I have never been interested in meeting anybody in an online setting.  I crusied some of the sites and even checked out some of the adult type friend sites.  But, when it came right down to it.  I never met anyone because I’m too much of a chicken shit.

I mean you hear horror stories of people meeting in person and one or the other, or neither of them, is what they claimed they were.  Or look like that picture they sent you. 

Call me old fashioned, but when I was looking to meet somebody, I would rather it be over the cucumbers in the produce section of the local Piggly Wiggly, or maybe over a goofy “cooking for one” book at the library.

I joined MySpace last year to comment and cut up with my REAL LIFE FRIENDS.  I never accept “friend requests” from people who I have never met in MY REAL LIFE.  Nor do I ever randomly pour through page after page of people requesting them to be my friends.  No.  If I don’t know ya in real life, then you’ll never make it past the gate.

I know more than a few people who have met their significant other online (eHarmony, Match.com, MySpace…) and who have actually made it for a minute.  But I know of none who has made it for the long haul.  Why?

Well, in this day and age, it seems that those in the online dating community just shift around.  Maybe its because there are so many available folks out there just lookin for love in all the wrong places. 

It’s a meat market for reals.  But, it’s not like a meat market as a bar would be.  No.  Say you go to your favorite bar or club.  Yah, it’s a fashion show.  Yah, everybody is there hoping to meet someone unless they are there with someone.
But, at least you now when you are talking to them face to face, they aren’t sitting there browsing profiles of others while they are talking you up.

I don’t know.  I guess I was jaded, or tainted against this kind of crap.  I’m not a very trusting individual since a guy I was seeing in the last century was a total computer dork that (I found out later) was always looking at online personals and profiles. 

Now you’re prolly sitting there thinking, why is she going off on this lame ass tanget?  What the hell pulled her trigger today?

Well, friends, I’ll tell ya.  There’s a dumb-ass on AOL and yahoo who surfaces now and again thinking we’re the best of friends.  Before MySpace, he used to comb AOL profiles and email unsuspecting females.  I guess so he would have someone to talk to or whatever.  Anyway, I guess it was middle of last year, after he joined MySpace, he surfaced again, showing 198360876 (exaggerated for impact) friends, all of which are female.  Which proves my point.  Or maybe it doesn’t.  I’m sort of annoyed right now.

So, today on my little yahoo messenger thingy, I posted my status as “I’ll never paint again, swear to God!”    And I guess it piked his little curiousity button somehow.  So, he (out of the blue) decided to IM me…  Lord have mercy… 

The conversation went a little somethin like this:

Dork:  ok, I just gotta ask why won’t you ever paint again?

Me: Because I have no feeling left in my arms from painting over dark colors with white like I promised my landllord. lol

Dork:  see you should of called me you know thats whats i do for a living**** 

****NOTE:  Actually, I didn’t know that, but whatever

Me:  Nopie, didn’t know that.

Dork:  yes i told you when we first started talking i remodel houses for a living

Me:  How long ago was that though?  And how long has it been since we talked?  Prey tell, do you remember what I do or from what locale I hail?

Dork:  only couple days…lol just kiddon and in winter months

Me:  No, it was well before last summer.  And as I recall I wasn’t interested in talking to you because you find it to be wonderful to collect women friends online. 

Dork:  no it wasnt you must be thinking of that other man lol

Me:  I talk to no other men, other than the one I’m about to marry****

**** NOTE: That is not all together true.  I have REAL LIFE FRIENDS that are male and I certainly talk to them.

Dork:  see

Me:  See what?  You act like you know me.

Me:  He lives with me, I don’t talk to him online  (Also not completely true, he lives with me part time until we actually jump on the weddin train)

Dork:  well that’s cool

Then the dork went silent and didn’t bother me anymore.  I just get irritated that people have so little value for someone else’s time I suppose. 
Anyway, he is like every other person out there waiting to see some long lost person they added on to their buddy list, so they can feel important because they are chatting it up.

GET A LIFE!

In this discussion of family, I will tell about a part of mine. Not to tell about my family as much as to tell a story of what this new technology is doing to parts of America.

My sister got a call from my aunt at the law office she works for. My aunt and uncle are in a very rural farm area of Tennessee and he is the pastor of a small Baptist church. If I told you the sort of stuff that goes on in his church you’d think I was making it up. Not snake handling crazy, but, yeah, you’d be freaked out if you went there. This is the uncle who, during a wedding he was officiating, stopped to make an altar call in case anyone wanted to accept Jesus as their Savior first. So, anyway, my aunt calls my sister in a terrible panic. My uncle was in mortal fear that he was going to lose his church. So much so, that he had written a suicide note. She wanted a lawyer to do something.

What that something is, we are still not sure.

The crisis is something like this. One of the guys who plays in the church band, has a rock and roll band on the side. Nothing like Super Satanic Metal Death stuff, just a decent rock band. And they have a MySpace page. And people are posting comments on this page and using foul language, and saying crude things like “You guys &^%#& rock!” This is happening out there on the Internets.

So, my uncle is in desperation and some sort of legal action must be taken and no one knows what to do and he may just have to kill himself about it. It’s just that desperate a situation.

Really.

We get these surveys and we all put in canned one liner answers. And honestly, how many times do you have to answer the same question about what color your underwear are or how many times in the last 3 weeks someone else has slept in your bed?

No, I’m not on a high horse. I am one of the most guilty individuals that I know. If I am bored at work or have nothing to do and there is a survey sitting there in the bulletins, it’s like a train wreck. I have to look. And then, before I know it, I am committing a crime against all that is right in the world and tap, tap, tapping my keyboard, filling in the answers.

     A few months ago, I went out with a couple of friends (Gina and Joe) and had a fun time.  In trying to make sure Joe was okay to drive (he ran from the car) I inadvertently dropped my phone in her backseat.
     Long story short, one of her workmates, Paula, volunteered to bring me the phone, and I agreed.  She didn’t bring it to me, however.  Instead, she threw it out her window in Halls, TN (where I definitely do not live) and ignored all attempts at contact.
     Fortunately, an older gentleman named Wade ended up with the phone (picked up from a ditch and put it in his mailbox by his postwoman, he said).  He called me, from my phone, and arranged to get the phone back to me.  Thank God for honest people in the world.
     Last night, a friend of mine called Paula and let her have it.  In turn, Gina calls me to scream at me so much I have to walk outside from where I was to hear her.  She calls me a liar, tells me that I had fabricated the entire story and that she’s told my friends, they believe her, and blah blah blah blah whiney, idiotic garbage.

     This is overly dramatic for me, and whole lot of them can screw off.

     Another asshat has been hanging around telling people he’s a race car driver, with millions of dollars, million dollar contracts, and he’s gonna start paying three of us at the first of January.
     He told me that he lived in a 4000 sq ft house and wanted me to secure it and run Ethernet around it.  Told me had a four bay garage where he keeps his race cars, and one of the bay doors is torn off because he and a friend came home drunk and couldn’t get it open to park the truck — so they rammed it. 
     He told me that he has a private jet, and has invited us all out on several occasions, but never follows through.
     He’s told us all that he owns Tennessee Racing, Inc.
     He’s an IMCA driver and points leader.
     He’s on Team ARCA.
     He’s a NASCAR driver.
     He was in Daytona this weekend with Teresa and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

     Needless to say, he hasn’t paid any of us a cent.  ”My racing license was revoked, and I’m trying to get it back.”  Of course, he’s already told me that one, and that he did get it back.  “Yeah, but I went this weekend and got it back.”  Of course, he’d already told me that they’d reinstated him the week before.  But that’s also been mixed with, “I might be going to jail,” “All my assetts are frozen by the court,” and “I have to go to Europe to hide from some very bad people.”  Of course, those things have changed, too.  “The judge let me off even though she hates me,”  “I have more money than the courts know about,” and “I said I was gonna to Europe to hide after I hurt the guy who was molesting my daughter.”  But no, he didn’t.  He’s talked himself into both a corner and poverty.
     About the house:  “Oh, well, I haven’t bought it yet.  I was looking at four, but they were out of my price range.  I only have $750K and need $1.2M.”  I can’t help but wonder why he’d crash the garage doors on a house he doesn’t own, then?  He lives in a crappy apartment in South Knoxville.
     Why doesn’t his pilot file flight plans?  “I didn’t know they were supposed to.”  Yeah, that pilot stuff might elude him, especially since he claims to have had a pilot’s license.
     Tennessee Racing, Inc. doesn’t exist?  “Yeah, I registered that in Iowa.”  No, not there either..
     He’s not on the IMCA list.
     Team ARCA’s never heard of him.
     NASCAR certainly hasn’t ever heard of him.
     Teresa and Dale Jr. have had a parting of ways and certainly haven’t sat down to dinner together, much less together with anyone else.  And since Dale Jr. has been busy with the Nextel Cup and giving press releases about the future of DEI & his younger brother, Kerry, it’s pretty much an impossibility that our dear-old-bullshitter had dinner with just him, even.

     “Well, maybe I should just not come around if it’s gonna be like that!”
     “Good idea.  BYE!”

     Besides, I doubt Dale Jr. would take time out of his busy schedule to have dinner with a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.

     I declare this a Drama Free Zone.

     Take it outside — we don’t need that crap in here.

I saw this post over on BoingBoing and I thought “they are right!” The Christians that is.

It often makes the blogger feel good or makes him feel as if his opinion counts—when it is mostly mindless blather!

Blogs can be summed up as people talking about almost anything, but really nothing. There is no purpose to much of the contents — no direction. [...] The contents of blogs can often best be described as trash and the expression of shallowness. What is deemed as a higher level of communication is simply a mindless form of entertainment.

I agree! 99.999837% of MySpace is exactly what this says. And if you are talking to a bunch of teenagers, this is all likely correct advice.

But I think whoever wrote this only read LiveJournal and MySpace to draw these conclusions. There are a lot of blogs out there with content and usefullness. It’s just when the blog’s purpose is just to tell everyone how you feel at the moment, or minutia of your daily life that it is all ego and fluff.

We don’t need any more of those, unless of course you are a very interesting person like maybe Dita Von Tease. We need to know what she is doing at all times.

I really hope some folks in the church have hobbies. Maybe they work on old cars or fish or collect African art. If they do, they might start a blog to share what they know and enjoy outside of making Jesus Christ the Lord of their lives.

I wish they would preach against filling out surveys and posting them to all your friends on MySpace. Those people are going to hell.

     Well, today, I finished up what was supposed to be a one week contract in two hours.  IT Security, server management, that sort of dork stuff.  Two hours for what they expected to take a week.
     Either I’m really good, or they have really freakin’ low expectations.

     I guess now it’s just time to wait for the check from this multinational corporation.  Bankroll.  Thank you, thank you very much.

     I screwed around on MySpace a little tonight, and decided, “Ya know, Myspace really sucks.  This is a crappy design.”  Then, by some freakish coincidence, as if he’d heard my thoughts, Swanky sent me an message to check out this blog:

Yesterday I was reading about how the completely shit-ass design of MySpace is what gives them so much traffic (people need to click through 97 pages to do something they could do in one click on another site) and today I’ve added another reason to puke at the thought of that site. I keep getting e-mails from them that some skank named Jennifer has invited me to join her group “Hot Videos” but since I can’t do anything with the e-mail I have to go to the site to take action on it. Except even though I was on the site hours ago it’s forgotten my cookie and I have to login again. Except it says “you need to login to do that!” I need to login to login? OK, now, 3 pages later I’m logged in. And then I have to go home. And then I have to go to the mailbox. And then I have to go to the message. 6 pages later I finally get to this message and hit deny, to which I’m treated to a “sorry, you can’t do this because we suck and are having errors or the atari 2600 box this whole site is running on just got unplugged or something” bullshit error message. Basically it won’t let me deny the message. I try again and again. I’ve now given MySpace about 20 page views trying to delete this spam. Finally I decide to just report it as spam instead, except I can’t do that either because of the same error that says they can’t deny the request. Worst. Site. Ever.

     Short, sweet and to the point.

     And this, of course, is why many people are saying, “Pageviews are obsolete!”

     Sorry, but as a designer, I’ve known that for at least eight years.  I mean, come on — please don’t tell me you guys are still measuring Hits and Pageviews instead of User Sessions?  Please?

     *shakes head*

     Tonight, I’ve been watching “Van Wilder” on Comedy Central.

     Towards the end of the movie, there was a commercial for the Helio.  “Don’t call us a phone company.”  “Get all your MySpace content right on your device!”
     From their website:

Helio puts you + your friends (not rates and minutes) at the center of our business, because the most important thing a mobile service can do is better connect you to your friends.
 .
 .
 .
We won’t nickel and dime you. Get All-In with our all inclusive membership and get access to MySpace, H.O.T. (Helio On Top), video, speedy 3G, and much, much more.

     Now, that’s all fine and good.  But their ad was *strategically* placed just prior to the Van Wilder scene:

We are now in session.  Mr. Wilder, you were found in violation of Article Section B of Coolidge’s bylaws — soliciting of alcohol to extreme minors…

     Coincidence?

     All you have to do is search Google…

     Looks like a cool device, tho… But Helio should certainly play down the whole MySpace thing.  I mean, who needs that kinda class-action?