I’m really late with commentary on this, but awhile back there was a story on the news about a “notorious” cat-tagger that had finally been arrested. When I first heard the story it made me smile to think there’s someone out there painting cats on freeways. Then I wondered why the hell is a guy who paints cats on freeway overpasses considered “notorious” in the first place? I mean uhm … cats are awesome. Anyone who likes to paint cats must also be awesome. Right? Well, apparently not according to the LAPD because they apparently care more about cat-tagging than “real” crime. In my opinion, his work is not “tagging” but then I don’t know for sure if the guy is a gang member marking his turf or not, but even if it is tagging, it’s a lot better than the usual tags you see around the ‘hood. I remember as a small kitty, erm sorry, kiddie, there was another “cat-tagger” who graced the flood control channels with painted pussies. I remember being intrigued by them as a kid and thinking how cool it was that someone turned the ugly-ass storm drain covers into smiling cat faces. I also seem to recall there was a bit of an outrage back then too that this person must be stopped, as he was just encouraging more graffiti along the flood channels (and yes, it did get somewhat out of control at one point.) But this brings up the question that was drilled into my head in art school: What is art? Some of the graffiti I’ve seen around the city is, in my opinion as an art-degree possessing person, most definitely art. Some of it is just crap. In my opinion a lot of “art” in galleries and museums is also crap. But where do we draw the line? Who decides? If someone were to pay a million dollars to buy a brick wall with gang tags all over it, would that make it art? Is it only art if it expresses some esoteric idea the person is trying to convey? In art school, one of the generally accepted criteria of art is that it causes an emotional response in the viewer. If a freeway cat-tag makes you smile, is it art? If it causes outrage is it art? I think so.

Disclaimer: I am not implying by my use of the phrase “cat tagger” in reference to Leo Limón, that he was a tagger or gang member, I just used it to show the idiocy of using meaningless labels (ie tags) to categorize someone’s art.

Wow, I’ve been majorly slacking in updating this blog haven’t I? It must be because I’m so busy in my life I don’t have time to do a blog, right? Yeah. ::cough:: Actually it’s more that I’ve been too lazy playing dopey Facebook games and looking for work, being unemployed both sucks and is fun, but having no money is definitely not fun. Except I did have a birthday, so I got some more money yay! Now I can slack a bit more.

I did do one thing productive recently though, I joined up on this website called Spark People. Dopey name, but cool site. I have very vague memories of visiting this site in its original iteration a few years ago, I might have even bookmarked it, but I didn’t join it. (Back then it was some kind of “goal making” site or something lame, and being the type that runs from goal-making I didn’t really get all too excited.)

Anyway, every year on my birthday I do a self-evaluation kinda thing, sorta like how a lot of people do New Year’s Resolutions, but since I hate resolutions and goals, I just sorta take inventory of where I was a year ago, where I am now, and where I’d like to be next year, then write things down on little scraps of paper and put them in a box, then the following year I take them out and read them, and if I haven’t done them yet and I still want to, back in the box they go. A few of those scraps have been in that damn box for YEARS. So this year I decided to try to clean some of them outta there and one that’s been there for a long time is the lose weight/get healthy type ones. Being unemployed and pretty much broke, I decided joining up on one of those weight-loss programs online or in real-world or joining a gym wasn’t practical at the moment, so I did what netheads do best, I consulted the Oracle of Google, and lo and behold, while reading reviews of other websites, someone had posted a comment about Spark People and that it was FREE. Not “free diet profile” or “free evaulation” or “free trial” free but really, truly FREE. So, I checked it out and despite being just a wee bit on the sappy side with occasional plugs of their book, it is indeed free, and has an amazing number of useful tools to boot, more than either of the online diet/fitness sites I’d tried in the past. So I joined up.

One of the things that I think makes the site “better” is something silly and simple: Incentives. Every time you do something like track a food in the log or do an exercise or read an article or post a message to a board, you earn points, and those points can be used to “buy” little “gifts” which are just images you put on your little personal Spark Page. Yeah, you get your own little web page and blog too!

So, now I’ve got another internet distraction, but hopefully this one is a good one. I was quite shocked at how much I weighed when I did my profile for the site (I knew I’d gained weight since my illness last year but holy f*ckanoly I didn’t realize how bad it really was.) And my fitness level has declined drastically as well, due to my inability to exercise for almost a year. But I’m feeling better now, and I’m motivated, and got new shoes with my birthday money haha. No damn excuses now, baby! So next year on my birthday when I open up that damn box, there should be at least two of those little scraps of paper that I can finally get rid of for good.

Oh, and for those of you still on Facebook, make sure you check your privacy settings, Facebook just added a new feature, Phonebook, which makes your phone number(s) viewable to all your friends (and maybe strangers too, I’m not sure.) AND they’re supposedly working on some new dopey feature which will take posts that you make and use them in a huge searchable database (sort of how like now when you put an “interest” on your profile it auto-links to some dopey topic page for that interest.) So, careful the things you say ….

Today is Quit Facebook Day and while I personally haven’t quit Facebook due to my FARMVILLE ADDICTION I don’t share any “personal” information with them either. I learned that lesson a couple weeks after joining when they changed their privacy settings making my entire friends list available to everyone even though I had it set to show to no one but me. I figured not only did they not respect my privacy choices, they didn’t respect my friends and family’s privacy either. So I deleted all my “real world” friends from my Facebook account at that point and haven’t given them access to my real life since. Now I only use Facebook for dopey games so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they disabled my account for spamming my FarmVille friends with too many gifts. Don’t laugh, that’s actually happened to some people, just go read the Zynga forums sometime.

Anyway, here are MY reasons to quit Facebook:

Facebook arbitrarily changes its privacy settings on a whim without notifying users before or after changes are made and has on more than one occasion made information public even if you had it manually set in the privacy settings to private.

Facebook owns everything you upload to their site, including posts, status updates, photos, and your “data”.

Facebook doesn’t seem to have a clue how to program a site so that it’s both secure and works. (Newsfeeds anyone? Missing friends in games anyone? Apps sharing personal information to developers anyone?)

Facebook exists to make money by selling your information to advertisers, including those advertisers who release apps that harvest data and then sell that data to others without your knowledge or permission.

Facebook may disable your account for posting information that puts Facebook or its policies in a negative light. Don’t laugh, it’s happened.

Facebook requires you to use your true legal name (they can even disable your account if your legal name is William but you sign up as Bill,) yet provides no protection of that information to keep it out of the hands of stalkers, spammers, etc. Good luck if you have an uncommon name that can easily be Googled. I find this particularly disturbing for minors using the site. Facebook requires your child to use their legal name, yet does not allow you the parent to protect that information from pedophiles and the like. And their user agreement actually forbids anyone but the account holder (in this case your child) from logging into that account, so a parent cannot log into their child’s Facebook account to make sure they don’t have weirdos added as friends, because by doing so that parent has violated the user agreement and the account can be disabled by Facebook.

Just in case those didn’t scare you enough, here’s a few more: Gizmodo’s Reasons, Facebook’s CEO’s Plans, Eroding Privacy Trend, and Other Reasons.

Well, OK not really, actually they killed my OLD blog, sorta … you see, when this blog first started, it was over on Blogger.com, but then this unknown company called Google bought Blogger, and I knew that was the beginning of the end so I switched over to WordPress and it’s been bliss ever since. But I had all those old worthless posts over on Blogger …. hmm … well fortunately since I’m a computer geek to some degree, I was smart enough to host my old Blogger posts on MY server since I’ve had troubles in the past with websites hosting my websites going outta business (geocities, xoom, compuserve, etc, etc) so I figured the more control I had the better. Welp, it paid off, because tomorrow Blogger is cutting off FTP access to blogs, and that’s what I had used for my old Blogger blog BUT since I’ve been over here for about 3 years, my old Blogger blog hasn’t had any new posties since 2007, and all the posts it did have are on my own server, so instead of using Blogger’s dopey “migration” tool which would undoubtedly bork everything all up, I opted instead to just switch the old blog to their Blogspot thingie (which effectively deleted the blog there) and posted a new post with a redirect to here. But since all those old Blogger posts have been tucked up all snuggly and safe on MY server, and because I’d “moved” years ago, I already had a link to my old archived posts on here. I did all the dirty work of manually creating a page with each week’s ‘archive’ linked to the blog posts years ago muahahah take that Google, I knew you were evil all along! So, as long as my webhost doesn’t go outta business, I’m swell. And if it does, it’s OK too because I backup my blog every time I upgrade WordPress, so it’s just a matter of copying files over to a new server and setting up the configurations if I have to get another web host. Ah, control. Nothin’ better.

to reply to inane celebrity tweets with even more inane replies? I get SO tempted sometimes but I don’t want to become one of THOSE PEOPLE who think they’re special because a celebrity replies back to them with yet another inane tweet.

Speaking of Twitter, I am somewhat amused by some of the names celebrities give to their tweets and their followers: twits, twats, tots, tweeple, twitterverse. And some celebrities who shall remain nameless tweet so often I think they must keep their cellphones with them every moment of their existence and tweet about everything that pops into their head. Huh, I guess celebrities really are just “normal” like the rest of us. Either that or they just recruit minions to tweet for them.

Wow I haven’t ranted in months, what’s wrong with me? Oh yeah, it’s that FARMVILLE ADDICTION. Anyway not much has happened, the holidays came and went and I wished I could hibernate like I wish every year, and my health has continued to improve (aside from that apparently dislocated shoulder that messed me up for a couple months) and I’m pretty much ready to work now if only I could find a job.

Uhm … I saw Avatar … … … not much to say there. Oh yeah it was in 3D which means they can jack up ticket prices so you don’t have much snack money left outta that $20 bill. I really don’t get the hype on this movie though, it’s really just more special effects and a somewhat lame and undeveloped story like most “blockbusters” so uhm … is it just the 3D? I was more impressed with the 3D effects in the previews than the actual movie. Oh well.

Other than that my life has been pretty much the same old boring life it’s been for the last few years. Once I start working again I’ll have more angst I’m sure though, rest and relaxation tends to make me more mellow.

Back in the dark ages of the interwebs, long before the days of banner ads and animated .gifs, when the fashionable background color of all websites was gray, and when knowing HTML meant you knew how to change the text size and alignment, I started my very first web page … on GeoCities … because at the time, it was the only place I knew of where you could get a free webpage, and because you could have a cool “address” like www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4780 (and for those of you Wayback Machine users, my page was WAY before the one that’s archived) and you could decorate your page with nifty stuff like rainbow divider bars and stuff. It was also the reason I learned HTML in the first place, and to this day I still hand code most of my sites using good old archaic HTML – no Flash, no .css, no .php just HTML. Of course, this blog is special because I use the magic of WordPress but that’s only because it’s easy, and I’m lazy.

GeoCities was also the very first home of the nomadic First Bernadette Peters Webpage. It didn’t stay there long though, it moved first to CompuServe then to Earthlink then I closed it back in 1999 because I was bored and there were other fan pages by then and Bernadette finally got her own “official” web page.

in the California State Legislature. Beginning tomorrow, all you lucky slobs who are not unemployed in California will see a nice little surprise in your next paycheck. A nasty surprise. California is increasing state tax withholding by 10%, even though your tax rate hasn’t actually gone up (yet) and of course it’s an annualized change so uhm … take that, you silly taxpayers who keep whining about tax increases.

The thing that bothers me about this is that the state seems to be illegally borrowing money from us that we don’t actually owe, so they can get an interest-free loan to prop up their dopey outta whack budget that they won’t balance. Do they really think this is going to help? Of course not, I think they’re just preparing us for the inevitable onslaught of tax increases yet to come.

I really, really wish the voters of California would get a f***ing clue one of these days and vote each and every one of these thieves out of office, from the lowest rung all the way up to the governor, because I’m getting really tired of being forced to pay for things that I don’t actually benefit from, while the state workers and the union workers and the beneficiaries of all these dopey social programs (like that “we’ll pay you to take care of your own relatives at taxpayer expense” program, which is, of course, unionized) seem to get by unscathed. They don’t get pay cuts. They don’t get laid off. They don’t lose thousands of dollars from pension fund investments that went sour. Of course not, because they get bailed out time and time again by the taxpayers. And the worst part is the state keeps adding more stuff to the pile.

Oh, and for those of you who are thinking hey, I’ll just change my withholding so I don’t get a tax withholding increase, be careful, I’ve heard of people getting whacked with penalties that far outweigh the “savings” when the state catches on and you end up owing more taxes than were withheld. (And since they’ll probably jack our taxes up again anyway, there’s really no point in fighting it, they’ll take it all and then some because they refuse to cut anything that needs to be cut from the state budget.)

Happy Halloween!

WTF?

I knew several years ago the whole Nobel Prize committee was whacked outta its mind in its choices (Arafat for one, wasn’t he a terrorist?) but uhm … this one takes the cake. Obama was in office for what, a few days before the deadline for nominations? (Hell, I didn’t even know he was nominated.) And what exactly did he do in those few days for world peace? Oh wait, I forgot, silly me, the peace prize isn’t actually about world peace anymore it’s about political propaganda for a “cause”. But even so, uhm … what did he do? I don’t think he had plunked down billions of dollars to bail out mismanaged companies that “cannot fail” yet thereby helping to further destroy the economy. Uhm … I don’t think he had adopted Bo the wonder dog yet. So what the hell did he do to deserve this? Is it because he’s a pro-Palestinian “Muslim?” Could it be because he’s the first black American president? Hmm … maybe that’s it.

Oh well, at least Obama himself admitted he was undeserving hehe.

I’ve been doing that trial of Lord of the Rings Online all week and a couple funny things happened … one … I was out in the middle of freakin’ nowhere in Elf Land and I got ambushed by a bear and took him out, but the funny part is that he did a death move that was hilarious, not only did he kinda fly up in the air and do a flip, but he landed head-first into the dirt:

Then today while playing my little Hobbit in the Shire I happened up a farm and did a couple quests then the farmer dude tells me to go talk to his chicken (??!!??) so I do and then I end up in a weird alternate universe where I am turned into a level 1 chicken:

The bad part about being a chicken is that it makes the game insanely hard. I did manage to do the first quest in the chain, but after getting one-shotted by wolves three times in a row while trying to do the second quest I gave up. Man, and I thought Restoring the Quickpost quests were a pain in the pants. I think I’ll have to save those chicken quests for when I need a serious adrenaline boost and have way too much time on my hands. Still, it was an amusing find that I don’t remember being there in beta.

The best quest so far though was that one in the cellar of Sprigley’s farm, I remember that one from beta (thankfully it’s easier now) and it creeped me out then too … you walk around in the dark in this underground cave full of spiders and every now and then you come across one that drops down from the ceiling and starts attacking you. Not for the arachnophobic for sure. One nice thing they did though is that if you manage to find the boss spider down there the first time you’re on a quest you do NOT have to go back in there again, you can initiate the boss quest from there then turn in the trophy at the same time you finish the main quest. I remember in beta barely making it outta there alive on the first part of the quest then the dude would send you back in there to kill the mother spider and I cannot tell you how many times I died down there in beta. So it’s seriously nice to have “revenge” now that it’s a doable solo quest.

None of the other quests though have really measured up to the ones you get in World of Warcraft, but one Intro quest came close, Burying the Dead, part of the Race of Man Intro quests. That part wasn’t done yet in beta either so this was all new. But it was the only time so far playing the game I’ve felt a swell of emotion, so at least there is a glimmer of hope in the game.

I’m also rather liking playing my Rune Keeper, it’s basically a hybrid mage/healer and so far has been even easier to solo with than my Hobbit minstrel. And a lot more fun than mashing songs all day.