This post contains some superb pictures from the HDR pool on flickr.
In this post I cover YouTube’s new Terms of Service, a few interesting movie trailers, the TV pilot Secrets of a small town from ABC, the tagging and search utility Keotag, free education through Qoolsqool and Wikibooks, my wife, the length of my posts, alienation and more!
Index of this post
- YouTube TOS
- Movie Trailers
- TV Pilot Secrets of a small town reviewed
- Keotag
- Free Education
- Big Brother UK, USA and AU
- An Essay on Alienation, from your host
New YouTube Terms of Service modifications
YouTube changed their terms of service recently, and a firestorm of controversy ensued after people started dissecting the legalese. ZeFrank also covered this in Friday’s episode.
Marketing to people who hate marketing.
Trailer to the new Darren Aronofsky film The Fountain. I started liking Aronofsky after his cult movie Pi.
Speaking of Hugh Jackman, he’s also in the next Christopher Nolan movie called The Prestige with Michael Caine, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johanson and David Bowie.
Secrets of a small town
From what I have seen of the upcoming fall schedule and pilots, it looks like the producers of the new crop of shows have done their research on Lost. By no means are they Lost clones. They have developed an interesting batch of shows that will unfold during a season of stories. From Heroes, to Traveler and to Secrets of a small town, the mysteries are coming to prime time.
This show reminds me a lot of Twin Peaks. This reference is hard to miss, because the meat of the show is similar. A girl dies in a small town, someone is sent to investigate. In this case, they have confounded the mystery or should I say mysteries, by making the investigator a reporter returning home after having skipped out on her wedding day eight years ago.
She hasn’t communicated with her sister for all that time and shows up to cover the story of the murder. Slowly, the mystery unfolds with conspiracies within conspiracies. This show is in no way as fun or quirky as Twin Peaks. There are no riddles or dwarves with reverse stories. Just a few mysteries tied to each other.
From rape to murder, a plethora of sins are uncovered. It is like a carpet is uncovered, a carpet that kept all the dirty pretty things hidden, the dirty little secrets.
Keotag
I just discovered Keotag, a nice useful tag search and tag word generator. It also generates the code and links that I have at the bottom of all of my posts. Really interesting. This is a hint for those of you having trouble coding the stuff, just go to the site and follow the simple instructions, and copy & paste the code into the html editor of WP. Voilà! It even generates the code for social bookmarking and other services (del.icio.us, digg, rawsugar and more).
Qoolsqool
For those of my readers trying to learn more about certain subjects, I’ve recently discovered Qoolsqool, a web 2.0 service where internet users select the best educational resources, via a memedigger type layout.
Speaking of free education, there are a lot of free text books available through wikibooks. They are free, open content and you can edit them as well, to contribute.
My wife’s blog
I set my wife up with a blog this week, hope she enjoys it! I also set her up with a free pro account from Zooomr. Bloggers get free pro accounts from Zooomr. Over the years, she has become a pro photographer, but she still teaches fulltime.
Layout and length of posts
I changed the layout a bit and thought hard about the length of my posts. For the moment, I think that I’ll continue the way I’m doing right now. I thought about maybe adding an index, though that would work out a bit weirdly. I’ve decided to try out the index of a post idea. I have modified this post to have an index at the beginning so that readers who are less interested by certain parts of the post can skip them easily. Please feel free to leave your comments on this feature.
Big Brother USA
I heard from my wife that Dr Will and Chicken George were nominated for eviction this week by James, the new HOH. She followed this through some discussion forums on BBUSA. Dr Will is all blasé about the whole show and doesn’t want to loose money from his practice.
Big Brother UK
It came to no surprise that Jayne was evicted from the BBUK house. The house will be a lot quieter. The housemates won the shopping task. There has been some conflict between Michael and Richard.
Big Brother Australia
Jamie won FNL yesterday and took Chris not Krystal to the rewards room. He won a scooter. And they are going surfing on a secure location in Dreamcoast, the theme park where the BBAU house is located.
Alienation, a message from your host
Sometimes, you feel alienated.
Alone with my dog, I wonder sometimes why.
I’ve had a tumultuous week and the drama of the weekend hasn’t helped at all. Just like the blogosphere is a viral medium, emotions can be viral too. How other people are affected emotionally, affects other people around them. It’s funny how emotions can be transmitted through the blogosphere as well.
When I was in university, in 1995, I used to chat a lot. I used to use IM, emails, mIRC, the whole lot. I stopped at some point because it got to the point that I couldn’t start up my computer and not be assaulted by 15 different conversations from my MSN contacts. Nowadays, MSN is installed again, after a few years off, but it’s turned off. Yahoo Pager is there too, but I only use to talk to one person, one of my closest friends. I use Skype for all my long distance calls, since it’s free. But most of the time, I don’t welcome anybody to call me out of the blue. I’m invisible.
I guess that I learnt that I wanted to have a real life, not a made-up one online. That is why games like Second Life worry me. The whole otaku phenomenon has me worried about where this is heading for our society.
When it’s nice outside, I don’t sit in front of my computer, I take a walk with my dog. I go running.
No matter how strong you think you are, at the end, you always come back to how you feel, and if you can’t feel, well then you have a problem. Sometimes I get frustrated, with all the efforts that I put in the various ventures that I am involved with, to get critiqued by people whom I have never met before, I find it draining.
And it’s not just the random haters or the people who hate your blogging style or opinions, it’s the way sometimes people are affected by what you write or comment. I don’t really give a shit about the haters, with the love comes the hate. And without the hate there would be no love. Of course I don’t delude myself that people love my blog, hopefully a lot of you enjoy it and find it entertaining.
I have been in a bit of a rut since the beginning of the year. This has improved somewhat. With the impending move to BC, I am looking forward to taking it slower. There are a lot of plans and ventures coming into fruition over the next few months and I am looking forward to collaborating with some interesting people that I have met.
What I find perplexing, is that the best intentions sometimes end up alienating people.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I love blogging, I love commenting, I love interacting and discussing on blogs. And with a lot of people, this has turned out to be a positive experience. With others, I have been somewhat disappointed.
I am a private person; I do not put myself up on display for anyone. I keep most of my life for myself and my wife.
I comment on the blogs that I read, full stop. Check out my coComment RSS feed or my blogroll. Those are the sites that I read. My commenting has never been a marketing ploy; I have gotten most of my traffic through memediggers and discussions. If for some reasons my comments aren’t appreciated, well then I’ll just stop commenting on those blogs.
You don’t like what I have to say, you don’t like my comments, send me an email and I’ll stop commenting on your blog. In fact, I’ll stop reading your blog, because I have got enough drama in my life and I don’t need anymore.
For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.
Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion
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memoirs on a rainy day 
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