thanks peter.
Archive for February, 2007
28
Feb
manamana
23
Feb
what the facebook!
So back in the summer when we were working on the GM youth portal the idea of advertising on facebook came up, that and flavor of the year myspace. When I did my research into facebook I was met with the inability to register since I was no longer in school. At the time you needed to be a current student, with a student email address. A short month later I was contacted by the facebook team with a message telling me I was allowed to register with a non acedemic email address and that I was welcome aboard. I signed up that day and low and behold my company wasn’t in the database so I entered it to be registered.
A few weeks later I check back to see if others I had told had signed up for facebook, there was one singular person from my company on facebook, once they were added my facebook account stayed stagnent for a long while. By late november I had a few more friends added from maclaren but nothing too big round 4 or 5.
Fast forward to about 1 month ago, I started to get emails with friend requests from the girls at the dance studio. Looks like facebook had hit the teen sceen, and while I was all for adding these people I knew they really wern’t the classmates I was hoping to find on facebook. a short week later and I got my first old friend from highschool, was facebook finally hitting the everyday internet surfer? Yes, yes it was. In the last two weeks I’ve overheard and joined in conversations about facebook on the go train. Re-kindeled friendships that were broken up when i didnt go off to university like 95% of my classmates and left messages on the walls of people I havent talked to in 10 plus years. TO me its surprising that facebook took so long to reach the masses when its a really simple and powerful tool.
Unlike classmates that charge you, facebook is free to everybody which is great. Not only that but its got some great simple tools that make reaching back to friends really simple. Couple that with some great photo tools, (no flickr integration sadly) the ability to integrate your own RSS feed from an outside source to populate your blog and a generally easy to use navigation and content structure and you’ve got a great online tool that brings people together, simply and effectivley.
kudos to you facebook a job done well.
19
Feb
another year older
yep rockin the 29 now.
thats all
14
Feb
the commute + lurking
It’s not secret that I take the GO-train twice a day from the lovely confines of the burbs into the city on a wirlwind of 40 min on the express train. One of my favorite things to do on the train after playing videogames or sleeping is to people watch or better yet people listen. Nothing covers up eavesdropping like playing bejeweled on your treo.
Today the people in the same pod as me were talking about a website, naturallly my interests perked. They talked about galleries they recently updated and comments they posted… myspace I thought, but then I began to second guess myself. Could they be on facebook? virb? some new nice site people in the shwa were all hot onto. After a few minutes of them discussing I figured out that it was indeed facebook they were talking about (phew my games still legit) it was the new addition of these free gifts facebook was offering that set it off for me. I asked the people if they were indeed talking about facebook. How just recently they came to discover it and how I had a similar experience with many of my olld friends finding out about facebook and me either finding them or them finding me.
We also talked shortly about how kids social behaviors are changing, how kids would soooner MSN or facebook their friends than pick up the phone. Hell they would rather chat onine than walk a block to actually hang out with their friends. I know that when I was younger that the internet served as a tool to get stuff done, sure I socialized over ICQ and ran my own KDX server but those were quite basic back in the day and I still spent most of my time interacting with people on a more human level, the phone or in the flesh.
While I dont discredit my love for the internet and technology having a kid to raise in such a technologically advanced time is going to prove to be a small challenge, while I want my kid to grow up knowing how stuff works and how to conduct yourself online in the safest of manners I cant help but want to teach my kid the joys of interacting outside of the 1’s and 0’s and get some human on human time.
it sure is going to be fun
13
Feb
Talking about myself
This morning at our creative re-group I had to stand up in front of the class and tell my peers and the people at the main agency who I was and how I got to where I’m at today.
here are my notes, I dont really like talking infront of people and especially about myself but I’m told it went well… these were my cliffs notes to make sure I didnt forget anything, typed on my treo from the train ride home the night before.
Continue reading ‘Talking about myself’
12
Feb
me and my wii
Last week the family procured a Nintendo Wii system.(thanks terri, eric and johnathan!) It took me until thursday to play it since Emliy surprisingly doesn’t enjoy watching me meticulously unbox new electronics and move old systems around (sorry gamecube) rewire bits and generally set things up in a neat and orderly manner, tho I’ll have to admit that my solution for the systems in the cabnet beside the TV has its faults the excitement of the Wii kind of overshadowed everything else.
Let me say that this system is a dream to set up. 3 sets of cords to plug in, the RCA, Wii sensor bar and the powerblock. The system itself is quite small and takes up literally no space when used vertically in the provided stand. With the Wii set up on wednesday, thursday was my first play night.
I’m going to have to give it up to nintendo while the system boots fast the one thing I noticed is that there is no launch screen, I was so accustomed to the Gamecube start up screen that I was really looking forward to seeing the Wii start up. Sadly I’m only greeted with a warning not to smash myself or others around me.
The menu system that was developed for the Nintendo DS are in my opinion brilliant. Simple clean and to the point. You can navigate everything so simply. This still holds true to the Wii and while I would have loved to see the two systems share common design cues I can easily be swayed. Set up consists of naming your system entering the date and time. Online set up was simple since I have an open network at home it picked up the wireless signal no problem and I found myself with a set up and newly updated system in about 15 min.
So far the system is great, both Jen and I are highly addicted to bowling while golf seems to be our least favorite sport. I’m getting the hang of boxing but it will take some time getting used to and figuring out all the combinations for the different punches, for seemingly simple concepted games there are alot of intricate things built into each of the sports.
I’m attempting to play the wii for a half hour each day to see if it affects my fitness level, I’ve been bitten by the Wii workout bug and while I type this with the sorest body I’ve had for a long time I’ve been playing through the pain to try and keep my wii sports age low, after an injury filled weekened I’m back up to 35 while on friday i was as low as 26.
we’ll definitly see how this thing goes.
