What a night.

After a long, grueling day at work, I finally signed out and booked out of here as fast as I could. There was only one problem though.

My car battery was dead.

When I came to work today, several news vans had parked (and doubled parked) in spaces I usually took, and since I was in a hurry, I turned on my hazard lights, doubled parked my car as well, and ran inside so I could sign in on time. I came back out again, found another parking space to stash my car, and yep, I forgot to turn off the hazard lights.

Mother@#$%.

I didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking around here for somebody to help jumpstart my car, so I called up roadside assistance, figuring it wouldn’t be a big deal for them to send somebody over to quickly get me up and running again.

Good grief, it was like I had called the DMV.

“What is your VIN number?”

“What is the make and model of your vehicle?”

“What is your call back number?”

“What is your current home address?”

“What is your work address?”

“What is the color of your vehicle?”

Color???? Who gives a crap what color it is?? Just send somebody over here to jumpstart it already so I can go home, dammit!!!!!!!!

FINALLY, the operator informed me that someone would shortly arrive and that I would get two automated calls to confirm the service truck’s arrival.

I get the first call: “Your service truck is estimated to arrive in one hour.”

Fortunately the guy came sooner than that. On my way out to greet him, I passed by a couple of young lawyers, a guy and a girl who worked out of our case assessment office. They were stepping out too but ignored me. The guy was built, clean cut, and nicely dressed in a sharp suit, and the girl of course was a gorgeous looking brunette. I looked at them and felt ashamed. I was in rags of a uniform, a 5 o’ clock shadow on my face, with sad, broken eyes whose fire had died out a long time ago. I looked at them for a long moment. Accomplished people. Happy people. Something I would never become, a life that I would never have. I quickened my pace to get away from them and headed up the street

The service guy was a friendly dude who arrived in a minivan. When he stepped out, I noticed he was missing some of his front teeth.

“Awww kay, ley me paww ze ood herr.”

“Uh, ok.”

A few minutes later my precious baby roared to life once again.

“Awwwkay! Yor awww goods zuu go.”

I thanked him, jumped in and floored it. I wanted to get home, crawl into bed, and get away from this weary life. To sleep and dream, and perhaps never wake up again.

After putting up Google ads on my blog, I noticed scrolling in Firefox seemed to get choppy when the text ads came into view, but when they weren’t scrolling was smooth as usual. Great, another bug I needed to hunt down. I can just forget about getting any sleep this week. Web design, @#$%!

Fortunately though, I got lucky and found out a line in my stylesheet ( background-attachment: fixed; ) turned out to be the culprit. I removed it and presto, the scrolling problem cleared up. My background stayed exactly the same afterwards, so apparently I didn’t even need it there. One of these days I’m gonna get a book on CSS so I can finally figure out what in God’s name I’m putting in my stylesheets. Even now I still can’t get a handle on floats and how they work. But I mean really, float this people. Sheesh.

But anyways, happy to see this irritating bug had quickly been squashed, I surfed back to my blog to double check… and saw an ad for cosmetics staring me right in the face.

What the…? Hellooooo, what happened to relevant ads, Google dudes???

Then it got worse. After refreshing the page a few times, an ad for John McCain’s presidential campaign showed up.

OMG get it off my blog, get it off get it off getitoff!!!! AHHHH!!!!!!!!

I furiously clicked as fast as I could to my Adsense account and read up on how I could filter out some of these ads. Let me tell ya, Google’s Competitive Ad Filter… sux… rocks. You can’t use keywords or even perform a search for ads you’d like to screen. Instead you basically have to check the link properties of a particular ad (since you can’t click on them), and then check out where it links to so you can add the originating site to the filter list. Unfortunately Google’s redirection script turns each link into a 300 mile long streak of cryptic nonsense, so you have to carefully scroll through it until you find the originating URL. This is what I have to go through to keep my blog from advertising lipstick. Good grief, I may as well start subscribing right now to Glamour and Vogue magazines.

Though now that I think about it, my fingernails could use a really good manicure… ohhhhh crap.

One of the growing trends I’ve been observing in the blogosphere lately has been the arrival of social networking and Web 2.0 sites that all seem to have one thing in common: they’re all designed to encourage you to store your content on THEIR networks, rather than on your own site. Got photos you want to show the world? Upload them to Flickr. For videos, there’s YouTube. For music, there’s Last.FM, iLike, Garageband and so on. For those who like to write, network or blog, we have MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and blah blah blah, ad infinitum. And then of course we have the specialty sites like Twitter and Tumblr and blah blah blah ad infinitum. Good grief. While I admit that all these sites have their uses respectively, it also means you’re investing a whole lotta time and resources on just about everything except your own blog. People may not even come to your site anymore because your content is now available elsewhere, whether on a MySpace server or a YouTube channel or God only knows where else you’ve been going. Web 2.0 then has not only stolen your time and content, it’s taken your traffic too, and with it a chance for monetization. As a result your blog will eventually wither away until it becomes abandoned altogether, its distinctiveness completely assimilated into the Web 2.0 Collective. Resistance is futile.

Ok, I’m exaggerating, (somewhat), but I have noticed a pattern where bloggers no longer seem to attend to their own blogs with the fervor they once had in the past, and these social networking sites have a lot to do with it. Playing on all those networks can definitely suck up a lot of your time, so much that your creative and physical energy is usually completely exhausted by the time you’re ready to come back to your own blogging home. This actually started to happen with me as well when I noticed I was actually posting more often on StumbleUpon than I was here. Bad Lincoln!! Bad!!!!!

Somehow a balance needs to be struck between utilizing these networks while also maintaining the growth of your own blog, and I think the answer lies in part by observing Facebook’s recent move to allow third party companies onto their platform. For them it’s all about pulling the features and services these companies have into their own network, providing a central location for the very best these third party services have to offer.

In a way I hope that’s what I’m accomplishing here. While I belong to a variety of networks from StumbleUpon to Last.FM (and beyond), using widgets and other plugin technologies has enabled me to pull everything here in one place, rather than watch it all being pushed out there. Even my Flickr Album can be completely viewed natively without any requisite need to go to Flickr. That I think is the key. Follow the Facebook model, and use networks and services to help to promote YOUR blog, not the other way around. Resist the Borg! Fight the power! Viva La Blog Revolucion!

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.

The REAL storm wasn’t the Nor’easter that recently hit us, it was the one that followed me to work today (and beyond).

When I came in I proceeded to get absolutely pummeled by a mountain of work, completely catching me off guard because stupid me, I actually thought the Nor’easter would create a slow work day for us. Yeah right. Evidently our esteemed court system thought otherwise, and happily dished out more restraining orders than I’ve ever seen in 3 lifetimes. Good grief.

Then I got into it with my boss as I kept grilling him for why he was refusing to help me in putting a schedule together that would allow me to go to law school. His ultimatum was that if I didn’t like it I could always transfer out, and with a shrug he washed his hands of the whole matter.

But it didn’t stop there. I complained to him about the mouse droppings that were on my desk, and he asked me why I didn’t clean it up myself. Was this guy purposely being dense here, or was he just born an assface? You don’t just clean mouse droppings with a simple wipe and expect it to be clean. The area needed to be sterilized before it can be used again. But this seems to matter to my boss, not at all.

Then I found out he was no longer authorizing overtime for my coworkers, which meant I’d be by myself at the busiest time of day to man the phones, an absolute no-no for me since I was hearing impaired. I did the best I could under the circumstances, but after dealing with clerks who spoke secondhand English with a thick accent for the better part of an hour, I knew it was not going to be a good day.

The day would mercifully come to an end, but not before I find out that Uptown Girl had in fact been stringing me along this whole time, and never did have any serious interest in me, except possibly as distant friends. Gee I wish I would have known that before I sent her the damned flowers for her birthday. I want my 30 bucks back.

What a day.