8c: @cokematic we don’t wonder. it’s a point of national pride.
mefloranie: @cokematic We all strive to get fatter than the next kid.

Yeah, still no post on my recent trip … I’ve been rather preoccupied (plus, I wanted to sort though all the photos before I started on the post but 1800+ photos are quite a number to go though and I bet only 300-500 will be use-able…. Moving on). Instead, here are some quotes and some light readings from around the interwebs this past week! As usual, you my follow me on Google Reader / Buzz for the latest.

Hortense on the use of the meme “THIS”

“Yes, I agree, you’ve completely captured my thoughts on this subject and expressed them in a way I couldn’t quite express myself. Thank you, fellow internet user. You are correct, and I appreciate your input.”

Follow up:

owen_s: @cokematic LOL yes, this.
cokematic: @owen_s don’t you mean.. “Yes, I agree, you’ve completely
captured my thoughts on this subject & expressed them in a way…
cokematic: @owen_s …I couldn’t quite express myself. Thank you, fellow
internet user. You are correct, and I appreciate your input.”
cinco_bajeena: @cokematic @owen_s LOL suddenly “THIS” doesn’t even fit in
one tweet

Creative people are just high functioning schizophrenics

“Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box”

Comment on Lame Government Officially Shoots Down Nuking the Oil Spill over at Gawker

Haven’t we done enough to the city of New Orleans already?

On top of the shitty levees we built them and the heckuva job we did not rescuing them when those levees failed, we let oil companies do whatever the hell they want to the wetlands (which just makes the strain on the defective levees even worse), and now that one of those companies is spilling thousands of barrels of oil right on the city’s front porch, we want to toss a nuclear bomb into the mix?!

Is there any city that we could possibly say ‘Fuck You’ to more often than we have to New Orleans?

Commenter on Google vs Apple: Google Doesn’t Need To Win

“the whole open vs closed argument is absurd. The only people who *really* care about that are the tiny but loud tech blogger group. Your mom and all her friends, all of the city employees, all of the short-order cooks, and nearly everyone in congress couldn’t care less. They’re going to buy whatever they think is shinier. They just want to play Plants vs Zombies.”

Natalie Tran (communitychannel)’s facebook status

“Sometimes I type words and even spellcheck has no suggestions. It’s like it’s saying, “yeah sorry man, no fucking clue what you’re trying to spell. You’re on your own.” I’ll move some letters around and it’ll still be like, “… yeah no, that doesn’t help.” “

Penny Arcade comic on Alan Wake

Alan Wake is about a writer, writing about another writer, who is writing about himself and another fucking writer! It’s like if M.C.Escher was a writer, and also a douchebag.

Oh I’ll get the photos and stuff sorted out next week. I hope…

See where this is going? [original]

The Electronic Frontier Federation (EFF) recently published timeline of Facebook’s eroding private policy. What really irks me is how Zukerberg suckered people into Facebook, and slowly but methodologically took  away your rights and your ability to control your own information and profile. I’ve always live by this:

“Never expect anything you reveal on the internet to be private, no matter what anyone tells you”

And for good reason, because what is even more disturbing is the fact that Facbook will store your information even after you delete it.

While some have quit Facebook completely I haven’t made that kind of bold leap yet. Until another social network comes along that appeals to me, I’ll probably stick with it (And if you think Facebook will never fall, well… that’s what people said about Myspace not even 5 years ago). That doesn’t mean I won’t take some sort of action. Ever since Facebook took away my control of who can comment on my notes on Facebook, I’ve stopped importing my blog’s RSS feed. I’ve replace most Facebook status updates with Twitter updates (I recently reached 5000 tweets!), replaced a majority of my shared links with Google Reader Shared Items / Google Buzz and I don’t even post as many photos as I used to (keeping a majority of them on Flckr instead). Yes, that’s my little stand against Facebook, for now.

Every CEO of a social network should be required to use the default privacy settings for all of their accounts on the service.
- anildash

additional reading:

• Electronic Frontier Federation
• Wikipedia entry : “Criticisms of Facebook (Privacy Concerns)”
• The most important difference between Google Buzz and Facebook

polymetrica: I’ll probably regret it forever if I don’t mention that my birthday was today. Today meaning May 3.
polymetrica: I hate it when people mention their birthdays so blatantly but it seems also kind of stupid if one does not tell anyone.
polymetrica: But seriously, birthdays happen every year, and it’s not like your birthday will be better if you get a lot of HBD messages.
polymetrica: Also who cares if it’s YOUR birthday, it’s others’ birthdays as well..or whatever.
polymetrica: And don’t wish me a happy birthday if you do not care for my existence! That is being phony!

cokematic: FUCK IKEA GLASS DOORS. FUCK THEM TO HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

I loved how little faith everyone has in my ability to detect the presence of a glass door.

digiwombat: @cokematic Did you fucking run into a glass door? Hahaha. PLEASE SAY YES!
owen_s: @cokematic …walked into one?
daedalusyumeno: @cokematic Epic fail if you actually thought there was nothing there.
Hitoribocchi: @cokematic I take it that you accidentally bumped into them, no?
TheFuzzy: @cokematic The guards are going to have a kick looping that security cam footage.

And yes. The BILLY bookcases do have glass door add-ons available (that was the second most asked question last night). Save yourself the trouble and get IKEA to install them for you (I won’t tell anyone not to get them, only because they look really nice).

Ps. I have never walked into a glass door before. Telephone poles, yes.

After getting home at 4am the night before and pulling an all nighter so I would be packed up in time, I moved* into my new apartment in the morning. The rest of my day went something like this:

12:20pm arrived in Yau Mat Tei extra early (I totally forgot how close to civilization Inow live) in hopes of finding some coffee.
12:20pm gave up on my search and settled for canned coffee from 7-11 instead
12:45pm meet up with some friends for dim sum
2:00pm finally get a table for dim sum. While waiting, I saw some old lady wearing a pink tshirt with my name on it written in sparkles
3:30pm bought a frisbee and looked around for a place to toss it around
4:00pm gave up and headed to my new apartment. There, we found a place to toss the frisbee around
5:0opm headed back into the city, had some downtime at a nearby Starbucks
6:30pm dinner at some random restaurant
7:20pm Shutter Island!!
10:00pm home; stopped by a McD’s to get an apple pie in celebration of Pi Day (eah, I couldn’t find good pie >.<).
10:00pm home for real; shower, did abit of work, cooked lunch for tomorrow
midnight in bed

of course, there was still this incident (which will probably scar some of my friends for a while):

Cokematic: 4am.. going home. I don’t remeber anything, but Im preetty sure I was wearing a dress at some point during the party
3:52 AM Mar 14th via mobile web

I’m gonna have to do something about that. Anyway, back to normal next weekend as I’m off to South Korea for some snow and skiing (but only if work doesn’t kill me first). I actually want to go to North Korea, but this is probably too short of a trip to be sneaking off into commie territory.

*by moving I mean, move all the boxes to my new place and then instead of unpacking then, shove all the boxes in one of the rooms

Specs after the jump.

Processor : Intel Core i5-750
Motherboard : MSI P55-GD65 LGA 1156 Intel P55 ATX || $160
Memory : 8GB RAM (4x Kingston 2GB DDR3 1333 MHZ)

Primary drive : Intel X25-M 80GB
Secondary drives :
2x 1TB WD Caviar Black 7200 RPM 32MB (onboard Raid 1)
1x 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 32MB

Video card : MSI Radeon HD 5750 1GB

Optical and media:
LG GBC-H20L Blu-ray/DVD RW combo drive
All in one USB reader

PSU: Delta 550W

Case: Coolermaster Centurion 5 II

I decided to only run Windows 7 (64-bit) on this instead of my original plans of dualbooting Windows 7 and XP. The XP was only needed for work since my workplace only supports Cisco VPN client 4.x and its complete crap. It doesn’t work on 64 bit systems, hell, it doesn’t even work on Windows 7, 32 bit systems. What the hell man.

I’ve since discovered ShrewSoft VPN, its working perfectly so far.

By the way, the X25M (along with 8GB ram) is absolutely amazing. I can pop open Photoshop CS3 in under 2.5 seconds~ And what’s with the mid range graphics card you ask? I don’t game on my PC right now, by the time I start, it’ll probably be time to pick up a better video card (or buy a second 5750 and crosswire them, depends on needs and cost when Diablo III is finally released~).

Oh and 8GB of ram also lets you do this:

owen_s : what AIR Beta 2 means for the rest of you (those who use TweetDeck) is that it takes up less RAM, which is all you need to know. so… yeah.
cokematic: @owen_s adobe air’s got nothing on me and my 8gb of ram.
owen_s: @cokematic –SHUT UP I KNEW YOU’D SAY THAT S T F U
cokematic: @owen_s ilu too
owen_s: @cokematic whatever, you’re just a deranged bisexual lolicon

Google buzz isn’t a Facebook replacement; It’s also not a Twitter replacement. It is a much improved version of Google Reader Shared Items (GRSI), with a better comment system and a whole lot less buggy (Don’t even get me started on how much I actually hated GRSI). Yeah, I actually like Google Buzz.

Likes:
Gmail integration
Comment notification (yeah I know alot of people whine about it, but you can easily set up a filter to have it bypass the inbox)
Realtime updates
Comments show up on GRSI for those who refuse to make the leap to Buzz

Dislikes:
I wish they would use the “compact” mode like how shared items show up in GRSI, that way I can scan though all these buzzes quickly.
How a buzz that has been recently commented get bumped to the top again. This should be optional/disabled (how the hell will I ever get through all these Buzzes. Are they even called Buzzes? Argh)
A “re-buzz” option would be nice too.
The sharing dilemma*
It would be nice if in the event that two (or more) people I follow posting the same thing on Buzz, it should be stacked and not show up as separate buzzes. (Not sure how well that would work out, actually…)

The Sharing Dilemma:
Prior to Google Buzz, anything I though worth sharing would be posted to Facebook and GRSI. If it was funny enough, then it would be posted to Twitter too.

After Google Buzz, well things got complicated. Witch such a large overlap,the decision is not as straightforward. I think I’ll go with posting things on Buzz and see how that works (although if its really good I guess I can still repost to FB and Twitter. I Kinda feel sorry for the people who are in the centre of the Venn Diagram though)

ps. It just occurred to me that Buzz would make a great metablogging platform. I hope this will reduce the amount of Twitter ranting I see (You know who you are! I mean there’s a 140 character limit on Twitter for a damn reason!!!)

So in frustration I turned to Twitter:

me: Hotels in Kenya are *#^%&*# expensive I tell you
usagijen: the question is, Kenya afford it? *ba dum psh*

Bad jokes are bad.