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Observing Ramadan
An excellent set of excellent photos via The Boston Globe. Funny how many of these pictures have to do with food.
Andy Rooney - Organized
I hope it never gets this bad. From Lifehacker, one of my favourite aggregator blogs right now.
Google Reader
I’ve been using Google Reader to go through my list of regular reads, although I find using an RSS reader doesn’t actually save you much on the internet. You’re still pretty much going through your bookmarks, just that they’re all now in one place and I don’t really regularly visit blogs that don’t have feeds of some kind. Things like Digg, Videosift or the news feeds I subscribe to are particularly frustrating since they update very regularly and you don’t always get a chance to actually go through all the posts. In any case, between Google Reader and Facebook(the genuine crack cocaine of social networking sites), that’s how I’m spending my internet time these days.
So here’s some stuff I got off the feeds.
I’m not a friendster, I’m not a star
I came across an article awhile back with a map showing the popularity of different social networking sites across different geographic regions, and part of the tagline was “And guess who’s still using Friendster?”
Part of why a lot of people jumped ship to Myspace a few years back was that Friendster was absurdly slow at one point, and offered little in the way of personal page customisation, which Myspace had in spades. Unfortunately, as not everybody has an eye for design a lot of Myspace pages end up looking like overly cluttered messes. Myspace also tends to have an overabundance of fake pages meant to redirect users to porn/spam sites.
Friendster’s moved on a lot in the past two years though, incorporating bits of the best parts of Myspace (the ability to feature audio/video, some degree of page customisation) and I think if it had been like this two years ago it wouldn’t have lost the ground it did. I think the pluses of Myspace are that at this point it’s a far better marketing tool (far more bands and musicians have Myspace pages as compared with other sites, for example) and it’s much easier to find people you don’t know but might have similar interests to,although Myspace can be almost as slow as Friendster a couple of years ago.
I’ve debated getting accounts for things like last.fm or imeem but in all honesty I’m not actually all that interested in finding new music to listen to these days. I’m getting old like that.
Back to the matter of where Friendster reigns. I knew without looking what the answer was of course, being on Friendster myself but the map naturally showed Friendster being the dominant social networking site in South East Asia… and nowhere else on Earth.
Which of course makes Friendster the Michael Learns to Rock of social networking sites.
Me on Friendster/ Myspace
The United States of Malaysia
Originally uploaded by Luca Zappa. Originally uploaded by blackjacket.
Reasons why Malaysia and the U.S. might be the same country:
- They both have similar flags.
- They both have big yellow coloured school buses
- Both have a federal government as well as individual state governments.
- The capital of both countries is a city within a larger state, but is considered a territory to itself.
- Both have had publicised issues regarded the separation of church and state(substitute mosque in place of church for Malaysia).
- Both have a stretch of states that are considered to be socially conservative and tend to vote on religious grounds.
- Both have issues regarding affirmative action (although somehow in Malaysia affirmative action involves the majority, who already wield a significant amount of political and economic power and still somehow can’t catch a break).
- Both have two states that are very far away from the rest of the country(Alaska and Hawaii for the US, Sarawak and Sabah for Malaysia), one of which is the largest in the country(Sarawak and Alaska).
Technorati Tags: malaysia, america, usa
A Whirlwind of Possible Storms
For his students, ex-students and anybody else who might be interested.
Cheer up emo girl
(EDITED 7th April 2007, 11.36am)
02 April 2007
YOUTHink, Home, The Straits Times
“Emo heroes: Just a bunch of zeroes?”
Jessica LimThe anti-hero has come full circle: What follows the 1990s’ icon, the angsty late Kurt Cobain, is now part of mainstream fabric.
Meet Gen Y’s role model: the ‘emo hero’.He may be cute, brainy and kind. Unfortunately, he is also a bit dumb. Worse, he may be presenting an unfair image of the rest of us.
The classic emo hero? Prison Break’s resident cute, brainy and kind Michael Scofield (played by Wentworth Miller).
