Pownce: gender-confused friendly

So I managed to get one of the "highly coveted" invitation to join Pownce. If you're sitting there going "Pownce, what's that?", you're not the only one. I didn't know of its existence until I read a post from a blog that's giving out invitations for Pownce. Apparently, it's a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter. And if you're going "Twitter, what's that?" like my sister, it's a blogging service like blogger but it's for the ADHD generation. You basically just write one or two sentences per post and you can post as frequently as you like. I thought it would be nice to get a Twitter account a while back but then changed my mind. What the heck am I gonna blog about if I can blog every minute? It might resemble something like this:

5:55am, just woke up, gonna go wash my face
6:00am, finished washing my face and worrying about new zits, gonna get breakfast now
6:30am, finished breakfast gonna get changed to go to uni
7:00am, in the car, omg my mum is listening to nursery rhythms
8:30am, in lecture theatre, gee, we have that bore for biochem YET again

Ok,you get the picture. Seriously, I barely have anyone reading my once or twice a week blog, who would be interested in me enough to read my twitters and I doubt my friends would even be interested in what I do.

Anyhow, back to the topic of Pownce. I thought it would be a nice time to try this micro-blogging thing, besides I like trying web2.0 things when they're in alpha stages. So I signed up with the invitation, the sign up process is simple enough but then I reached the gender questions. Gone were the days when you can give a simple, definitive answer to this question. What I got on the drop down list is this

Huhm, so hard to choose, I didn't know that a chick is a completely different gender from a girl and a lady. And guess what? all of those aren't female either. No wonder why there are so many gender-confused people around these days. For instance, the other day I was at Flinder street station and there was this person walking in front of me. From this person's back I would say that it was a girl/chick/lady/female half the the population. Then the person turned around and it was a guy/dude/gentleman/male. It's just that he was wearing skinny jeans the way girls/chicks/ladies/females usually do, pink, long and tight t-shirt (in winter, gee talking about a case of hypothermia waiting to happen) and flip-flops (I don't want to use the word thongs, which is what we call flip-flops here in Australia because really how can I know if anyone is wearing thongs, the underwear, unless they wear them outside their normal clothes). What made me decided that he was a female was the way he walked. He walked with a prominent sway in the hips like the way female models do.

So the point of all this is to say the whole thing with the dude that looked like a chick is weird and that Pownce should include an option on their registration form for gender-confused people who do not belong to any of the categories they have there already. But then they'll be in the none-of-the-above category.

Back to Pownce, after finally settling my confusion over what exactly is my gender I finally logged on. And what a disappointment was Pownce. It's basically a place where you can share things with your "friends". It's more like a messenger than a micro-blogging platform. And we all know what I think of instant messengers, don't we? Maybe I should make new friends and possibly they can pownce me some leak albums.

That's it for now, before I go though, here's a video (that you might have seen already) that I've just discovered today: What if God had a myspace.

What if God Had a MySpace

Posted Jun 17, 2006

This hilarious video answers the age-old question, "What if God had a MySpace account?"

Book browsing

I went to see "Ocean's Thirteen" yesterday however, the movie wasn't the highlight of the evening. It was the time spent in Borders waiting and browsing books that was more interesting. I ended up buying 2 CDs and found 2 books that look quite promising. The first one is "God is not great" by Christopher Hitchens. The other one is "The Atheist Manifesto" by Michel Onfray. What's with the religion bashing books huh? I didn't buy any of those since I still haven't quite finished "The God delusion" yet.

Another book that caught my attention was "Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture". It almost won the 'what the f*** book of the day' award had it not been for the metal clad bible I saw 5 minutes later. The guide to emo culture book is really a guide to emo culture. I thought it was satirical but no, it's a straight and narrow guide to how to be cool and yet so uncool at the same time. What I can say about that is, make up your damn mind. Do you want to be cool or uncool?

While we're still on the topic of emo. Let me introduce you to Emo Google. It's Google with an all black emo finish. It gives you the exact results as the normal Google, (sorry, no emo related search results yet) with the benefit of a seriously ugly black background on the main page to hurt your eyeballs and visual cortex.


The metal bible however was hilarious. So much so that I had to take some pictures of it.
The obvious question that popped into my head when I saw these metallic beauties above was "What can you possibly do with a metal bible?". I came up with an answer for that as well. Imagine this:

You are a proud owner of metal bible, you love it so much you bring it with you everywhere because really, you like to have a bible with you at all time and a normal leather bound volume can't withstand the stress and strain of being bounced around in your bag with mobile phones and all the other unholy modern crap like coins, keys and credit cards (but seriously, don't bring it with you all the time, the bible alone is heavy enough, add the extra hard metal cover it's as heavy as a four 30-gig ipods). One day you encounter a mugging and you decided that you will dissuade the mugger to give up his evil deeds by some cleverly chosen passages from your metal clad bible. (In my honest opinion, you gotta be crazy to think that but hey there are some crazy people running around all the time). But surprise surprise the mugger doesn't appreciate old sacred writ and turns the knife on you instead. What are you gonna do now? You have the perfect weapon in your hand. If holy words can't dissuade the mugger, heavy metal applied straight to the head can at least knock him out and give you enough time to run.


This is a shot of the back of said bible. Strange how people say that you can find answers in the bible. I was at a crossroad of sort the other day during my exam. I was stuck on one question: Is Atenolol a beta agonist or is it a beta antagonist. I went home and try to look that up in the bible, guess what? It doesn't give out that sort of answer, it doesn't even give you any direction to where you can find the answer. I propose that we change the saying that "answers can be found in the bible" to "relatively reliable answers can be found on Wikipedia" instead.

So long big-ass apps!

It has recently come to my attention that my tinkering with the template has made it impossible to load my blog on the blasted Internet Explorer. This is, of course, unacceptable. After all, 90% of my readers use IE to read this blog. So after some more tinkering the blog is now compatible with IE again.

From as long as I can remember, I've hated IE. It's one of those big-ass applications that eat resources for snacks, another one of those is Acrobat Reader. Opera used to be my favourite alternative to IE until I discovered Firefox. I think Opera was the first browser to come up with tabbed browsing and it's a better browser than Firefox.

So you might ask why did I switch to Firefox? Well, first Opera is slightly bigger than Firefox, it's got an integrated off-line mail client which I don't need. Secondly, back when I still used it, I couldn't get Java or Flash to work properly with Opera even though I installed the version with Java built-in. And then there's the big attraction with the totally FREE Firefox. Opera was free too but back then the free version got this huge ad panel that just irritated me.

I think everybody's into tabbed browsing at the moment. Don't you just love tabs? Anyhow, I think everybody loves it so much that even Microsoft has to integrate that into the new version of IE. Sneaky bastard went behind my back to install IE7 on my computer when I used Windows Update. It even updated WMP to version 11. The result? It took half and hour for my laptop to start up after Windows Update rebooted without my permission while I was typing a post. I was able to salvage the post all thanks to Blogger auto save function. No more automated Windows Updates from now on for me. Everything has got to go through me first!

I must say the new IE is a complete ripoff of Firefox. New features in IE7? Not so new if you ask me. Tabbed browsing and search box built in? They've got Firefox stamped all over them. Granted the original skin of Firefox doesn't look as attractive as the new IE but you can choose from a wide range of skins for Firefox. I would love to remove IE completely but sadly, I need it for Windows Update.

The other famous infamous big-ass program in my book is Acrobat Reader (AR). Just download the installer is exhausting (especially when you have to do it on a dial-up connection). 70MB? That's just too frakking big for something you can't use all the features. I've got to restart my laptop so many times because AR crashed it while opening a file that's got way too many pictures. I don't have to tell you how much I hate AR do I? I hate it so much that when I found an alternative to it I kicked its ass out of my laptop.

The alternative and, might I add, much much smaller and better program is Foxit Reader which is available FREE of charge and full of features AR charged you a fortune for. Yup, I'm talking about annotating right on the pdf file. If you're a uni-student who's, like me, too stingy to print out all the lecture notes you can bring your laptop to lectures and type notes right on the lecture notes. Here's a screenshot of Foxit in action.

There's a good reason for my absence...

...and a few not so good reasons. They're the usual reasons, they mostly have something to do with books or DVDs. I've just found the best non-fiction book of the year, the best documentary I've seen this year and possibly the best TV show ever and they all have something to do with Atheism. However, this post is about why I've been non communicado for 4 days when I don't have anything to do.

Well, it was because my laptop, my beloved laptop, decided that the feeling isn't mutual and wanted to die.

OK, I overstated that a bit. It didn't decide to commit suicide or anything remotely like that. It did acted up and I felt like strangling it with its power cord. All I did was trying to clean up the hard drive and permanently delete some junk then all of the sudden Norton Internet Security crashed and wouldn't work again. Hence operation "clean up hard drive" turned into operation "get rid of Norton Internet Security".

Now that's not the end of the problem. Since I was without any proper protection from virus and adwares I decided to install a newer version of NIS. Everything went well until NIS interfered with my bittorrent download. No matter how many times I told it to allow all activities it wouldn't do what I told it to and just crashed my laptop almost every time I started a bittorrent download. When it didn't crash the laptop, which was quite rare, the download went at dial-up speed.

So out went NIS and my laptop was alright again, albeit without Antivirus and internet security. The stupid built in firewall in Windows SP2 doesn't provide enough protection so I have to find an alternative to NIS. And I found it. From now on I'm gonna stick with McAfee Internet Security Suite. It's good and it's fast. Plus it works fine with bittorrent. Now I have to get back to operation: clean up laptop hard drive.

Blogger beta rocks!

If you're wondering what's the firetruck happens to my blog, stop wondering. I didn't do something stupid like mucking away at the template I wrote last year and forgot to save a backup template hence I had to stick with some lame highly unoriginal templates provided by Blogger. Nope, no such thing happened. It was just that I got offered a chance to try out Blogger Beta and jumped at it. Blogger Beta rocks.
Let's talk about the good points first:

• Labels, finally blogger has labels. I've been wanting labels for a while now and couldn't have the time to poke around some Blogger hacks to put labels on my blog. I tried to compensate for that by having a Wordpress mirror which is fully label supported. The problem with Wordpress is that it's too freaking slow, even at cable speed it was slow [or maybe it was just my rotten luck]. I don't really have to say anything about Wordpress on dialup, do I? It was excruciatingly slow.
• Super fast. Blogger Beta offers basically the same stuffs as Wordpress, with the exception of an in built counter however, Blogger Beta was fast, probably faster than the old blogger. Wordpress eats Blogger Beta's dirt.
• Customise is child's play. Yes, child's play. There are a few widgets available and customise backgrounds, fonts, font size, font colours are as easy as abc. I remember the pain I had to go through last year to customise my blog, this is just too easy.
• add links with ease. Adding links to the template in Blogger was a real pain in the ass. However, you can always use del.icio.us or blogrolling.com to reduce that pain. Blogger Beta offers a real cure for the pain. Just log in and post links away. I'm loving this.
  
• Heaps of new features like private blogs and invite only blogs. Frankly, these are the stuffs that I really don't care about hence the short paragraph. For more info click here

Now to the down points

• No counter yet. There's been some rumour about Google intergrating Measure Map into Blogger but so far, nothing yet.
• Can't edit HTML source code. I love my old template even though it was a bit dodgy. Especially my banner which I made personally. My old template was personalised, not just customised. HTML editing is "coming soon" but how soon is anyone's guess.

So that's it for the down points so far. Now I have to do some back tracking and post labels to all my old posts, that should take a while.