A real note
Francesca, my wife, decided to write me an actual note on paper tonight while she was at her micro-economics class. Hell, if I was taking micro-economics, I’d be looking for some way to waste time too. Anyway, here’s the full content of her note (with permission, of course):
Dear Jay,
I feel like chatting with you - but I don’t have email or IM in this class. I guess I’ll have to resort to a good old note. Funny - I don’t think I’ve written a note in class in a very long time!
So… howz it going - damn! This is different than IM.
Yep, that’s it. The whole thing. And, to be honest - I know exactly how she was feeling.
On another note, during this particular class, Fran mentioned that they received their marks back, and overall the class did not do too well. When the time came for a break, everyone heads to the cafeteria to get a coffee or something to snack on - when she arrived there were about ten people from her class, all mumbling angrily into their cell phones. Fran commented that this is an interesting societal change we’re seeing; 10 years ago (and probably even less), those angry students would be talking to each other, commiserating about their marks and possibly even planning study sessions. Today, none of them even know each other’s names.
As someone who is a huge technology enthusiast and supporter, I find this sort of trend troubling; I’m not sure we as a society gain enough from online interactions to counteract the negative influences, like this one.
Whew - Too Damn Much Blogging
In other news, I woke up this morning with just a killer headache, and none of my super-secret-works-almost-every-time headache medicine available… okay, it’s not that secret - Advil Liquigels are like magic for me. Anyway, after a trip to the mall to run some errands, I got hooked up with the junk and was finally able to start fighting off this nasty headache. It’s gone now, but it’s also almost 1:00 AM. I should be sleeping. That explains the random nature of this post - I hope my DownloadSquad posts weren’t like this!I’m the #1 Jason Clarke on Yahoo!
I normally use Google for the majority of my web searching. Just over a week ago Lifehacker pointed to YaGoohoo!gle, which is a site that allows you to submit one search query to Google and Yahoo! at the same time. So, of course, I searched for my name. Interestingly, my blog’s homepage doesn’t show up in the first 1000 hits on Google (I’ve used a different tool to verify that), but show up #1 on Yahoo. (I can’t bring myself to put Yahoo’s exclamation point after their name every time…) Certain posts from this blog show up in the top 100 results on Google, but not my homepage. I think I like Yahoo just a little bit more now. 
Yay for egosurfing.
Oh, and I’ve gone back to using Yahoo’s (well, really X1’s) desktop search utility. Copernic has a great offering, but X1 / Yahoo Desktop Search (same-same) have a user interface that works a little better for me. Plus, for me being able to see a progress bar during indexing is huge (yes, I have control issues). Copernic still doesn’t have that for some reason. Yahoo still blows chunks when it comes to releasing information about what they’re doing with YDS, and making it easy to find out if there’s a new version available. And they should be downright embarrassed about their ’support forum’. But the new version (which I found out about from a blog rather than from Yahoo) seems to have fixed my biggest issues, so I’m happily using it again.
Blogs Filtering Down?
I was so excited when I learned that the company I work for had posted an article in the lunchroom about how blogs are being used more and more for PR. Unfortunately, it was only posted there because one of our company’s traditional ads appeared below the article on the same page. *sigh*
Flickr Sucks - They Don’t Respect Their Users
I just received an email from Flickr, stating that my account has been reduced from Pro status to Free status. What pisses me off is that in the email, they say that they usually warn people ahead of time before this happens, but with the holidays blah, blah, blah, basically “tough shit”. What I heard? “You’re not important enough to us to treat with respect.”
Now, I didn’t pay for my Pro account - I earned it. I got 5 of my friends to sign up for it in a very short window of time to earn my Pro account, because I believed in their product. Now I regret that I did that. I don’t want my friends to be associated with a site that treats people this way.
For the record, here are the contents of the message that I received:
Subject: Flickr Pro Account Expired
Hello Friends and Flickrrs!
We’re writing to let you know that, not only do you rule, but your Flickr Pro Account has expired. We usually let people know this a week in advance, but things have been nuts — nuts! — here at Flickr HQ (in a good way!) and then the holidays happened.
Your Flickr account has reverted to a Free Account, which means that you can upload 10 MB of photos a month, and only the last 100 photos are visible in your photostream.
ALL your photos are still there, and will be restored if you upgrade to a pro account!
There is more information here:
http://www.flickr.com/upgrade/There are a lot of fantastic features, upgrades and improvements coming with the 1.0 release, so stay tuned.
This is the last email you will receive about this, unless of course you resubscribe, at which point we’ll probably send you another email to let you know when *that* account is expiring.
Joy!
Caterina, on behalf of Flickr
———————————-
PS: I am writing this from my personal account, so please don’t write back here. If you have questions, check out the help page here:
http://www.flickr.com/help.gne
At this point, Flickr can kiss my ass. I won’t be recommending them to my friends, and I will be warning any friends that I know currently have Flickr accounts to beware. This is very not cool.
