having trouble staying awake since my day began not long after 530am. I just thought I'd let interested parties know. No further public details available.
2. A few more people accepted my LinkedIn invitations plus I got a few invitations and my contacts are over 30 now. Yay. I recommend LinkedIn to everyone from a professional work standpoint. If you have a job and you're a professional, you should have an account. It's a great resource. I have the free account and it's more than sufficient for my needs.
3. Reminder: if you're on NHL Connect, Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn -- let's connect. I use my darsysataoldotcom address on all of them.
4. If you haven't visited kiva.org, please check it out. If you haven't joined, let me know and I'll gladly send you an invitation. This is a great way for you to help those less fortunate. It's a micro-lending site. You put your money in $25 a pop and when you're paid back you can get your money or re-loan it to someone else. I have a few friends already participating. I've got 5 loans outstanding as of right now. Their default rate is low. It's not a charitable contribution, nor is it a tax deduction because you put in and get your money back without interest. But it's double-karma points and we all need good karma.
5. Looks like I am, after all, going to London this Christmas. I am ditching Christmas and leave Christmas morning with my sister. We're flying to Paris, spending a day in EuroDisney, and then taking the train to London. Continental has absurdly low fares to CDG from Newark right now. With the current exchange rate, the trip will still be a bit expensive. I'm working on that. Well Karen is, but she's so slow to respond it's frustrating me. Relatives will have to see me Christmas Eve instead. SMARTIES! YORKIES! YUMMMM! I'm going to try and meet with an estate agent to see what I have to do to buy a home and reture there, though the time of year may prohibit that.
6. I'm really hungry right now. I wish someone would bring me food.

Friend Test Analysis

In yesterday's post I posted the "friend test" which is both amusing and revealing at the same time. A number of my friends have taken it as well as some people I don't know quite as well. I assumed the better the friend, the better the score, but clearly this isn't the case.

Since I was able to control the questions and answers, nobody who knows the least bit about me should score below 50% because if you've ever read my website you can get 50%. If you've visited my website and visited my blog regularly, you should get around 70%. To get past that mark you'd actually have to know something about me.

Let me say, I'm pleased at Jose's score because not only did he get the highest score so far, he e-mailed me to correct one of his answers which would have put him at 90% -- out of a possible 95% since one question I don't expect anyone could answer right except by sheer luck (the people group question). I expected he'd do well and he did.

I've learned something from this: for the most part, the people I expected to know me really well, don't -- and the people I didn't necessarily expect to know me so well have done better than I expected. A score of 70% is where I expected my friends to start in, but that hasn't happened. I'm not sure if I should be upset, sad, distressed, disappointed, or what. I don't want to call out names because I don't want to embarrass anyone.

If you don't want to use your real e-mail to register, you can use Guerilla Mail's disposable e-mail addresses -- they're great for that.

Also, if anyone is a member of: Orkut, MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, NHLConnect, or StumbleUpon, feel free to add me to your contacts. Expand your network.

The Return of Sanford Wallace

Sanford Wallace, generally credited* with modern spam**, the scourge of the Internet, is at it again. This time, MySpace is suing him. I'm quite mystified why someone hasn't given him a pair of cement shoes and thrown him over a bridge. Like many things in life, just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. Now he's making fake profiles on social-networking sites to lure people to spam sites on the net.

Having battled Spamford Wallace and CyberPromo myself back in the Pro-Entropy days, I am definitely on MySpace's side. They've got just as much money as AOL did and they have a good chance of winning. I hope he suffers anal violation in prison by an HIV positive masochistic guy who's built like a pro-wrestler.


* I don't mean this in a good way, obviously.
** He's also credited with the modern junk-fax

Randomness Part Trois

Let's see where to begin.

1. Today, at work, I upgraded from Outlook Express to Outlook. I can't say I'm happy. There are so many little things with Outlook that bug me. The two biggest issues being the address book (Contacts) aren't working properly and I can't figure it out, nor can any of the so-called 'experts' I know. The other is you can't highlight an e-mail in a certain colour using "rules".

2. I cooked dinner. It was very sub-par. This is why I never try anything new. Sweet Corn Cakes sounded good, in theory. In practice, not so good. I ate it all anyway just to spite myself.

3. I got a haircut on the way home from work. Yay.

4. I installed Google Analytics on my site, so we'll see tomorrow how it works (or if it works depending how my installation skills were).

5. The term "emo" has been getting lots of hits on my blog all of a sudden, but mostly it's still the damned Led Zeppelin and Crazy Frog posts that bring visitors here. On the plus side, my hit count is over 95,000 now -- that's a lot of views. On the minus side, most of them look at one or two posts and leave. And worse, none of them click my advertising. I have yet to see a check from Google Adsense. It's okay, though, 'cause I like Google anyway.

6. One of my Chinese vendors sent me the most cool and useful gifts. I don't normally get gifts from my vendors, but happily this was a special occasion I suppose. I got a book in "Practical Chinese Conversations: 100 Putonghua Situations" which comes with CDs and everything. I had mentioned that I was going to try and learn some Chinese phrases, and now I can. The only disadvantage is the don't explain their pronunciation guide, so you've got to listen to the CDs. I can pronounce xièxie, but can't even fathom how to say wènhòu.

7. I told off one of my vendors (Friday) and have yet to hear back. Usually you want to keep a customer, but I guess they don't.

8. I recently added some chick to my MySpace page 'cause she asked, but she's got lots of bulletins, so I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep her around. I hate people who burn through bulletins.

9. I have one ticket (for anyone who wants to go and sit with me) to the 12-23, 27, and 29 Panther Games. And also the 12-25 Evening Dolphins vs Jets game. E-mail me if interested. No charge. Being my date is punishment enough :)

10. My feet are cold. Actually I've been cold all day and coughing a bunch. I wonder if my cold is coming back.

11. Hello to Erin who is recovering from her hoof knee work. Here's to hoping she feels better.

12. I have discovered I prefer cheaper toilet paper to Charmin. I could tell you why but it's a bit gross.

Blue October And MySpace

As I have said previously, I have a My Space account if you care to look me up. But that isn't the point of this post. I will agree with all of you that MySpace has many things to ridicule relentlessly until the horse dies from beating. However, as I said, some of the bands are cool.

There's some guy named Casterisk -- I found him because he happened to be in one of my friend's profiles. So I clicked on his profile, just to see what sort of friends my friend had and in the background there was this really cool song. It was so cool I wanted to own it, but there was no link to the song I could find. One of the many disadvantages of MySpace is that people can create pages that are hard to read and difficult to navigate and although this page wasn't too bad, my poor eyes still couldn't find the information.

I emailed him and asked him about the song. So he wrote back and told me who the band was. I ordered the CD I liked the song so much. I've got to tell you, the whole CD is fucking fantastic. It's called Foiled and it's by Blue October -- be careful there are two bands with the same name. The song I loved was called "She's My Ride Home" though it's not the one you hear all over the radio.

Oh, and as a shout out to Casterisk, you should check out his MySpace page. He's got a great MySpace blog with some really interesting things to say. Plus you can hear that awesome song in the background -- though it's probably changed by now.

My Space

Um, yeah, okay. I have a MySpace page. The direct URL is http://www.myspace.com/darsys

I made this page because my friend Maury invited me to do it. I've made a little profile which is far less cluttered and offensive than most. So I'll probably leave my account there -- though I doubt it'll get much more use than my Orkut account.

I've sworn I'd never, ever, no matter what make a MySpace page because it's full of whiny, bratty, moronic kids. To be clear, I'm not saying all kids are like that. But MySpace has more than its fair share of twits who don't know the difference between IT'S and ITS (or YOU'RE and YOUR) -- and, quite frankly, I look down on people who should know better but don't. It's a failure of our educational system where teachers are afraid to fail the students for shit like that, or worse they don't know it's wrong. But I digress.

I thought I'd hate MySpace with a passion. I don't hate it, nor am I in love with it. What I do find kind of neat are all the musicians that are there. That's the one thing that MySpace has that's great. You can learn about bands, try their music, and (if inclined) interact with fellow fans.

Social networking just doesn't do it for me I suppose.