The Millennium Shrimp

A couple of days ago this message floated through faceblah status updates:

FACEBOOK has agreed to let a third party advertisers use your posted pictures WITHOUT your permission. Click on SETTINGS up at the top by the Log out link. Select Privacy, then NEWSFEEDS and WALL. Select the FACEBOOK ADS tab. There is a drop down box, select NO ONE. Then SAVE your changes. (REPOST To LET YOUR FRIENDS KNOW!)

Today I saw this advertisement on a picture:

Jason Espino featured in facebook advertising

So, it really wasn’t an email rumor after all. Facebook, the hot internet application of the 21st century has, in it’s perpetual quest for a business model that actually generates money, hit upon the novel idea of whoring out it’s users’ information to advertisers.

Ultimately, it’s your decision whether or not you want to let them do that. If you don’t want it, be sure to update your privancy settings.

Just got back from a long weekend in Penna. It was a lot of fun. While I was out there I tried out my Flip video camcorder. I’ve had it for a while now, but haven’t really been using it all that much. This morning I started downloading some video to the work laptop (Dell Vostro 1510) while I went to Executive Conference Room 1A for an early morning meeting…

When I got back to my desk, I had this wonderful message about the Flip software having encountered an error. So I closed out of it and tried to go back to the drive in Windows explorer. It couldn’t find the drive anymore. I unplugged it and plugged it back in.

“Unrecognized USB device”

Tried it in the adjacent. Didn’t work.

urrr…

Found this page on the interwebs:
http://www.perfectporridge.com/2007/12/31/flip-video-headaches/

Just for S and G, I plugged it into the USB port on the right-hand side of the computer. It works again.

I’ve run across this behavior in USB devices more often than I care to admit. It’s especially annoying when $1000 Speech Microphones will suddenly stop working. The two things we generally tell people as a first step in trouble-shooting these devices is to try plugging it into another port and/or rebooting the PC.
USB, the not so Universal Serial Bus…

interesting new web mapping application:

http://unterbahn.com/tag/cartagen/

Heh, I’ve always wondered that, too…

My Dad works for Scantron’s Service Group. Or what used to be Scantron’s service group. It’s hard to keep track of who’s what these days. But he does work on the scantron machines. I’ll have to ask what _does_ happen if you don’t use a #2 pencil?

There’s nothing like asking the most important question of your life over twitter. Evidently, this is the new badge of geek cred. Of course it, it doesn’t really compare to Cmdr Taco proposing to his wife on /. And she even posted her answer. That’s still probably the ultimate geek marriage proposal. Well, besides building a laser and burning the question into the near side of the moon in letters large enough to be visible from space:-)

I saw a man with a tat on his big fat belly
It wiggled around like marmalade jelly
It took me a while to catch what it said
Cause I had to match the rhythm
Of his belly with my head
Guitar Praise is what it raved in a typical tattoo green
He stood on a box in the middle of the city
And claimed he had a dream…

[For all the pew potatoes who sit there on Sunday Morning fantasizing about leading Praise and Worship?]

So, our secretary here at work bought an Asus eee pc for her daughter. It’s pink. It also doesn’t come with Java pre-installed(?!)The 4G models come with Java, but the 2G models don’t. So,I installed Java for her. That was about two months ago. Then her daughter screwed something up, so she re-installed the distro, but couldn’t get Java to work. It’s probably one of the more convoluted installations I’ve gone through on a modern Linux distribution for a relatively common software package.

(more…)

Got an interesting email this morning:

Dearest beloved one,

I am Mrs. Evangeline Wells, a citizen of United Kingdom, a widow to late Frederick wells. I am 61 years old, suffering from long time cancer of the breast, from all indication my conditions is really deteriorating and it is quite obvious that I would not live more than three months, according to my doctor and from all indication regarding to my medical analysis, the cancer stage has gotten to a very bad stage after the series of breast surgery conducted by the specialist .all the efforts made to put a resuscitative measure was to no avail, my doctors confirmed that my tendency of lasting long is not Transparent.

I love machine translation!

Another interesting factoid - the reply-to address was at Live.com. Is this part of Microsoft’s post-Yahoo internet strategy?

MySpace, though, is the anti-thesis of government. It’s about freedom.

Indeed. It’s about giving the technologically inept individual the power to suck total *ss on the intarweb, because Geocities never made it easy enough back in the day.

[Edited for family friendly-ness]

Evidently Murdoch (of Faux News fame) is unhappy that Myspace is loosing prominence relative to Facesplat