Sunday, September 21, 2008

All moved in

As of last Sunday, I am all moved in to my new place. I ended up rooming with a friend of my girlfriend's. It has proven to be rewarding. I am closer to everyone and everything that is important to me (not including family though unfortunately). One of the major advantages is now I have a permanent wired connection and can therefore use Ubuntu almost exclusively. I had to go get a new wired keyboard, and still can't use my Bluetooth mouse, but I'm thinking of selling them anyway. They've been nothing but trouble, and I can always invest in wireless that is not Bluetooth. I find Bluetooth, for something simple like peripherals, is quite pointless. No data is exchanged and therefore, Bluetooth is overkill. The only problem is that I want to keep the dongle for my computer (to keep it's Bluetooth compatibility) but might have a hard time selling the keyboard and mouse without it. But we'll see. I will check eBay next.

Another problem is that the internet connection is kind of shaky for the Xbox. I got dropped from a Halo 3 game lastnight. I have never dropped before. I've also been having some major connectivity problems with Lost Planet Colonies. I go to search for games, and most of the time it has told me "no matches found". This has happened to me once at home. That was a result of server problems on the end of the game server. I seriously hope my NAT is closed or something so I can fix it and be on my merry way again. I am going to be severely depressed if I can't play Lost Planet.

Another thing that's odd for me is that I have to turn off my technology when I go to bed. I am used to just leaving it on all the time. But since I will actually be paying for power, I have to be conscious of this. But I can still leave it on the majority of the days on the weekends. Just when I know I won't be using it.

I've also been stressed more. Since everything around me has changed, and I have been presented with a whole new set of expectations, I have kind of been slow on the upkeep. I will continue to be stressed until I can really establish a regular and beneficial routine. But even then it might be a long, long time before I am comfortable, due to some interpersonal problems. I've even been stressed since before school even started. Getting in wasn't a pretty picture, and neither was the whole last minute change. I thought I was going to one school up until a week before classes start. The place I wanted to go (where I am now) accepted me extremely last minute, and my stress level increased exponentially. I had to do in a week what most people had months to do, in order to prepare for classes and such. After that, of course, was trying to find a place to live. Most of the places I saw were complete shitholes. The one place I wanted got snatched out from under me a couple hours before I was going to potentially take the place. It was kind of chaotic. And now school begins, as does a whole new set of problems. Yippe skippie.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The craptacular new Facebook layout

I'm going to cut straight to the chase: who the fuck designed the new Facebook layout? It clearly has to be someone with the design skills and intelligence of a chimpanzee with a lobotomy. It's the most counterintuitive piece of shit I have used in a long time, and I hated Last.fm's recent redesign.
The wall is now all clustered together. Kind of like what would happen if you took your shoes, cutlery, pencils, pens, markers, dishes, bathroom items, other assorted household items, and threw them all into one big huge pile with all of your neighbourhood's items as well. Now find one of your spoons, and you have the annoyance I experience when using the new Facebook.
I can't look at all of my information on one page, no no, that would be too simple. I have to have minimum three fucking pages on my profile. None of the apps are on the main pages either; those are completely separate. So if, for example, you wished for someone to see one of your apps (which is generally why people install apps in the first place), they will not see it unless they make a point of visiting your "Boxes" page. What a fucking stupid name...it took me like ten minutes to figure out where the fuck all of my apps went because this title is completely irrelevant to the actual purpose of the page. How about calling it something like, oh, "Apps"?
The wall comments (even though this fits in with the first point of contention, it still deserves it's own mention) are lumped in with all other events. I don't know when the fuck people have commented on my page, because it's squished right in there between the other crap. The only way I really know is if the comment is at the top, or I happen to check my email. How is that a fucking Wall? The Wall is a place for comments only goddammit.

I could go on and on about how I fucking hate new Facebook (e.g. why does the status have to be so big in "The Wall", why does it show all comments for posted items in the news feed, why the hell did they change the right hand navigation, etc.) But I think I've made my point. I am far from the only one. I've looked around and seen that at least 75% of people whose comments I've seen have said they hate the new layout as well. How hard is it to give us a fucking option to pick which layout we want to use? Why is that such a huge deal? But apparently Mark Zuckerberg has his head so far up his ass that he doesn't realize that what he did to Facebook is absolutely retarded. The best part is, they ask for feedback on the new layout, but completely ignore when people say they don't like it. Everything short of saying "too fucking bad".

So, someone please tell me, why the fuck are they forcing this change when there's no reason to do so? Does it not matter anymore what users think? What was wrong with the original Facebook layout? I found it to be perfectly usable and pleasant.

Friday, September 5, 2008

My browser speed



That is how fast my browser is. Note the right hand column, and how the different browsers compare to each other. Not surprisingly, Internet Exploder is like a special Olympics athlete running against non-special Olympians (oh, I'm horrible, I know). It looks like I'll be downloading Google Chrome soon, well, when I feel like going back to Windows.

Want to know what your browser speed is? Click here and it will tell you (you have to take a screen shot if you want to record it).