Oh my God I don't like this... I don't like this... I don't like this one bit! =P Arrrrrrrrgh... I don't like this!!! I do however still find it very much worth watching, specially with the nice concept robot and everything... but I DO NOT LIKE THIS! xP
A short film about a helper robot who doesn't prove as helpful as the advertisement claims. Written and directed by Ruairi Robinson.
And I am not the least bit surprised. After all, we all saw this coming... didn't we.
About a year ago I came across Evri. After I played around with it a bit and did some inspection, I realized it was simply not interesting. It doesn't do anything special that hasn't already been covered by another 10,000 more complete and useful services out there.
With everything that went down with Twine in the past year, it was predicted by a lot of people that I spoke with, that Twine.com had pretty much always been for sale, if you catch my drift. The only thing is, I guess a part of me was always hoping that some big cool company would come along and acquire Twine, and perhaps that way Twine would finally be made into what it was originally supposed to be [or at least what the pitch was!].
Well, the Radar Networks finally got bought today. Twine.com finally got owned today, and as a result we now have a combination of 2 completely lame projects. On one hand I find this very disappointing. On the other hand, I find it very laughable. =P What I find even more amusing, is the little "Evri + Twine" logo that they've stuck on the top of the Twine pages. It looks to me like it's saying "here's how you know we have successfully made a bloody mess of things".
I can not believe where Twine started, and where it is now, truly and finally, ending....
A few hours ago xo directed me to this forum thread on Channel 9. Honestly, at the first glance this seemed to me like some sort of an elaborate joke, but as it turned out, it very much isn’t! As you can read here, apparently yesterday at D7 Steve Balmer announced the new MS search engine called…. well yes, it’s actually called “Bing” =)) And here is the new Bing webpage, not a joke! Now of course there’s no talk of other Live services being rebranded as of yet, but I can see how the starter of that C9 thread could have came to this conclusion. If one of the very main features of “Live” is going to be rebranded, what are the chances that the rest of them will be too? Specially since they’ve already announce “Bing Maps” too, which is the new name for MS’s Virtual Earth.
And now try to imagine the verbal disaster that this would entail. For instance, if WLM is going to be called Bing Messenger, would you really feel like telling someone to “Bing” you? =)) And even if it is just the search engine…. “let me Bing that for you”!! =D Can somebody tell me, how in the universe MS managed to come up with a name as ridiculous as this?? It almost looks like a very desperate attempt at being hip! Plus, I read on another C9 thread that Bing actually means “disease” in Chinese Mandarine!! Way to choose a proper name Microsoft!
Windows Live Messenger never fails to surprise with all sorts of new and improved bugs and glitches. But as of this morning, I’ve ran into a problem that’s much worse than anything I had ever experienced before. In the morning I noticed that somehow some of the people who I usually see online during those hours, appeared offline. Then near noon when I logged on again, a friend who was looking offline to me, started a group conversation with me that included another friend who was also appearing offline! Well this was obviously quite odd, since offline people don’t even get listed in the group conversations on WLM, but they were both listed, with an “offline” sign in front of their names. And one of them, was talking to me!
Then I started testing around and found out that a good number of people who appear offline to me, are in fact quite online. And as for trying to communicate with them, it works quite randomly. As in, they may or may not receive my messages, and I may or may not receive theirs. Of course I did try logging out and back in a few times, with no change. Then I got on my Palm Pilot and logged onto my mobile WLM account, and guess what, the same people look offline over there too! Also shortly after, I started noticing that people’s nicknames don’t show up correctly, and I see their email addresses instead. And to make things worse, I know 1 contact which has disappeared off of my mobile account so far.
So, since the same issue is repeating on different clients on different systems with different accounts, well, this is obviously not a local issue. I have to mention that the 2 accounts are linked, but…. well I don’t know if that’s even relevant. Honestly, this makes absolutely no sense to me. It’s the oddest thing I’ve ever encountered on WLM. For now, I’ve told everyone that I’ll be available on Skype… but I have no idea what to do if this problem doesn’t somehow resolve itself. Any ideas anyone?
Update: Boy do I hate Microsoft and do I feel like completely boycotting Windows Live altogether right now. While looking for news on the issue [which apparently is not just mine], look what I found:
Today I received a letter that at the first few moments surprised, and then both angered and amazed the heck out of me. A scam letter, that is. The "Domain Registry of Canada" con artists have apparently decided to show me the "courtesy" of letting me know that my domain name will expire in some months, and offering me to "renew" my domain name with them, which by the way was never registered with them to start with. Of course somewhere down the line they do use the word "transfer" securely placed in the middle of a long ambiguous sentence to assure that at least a good %50 [possibly more?] of the people who receive a similar letter will never quite figure what it is that these lying b*****ds [excuse my language] are trying to manage here.
Yes, believe it or not, these people dig into your records and try to confuse you into transferring your domain name to their bloody registrar, by "explaining" to you that if you don't renew your domain name you'd no longer be holding it. And by the number of warning posts you can find on the web regarding the sodding "Domain Registry of Canada", you can tell that they probably have managed to get quite a number of domain names switched so far. So not the most brilliant trick I'd say, but apparently it hasn't been without results.
I also have to mention that just for the sake of having had my say, I called them and gave them some ideas as to what I think of them and their little trick, which of course resulted in receiving a hang up beep. And here's a sample of their letter which I found on the web. Have a look....
What in the heaven's name just happened to the last.fm playlists?
On one hand, we now have the ability to create more than 1 playlist. On the other hand, now only the subscribers can actually play those playlists, and that is only if the playlist contains at least 45 tracks and 15 different artists!! As you can imagine I'm not happy about that at all! On top of that, what really ticked me off last night was that I noticed the new 200 track limit, which has already been applied on ALL playlists, even the ones that had been created before the updates. This of course means that large parts of some of my favorite neighborhood playlists have simply been annihilated. No backups, nothing. So now I have 5 playlists which I can do very close to zilch with, and I can no longer go swimming in the mighty playlists created by my friends.
And just to make my mood even darker, obviously the flash playlist player widget no longer works either... it did till 2 days ago... grrrrrrrrrr!!
So, anybody else sharing my mood?
As probably obvious by the title, I'm currently somewhat confused and you could even call it somewhat ticked off. Last night a Persian speaker friend of mine sent me a link to an article in a Persian weblog that he found amusing. Well honestly the article itself didn't take as much of my attention as the little banner on the corner of the page did. Yes, it's similar to the one I've posted here. I had a feeling that I had seen the same banner before on possibly another Persian weblog. I clicked on the banner and was directed to THIS website, where I got a bit of an explanation as to what's cooking, and I also found the link to THIS OTHER website, where I got the complete and full version story. So, as far as my understanding is, this is what's going on. The 2nd website is the homepage for an Iranian government organization who's name translates to something in lines of "The Iranian Website Classification Organization". To make the long story short, this organization's soul purpose is to classify and register all the websites or weblogs owned by Iranians, so that [obviously] they can take their nasty acts of censorship and harassment of the Iranian internet users to it's next, simpler step. The organization's expectation is for every single Iranian domain owner to go ahead and hand them all information about their websites, weblogs and whatever other sort of online identity that they have, which in turn will make it a lot simpler for the Iranian government to either annihilate whatever online content they don't find to their liking, or make them inaccessible from Iran. How bloody bizarre is that? I wonder who's unholy idea this is, to take away the smallest peace of freedom of speech that may be left through the internet, using this new, enhanced and completely idiotic tactic? And I really do mean idiotic: what on earth makes them fancy that people will just go through with this? Hence the first website I mentioned, and the banner.... that's the big "NO" for the answer. Thank you very much! But you know what bakes my noodles even more? Just out of pure curiosity I had a look around the organization's website and came across their website registration form. And guess what. It's applicable to Iranians everywhere, not just in Iran [you can select whatever country you're in]. Yeah. Bloody right. I wonder how far they think they're going to get with that one....
A few days ago I came across a group invitation on Facebook, that actually managed to get my attention. What I gathered about the group at the first glance, didn't make much sense. I was thinking to myself that I'm probably a bit tired or reading too fast and I simply don't get it. But unfortunately that wasn't the case. Now this is old news, and could be that most of you have already heard about it, but somehow I had never came across the story of "Guillermo Habacuc Vargas" and his horrible crime that he likes to call art. From what I gathered, sometime on October last year, this so called "artist" from Costa Rica, paid a couple of kids to catch him a dog off of the street and then he chained the dog to the corner of an art gallery [a part of an exhibition in Nicaragua]. He didn't feed the dog, and didn't allow anybody else to do that either. The poor dog starved to death right in front of the eyes of tons of people walking in and out of the gallery, and nobody did a thing about it. Nobody. The bloody insane guy calls this art. What bothers me even more is that the so called "Prestigious Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American" decided that this horrible act was actually art, and Guillermo Habacuc Vargas has been invited to repeat his cruel action for the biennial of 2008. Unbelievable! I just feel my own blood boiling when I think about this. Right now there are tons of videos on YouTube showing the frustration of people from everywhere, and there's a petition to try to stop this cruel act from happening again in 2008. Through this weblog you can find the petition, as well as an English translation of it, and some more information about the whole fiasco. I hope you'll sign the petition if you haven't already. And I certainly hope that this insane person will be stopped. I just can't think of another dog having the same fate.... ="""(
This weblog is a
collection of my random thoughts. It's as simple as that. What I write here
is for my friends, or anyone else who might find it worth reading. This is
not a tech blog, a science blog, a lyrics blog or...although you might find
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if you have any thoughts about something that you read here please drop me a
line and let me know. So...after all this, welcome to my weblog, thanks for
visiting and enjoy your stay! =)
Friday, March 25, 2011
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