Technology Hates Me

The perfect computer would have about 12 USB ports.

With all the gadgets that need plugged in, either for charging or for data transfer you would think that desktops and laptops would have more slots for USBs, but no.

I have an external hard drive, my keyboard and mouse, my printer and at any given time, an ipod, a zen, or a nook connected for some reason or another. I hate when more than one gadget needs charging at the same time.

The thought of buying additional ports, that get plugged into one of the existing ports makes me want to scream almost as much as buying ink for my printer.

Why is it so hard to create a device that has enough slots for all of the damn gadgets that they encourage us to buy?

Must-Have iPhone Apps

Yes, I've given in to smart phones. When my battery was dying ridiculously quickly and the back of the phone wouldn't stay on, I knew it was time for an upgrade and I went straight to the iPhone.

Sure, it's expensive, but it's fun as hell, not to mention convenient and helpful. To get the most out of your iPhone (and maybe even Droid, or whatever), here are the apps I've already got.

Angry Birds: Yeah, obvious, and just as addicting as they say. Be sure to check out Angry Birds Seasons, too.

Words with Friends: Basically, a Scrabble match with whatever friends of yours are also playing.

Hanging with Friends: The same concept except with Hangman.

Hisptamatic: Get beautiful pictures with different effects that basically make the pictures look like old Polaroids someone found in the attic. Like, "Remember way back in 2011 when iPhones were all the rage?"

Facebook: Yes, getting all your notifications and news on your phone is a very dangerous thing. But that's why it's so awesome.

Skype: If you want the thrill of a webcam but your computer is as terrible as mine, Skype on your phone is just as good. It'll be nice come fall to keep in touch with my long-distance man without using his minutes. The quality sometimes is sometimes mediocre, but it's better than nothing.

The Weather Channel: iPhone may come with a weather app already, but it blows. The Weather Channel is as good as you get, complete with maps, hourly predictions, and 36-hour coverage.

Flashlight: You know how you use your phone as a flashlight anyway? This makes it more legit.

Foursquare: Welcome stalkers and earn badges and points for every place you visit. Or prove that you really are a hermit.

PNC Virtual Wallet: My mom doesn't trust phone banking, but it rules. Transfer money, check balances, even deposit checks! No more trips to the bank. There goes my Foursquare points...

Pittsburgh Penguins: Up-to-date news and, come hockey season, live scoring and penalty updates.

Team Coco: All the ginger fun on your phone.

Fruit Ninja: Slice that fruit!

Alarm Clock: The chimes are so peaceful.

Twitter: Because you can never be too connected.

RedLaser: Okay, I haven't actually used this yet, but it scans barcodes and tells you if that item is available elsewhere cheaper.

Mancala: As addicting as any iPhone game hit.

Mahjong: Same deal.

ParkPGH: Need to know what garages in the Cultural District are open and what they cost? This will tell you!

It's a small internet, after all

A lot of people operate under the assumption that everything thrown onto the internet happens in some sort of void. Usually this amounts to people being incredible asshats to each other and unleashing horrors that would get them arrested in real life. But it also creates a weird sort of dissonance when you release that there are real people in your audience.

I'm being vague, so let's get a little more example-y. So far in the past two months, I've seen that at least three of the bands or books I've reviewed on various sites have found those reviews and posted them on their own sites. Now, I realize that with Google and RSS feeds, it's pretty easy to be alerted every time your name is mentioned on the web. But that doesn't make me any less surprised that they found the reviews. Surprised, and flattered, and a little freaked out. It's a weird mix of emotions.

It's also weird when the tables turn and you find things about yourself on Google. I have the luck (or curse, depending on the situation) that my maiden name and my married name are the same as two semi-obscure celebrities, enough so that you have to tack on some extra words to actually find information on me. But when people can actually Google me, it's created some situations. Once an old roommate found a blog where I'd ranted about her roomie drama, and it started World War III. On a slightly less butthurt note, a few years ago I discovered that a half-assed paper I wrote my sophomore college year for a class on folklore about misheard lyrics had been posted on a couple academic sites as a reference and one "download a paper for $10" site.

So Wenches, have you ever had an interesting experience where the internet collided with your real life?

Technology Is Awesome

Be prepared for a rant on how technology also sucks in the near future, because you can't win 'em all.

One of the joys of sharing a digital camera is the fact that even when I ask someone not to delete pictures until I can get them uploaded, there's a good chance that they'll get deleted anyway. My dad managed to delete all of the pictures I took on Christmas Day, & maybe more than half of the ones I took a few days later at a concert.

Call it denial or an unwillingness to accept defeat & let my photos fall into cyber-oblivion, but I decided to look into recovering deleted pictures from a memory card. Maybe everyone else knew this was possible - I had a hunch it might be - but the fact that it is made me super excited.

What I found was a program called Zero Assumption Recovery. You can download it for free, so in case of unfortunate accidents with the "delete" button, it might not be bad to get. I was able to scan my memory card & it picked up almost all of the missing pictures, plus ones I'd deleted months before that. After it scans, you can preview whatever it found & decide what to save.

It's not completely perfect. Naturally, the more pictures that were taken after the deleted ones, the less likely it is that you'll be able to recover them. Sometimes the complete image isn't saved, but still, it's better than nothing.

I Hate You Hating the New Facebook

I Hate You Hating the New Facebook

There's a time I dread every year, a time of great trepidation in Internetland: the roll out of this year's Facebook redesign. And unlike the 5 billion groups that pop up two days later, I don't hate the new designs. No, what I hate is constantly hearing how much everyone else hates it.

I get an average of two group/fanpage invites a day the first two weeks of the new Facebook roll out to the effect of "Thousands of children are homeless in Haiti, but the new Facebook is the worst tragedy of the year." And I promptly delete them. Why? Because - gasp! - usually I like the Facebook redesigns. When I don't, I suck it the fuck up and get used to it.

The thing I hate the most is the barrage of status updates bitching about the redesign. Most of these are folks under the age of 25 going "Waaaa I can't find ANYTHING!" The reason I hate this so much is because these are the exact same folks that say, "OMG, old people (read: anyone older than them, median age of old = 23+ I wish I were joking) don't know NEthing about the internet! LOL!"

Hey, bitching people! Pot calling the kettle black much? The first day your Facebook profile updates to the new design, they have a fucking tutorial that tells you exactly where everything moved or changed. Most of the changes are cosmetic and don't have a huge impact on your user experience, too. So either clam the fuck up or have a little sympathy when someone older than you (usually your parents, but also reserved for the nameless faceless Olde People) doesn't immediately know how to upload photos on their computer or use Twitter.

Caveat: This is mostly reserved for youngins and mombies who live on Facebook. If you have a for really realz job or actual grownup responsibilities, you get a free pass because, God forbid, you don't log onto Facebook every 12 seconds.

PS Rant-within-a-rant: Hey, same group of people that clogs up my newsfeed with this bullshit? STOP MAKING ME FEEL OLD. Seriously, one of you saw the Phantom Menace when you were in SECOND GRADE. There is a very appropriate Garth Brooks song title I could wax poetic about if I didn't want to stab everyone of you in the eye socket right now.

My 2 cents on the Late Night clustercuss

My 2 cents on the Late Night clustercuss

I haven't really gotten too much into CoCoGate on here, mainly because the internet already has plenty of commentary on it. I think that it was a dick move, and that if ratings were the issue, NBC should have shit-canned both shows instead of turning it into a giant pop culture pissing contest. But mostly I think it just shows what a colossal waste the Nielsen ratings really are. (this is what I did my senior graduation paper so nerdom ahoy!)

The Nielsen ratings really worked well when entire households sat down and watched the same thing on their one television on one of 13 UHF channels. When households had more than one set watched by more than one person and a little thing called cable in the 70s, it started making the numbers less reliable. When people don't even watch television at its regular time, cable has made the FCC basically obsolete, and most people in the Cream-Yer-Pants demographic watch most television through legal, illegal, and quasi-legal means through their computers... Well, you see where I'm going. When I did my paper way back in the Year Of Our Lord 2007, DVR recordings weren't even counted. So I'm surprised the Neilsen company adopted it so fast.... a decade after the technology came out. (and they only count it if the playback was within three days of the recording! Yikes! There's stuff on my DVR from September!)

*jumps off the high horse* So, Conan. Eh, I watched about every ep of the Tonight show, even though it was usually at dinner the next day. I guess I have the right to be mad (the "you can't bitch if you don't vote" argument), but in the end, I can't cover the streets in blood over pop culture. I think most of these grandiose Internets plans to boycott NBC are pretty naive. Here's your list of things to boycott - hope you kids won't miss Battlestar Galactica. Or, um, electricity. And for all you putting such high hopes of Fox, remember that it likes to kill good shows in their first season.

Mostly, though, I'm just kind of... proud? As my husband and I sat around for our 2nd annual "Conan leaves a show" night, I just couldn't imagine having my dream job yanked out from under me. But in a way, it's a little comforting. Somehow it made me feel a little less bad about being "not laid off per say from my first real job last year. And his speech toward the end, urging all the internet youngins to not be cynical, kind of made my heart swell.

So I'm eagerly awaiting his next show. And I guess NBC either needs to get its ass in gear or hope every advertising firm in America likes Chuck.

All the RAGE

All the RAGE

My roommate came back from work the other afternoon, having spent most of her time on Facebook, talking about the ads along the side of the page and how they were telling her to lose weight before her wedding. As a joke, I checked out what ads appear on my page, just to see how ridiculous they were, and lo and behold, one sucked me right in.

"Like Eddie Izzard?" it said. "Yes, yes I do!" I said. And I clicked. I have become a mindless slave to the internet.

What it directed me to was Rage, the first film to be distributed over mobile phones. Why phones? Because it ties in with the plot - a college student is interviewing people behind-the-scenes at a New York fashion show and filming the interviews on his phone. It's also available online. I was intrigued. I started with a clip of Eddie Izzard's part, since that's what got my attention in the first place, and ended up fascinated and in love.

The film is released in episode format, going day-by-day through the fashion show, ultimately spanning a week with a new episodes released Mondays and Thursdays averaging about 20 minutes long. While typically, in film, you watch everything happen, with Rage, all you know is what you are literally told by the characters in the interviews, and what's hinted at by the unseen student filming, Michelangelo. You get a sense of what he thinks of everything based on the typing in the very beginning of each episode - for example, the first one starts with "I meet some important people," but he erases "important" and just says "people." But you never see him, or hear him. You can tell he's asking questions and you can tell what they are based on the answers, but that's it. It's almost as if you are Michelangelo.

You're essentially watching fictional interviews with everyone from models to designers to the guy who delivers the pizza. It doesn't sound horribly intriguing, but it is. The characters and plot are well-developed enough to keep it interesting. The actual story itself isn't new, but the way it's told is different.

Admittedly, most of the first part is boring. It's mostly exposition. You meet people, hear the basics of what's going on, and get an idea of what the characters are like. Part two is where things get interesting, with the sudden death of a model and the way the characters react to it, the feeling of despair and chaos in the moments after, even though we never actually see the death or even meet the model herself. Not to mention the fact that things start to get shady when PR - of course - tries to instruct Michelangelo on who he can and can't talk to, and makes sure the interviews are to be used to a college project only.

The cast is pretty impressive, with a combination of some pretty famous faces mixed with others that aren't as well-known, and all of them do an excellent job. The most interesting one, at least so far, is easily Jude Law as the model Minx. Jude Law, basically in drag, and he looks beautiful. Other stars include Diane Wiest as a manager, Steve Buscemi as a photographer, Judi Dench as a writer/critic, Eddie Izzard as a mogul, and John Leguizamo as his body guard. Most of them aren't introduced until part two.

I'm anxious to see how everything pans out. I'm very intrigued. I definitely recommend checking it out when you have a chance here, especially if you have a spare 20 minutes or are looking for something new. Episodes 1 and 2 are up now. Three should be coming Monday. The site also features a trailer, and clips of some of the characters.

The Future Of Libraries And Books

The Future Of Libraries And Books

A friend of mine posted an article from CNN on her blog today about libraries and it really got me to thinking. What is the future of libraries?

Here's the article.

In some ways the futuristic library makes sense. After all, most kids went to the library to look up information and that information can be readily found on the internet now. How sad that all the encyclopedias are fast becoming obsolete as a result of technology.

What really disturbed me was the title that said libraries with or without books. The perfect library for me is one that is nothing but books. Any of you that watch Doctor Who might remember thelibrary created for the episode "Silence In The Library." That library would be my idea of bliss.

I can't fathom why people would want to download a book to a device like Kindle, except when they are someone that does a lot of traveling and can't be bogged down with an extra carry on full of books. Then I can understand, though the price of these devices really floors me. $299! My notebook laptop was cheaper than that.

I can't believe its the way reading will be done in the future. I can't be the only one that loves the feel of a book in my hands, turning the pages, smelling the wonderful smell of paper and ink.

You can't get that from a plastic device.

Will libraries then be online? With files that you can only access for a week? Or two?

It boggles the mind.

Actually, I don't even want to think about such a thing. I grew up loving libraries and though I don't go to my local library often, my own house is turning into one.

I understand that progress is a good thing, but the world needs to remember that there can be too much of a good thing as well.