Current Digg Annoyances

What's with digg being extra slow lately. Every now and then, when you browse profile pages, they stop loading. The most common page where this occurs appears to be your friend's submission (http://digg.com/users/mojaam/friends/submissions)Then there's the flashing ad telling people they are the 10,000th visitor every day. Clicking the ad, which will probably be no one, takes you to a spammish looking web page that tells you to select a FREE Laptop and enter your email. Yeah right. Digg have to be more selective with which ads they show, stuff likes this just devalues the site.

deviantWATCH Thumbnails Workaround

I've been a long time deviantArt user. About 5 years actually. Subscribed a bunch of times. But I just been feeling cheated by dA lately so I decided not to resubscribe. One feature that really shouldn't be monetized in the first place is the deviantWATCH Thumbnails. It allows you to see deviation thumbnails of artist you are watching as oppose to just a linked title. Anyway, I thought maybe I can use the ":thumb + deviation #" feature available to all users to my advantage. I'm no programmer by any stretch but I wrote some java code, parse the source HTML (copy and paste it to a html.txt file in the same directory of your Class1.java file) of my deviantWatch to extract the thumbs... and finally paste them at the news posting page. Unfortunately, the Greasemonkey (Firefox extention) script called deviant Enlarge does not work with them but it's still better and faster way of going through your deviantWatch.

Average Number of Facebook Friends

I was watching this video in which Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about online personas at The Commonwealth Club. Among other topics relating to social networks, he mentioned the average number of facebook friends. It's always cool to know some of these stats. So far facebook offers network stats and you can use some apps like Zeitgeist or platypus for personal stats, or gather Facebook user data via their advertiser tool that facilitates audience targeting.

Mark Zuckerberg: I think it's interesting that this hundred thirty or hundred fifty number keeps on coming up because the average number of friends someone has on Facebook is right in that range. It's like around 125 or 130 or so. And I think that that reflects that the relationships that people have on Facebook are real. You know, it's not really an application that's used for meeting people much at all, it's mostly just for keeping up with the people you know. And getting a handle of what's going on in their lives, communicating with them.

Random Observation

As of right now, there are:

- 12 people in the skinnyCorp (threadless.com) facebook network
- 31 @ Digg
- 581 @ Facebook
- 3,893 @ Yahoo
- 5,691 @ Google
- 15,126 @ Microsoft

August 26, 2007

No longer a something+teen. Adulthood is nearing, where I will have to have a career, probably 9-5, and pay all kinds of monthly bills... ugh. So I watched Rush Hour 3, but it was short and funny, story was pretty nonexistent. Then continued watching my favorite series, Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, mixing up the episodes as I go. I will probably need to take a few months off from them in order to watch and be able to enjoy them all over again, but it's cool. I move back to the dorms tomorrow and college football and NFL starts soon and The Office in a month.

Viewbook

What up! Just wanted to share this neat flash application/website I found called viewbook. Their font in their logo almost look like facebooks haha. You will think deviantArt will have something as intuitive as this thing long ago but this place is just soooo stagnant even though it's ranked in the top 100 sites on alexa, I think it's mostly because of the talented artists on here though. Anyway, go sign up for your own viewbook, I doubt this will stay free for long.

Viewbook.com
My Viewbook

----------------
Now playing: Pendulum - Slam

Computer Woes

Rest in peace, my beloved gateway 7330gz laptop. Today it died, I mean I can't even turn it on. The only sign of life is the blue plugged in icon. It already was suffering from a few sickness: Short breath, aka sucky battery life, as in it will die in less than 15 minutes unplugged. Also suffered from a black eye, aka screen was damaged, flickers, very freckled. Even with it's sickness, I still love it and count on it for some things but now it's completely dead. Actually, it probably committed suicide because it grew too old of my polygamist practices. That's right, I got another computer, my desktop. I actually use that a lot more. But just like the laptop, it have it's problems, like Ruckus won't install on it for some reason and can't handle video (mpg, avi, wma, mov...). Just flash, lucky for me, it seems everything is in flash nowadays so that's good. But anyway, downloading album quality songs from Ruckus legally and playing videos not in flash is what the laptop will let me do. Now I'm not sure what to do. I already tried everything I knew to fix these problems but no go.

I am broke and definitely can't even imagine how I'll pay the upcoming expenses for school. I need clothes, books, and even though my tuition, room, and board will be aided by loans and some fafsa, I will still have thousands left to pay. I don't like loans because I'm not even sure I can finish school let alone get that career job to start paying them back yet. But I think that's my option, I will have to get my sist to co-sign and whatnot and then I can get things taken care of. It's absolutely a must that I get nothing lower than a 3.0 this fall. Damn, I hate even thinking about my past work. The only way to get over that will be to do great this semester, heck, I'll be kicked out if I don't. So yeh, hope to get a new laptop, or desktop, or both soon.

Got a small list of things to do but I keep procrastinating. I'm even procrastinating what I am procrastinating those things with. I'm vectoring instead of those things yet I procrastinate vectoring as well. Argh, hope I become more productive and optimistic soon. Just rediscovered drums and bass again, and with the help of my stacks of mountain dew, they should help get me going.

Long Overdue Vector Art Gift

Here is a long overdue graduation and birthday gift for my sist, miss MBA, that's what's up! I'm kinda cheating by combining two events in one since they were close hehe.

Attempted Robbery

Some ignant high school-looking kids tried to rough my video iPod today on the metro. Actually it's my sister's. God though had my back even though I am a bit slow on my daily prayers and what not. I am thankful. Yeh, I felt it coming, I was in the up front cars, like the second one I think, near the door unfortunately, then they came in bunches. Common sense told me they poor, ghetto, and ignant. I didn't let them stop me from going about my biz watching music videos and all. When the train got to their stop, they all departed except for one, he waited right before the door closed, then made his move. I don't know if I know for certain what was coming but I had a feeling and so tightened my grip. In less than 3 secs he tried, failed, and ran like the bitch (excuse my language) he is.

Life lessons are always nice, I can't be couped up on this computer all day. So I have learned to pretty much reduce my iPod's visibility. From now on, I'm only watching videos in certain situations where I am confident no one will see it and in turn get jealous and start hatin. Which is the only part I might understand about this and place partial blame on myself as that is logical but still inexcusable and not right; poor person sees something cool in front of him... the person starts hating... and so on. Besides, I don't think I'm the stuntin type. Now what will I do if I recognize them again? Probably nothing, I'm not trying to get arrested or banned from metro over small things. I only ride the metro 3 times a week for my unpaid summer internship in DC.

Speaking of unpaid internships, I really hope it's worth it. I spend almost $10 a day on fares, parking, and gas everyday. I'm going to have to ask them for some kind of reimbursement of some sort or something you know. It will look good on my resume but so what really. Seems like I'm going to have to stop putting my GPA up there as I am struggling and going deeper than ever as I continue in my higher education. Life sucks although I am making moves to make it not suck.

Spring Break 2007

Maaan, I brought all the books I can possibly bring home to study over spring break... have not touched a single one. On the bright side I guess I have been chilling and getting a lot of rest. Naa, it was a waste of a break. Watched NCAA tourney (my bracket is destroyed) and sent off lil bro, my sis, and mom off to Naija, and that's pretty much it.

When I return, I'm just going to have to make sure I don't fail any of my classes. It's really ridiculous, in my CMSC 202 class, I need a B to move on else I have to repeat it. In my CMSC 203 class, the teacher is from another planet and really don't know how to teach... my grade there is up in the air, in Chem 101; I started off easy, understanding thangs, then things were pushed to the third gear and now I am left behind, but I think it's the most manageable of all my classes, then in Calc 2, wow, what an arduous course, I really hope I get no less than a C here. Well, aside from spending all my time in the library (so I say), I'm hungry for some basketball and so I'll be in the gym a lot too.