...some things never change.

The Internet has come a looong way. I was too young to remember its early years what with the IRC stuff and all that, but I was right there in the thick of action during its teenage years, and that was when people still used to go to chatrooms, and use ICQ (uh-oh!) and all that.  I had been the first person to register my Hotmail account in my name. Yes, the Original Gangsta, the non-extra-numbers-attached-to-my-Hotmail-address person. All that 2 megabytes of space, belonging to the first doremish to ever claim the account.

I have to say, I am glad that my lack of originality for a clever name is now indicative of foresight. Talk about dumb luck... As any geek would understand, there's always a bit of pride when you are the first one to get your name registered. Forever and ever a big eff-u to all the people of the same name.

Then, slowly, everything required registration. Hotmail's ironically puny inbox started filling up with dozens of emails per day questioning the size of my manhood. If not that, then it's this distressed Nigerian prince that seems to constantly get himself in trouble (well gee if you can't learn from your first mistake, I can't help you, there's no bail out in my book of principles... all about tough love). Next thing you know, Reader's Digest tells me I'm winning millions every day, too. Done are the days of eagerly waiting for one new unread email to pop up - new mails were popping up everyday, and most of it was junk.

An then GMail came along with, gasp, one whole gigabyte. So guess who again eff-u'd all the later-adopters-of-gmail-of-the-same-name? Yeuuuup. So the perfect arrangement was born. An email was sent out to all the 15 whopping contacts in Hotmail to officialize the transition, and it seems to be responded by as many people requesting the sought-after-Gmail-invite.

And Mish called the new gmail account legit; 
and the old hotmail account garbage bin: 
and Mish saw that it was good.

Alas, insert that same stupid cliché about history repeating itself (if you are bored, wiki Historical Reccurence like I just did, that's another interesting time sink). Even with my best effort of keeping random registrations to Hotmail and real life impacting registrations to Gmail, there are all those "subscriptions" that end up going through Gmail. You want to create a profile on the career website? Sure, we'll send you a Newsletter for some crap every week. Honestly, I think the best way to ensure people don't read the content of your email, is by having "Weekly Update" or "October Newsletter" in your subject line.

My problem now is that, after finding that minuscule link buried in the 176523 words disclaimer that says "unsubscribe", and doing what is necessary to tell them to stop, I keep receiving some of those boring crap.

For me, lately, Internet has been lackluster. There was a long drought of more of the same stuff, and BAM prolification of user-generated contents and everybody's grandmother is on Facebook and following your tweets. But really, except for going to reddit and reading wikipedia, there's hardly anything that gets me excited to go online anymore... my routine became that of cleaning up my inbox (gotta be diligent or otherwise it gets 716523 groupons and travelzoo deals) and a quick scan of facebook (that replaces calling up friends to catch up), maybe the frontpage of reddit.

Maybe I am just getting old and grumpy, and change resistant. It's sad to see that with all those changes, the only thing that stayed with me through thick and thin is that my email inbox is still questioning my manhood (but now it's actually grown to 7GB - the inbox, not my manhood), and Nigeria still has very distressed royalties. Gone are the wild wild west days of Napster and easy p2p sharing, the intimacy of an ICQ Chat (not the uh-oh! one, but the real time one), dingey home-made HTML angelfire websites and the anonymity of your online persona (damn youtube celebrities breaking the 4th wall!).

I kinda miss the good ol' days. What do you miss the most about Ye Olde Internet?

waiting for those goddamn updates / iTunes makes me cringe every time I open it.

There used to be a time where things were much simpler. Your computer wants to tell you something is wrong? Big blue screen of death. You get a dozen of those a day? Format C:\. You have your trusty little boot disks, and drivers on neatly labeled floppy disks, in a box. You made copies of those things and that was your backup. And life was long and arduous, modems disconnected when people picked up the phone, but life was simple.

Now I have a computer that is 187623615273x more powerful than my first computer, an iPad and a Playstation 3 all of which are hardly anything I could have imagined 10 years ago. But what do I do whenever I turn on anything nowadays?

Facking update prompts. The boot time is reduced to virtually zero for the iPad to less than a minute for the other machines, down from the 15 minutes that I used to use to take a shower, while waiting for my computer to boot. But instead now after everything is opened up, I need to install 65412654 updates on Windows 7, on the PS3, on the iTunes because if you don't update iTunes you can't update iPad and if you don't update your iPad you can't update your 40 apps that have newer version to be compatible with the new iPad OS.

Now every time there's a new version of the iOS out, it has become one of those things that I need to do and keep postponing. Like a paint job. But it has 16523 prompts from different apps that I open to remind me to get the latest stuff. Then I'm forced to open up iTunes. Gaaaawd I hate iTunes. What a ugly slow snooty piece of sheet. It takes forever to complete the entire process and restore the content (this update just took me 1 hour) and that's only half the battle. After that I will have to proceed to install all those updates on the apps, some of which won't work as good as before after their updates...

It's great that we have all those nifty gadgets nowadays, but honestly if I need to do all this to get to use it for what I want it to, there's still too much work to be done by me. Com'on wizzes of the IT world... do something.

(Just in - "iTunes could not restore doremish's iPad - error occurred during the restore, backup corrupt"... &!#&^@ you piece of shit you're the one that backed up my effing iPad!@%$)

on limitations of blogger, and quick tips

As an ex-Xanga user, I have to admit that the features in Xanga were more intuitive and useful than Blogger. However as nice as features were, they didn't drown out the loud and ugly ads that were rampant on the website, and there was no way I was going to pay for my blog when my reader base is a total of maybe 10 people.

Anyhow, here's a little list of what used to be available to me but isn't anymore, and some work-arounds that I've found while snooping around Blogger Forums. 

1. The reply button - the most intuitively feature of them all, and to this date I don't understand why it is lacking in Blogger when everyone else offers it. The reply button is usually next or below a comment and allows you to, well, reply to comments.

How-to: Here is a little widget that adds a reply button to your blog comments: 

http://blog.thisischen.com/2009/04/how-do-i-reply-to-comment-on-blogger.html

2. Something to notify you when someone replies to you on their website - so you left a comment, how do you know if the author replies to your comment? As a blogger who cares, and replies to reader comments, what if my very witty and insightful responses never get to my flock? 

Whereas Xanga automatically notifies people of replies made on their comments, unfortunately you have to opt-in this option in Blogger if you want more of my wisdom. 

How-to: When you're commenting, click on the Subscribe by e-mail link underneath the Comment Box, this will send new comments to the particular post to your email. Unfortunately, the replyer to your comment (e.g. me) has no way to enforce this on you. So if I call you a dumbass in my reply it's because you wanted the insult. 

This is obviously annoying. If you're a preacher, you should defect and use Wordpress or something.

3. Direct link to the commenter and follower's blog - So I click on your little picture, because you're following me and as a curious cat, I want to read your blog too and show some support. If you are one of those people that forgot to click a little box in your profile "display my blogs", then I can't find your blog. Not unless I know your very clever blog name, or that 18 digits blog ID.

Even if you do, after I click on your name it shows me a list of blogs you have, and then I have to click on your blog link. Ugh.

How-to: Go to your profile, choose to display your blog in your profile - you'll get more readers!

I'm completely addicted to my ipad...

Apart from the few minutes I spend on the newspaper's crossword puzzle everyday after work before giving up, i hardly ever do anything without paddy. I work out with it, i watch tv while playing mindnumbing games on it, i read on it and heck i even put it on the pillow next to me... It's the first thing i touch in the morning and it's the last thing i see before i go to sleep. Worst of all I've downloaded so many apps that i don't use.... And i've picked up twitter.

With all the connectivity i have you'd think that i'm an information junkie. Au contraire, all i've been doing is pretty much looking up celebrity gossips, play asinine games and reading extremely lengthy fantasy novels. I even have a backlog of such novels. I've vaguely heard of that missouri tornado but apart from that i don't really know what's happening out there nowadays. I even missed out on the entire Arnold saga because of crazy work hours last week, and had to read a summary timeline on the weekend to catch up - by that time i've obviously already missed out on all the late night show jokes :/

I can certainly catch up on all those late night show episodes, but what about those glee, modern family and big bang theory episodes that i missed, too? I've got several months of magazines i haven't read, and i've been ignoring raphael (my ps3) for months now. Piano and guitar are collecting dust and i'm ashamed when guests ask about them - if not because of lack of space i wouldn't even put them in display.

Looking around, i guess i have come a long way in terms of knowing how to deal with time by myself and entertain myself... Or maybe it's just one of my people-hating-phases.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad