I’ve been as busy as a beaver lately, but now that I’ve set aside a few minutes to blog here, I can’t remember what I did five minutes ago, let alone what I’ve been doing for the past week. My head’s in a fog, I’m chronically tired, and the whole world seems hell bent on working my very last nerve.

So, what to write about? Well, I’m here at my desk at work, munching on some chicken fingers and using toilet paper as makeshift napkins. The Eagles are playing off my laptop, and I’m just sitting here, wondering about my life, and what it’s become.

*cruuuunch* Mmmmm, good chicken…

Fridays at work always seems to be a bittersweet day for me. On one hand I have the office to myself, I can relax and surf the Internet or watch TV. Sometimes I’ll order in some pizza and garlic rolls, then chow down while I check my email and blogging stats.

But it’s also a day when the reality of how lonely my existence has become really sets in. While everyone else is making plans for a fun night out with their loved ones and friends, I just sit here at work, with only a lukewarm pizza slice and a dead cell phone to keep me company.

I can’t help but wonder if I’ve finally managed to dig a hole deep enough that escaping it has now become utterly impossible. This seems to be my lot in life, as it has been for the past seven or more years. Nothing has changed, and nothing will ever change. It seems the only thing left for me to do is resign myself to my fate, and hope something like cancer will finish me off early.

What a waste of human flesh I’ve become.

Is it me, or does the mass of social networking (or Web 2.0) sites out there seem to be such an overwhelming chaos of convoluted information that even Einstein would have trouble making sense of it all?

Unfortunately though, not content to see 3 or 4 daily readers perusing my blog (despite my anti-social tendencies), I decided to make a journey through the social networking universe and see what was out there, and whether I wanted any of it to come back to my little corner on the web. I also needed a vehicle that would help me find relevant content that could truly inspire me (while also setting me apart from other bloggers). I started by going down the list of social networking sites found at Wiki, and from there I proceeded to spend the rest of the day clicking from place to place, sometimes bored, sometimes impressed, but mostly confused and perplexed.

Some sites seemed simple enough in its concept, but others begged the question: “What in the blue @#$% is the point of all this?” First there were the MySpace clones, some of which appear to improve on MySpace’s shortcomings. Whatever. As far as I was concerned, such sites were online slums exhibiting the worst that humanity had to offer, so I quickly moved on whenever it became obvious that a site I was visiting had been designed using a model similar to MySpace. To be fair, Facebook wasn’t nearly as bad or coarse as some of the MySpace pages I’ve surfed, but it’s really designed for those attending college (and for employees of popular companies).

Then it was on to sites that offered… well I wasn’t exactly sure what it was they offered. The worst offender I think had to be BlinkBits. I just stared at this thing for what had to be 30 minutes and I still couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. It did appear to be overwhelmed with spam though, and whenever I made a test submission, the content just seemed to get lost in all the advertising for Viagra. Hooo-kay…. Blinklist on the other hand seemed to be more polished, but it was still hard to understand the actual purpose of it. The list of “blinks” I sifted through didn’t seem appealing enough for me to check out (and again a lot of the blinks appeared to be spam).

My headaches from surfing finally started to wane when I began checking out the social bookmarking sites. Del.icio.us as some people by now probably know is the most popular one there is, but to me it seemed a little… bland. REALLY bland. So bland in fact that I thought for sure I was missing something, a key feature I was supposed to enable to access its full features. But nope, Del.icio.us was just a simple bookmarking service that utilizes tags to help you organize your bookmarks. Its interface though was just plain UGLY to me, and once I realized it couldn’t be changed, I began to understand why other social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia existed. I’ve already uploaded my bookmarks to Del.icio.us, but I think after I organize them I’ll export tham to Ma.gnolia, which has a much more polished and appealing interface to me. Del.icio.us seemed like the barebones equivalent of a Linux box, while Ma.gnolia gave me that happy-dappy, flower-filled MacOS feel, complete with sunshine and rainbows. There were a few other bookmarking services as well with some truly novel concepts, like Backflip’s method of organzing your bookmarks in a Yahoo style directory, but the rest more or less seemed redundant to me.

I then moved on to blogging oriented communities, like Xanga, Blogger and LiveJournal. But the most polished one I’ve found thus far was Vox.com, created by the makers of the MovableType blogging script. I’ve already been able to duplicate most, if not all of the features offered by these communities on my own blog, so I didn’t feel the need to join for the time being. One community that stood out a little though was MyBlogLog, which was designed with the idea of having people connect with other readers of their favorite blogs. I played around with it for a while, but didn’t see much use for it, partly because my favorite blogs weren’t listed, and partly because the listing of readers for a particular blog didn’t tell me much, if anything. All you see is a small thumbnail of the reader and their usually cryptic usernames underneath. It was still an interesting concept though, so I may decide to stick around and see if I can make it worth my while. There was another site called Squidoo that looked intriguing as well, giving users the ability to create “lenses” that were in essence start pages piecing together a variety of content reflecting the user’s personal interests. At least I think that’s what it is. It basically just offered a different way to organize content, but unfortunately the design seems to make it susceptible to spam as well. Some of the lenses read more like bland advertisements rather than a user’s actual personal take on places on the web that interested him.

For the most part I ignored some of the popular social networks based on specific themes since I was, ironically enough, already a member of them. Namely, I’m thinking of YouTube, Last.FM and Flickr. These three sites have definitely proved their weight in gold, and I’ve been consistently using all of them to complement my own blog. It’s funny, while I generally despise mainstream social networks like MySpace, these theme based networks on the other hand are like manna from heaven. There’s even a site called Doostang that’s designed to help people find jobs through social networking. Muy coolio.

I also came across a few nifty sites that offered a variety of ways for people to organize get-togethers and meetings in real life. Dodgeball (which uses mobile phones to send you alerts when friends and crushes are nearby) and Meetup (which allows you to find groups and meetings of interest in your area) were two of the best I’ve seen. If I had any friends I’m sure these services would certainly come in handy.

Finally, I soon I began descending on news oriented sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Tailrank, NewsVine (and many, many more). Newsvine by the way actually looked in some ways like NetVibes (a service that allows you to design your own personal start page through aggregation). It looked interesting, but WAY overloaded with content. It was one of those things that required your full attention in order to understand how it worked, but I suspect I’ll be investing a lot of time learning how to use all the features it offered only to end up wondering why I bothered in the first place. Tailrank was more blogging oriented, providing feeds for the user that can help you glean what
topics were currently drawing the most interest in the blogosphere. Reddit offered a Slashdot-like way to submit and discuss news items in a vanilla but very addictive format. Then there was Meshly, a service that offered a way for users to submit articles and content via instant messaging. Digg was far more polished in its look and voting system and remains one of the top sites in this particular category of social networks, but in the end I began to realize why these particular sites weren’t that appealing to me. In truth, I wasn’t really a news oriented person. I’m as interested in what’s happening in the world as anyone else of course, but sites like Digg and Reddit completely overwhelm you not just with news related items, but LONG discussion threads such news articles regularly spawn. They seem to go on forever, and ever, and ever, and…

I also noticed that these news oriented networks tend to draw a particularly monolothic demographic, so much that the vast majority of users that peruse these sites could probably be described as angry white male geekazoids who generally spend their pastime decrying in rabid fashion the latest evils of the current White House administration. Ironically enough, this probably would have still been the case had a site like Digg been launched in say, 1998, which back then would have undoubtedly provided an outlet for angry white male geekazoids to vent their frustrations over, uhhhh… the latest evils of the White House administration. In a way this is what I believe is the downside of time based content. It’s repetitive, cyclical, and ultimately boring. Wars come, wars go. Scandals come, scandals go. There really is nothing new under the sun. And I was getting tired of reading through news items that continuously sparked the same old rehashed arguments and flame wars ad infinitum. Good grief, tell me something NEW.

And yet the blogosphere is mostly awash in news, and discussions (or flame wars) over said news, so much that they start to become almost indistinguishable from one another. Where was the diversity? Where was the focus on timeless content, on things that might really matter? The void here was remarkably palpable to me, abandoned instead for themes that would guarantee the heaviest traffic: news and politics. Quality is forsaken in the never ending quest for quantity. And why not? Quantity after all is what brings in the mula.

Tired and weary from my online journey around the world, and from sifting through the endless content at places like Reddit and Digg, it occurred to me that I already had something wonderful and good all along, patiently waiting for me to come home. I had a means to explore timeless content the way it used to be done, back when the web was just getting started. Back when it wasn’t all about news, but about people, about true individuality and innovation. About things that mattered. That something was a small little toolbar currently residing at the top of my browser, provided to me by the good folks at StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon was really what I had been looking for all along. A way to surf the web aimlessly and randomly, and yet still find wonderful places that I could bookmark or blog about in a heartbeat. I was finding content that mattered to me, content I never would have found in a million years perusing sites like Reddit or Digg, or even via a search on Google. The kind of community StumbleUpon offered also proved to be far more diverse, and a more accurate reflection of the general population of mankind. StumbleUpon was the kind of social network that attracted people from all walks of life, rather than just a particular demographic of smarmy geeks who coined phrases like “Web 2.0″ and “folksonomies,” and then expecting the rest of us mere mortals to know what the hell they’re talking about.

So finally, after two bleary eyed days of clicking and surfing, after seeing what’s out there and beyond, the prodigal blogger has finally stumbled his way home. And who knows, if even StumbleUpon should lose its appeal after time, I could always create my own social network.

I’ve been troubleshooting my blog to see what’s been causing the added load time, and then ended up spending a couple of bucks so I could correctly send pics to my blog from my cell phone, which previously kept resulting in broken links and improper syntax. I think finally got it right though….

By the way, blogging by cell has been made possible using a 2 year old plugin script…. written in German. Good grief, half the time I wonder what in the blue balls I’m doing here. It seems I spend more time doing blog maintenance than actually blogging. Still, I did manage to build this thing from scratch after months of work and scouring all four corners of the Internet for nifty plugins, so I’m not about to abandon this little project of mine and flee to Xanga just yet.

Anyhoo, after getting sidetracked by the moblogging issue, I went back to analyze why my index page seemed to lag at times when I tred to load it. Apparently, my tags plugin (the Ultimate Tag Warrior) seems to be the culprit. I noticed the load time sometimes jumped to 30 seconds or longer when my browser tried to access the ultimate-tag-warrior-ajax.php file. I have no idea why this is the case, but naturally I thought upgrading it might fix the issue.

Nope. Upgrading only proceeded to break the Tags Cloud shown in my sidebar. One step forward, two steps back. Love it…

I think the simpler solution was to just remove the code for the tags altogether from my index page. It clutters things up anyway, and it’s probably more appropriate to just display them on my individual pages instead. I think I finally licked this problem, but I’ll have to check it from home to make sure.

Ugh, I need a life.

Wow. I took this snapshot from my cell at a park right next to the apartments I’ve been checking out. The town here is so different from the ghettos I usually see that it seems to have been dropped from the sky.

I really like Twitter and what it offers, but they’ve been getting on my nerves lately. IMs have been getting dropped, service has been erratic, and the lag time in sending tweets or checking my own Twitter page makes me think I’m on dial-up again. When it does work I love it, since it provides an cool alternative for sideblogging/asides, a relatively new phenomenon where bloggers post mini-entries or short notes in a sidebar rather than in a normal blog entry. This feature helps prevent me from cluttering up my blog with short, inane entries of what I happen to be doing or thinking of at the moment, and instead relegates it to a small block on my sidebar (see top right). It also means I can fire off a message from IM or my cell phone without the need to actually go on the web if I want to post a little note on my blog. Muy coolio.

Verizon sucks big hairy monkey’s butt.

I had a battery ordered from an eBay store to replace the dying one I had on my cell now, and I figured it was safe enough because the seller had a near perfect rating from thousands of buyers. Otherwise I’d have to get it from Verizon, which charges a hefty 40 bucks for the same battery (WT*??) This way I was getting it for just 10.

Battery fried my phone. I don’t mean it simply didn’t work: it @#$% NUKED MY PHONE. When I put the original battery back in, it kept giving the error message “Use Genuine Battery,” and then it would power back down. I found out later on that Verizon’s LG line of phones uses a chip in their batteries to prevent customers from purchasing cheaper batteries from third party dealers. Well, isn’t that just lovely?

I took my phone to a service center hoping they could fix the problem. A battery swap didn’t work, so they held onto the phone to see if it could be fixed (maybe by resetting the software). I came back and the Verizon guy simply dropped a crappy replacement phone in my hands, along with a receipt to sign for it.

“Dude, the hell is this? Where’s my phone?”

“Oh, we couldn’t repair it, so we’re giving you a replacement phone.”

I looked at the phone. It had scratch marks all over the screen and looked like it had been used for years.

“This phone isn’t new. I want my old phone back. What about all the contacts and pictures I had on it? That all goes poof, just like that??”

A shrug of the shoulders.

“And this phone is refurbished for crying out loud.”

“No, it’s straight from LG.”

?????

“Yeah, and? It’s still refurbished… you know what, forget it, just give me my old phone back.”

Great service, huh? I decided to try my luck at another service center tomorrow. I have a suspicion they just took the phone, threw it in a drawer, and unwrapped a replacement phone for me without even taking a look at it. I’m hoping another service center might actually try to repair it, or at least give me a better phone.

Even though it really isn’t that big a loss (I could recover my contact list easily enough), the whole thing really chapped my ass for some reason. Maybe it’s the gall of them trying to force me to buy a proprietary battery over three times it’s actual cost. Maybe it’s because I was just having a generally bad day. Or maybe I just hadn’t eaten enough for the day. Or maybe all three.

Update: Since a few visitors are coming here looking for info on the “use genuine battery” message, I should note that if you swap the battery and it still doesn’t work, that message really means, “I’m broken, I need to be replaced, and if your warranty ran out, well too bad for you.” Ironically enough, after I got a replacement phone (with a few days to spare on the warranty), I also got a replacement for the battery that originally fried my old phone, and this one worked perfectly. Go figure. Long story short, if you want to try a third party battery to save money, make sure you back up your contacts, and make sure the phone is still under warranty. Otherwise you’ll be playing Russian Roulette with your cell. Before you do something like that, ask yourself: Do I feel lucky?