The other day I was talking with somebody who had very recently joined Facebook (yes, seems some people don't have Facebook, I'm shocked too). Not having been a big user of social networking websites until that moment, she talked about feeling very exposed: having photos of yourself up there for the world to see, and how the social aspect of your life is now visible to work colleagues or potential employers (as many people do like to keep those sides of their lives separate).

This isn't the first time I've heard these topics brought up when it comes to the social web - one friend in particular mentions these points as arguments for not joining Facebook, which kinda sucks because that person lives in Australia, so the keeping-in-touch stuff is all done through e-mail. Maybe it's time I gave these subjects a bit of thought, I said to myself.

Time to put one on. Actually, time to find a brain to make this thing of any use.

Personally, I haven't had too much fear of putting myself out there on the big bad internet. I run a personal website with my name plastered all over it so that Google can index me, and my e-mail address is just 1 click away from potential spambot loving.

My Facebook profile isn't any better either; everyone on my friends list sees the same thing: photos of me being stupid at parties of weekends past, my sometimes-personal Twitter-sized status updates, and work mates can just as easily read my posts about my latest work-related gripes.

Maybe it is time I started taking the face I show to the internet - which is the face I wear in real-life - a bit more seriously by putting some leash or restraint on it, because throughout my online life (some 14 or 15 years now) it's probably only dumb luck that has protected me from the consequences of being this open. Or maybe, I'm just not a good target: I'm not a big company, I'm not a famous person, I don't have lots of money, I don't wield any power, nor am I any combination of the above.

And I'm definitely not an Attractive Young Female.

OK, let's be realistic: I'm not even 1 of those 3 key words in the paragraph above, but because of what I'm not, I reduce the size of the pool of potential people I could be afraid of on the internet. Creepy old men don't want me, I'm too old for paedophiles and cradle-snatchers, and straight-guy stalkers ain't coming here for their fix.

As for my current employers or anybody in my future to whom I look to for work? Well, lets just hope that they not only want to add some programmer / web designer to their teams, but also want to inject some personality and honesty into their company (because with my ugly mug, those 2 traits are all I've got going for me now).

I was at work just a moment ago - grabbing my headphones (which I left there Friday evening because I had other things/people on my mind) and sending status reports to team leaders (also forgotten for the same reasons as the headphones) - and the city is noticeably full of Frenchies, or at the very least supporters of the French rugby team.

There's an international rugby match going down in the city in just a few hours - New Zealand vs France - and supporters of the away team are doing a good job of letting everybody know they're there. Bright red/white/blue wigs, face paint, clothing, flags and capes are standard fare. So are loud French songs which I can't understand, although I think that's mostly the point.

One group in particular was heckling anybody, in a friendly (ie: non-soccer fan) way of course, that obviously looked like a New Zealand supporter. And, for those who didn't at least look like a supporter of France, sung to loudly and in their general direction. As I headed to work, this group's and mine paths were going to cross.

Ah crap, I thought, I may not look NZ enough to be a New Zealander, but I'm definitely not a Frenchie. So as I neared them, I prepared myself for some form of undecipherable sports chant.

The chant however, never came. Instead, they looked at me approvingly, like a fellow Frenchie, hands raised in greeting to what they must've thought was a fellow France supporter. Hmm, maybe they reached a gap between the verse/chorus of their song I thought, except that the group proceeded to sing to the guy immediately behind me.

As I reached work and sat down at my desk, I was still thinking about why I had been skipped over by that group of France supporters. So I set my red/white bag on my chair, took its contents out, then took off my blue/off-white jacket and draped it over my chair. And when as I had these 2 items in-front of me, it finally clicked.

I am a big fat walking French flag.

The colour of my stuff

Walking through the city for the rest of the day felt a bit weird. Where previously my new winter jacket told all polar winds and sub-zero temperatures to fuck off, it and my bag were now in cahoots, broadcasting my treason in 2 different languages. I guess I should be glad that I didn't run into any groups of NZ supporters, or that I'd be going to the game tonight - a speck of red/white/blue in a sea of black...

Personally, I didn't feel too bad. I'm not a big rugbyhead, but I know NZ has lost all the major games to France in the last 8 years (ie: 2 World Cups). So no guilt on my part for accidentally supporting the team that beats NZ when it matters.

Go France! :P

(a sort-of sequel to my BEDA post, Mother's Day ahead)

Mother's Day (and my mum's birthday) was over a month ago, and what I ended-up getting my mum was a 2-part present to cover both occasions: The first part was a book, The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger. The second part of the present will be that, provided she likes the book, I'll take her to see the movie adaptation of the film coming out later this year.

I've never read the book myself, but have been meaning to for a long time; it's just that it's always on loan whenever I visit the library. Now that there's a copy on hand, I'll be sure to borrow it from my mum when she's done reading it.

So what should I happen to see when I made my way to work last week? As I walked through the book store from which I bought the book to reach the lift I needed to take to my work, I saw an entire shelf of The Time Traveller's Wife for sale at 50% off...

F*!@$!

For 50% off at Whitcoulls at the moment

When I got the book so many weeks ago, it was the last one on the shelf! It wasn't overly expensive or anything like that, but this has happened to me so often: I buy something, only to find it at a reduced price a week or so later! Most often this happens with clothes, which sucks because I just bought this sweet new jacket for an upcoming skiing trip at full price. If history chooses to repeat itself - which it often does just to mock me, probably because I never took it seriously as a subject during my high school years (lesson learned: don't shun your studies lest they come back and taunt you later in life, especially physics which will find very mathematical and cold-hearted ways to screw with you) - then I should see this exact jacket on sale a week or 2 before my skiing trip.

The other types of products this happens to me a lot with is computer stuff. Although with the speed at which technology evolves and the prices drop, a certain amount of "it'll be cheaper next week" is to be expected.

I guess it's the world's way of getting its money back off me; because I don't spend a lot or buy things very often, the economy finds some way to take it all back, thus evening-out my semi-frugal nature.

So around the time I was coping with my own battle against swine flu, I spent a lot of time just sitting at home and doing nothing. I tried to do some programming, but thinking on that level became tiring. I thought I could give my art a go, but I wasn't feeling particularly creative. All that was really left for me was to vege out on video games, so at my brother's recommendation, I played Dead Space on his Playstation 3.

To summarize, Dead Space is a sci-fi survival-horror action game set on a large spaceship that seems to have been overtaken by grotesque alien monsters. If you need comparison materials, think Doom 3 meets Event Horizon.

Anyway, as is expected of games in the survival-horror genré, you see a lot of blood, strange writing on walls, undecipherable symbols on walls, said writing/symbols drawn in blood, and any other combination of the above. When the blood on the walls started showing-up in Dead Space, I didn't really think much of it. But when the blood-soacked writing and strange alien symbols started showing-up, I began wondering: "Where are the pictures of dicks?"

As gay as that sounded, let me take a step back to write about an observation I made several weeks before.

The internet is notorious for its childishness. Given the chance, people will create usernames which allude to sex or dicks (case in point: my brother has registered the username 'PhallicThunder' on some forums), create banners depicting dicks (eg: first time my friends took Mario Kart DS online, they competed against others with dicks on their banners), or creatures shaped like dicks or boobs (eg: Spore Creature Creator).

While this isn't a dick creature, it turns out boob creatures aren't allowed

This obviously isn't an internet-only thing. Just the other day I walked past a construction site with grafitti of dicks on the walls. And when taking the lift up to my floor at work where the covers used to protect the walls against scratches are installed, those covers have their fair share of phallic pictography (same thing at my mum's work I've learned).

When I saw our elevator covers with their dick pics, I started to wonder, who in this building would do this? I mean, this is a workplace where the average age of employees is somewhere in the late 40s. If I had to accuse anybody of drawing those, I'd quickly point the finger at myself because a) I'm one of the youngest there, b) I'm pretty childish myself, and c) I really have a hard time imagining my middle-aged managers taking out a pen and scribbling pictures of dicks on the elevator wall covers while they giggle childishly.

So there I was, playing Dead Space, staring at a wall of blood-soaked words, wondering where the hell the dick graffiti was...

I imagine that, with your dying breath, writing warnings or hints to potential survivors about 'cutting off their limbs' or how to survive certain alien attacks takes precedence over posting phallic imagery on the walls of a spacecraft. But then again, when you're on your last legs, why the hell not?

(slightly unrelated, but my favourite example of vandalism has to be the one where they removed some letters from the sign PUBLIC PARKING, such that it read PUBIC KING)

It's only been 3 weeks since my last post, but already I feel as if I haven't written as much as I should have. What's been happening is that I've been working on some behind-the-scenes site updates (ie: programming) to make the blog much easier to update, and updatable from a computer that isn't my own.

All this time I've been updating the site using a rather manual process which can only be done from my own PC. It's worked for me so far, but throughout BEDA and the last month I found myself in situations where I wanted to write something but was very far away from my computer. Other computers were on hand which I could've used, but the way things were, it just wasn't possible.

I had hoped to implement these changes rather quickly, but as history has proved again and again, any updates I want to make are never completed quickly. Some of the updates are in effect, but there are still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out. So for this seemingly-apologetic post, I've continued to use the old way of posting.

And, for the remainder of the week, I'll write-up several posts about the many things I wanted to write about from the last couple of weeks, but kept holding-off on doing because I wanted to write them after I had updated the site.

BRB