My guitar buddy introduced me to this concept of 'love languages'. While the main Google hit is a page about 'the 5 love languages' what it basically comes down to is the idea that each of us has a certain way in which our affections can be won over and which we show affection ourselves. ie: some of us really like giving gifts as a way to show we care, and those same people might really respond to receiving gifts more than, say, complimenting them.

It's not a new idea - I'm sure we've all observed that some things will really get through to people and other things won't - and it goes a bit of a way to explain why some people can get along and others don't.

Personally, I'm a 'quality time' person (if you hit the Google link above and go to the first link which categorizes said languages) which I think a bit odd considering I have so much free time to myself (or maybe that actually explains why I look so forward to seeing my friends and going to whatever events they have). For another 'Octoberite' though, whose birthday was just last week, they seem to be especially fond of something that isn't really pigeonholed by any of the standard categories on that site: they really like receiving links to sites on the internet of cute animals doing cute things.

Exhibit A

Coupled with my Spidey-sense like ability to know when someone's birthday is (my friend didn't have their birthday listed on Facebook), I sat down at lunch one day and came up with ideas for their birthday present. Mid-way through my open chicken sandwich w/ fries, I invented "Panda An hour".

Panda An Hour was the name I gave to the initial idea of posting to their Facebook wall a link to a photo/video of a red panda (I really like red pandas, as my About pic should leave no doubts about) every hour of their birthday, for as long as I was awake. The idea went to include other animals because I don't really have that much red panda material.

(Actually, yes I do have that much red panda material, but most of it comes from the red panda encounter I did last year.)

Exhibit B

So I did my homework, and the day before her birthday I began compiling a list of photos and videos to use, starting with those in my own 'collection' of cute animal pics/videos, and slowly branched-out from there. I kept this up for several hours until I was up to my eyeballs (ie: 20+ tabs in Firefox) in cute animal material. I could feel my testosterone levels dropping as I brought up and bookmarked video after video, and picture after picture, compiling enough material to see me through the 16 or so hours I would be spamming her wall.

After finalizing the list of links, I went to sleep with doubts. Wall spamming isn't exactly the best thing you can do to someone, and with the internet just so full of stuff, we've even got videos and songs not-so-kindly asking people to lay-off the forwarding of stuff.

But when I get an idea in my head, I stubbornly follow it through, and this was one of those ideas. It's worked-out in the past... maybe 66% of the time. The other 33% have had me actually fall out of favour with people because of it because it can be read as very forthcoming, and in a very recent case I've somewhat frightened someone to the point of not talking with me for several months.

So I slept restlessly that night, only to be awoken by the alarm on both my cellphone and clock radio after what felt like mere minutes of sleep. After turning off both alarms, and even before eating breakfast, I turned on my computer and began the panda attack.

It was very likely to have been my least productive working day in a long time. I kept such a close eye on the lower-right corner of my computer screen, eyes glued to the minutes as they passed by, signalling the end of an hour and the beginning of a new one. When a new hour rolled-around, I double-checked my next choice of photo/video, even trawling for new ones if I second-guessed my initial choice. By the time I posted the next photo/video, I was maybe 30 minutes away until the next hour.

I also had a very brief lunch hour that day.

In short, it went down really well: I got a lot of good comments and I wasn't defriended before the day was over :) My own wall had the unfortunate side-effect of showing nothing but 'Emanuel Rabina posted a link on someone's wall...' activity, but I felt really good at the end of it.

Giving gifts has always made me feel good, and I've never really tried giving URLs as gifts before. In an age when we play-down the value of things like e-cards and generic e-mails, I wasn't really sure links would have a very high value, but it felt like I gave a little bit of me with every link I posted, much like how I'd feel when I give a real-life gift. Maybe it was the effort of spending my evening and half my working day tailoring those links for a specific person, and now that I wrote that, I feel like I've tread this ground before.

So maybe when that love languages site says 'quality time' is my love language, it doesn't just mean spending time is what speaks to me, but also that putting time into something can really grab my attention. It's certainly worked before :)

FINALLY! >:|

Now it seems as if every piece of software on my PC wants to update itself or download something over the internet (my calendar suddenly has all the appointments I loaded at work, iTunes wants to download all my podcast subscriptions 10 times over, and my firewall/antivirus is already getting a tonne of updates), so I'll let them all fight for bandwidth while I catch-up on my 'watch later' YouTube backlog.

15 days though... FFS! Last night when it all got resolved, it's as if Orcon finally got my message: I got a Tweet from them saying they think the problem is fixed now and could I please check (I was at work at the time, so couldn't check), I got a call on my mobile soon afterwards asking the same thing, and then a few hours later I got the same guy ringing up to make sure that it's OK now I was at home (it was, although it did cut out for about 10 minutes until I restarted the router), before another call from someone who was ringing to credit my account for the days I was without internet + extra for the inconvenience.

Where were all these people 10-15 days ago? :(

I'm glad it's over, but I think it'll take a while until the suppressed anger subsides. I'm still wary of the internet connection falling apart and find myself checking the internet light on the router whenever I pass it by. You know, just in case.

Day 15 without the internet... Blatant company-bashing: Orcon Genius sucks / blows / is not fit for human use.

---
Shortly after the trial cake, I was able to create a much-improved version of it for my friend's birthday. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it for show, so just imagine the same cake as before, but with fluffier base layers and a diamond of dark chocolate sitting atop a cream swirl in the centre.

So I had the cake down, but the birthday girl lived on the other side of the city, some 30 minute walk from where I live, and I thought to myself, I can't just walk through the city with an exposed cake. I need to protect it from prying eyes, car exhausts, cigarette smoke, and emos. What I needed was a cake box.

I never thought to ask around at the local bakeries or supermarkets to see if I could take one of their many cake boxes (they have tonnes of them just sitting in the back, surely they could part with just 1). All that came to mind was that I had, at the corner of my desk, a horde of packaging material collected from deliveries ranging from NZ-based online stores like Mighty Ape, to overseas giants like Amazon and the resellers behind eBay.

It's like I had been preparing for this moment my entire professional programming career...

So, in the lead-up to cake-making day, I carried as many boxes as I could back home from work, then spent my Friday evening making a cake box out of various-sized packaging material. 2 hours, the cannibalism of 3 smaller boxes, and several metres of sellotape later, this was the result:

Cake Box 1.0

It's a very crude-looking thing, but it did its job well: the box was large enough to contain the cake, the lid closed properly over the box to protect it from the elements, and there's even this slide-out 'tray' to take the cake out of the box if lifting it out will prove too messy.

The next day, cake complete and ready to serve, I carried the cake in the box through the harsh city environment*.

The birthday girl was very pleased with her cake, and I was pleased she was pleased with the cake. But even with the lovely cake before the both of us, I spent most of the time talking about the box! I mean, I'd made the cake before and blogged about it - I was done talking about the cake before I had even given it to her. The box however: it was new, I created it from scratch with other boxes, scissors, sellotape, and my crafting know-how. I almost drew comparisons between it and Frankenstein's monster: stitched together from other similar pieces, and... OK, that's where the comparison actually ends - I never breathed new life into the box since it was inanimate to start with and inanimate to finish.

Luckily for me, the birthday girl was nice enough to humour my OMG-I-made-a-cake-box obsession, and we talked about ways to improve the box for a good chunk of the afternoon. By the time I left, I had plenty of ideas swirling through my head for Cake Box 1.1.

---
* harsh for a cake anyway

Continuing from my last post, I'm still without internet :( 14 days without internet, bringing the total number of days I've been with internet in this last month since switching to Orcon to 9. That's right: 9 out of 28 days. So a warning to people thinking of switching to the Orcon Genius plan: don't. Not yet anyway - give them a few months to sort out all the initial problems, and then decide.

(The first time I join the 'early-adopter' boat, and it sinks the moment I set foot in it. *sigh* Just my luck eh?)

Anyway, I've been keeping myself relatively busy without the internet, and to survive the last weekend without it I went to my parents' house to leech their bandwidth :P

That's wasn't the only reason though: Sunday was Father's Day for New Zealand, and for Father's Day I thought I'd cook him (and the rest of the family) a pork roast that I saw on My Kitchen Rules.

As well as distracting me from my internet-less life for 1 hour a day, 3 nights a week, My Kitchen Rules is just another in a series of TV cooking competitions that I've been watching for no real reason except that I find myself channel surfing on a quiet night, and then come across the cooking show such that I keep coming back to it the next time it's on until the season/competition is done. Much like with the last Masterchef Australia - I just happened to see an episode half-way through the competition, and before I know it I'm watching the final and rooting for some guy who I didn't know just a few weeks before.

When I was starting on the pork roast, a voice started replaying in my head: it was Dylan Moran from his comedy show I saw just 2 weeks before when he was saying that we've all been "Masterchef'd to death", and it's unfortunate I can't even remember the context in which that line was used.

But he was right: the original pork roast recipe when taken straight from the My Kitchen Rules website was so 'chef-y'/restaurant-ish that I had to dumb it down for my mediocre cooking skills and middle-class tastes:

• Duck fat? WTF, I don't even know where I can buy that! Replaced with butter and oil.
• Fennel seeds? Couldn't find it at the local supermarket. Removed from the recipe.
• Jerusalem artichokes? Out of season, so not currently on store shelves. Removed.
• Prosciutto? Whoa, I'm not on that kind of salary. Replaced with bacon (which we didn't use in the end).

So what started as "Pork Cutlets With Caramelised Apple Sauce, Peas, Jerusalem Artichoke & Apple Puree" became "Pork shoulder roast with apple sauce, mashed potatoes, peas, baby carrots, and crackling". Regardless, the family was impressed, dad included. Although he was probably happier about not having to have to cook for the first time in... forever.

In the last couple of weeks I initiated a switch in ISP from a landline + DSL plan, to a naked DSL + VOIP plan from Orcon to remove the cost of having a landline that I barely ever use. Let's just say that it hasn't been the smoothest transition I've ever experienced; in the 3 weeks since I was switched, I've been without internet for 2 of them.

The first time, the new router (supplied by the Orcon - you can't use your own) simply broke and started emitting a clicking noise that reminded me of an electronic heartbeat, a dying one at that, which in turn evoked imagery from The Tell-Tale Heart. I was sent a replacement router soon afterwards, and that incident left me without internet for 4 days.

The second time, which is happening right now, the router is fine, but the problem I think lies at Orcon's end in that I can't get an internet connection because I believe I actually don't exist in their system anymore (my account information has all gone missing from their customer account pages). This incident so far has left me without internet for 8 days.

In the interim, I've been doing most of my browsing at work (hell I'm blogging from work right now) and just adding videos to my 'Watch Later' playlist which is backing-up pretty significantly - I'll need a good afternoon to myself just to get through them all. When I'm not at work, Facebook and Gmail are done through apps designed for my dumbphone.

8 days so far without internet, and I'm not actually missing it as much as I thought I would.

For one, I've had some sort of activity on every day/night - work (obviously), birthday dinners, comedy shows, out-of-town-friend lunches, watching My Kitchen Rules, and catching-up on all my TV shows. So I've been keeping pretty busy.

Secondly, I've noticed a beneficial side-effect: my vivid dreams have returned.

Looking through my site, I've only mentioned my dreams in one post, and in one story e-mail. To summarize, my dreams consist of several of the things I've come across in previous days, and are very heavily influenced by visual media like TV, movies, and video games. For example, I remember telling someone about a dream I had where I had to track-down some intergalactic criminal in a spaceship shaped like a pyramid (Stargate). And just last night, I had a dream involving dragons (Game of Thrones) and large-scale battles viewed from a top-down/isometric angle (Warcraft 3, Command & Conquer 4).

No matter what the setting, there is a recurring theme in my dreams in that they're always as action-packed as a Transformers movie (with a plot that's probably on-par with Transformers) and involve me trying to save the day or save the world for reasons I don't question except that there are bad people out there screwing things over for people who don't deserve it.

When I was younger, I remember trying to get some interpretations, any interpretations, about my dreams. There were so many "answers" from sources about falling dreams, drowning dreams, being-chased dreams, and so on, but never anything about performing ridiculous heroics. I've tried formulating my own ideas, but what the heck am I supposed to make out of fighting vampires/gargoyles with my friends while the village they attack is being evacuated, or rescuing another friend from a mist-filled ghost dimension with the help of 50-cent and the G-Unit?

I would like the internet back though - I feel very disconnected from the world right now and the narrow view of it that my phone provides just isn't enough. But can I keep my dreams too? Pretty please?

I normally Like or Favourite at least 1 YouTube video a day, sometimes even promote some comments that stick out, and it all ends up on my Facebook wall for people to peruse at their leisure or totally ignore. The stuff I usually like are music videos, particularly versions/covers done by others, and the occasional red panda video.

One time I came across this video of a guy singing "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, with his 6-year-old daughter (it was Jorge and Alexa, who you may have seen or heard of since this particular video has over 10 million views and it got them on Ellen). That video promptly ended-up on my wall. Around the same time an overseas friend of mine, bored at work and with nothing in particular to do for that week, found a video of a little girl named Rowan singing "Own Side" by Caitlin Rose. That video promptly ended-up on her wall.

When I spotted my friend with her own 'little cute girl singing some song' video on her wall, I thought, Bitch stole my idea! I then directed an evil stare at my computer screen and imagined the photons of hatred emitting from my eyes, entering the screen and travelling along the series of tubes that make up the internet to where it would meet her electronically-condensed evil stare and our combined malice would meet and duke it out on some virtual plain (likely some stretch of fibre-optic cable in the territory of Indonesia). Our little battle also played-out over some e-mails during work hours, each of us trying to convince the other that our own little cute girl was waaay better than their little cute girl.

Then maybe a week later, when the dust from our first virtual scuffle had settled in the waters of the Pacific, Jorge and Alexa made another video of equal or greater cuteness, and I thought, Yes! Time to tip this battle in my favour! So I posted it on my friend's wall and gloated: "My chosen cute girl continues to beat your chosen cute girl:"

In the time between me posting that to her wall and her inevitable reply, I felt smug for the remainder of the day, letting the timezone difference between us create this 4-hour barrier where I basked in victory because she was probably still at work and couldn't fight back. When the little notification e-mail came that she had replied, I was preparing myself to accept her words of defeat. Overconfidently, I opened the e-mail.

And she cheated.

She went and found some other girl, also singing the Caitlin Rose song, but unlike little Rowan or Alexa, this was some much older girl who can play guitar, play piano, plays Diablo, makes pizzas, and has an accent that managed to grab my attention from the other side of the world.

The e-mail conversation between us flared-up:

Me: The reason you’ve resorted to posting videos of guitar-playing pizza-making Scottish-sounding Norwegian girls is because I won the cute girl battle amirite? Admit it! Admit defeat and stop trying to distract me with the girl of my dreams!
Her: You're welcome :P

Sensing my resolve crumble, my friend then followed-up with this video from the same girl, entitled "Carpet, Cookie and Coeliac" (she was participating in some Alphabet Vlog challenge, and this video was for the letter C) in which she describes a condition she has: Coeliac disease.

---
I had known about gluten allergies for a long time, but never knew that it was called coeliac disease until very recently. I learned about that name when I was eating lunch with my parents at a local burger joint called Burger Fuel. At the tables, Burger Fuel was promoting their new gluten free buns using this little piece of advertising:

The ad made no sense to me. All I saw was a black-and-white picture of 2 guys with what looked like some weird song lyrics over the top. WTF? But you know who did get it? My mum. So she broke it down for my dad and I, using that teacher's voice normally reserve for preschoolers, or for those moments of smugness when you're feeling intellectually superior:

• the 2 guys are Simon and Garfunkel
• one of their songs is called "Cecelia", so the lyrics are to the tune of Cecilia, replacing 'Cecelia' with 'CeCoeliac'
• and a coeliac is someone who is allergic to gluten; the extra 'ce' was just there to fit it with the song

O_o

"Ohhh!" my dad I and I said as the five-thousand-piece puzzle that was Burger Fuel's flyer suddenly came together in our minds. I complained that this had to be the least effective advertising campaign in the history of advertising campaigns because of the background knowledge and prerequisite age one needed to even begin to understand what the hell it was all about.

Way to go Burger Fuel; an ad targeted at smart 50+ year olds.

And that my friends, is how I learned the word coeliac.

---
Anyway, after watching Ena's video as she goes through the grocery to buy things for herself because there's not a whole lot of selection for those allergic to gluten, I kinda started to feel a bit bad for her and for coeliacs in general. She also makes some pizzas in the video using gluten-free flour, and later that week I made a pizza using standard flour. As I put the final toppings on my pizza and admired my creation, Ena came to mind and I thought, Oh man, this pizza would probably kill her... I then put the pizza in the oven with a lot less enthusiasm than I had just moments before.

And the last few times I went to the supermarket and passed by the bakery section or the cookies/chips isle, all I hear is Ena's voice from the video when she says, "...all the lovely cakes I cannot have... all the cookies I can't have..." I then I step off the rear axle of the trolley that I was riding and continue to push the trolley like a normal person instead.

My friend and I seem to have come to some unspoken cease fire in our little war, probably because she's now found something else to occupy her time at work (I hope it's actual work) and probably because with one of the guys at my work on leave as my current project at work nears the finish line, my own workload has amazingly tripled. For some reason when there's a task to be assigned that isn't really anybody's forte, they randomly pick someone to give it to, and that random person is always me.

It seems I Am Number Four

*sigh*

Oh yeah, I got the comments going over the Easter weekend and have been testing them ever since; finding little problems with there here and there and fixing them when they arise. I'll be relying on you guys to tell me what you like/dislike about how I've implemented the comments here, and you can leave a comment to do just that :) But, if comments are still broken, tell me on Facebook, Twitter, or hell send me an e-mail.

It's been well over a month since I complained that this site had the stability of a house on stilts, because it's been well over a month since this site has imploded of its own accord, ie: it's fixed! :D

Well, it's been fixed for well over a month, meaning that for a while now my logs are no longer artificially inflated by program exceptions caused by annoying errors, and my visitor counts are no longer artificially inflated by my own make-sure-it's-all-OK visits either.

It's that latter one that I was particularly interested in getting some clean numbers about, because when I ran this site using web hosting provided by other companies, they gave me a whole bunch of tools to track visitor numbers and stats. They were OK for what they did, but they didn't really paint a very good picture of the sorts of things I was interested in, like how they got to my site in the first place. So when I moved to DIY web hosting earlier this year, I went looking for a visitor tracking package that would do what I wanted.

Cue Google Analytics.

Like many other visitor tracking tools out there, Google Analytics can tell me about the browser you're using to read this, the resolution of your monitor, even what city you're in (provided you haven't done sneaky things to your connection to mask that information). That last one in particular helps me gauge what percentage of my visitors are my friends, family, and combined with other tell-tale signs can let me know if that last visitor was my mother. (Hi mom!)

One thing that I really like which previous visitor tracking tools I've used hadn't offered, was the ability to let me know what search terms are used to bring people to my site. It makes me visit my Google Analytics dashboard quite often as I watch with interest the search terms used to bring people here. And the results... well they had me scratching my head.

The #3 search term used to bring people to my site is campaignultraq20b which is related to the Red Alert campaign I put together and released years ago as a bit of fun in modifying a game.

That one makes sense I thought, and so did search term #2: emanuel rabina My name. A search for that in Google gives you this site as the second result (the first being my Facebook page). It made me wonder though, who the hell is putting my name into Google? It's not me, even though I've blogged about doing just that in the past.

The answer was revealed to me when I visited my dad at work one day and, standing at his desk, I told him about something I posted. I watched as he opened his browser to look for that something I wrote, but to my surprise he didn't open a bookmark or type my site URL into the address bar. Instead, he typed my name into Google and clicked the link in the search results.

It's not the first I've heard of such behaviour though - I've read many articles about your ordinary citizen using Google as the gateway to everything; putting site names, even site URLs, into Google search and clicking on the results. So while I had heard of it, I never expected it of my tech-savvy family: me a Java programmer and web developer, my dad a computer programmer of a language whose acronym I now associate with Rocket Propelled Grenade or Role-Playing Game (What? RPG is a programming language? Get outta here!), my brother who has an iPhone and is more connected to the internet than a cloud service, and my mum who is the proud owner of an Amazon Kindle e-Reader and often sends the rest of the family e-mails about what's hot in tech (or YouTube).

That was the day I introduced my dad to bookmarks. I'll get around to telling him about RSS feeds (like mine) as a method of keeping-up with news from his favourite sites instead of having to do the rounds of visiting them every day and hoping there's an update, but I'm afraid that too much tech all at once might just make his head asplode.

Now brace yourselves, because the #1 search term used to bring people to my site is: chocolate chip cookies

What. The. Hell.

I kid you not - the most visited page on my website is my blog post, Giving-up on giving-up on baking, which I wrote about how I back-tracked on a previous post where I was so frustrated that I was surrounded by so many skilled bakers that I just gave-up on baking altogether!

I don't even know how that could have happened. I've tried putting "chocolate chip cookies" into Google, and I'm not even in the first 10 pages of results! How desperate for a cookie recipe must one be to end-up here!??!

So if you found my site by accident because you were looking for actual content about baking but instead landed here and had to put up with me whining about baking, could you please send me an e-mail (link in the 'Email Me' part of the top navigation bar). I'd really like to know how you got here.

In the past I've talked about how I show my age by sticking to buying CDs instead of buying digitally via iTunes or Amazon. I've even fallen out of grace with some friends by admitting what I've bought. The more egotistical side of me even goes on to think I'm one of the reasons the brick-and-mortar CD retail store is still around.

Well, as of a few weeks ago, that all changed. I installed iTunes.

Sunnovabitch

This isn't the first time I've tried to install iTunes. I've tried maybe 2 other times in the past year, but each time, for unknown reasons, the iTunes installer would just die on me. The instant I OK'ed the install location (which was just the default), the installer would give me its equivalent of the fail whale, before giving me 1 choice: Quit. (It's not really a choice if there are no other options now is it?)

I didn't really want to delve any deeper: there was likely something screwed-up with my Win7 64-bit install, but I didn't care; I didn't really need iTunes to help me with any part of my life that wasn't already covered by some other program or process on my computer. I was installing iTunes to pique my curiosity and trial a different media player.

But this all changed where, in the last few months, I started following a lot more independent or lesser-known musicians on YouTube. Now I love YouTube, but every rose has it's thorns. I've already ranted about how crude YouTube comments have been. I mean, where else can you find an abundance of lines like:

Uhhh...? no one forced you watch it. Please murder yourself.
- (source)

Anyway, one of those musicians posted a cover of Avril Lavigne's new single, What the Hell, that was so different from the original and gave it so much meaning that I probably added another 100 to the video's view count. Eventually, I was compelled to buy it to show my appreciation towards the artist, so I downloaded the iTunes installer again, ran it, prepared myself for it to fall over and... whoa, it installed properly.

I told my brother about it installing successfully, and he asked me, "You didn't install iTunes 10 did you?" Turns out I did, which is the version he hates with every fiber of his being for a whole lot of what he considers "UI fails". This being my first ever iTunes installation (and probably the only reason it installed properly on my computer), I kept it. When a new version comes out, I'll just be impressed by it a whole lot more (or unimpressed by it a whole lot less) since what is the 'norm' for me is already a lot lower than those who were able to have previous versions of iTunes to remember.

So I bought the song, tweeted about it, and now I'm hooked. A whole new world of music is now available to me and they just make it so damn easy to lose my money in it. Even though I keep a budget spreadsheet to track my own expenditures, there are just some things that I don't track, namely small ticket items like gum or the coins that I give to some charities on their street collection day. iTunes songs are less than what I give those charities, hell they're even less than a pack of gum! So they never really make it into there and I don't feel I've spent anything until Apple e-mails me a receipt for my past week's worth of purchases and I look at them all and think, Oh damn...

Everywhere I go (on the internet) people are posting their takes on the year gone by; the highs, the lows, the bests, the worsts, etc. Much of what I'm reading online now is just lists of what stuck-out for them in 2010.

I don't follow too many rules for what or what not to post on this site - it's mostly whatever comes to mind at the time and compels me to write, provided I have the time to write it - but one thing which I've tried not to do with my posts is to 'dial it in'. The definition of lazy posting is pretty broad, but to me that basically means: no lists.

Oh you see them everywhere you go: 5 Firefox extensions that every web developer needs, Top 10 beautiful websites, The 7 reasons why JSF blows goats... OK, those are very programmer-oriented, but even the mainstream lists are getting tiring: The 8 GI Joes most frequently left in the box, 6 heroic movie deaths that could have easily been avoided, 5 horrible life lessons learned from teen movies... (yes, those are Cracked articles, so Cracked, I'm blaming you for my list fatigue).

A sample of the recent things to come out of Cracked.com

For some reason, lists like those just scream lazy to me, like the person behind them enumerated their brain fart and attempted to legitimize it by putting it in some arbitrary order that only makes sense to themselves and their 15 cats. When I see it on a website, particularly one of those sites whose objective is to be a hub of like-minded people where the articles are supposed to impart actual knowledge and experiences, my mind starts imagining that I have direct access to the author and I ask them questions like, "Really, you couldn't think of anything better to write to get your paycheck?" before beating them over the head with the letter N book from a set of encyclopaedias.

It irks me because when I see lists masquerading as articles, all I see is a copy-and-paste page that adds zero value to the collective knowledge of the internet. It's like the author thought, "Hey, I found a bunch of awesome related topics elsewhere so I'm going to duplicate those things right here to save you a couple of clicks and keystrokes."

What that list then becomes is a page that acts as an index to other pages. You know what? We already have a site that does that for us: Google.

This isn't a battle I can win though: everyone loves lists, especially the internet. I mean, if someone else can be bothered bringing the information to you, then why not? (Lazy SOBs, the lot of us.) Some of the most popular sites out there, while not creating lists themselves, are those whose sole purpose is to give you the news from other sources (eg: Digg, Slashdot). And one of the most subscribed YouTube channels is just a guy who tells you about other popular YouTube videos.

Even I like lists, but seriously content authors: please please please write articles that make me feel smarter for having read them; give me some knowledge that I can use in my own job or life; and share your experiences in those fields so I can maybe apply them to my own. Don't just entertain me - if I wanted to do that, I can just shoot over to YouTube and watch the latest [adjective/pop-culture-noun] cat - but give me something that will help me, as a person, grow.

I'll let it slide for now because everyone and their mothers is doing the 2010 retrospective in bullet-point format, but the next time somebody tells me what 5 extensions I must install on Firefox, I'm shutting-off the computer and going to go outside or read a book. You know, something healthy.

Happy New Year everyone.

I don't think I keep up with the news as often as I should. Well, that's how my dad makes me feel about that subject: always telling me to read the paper or watch the 6 o'clock news. I haven't had him nag me about that for years now that I don't have to live with him ( :P ) so I have to remind myself to keep up with the latest.

Without having a newspaper delivered to my doorstep, my #1 news source is (quite obviously for anybody of my generation or younger) the internet, and has been that way since maybe 2002 when our family got what passed for broadband back in those days. My RSS feed is filled with technology and developer news, I subscribe to several podcasts that I listen to or watch while doing chores or eating dinner in-front of the TV, blogs give me more personal stories from around the world, I'm on Twitter, and the fan pages I've 'Like'd on Facebook (and haven't filtered-out of my news feed) keep me up-to-date with all sorts of things.

This way, I can make sure the news that reaches me is relevant to me, and news that I care about.

I even remember a few years ago I was playing Counter-Strike on some Australian servers (back when I had the free time to enjoy lots of multiplayer gaming) and the server chat and strong Aussie accents from those with headphones started going on about how London had just been bombed by terrorists. I stopped playing and turned on the TV to find-out more.

That's what I was doing during the London bombings of 2005.

Sorry old friend, but I'm moving on

With all the news sources I have on the internet, there was one place that I never imagined would tell me anything useful, let alone anything I wanted to know: YouTube comments.

Yup, the place where common sense sheds a tear and humanity comes to die, YouTube comments have historically been the place for all sorts of people to vent any kind of bullshit, relevant or not, to the video being played: racism, sexism, rape, paedophilia, how they went down on your mum, et cetera et cetera. Yet, just the other day I was watching a Paramore music video on YouTube (my brother and I are big fans) and on the comments I read people posting over and over again about how Josh and Zac Farro, members of Paramore, should come back.

"What the hell?" I thought, so I followed it up with a few searches, and lo and behold, I learned that those 2 guys had just left Paramore and that the announcement was made official the day before. I shared it with my brother, and he wasn't very happy about it either.

It was news that was relevant to me, news that I cared about, and I didn't learn of it over Twitter or Facebook or any of my RSS feeds; I learned about it on some YouTube comments.