An interesting thing happened at a recent event called a PoetryPalooza. One of the members of the Coffee House Writing Group, which I am pleased to belong to, is a very talented and creative writer. As a well-respected veteran of creative writing Rick Stepp-Bolling was kind enough to do a little seminar on metaphors. It was very well attended with people crowding all the way out of the room. Rick asked us all to choose the most popular topic they could think of to create metaphors about. The younger members of the audience overwhelmed the voting with Facebook. So after explaining the concept of metaphor and similie, he asked everyone to come up with one for Facebook and put it on a big strip of paper he handed out. Some were playful, some profound but each person had one. At our last writer’s club meeting, Rick brought us a poem he had written/assembled from the the submitted slips. It was eerie how well it reverberated with Facebookness, so I reproduced it below:
Facebook
Facebook is like Junior High School
AAAAA Except you never graduate
It’s as private as a politician’s campaign donations
AAAAA Or a politician’s pants
A drug addiction or bad habit
AAAAA Incorrigible, but everybody tolerates it
Facebook is like farting/burping on a televised blind date
It’s Charlie Brown’s teacher talking
The Devil’s notebook
The meat grinder of the soul
Or a young girl’s suicide note.
Facebook marks cyberspace
AAAAA Like Neil Armstrong on the moon
It drives traffic on the Internet like a freeway
Facebook is a family tree
AAAAA A scrapbook of pictures
AAAAA And tastes like fudge.
Facebook is a place to come out
AAAAA Or a place to hide
Like a loaded gun
AAAAA It can help or hurt you
It is the future we saw in the past
AAAAA But we are not ready for
Facebook is a sleeping dragon just waking up.
Thanks Rick.
Without realizing it, many iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other smartphone users are revealing a lot more to the world then they may realize -and it can be dangerous.
smartphones can display locations within 15 feet from posted photos
Many smartphone apps use GPS signaling or embedded information in photos uploaded from your phone for “geotagging”. This tagged information from your iPhone or Android or other smartphone can be used or captured to display exactly where a user is when they post pictures, blog, shop online, use online mapping, or utilize many other GPS enhanced services.
So What Exactly is Geotagging?
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Categories: Android Phones, digital camcorders, digital cameras, Internet & the web, iPhones, Technology Tags: dangers of geotagging, geotag, geotag camera, geotag photo viewer, geotagging, geotags
A guide to how to ‘personalize’ an Amazon gift card.
Just giving someone a gift card doesn’t seem very personal but if you have an idea of the kinds of things they like, giving the card along with a group of suggestions, including links might just be the way to go.
Recently during our family ‘secret Santa’ drawing, one of us drew the name of a person they didn’t know very well. After asking around the family it was discovered this person really liked Science Fiction. The gift limit was set for $50. The secret Santa was not very familiar with many science fiction books, movies or tv series so was concerned on how to proceed. Giving a $50 gift card from Amazon was a great idea, especially since the recipient lived far away in Houston, Texas but, it would not a very personal gift. But not being a Sci-Fi aficionado it would have been difficult to pick gifts in this genre and besides, one person’s science fiction is another’s fantasy. It is an uneven field.
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Companies are rapidly ‘fingerprinting’ and cataloging the 10 billion devices that connect to the Internet.
If you thought keyloggers and other spyware programs or even cookies were intrusive BlueCava, Inc. and other companies are beginning to catalog all connected consumer devices by developing a ‘digital’ fingerprint for them. So far, David Norris’s company in Irvine, California has uniquely identified more than 200 million computers, cellphones and TV set-top boxes out of 10 billion in the world, reports Julia Angwin and Jennifer Velentino-Devries in the Wall Street Journal. BlueCava estimates there are 10 billion devices currently online in the world today. The incentives to acquire and sell this kind of granulated information to the $23 billion U.S. online-ad industry alone, is monumental.
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So here’s the scoop on Imperial Wars.
Quick recap and some history:
IWars online multiplayer game
The design for this game has had a long, very long gestation period and many influences. Detailing them would get away from the point of this post. However it’s antecedents are more numerous and for the most part, different than the current style of online multiplayer games. The decision to design the game started with The Games Network though many of the gameplay concepts came before that. Over several years, and with the changed fortunes brought by The Games Network’s demise the design for Imperial Wars on the web took shape.
Working with lead programmer Mike Kienenberger first and then adding Bruce Dean’s art the project made a lot of headway. Essentially to the point where Imperial Wars is today. This was definitely a labor of love that everyone gave their all to, and though we got a game up and online, it has some flaws. It’s hard to say that because of all the hard work and effort that went into the game and because we accomplished so much of the design. I’m not being critical of what we accomplished, it was miraculous to come this close. But the real world is not forgiving by virtue of coming close. We always knew that if we didn’t find the funding we searched for that it would be just a barebones version of the game online at the end. Mike and Bruce were brilliant in what they accomplished. Because of the foundation we built the possibility to move forward remains.
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