Four Island

You people were quite split over this! :P In fact, I loved how half of you were extremely blunt! YAY :P

What was your favorite part of Randomlog, while it existed? Pink Panther - 0 vote(s)! Caption'd - 5 vote(s)! Random stuff - 0 vote(s)! Umm.... nothing - 5 vote(s)!

It seems like the only thing there worth retaining was Caption'd, which is coming up soon, so horray! Also, I didn't include My Life Is Happy in that poll, so I'm not quite sure if you like that, but anyway, yay for stuff!

Also, I'd like to mention something: OMG! Last week, I POSTED EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE WEEK! This is the first time I've do so all year! In fact, it's probably the first time I've done it since January 2009 :P. Horray! I am going to attempt to keep posting continuously because it's quite fun! Yay!

Anyway, for the the weekly Caption'd:

Hemorrhoids

I'm thinking of possibly posting two Caption'ds a week on Saturday rather than just one, if you think only one a week is too little. What do you think? Comment! :P

Wow, this certainly has been a posty week! I'm going to bring this lovely week to a close with another musical review! The last one was rather fun to do and there's this new album I've been listening to that I've just been itching to force everyone to listen to.

Can you guess who it is? Interestingly enough, the hint is the OTHER suggestion from Blogging About (last time was Haunted by Poe, which has to do with House Of Leaves). That's right, Imogen Heap. But, not really. Sort of. I'm reviewing the album Details by Frou-Frou!

Frou-Frou is a musical duo consisting of Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth. They only released one album (between Imogen Heap's first and second solo albums) called Details, way back in 2002. What I find odd, however, is that my Imogen Heap-fangirlness hadn't pushed me into listening to this album sooner. Quite odd. I actually knew a bit of their work, too: they covered the song "Holding Out For A Hero" by Bonnie Tyler (which was placed on the Shrek 2 Soundtrack), which I liked before I even knew who Imogen Heap was, and I started listening to "Psychobabble" off this album at some point last year, but for some reason neglected to listen to the rest of the album.

I think the reason for this is that when I thought of Frou-Frou, the song "Let Go" came into my head. Which is odd, considering that I only the first line of the chorus: "So let go, so let go". For some reason, that line really annoyed me any it probably put me off listening to the album. I finally listened to it, though, a few weeks ago and was so very happy I did. It was like Imogen Heap releasing a new album because, really, this IS her. And it is awesome.

So, like last time, I'm going to make a list of all of the tracks on the album and rate them one at a time. However, this time I'm not going to try to "interpret" them, like I did last time, seeing how badly I failed at that. :P Anyway, here we go!

1. Let Go - As stated earlier, I used to really despise this song. I really don't know why. Perhaps it was because I only knew the first line of the chorus. Anyway, once I started listening to the entire thing, it quickly became one of my favorite songs on the album. The entire thing is rather mysterious and exciting and the last two lines of the chorus (It's so amazing here. It's alright / 'Cause there's beauty in the breakdown) are sure to bounce around in your head for days. 5 stars
2. Breathe In - Another favorite of mine, this song, unlike Let Go, is rather bubbly and effervescent. The chorus is amazing, easy to remember and will, like the "da dayum dun dey" hook that sneaks in towards the end, keep you singing this song for a while. 5 stars
3. It's Good To Be In Love - This song enters with a foot-tapping beat similar to "Get You Off" by Fefe Dobson. Next enters Immi with some beautiful lyrics, which get even better during the pre-chorus and chorus, where the vibrant background comes to a crescendo. The song comes to an end with some vocals, some well-played instruments and a classic fade-out. A great song. 4 stars
4. Must Be Dreaming - An (appropriately) surreal song with verses that give a sense of running out of time, but an abrupt change of direction when it comes to the choruses, which are undoubtedly upbeat and high. Amazing song. 5 stars
5. Psychobabble - As stated earlier, this is the first song I heard off of this album after it was suggested to me by Pandora some time late last year. Because of this, I've heard it quite a lot and, as a result, am sadly quite tired of it. However, with it's dark themes and engaging music, I can't deny that it's a good song. 3 stars
6. Only Got One - A chirpy song about living your life. Shoot, I "interpreted" it. Anyway, an okay song with a repetitive chorus which really engages you at the second verse onward with the supporting beat and the hook "Liiiiife!" 3 stars
7. Shh - A somewhat dark song with jumpy, upbeat verses and opposingly mysterious, yet beautiful, choruses that draw you into the song with their amazing music and equally amazing vocals (Don't make a sound / shh, listen). This song is also similar to "Wild" by Poe in that about half of it is song, and the other half is instrumental with effervescent vocals thrown in. My favorite song on the album. 5 stars
8. Hear Me Out - A moderately slow song that picks up at with it's singable chorus. I say "moderately slow" as if it were an insult, but I rather like the occasional slow song. 4 stars
9. Maddening Shroud - A very upbeat song that relies less on Immi's electonica music style than the rest of the album. The song is saved, however, by the addictingly singable lyrics. 4 stars
10. Flicks - A very electronic song, in contrast with the previous song, that is instead hurt by the fact that I really don't know what's going on in it. 2 stars
11. The Dumbing Down Of Love - Frou-Frou closes the album with a slow, quiet song backed with a piano rather than synthesizers and beats. While not quite my style, the song is quite beautiful and the chorus does have a quality to it that I find quite good. 2 stars

Yay! That was fun! Anyway, if we average the scores together, Details by Frou-Frou rates 3.8 of 5 stars! Wow, that's the exact same score I gave to Haunted by Poe last time. Interesting.

Anyway, Details by Frou-Frou is an amazing and I really recommend to everywhere, especially those who share my taste in music (you know, the OMG IMOGEN HEAP taste :P). I hope you've gained something from this article! Yay! Bye! :D

Yesterday's post on stupid spammers inspired me, for some reason, to do something I've been wanting to do for a very long time: clean out my Gmail inbox. I've had Gmail for about a year and a half now and I've accumulated nearly 2000 emails in my inbox. It just doesn't look good. It doesn't look good at all.

I remember reading a while ago (though my Google searches turn up nothing now) that a good Gmail strategy is to get everything out of your inbox. Like a traditional Inbox at an office, your email inbox is a place where new and action-requiring emails live. Once they've been dealt with, they shouldn't be there anymore.

I didn't simply want to Archive everything, though. Wouldn't it still be unorganized, but rather, just out of the way? Isn't that like cleaning your room by shoving all of your dirty clothes under the bed so that they're out of sight, but not quite out of mind? So, instead, I decided that I'd create a few labels ("Friends", "Four Island", "Facebook"...) and then, working back from the oldest part of my inbox, label emails under all the appropriate labels. Then, I simply archived my entire inbox. There goes my garbage! However, unlike the garbage under your bed, my email was sorted and I could simply click on "Friends" to see emails from my friends instead of having to search through "All Mail".

This was good. So, I've formed a new policy for email checking. Here we go:

1. First of all, and this is fairly specific, but if you use the Google Mail Checker Plus extension for Chrome or any other similar program that not only checks your inbox for new email every once in a while, but also shows you what the new email is, disable it. If you don't want to disable it, at least configure it so that it doesn't show you new email. Make it send you to gmail.com instead. The best way to organize your email is to make sure that you are fully focused on the task, rather than simply waving your hand at something that pops up.
2. Second, create labels for yourself. If you have specific types of email that you get regularly, like emails from your friends or emails from annoying social networking sites, create labels for them. If possible, also create filters that can automatically assign new incoming email to one of your labels. However, if you do this, don't make the filter tell these incoming emails to skip the inbox. You still want all new email in your inbox, ready for you to deal with them.
3. When you have new email, go to your inbox and click the email at the bottom. You should work through your email one at a time to ensure, once again, that you aren't distracted.
4. Read the email. Does it fit under one of your labels? If so, label it. Is it garbage/spam? Mark it as so. Does it require a reply or other further action? If it requires a reply, try writing it right then. If that's not possible, or if the email requires further action, then simply move on to your next email. If you are done with the email, though, Archive it. This will move it out of the inbox and out of your way.

If you follow these steps, not only will your Gmail inbox be deliciously clean, but you will know that the items in your inbox actually require something to be done to them. Isn't that great? I hope you've enjoyed this little mini-howto as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Really, I haven't written one of these for a long time! :P

I've written on my blog about spam before, but then I was really just making fun of some pathetic spammer's attempt at spam. Oh wait, that's exactly what I'm going to do now. Oh well. :P

As some of you know, I use Gmail as my primary email service. My first email address, though, was through Yahoo! Mail. Yes, I've now realized that Yahoo! is terrible, but I keep the address as an alternative address because my Gmail account is really my personal address. Anyway, I was checking my Yahoo! address the other day because I was expecting some email when I decided to check the Spam box. My Yahoo! address seems to get a lot of weird spam, so I thought I'd go ahead and scope it out.

Wow. I have seem some weird things today. Let's start off with a puzzle. Tell me what you see wrong with this picture:

Yes, I find it quite humorous that the email is clearly from someone named Kevin, yet the subject line says "My name is Mariya". Lolwhut. Here's another one:

Who are you? Nicole or Elena? Either way, you're some stranger on the Internet emailing random people. These emails are best seen through when you're not even the correct target demographic. It's pretty funny. :P

Here's an odd thing I've noticed happen several times with spam at my Yahoo! address:

My Yahoo! address is not ".@yahoo.com". Would that even be possible? But I seem to receive a lot of spam that doesn't seem intended for me: the other two spam emails I showed, plus most of the spam I receive at that address, is sent to a slight variation of my address, but is, for some reason, sent to me instead.

That third picture there is from a 419 email, too. Again with the incorrect demographic. Seriously, I am waiting for some 8 year old with an email address to reply to one of those with "Um, okay, I like money, but I don't have a bank account and mommy told me not to talk to strangers so um I guess bye".

Yeah, this post is pretty weird, but I just saw those emails today and wanted to rant. Really, spammers are so stupid! Example:

Is that even English‽ While that is extremely stupid, that's not really what I meant. Well, it sort of is. What I mean is that spammers don't seem to even try to seem valid anymore. The majority of the Internet know what spam looks like and some, gasp, even know to avoid it! I mean, does spam actually do anything for spammers anymore? What with spam filters and users with an IQ over 5 that exist nowadays?

There's also the fact that, due to the Age of Social Networking, email is largely dying out. I don't say this happily, I relish in email. I get giddy when Gmail Checker Plus pops up with a new message, most of the time only to become disappointed when I see that it's from formspring and it's notifying me about a "newly" answered question that I saw 5 days ago. The death of email isn't a topic for this post, however, though I would like to talk about it at some point.

Really, I'm just ranting on how spammers are stupid and often times, the only reason I would ever see a spam email is because I voluntarily go into the Spam box with the intention of making fun of the idiots that spam people. The only possible use I can see for spam these days is DoS, or possibly scamming stupid people with no spam filters on. Regardless, spam is stupid. And that's the end of my rant! :P

The dissolving of Randomlog seems to have resulted in quite a bit of fallout. We continue, today, with another explanation-y post. One day, on Randomlog, an Uncategorized post was published entitled "Get Along Little Moose" accompanied by an extremely strange audio clip. I'll reproduce that here. :P

Click to listen to Get Along Little Moose

It's hilariously weird. For those of you that couldn't really understand it, here are the lyrics:

Get get get along Get get get along Get get get along little moose {x4}

Get along little moose You move way too stupidly We have to get to Mamatown in the north of Idaho! We have 4 head of nose To move way out West But you're moving too slow You are such a pervert!

Get Along Little Moose

What on earth is it? Is it a preview of The Gates Of Sleep's new song? Um, no. It's actually (once again) the result of a combination of MadLibs and my insanity. The other day, I was video-chatting with my cousin and we were doing MadLibs. No, we weren't Pink Panthering, we were putting in randomly insane words in each field. One MadLib I did was called "Westward Ho!" It was.... odd, to say the least, even disregarding my MadLibbial additions to it. It was about two insane children who thought they were cowgirls and were singing songs and stuff. (No, I'm exaggerating, seriously! :P)

The song they sang ended up as "Get along little moose, you move way too stupidly...". In a bout of insanity (where HAVEN'T we heard that before?), I opened Audacity, put the song though a Text-To-Speech program, added some background music, played around a bit with the vocals and.... there we are! Aren't I weird? :P

Okay, by now you've seen the title and are prepared to run for your life. DON'T WORRY. I'm not going to inundate you with Pink Panthers! Well, sort of. Maybe.

First, I wanted to sort of explain what on earth I was on during Randomlog. The idea started on or about Thursday, two weeks ago. I was poking around gmail.com for some reason and decided to create a new email address: one that people could send completely random stuff to that I would be inspired by to write or produce something. I probably filched that idea from Homestar Runner, but whatever. :P Anyway, I decided I would make a blog for the stuff I created via that method.

Later, I was poking around some old parts of The Fourm and discovered this old fossil. A story generated in a MadLib-like way. I mentioned in that post that I had also created a similar story using Pink Panther in every field. I don't know why I did that. It was weird. Anyway, I was suddenly inspired to create a new blog where every post was a Pink Panther'd MadLib story. I see now that that is enough to send someone insane. Oh well. :P

Anyway, I was setting up the Pink Panther blog at one point (K2 loves me like a kitten!) and suddenly realized that I could combine the two ideas! So I renamed the blog to Randomlog and made Visitor Content, the random email inspiration thing, the main part of the site. Sort of. As of Saturday, when this post was written, which also happens to be 7 days since the email address was first revealed, I have received no email at that address. Quite. :P

Anyway, as you know, Randomlog is no more. However, I do not like throwing stuff out. When I decided to post Caption'd images every week after the poll results, I didn't start posting images with the first one that hadn't been seen, I posted all of the previously revealed images (all four of them) AND posted a new image.

Where am I going with this? I think you know. The Pink Panther Collection! YAY! I moved all of the Pink Panthers from Randomlog, published or not, to a single page and put them up on Four Island Other. Read them! Please? :P Some of them are actually a bit funny because of the inappropriate parts of speech and the self-referencing, though the repetition does sort of get to you. Anyway, there we go. Twenty-three MadLibs full of Pink Panther. Yes, I know, I'm very odd. Deal with it. :P

Hi, this is the first piece of the segment from Randomlog that I like to call "My Life Is Happy" that I never really explained. A lot of the stuff I see on the Internet makes me really sad and I really wish I could fix the ending and make it happier. Well, that's what I'll be doing here. When I find a sad story or comic on the Internet, I'll recreate it and post it! Here goes the first one! (The original story is here).

---

Dear School,

God bless you for the beautiful radio I won at your recent senior citizen's luncheon. I'm 94 years old and live at the local Home for the Aged. My family has long since passed away and I rarely have visitors. As a result, I have very limited contact with the outside world. This makes your gift especially welcome.

My roommate, Maggie Cook, has had her own radio for as long as I've known her. She listens to it all the time, though usually with the volume so low, I can't hear it. For some reason, she has never wanted to share it.

Last Sunday morning, while listening to her morning gospel programs, she accidentally knocked her radio off its shelf. It smashed into many pieces, and caused her to cry. It was so sad.

Fortunately, I had my new radio. Knowing this, Maggie asked if she could listen to mine. I said "of course", but asked her to put the volume up so that I could hear it. She was so flustered--she wasn't aware that I couldn't hear it previously! It was all a huge misunderstanding. From then on, we became very close friends and we both enjoy the radio you sent us. Thank you so much for bringing entertainment into my life and helping me gain a new friend.

God bless you.

Sincerely, Edna Johnson

Yes, the public has spoken. I have gone quite insane. Look see:

Randomlog. Awesome idea or Starla's gone insane again? OMG THIS IS SO AWESOMELY RANDOM I LUV RANDOM YAY INSANE LOL YAY - 2 vote(s)! whut. You're already insane. You're more than that! Do something! - 5 vote(s)! What's Randomlog? - 1 vote(s)! Indifferent - 1 vote(s)!

So, Randomlog has been dissolved. I know, I think I went temporarily insane last week. However, I have a replacement life for it. Don't think it's legacy is dead! Because... something!

I have been trying for A VERA LONG TIME to get it through my THICK head that THIS IS MY PERSONAL WEBSITE. OMG. I CAN POST. WHAT I WANT. ON IT. AAAH. I've keep telling myself that I can post freely here, and yet, it never happens. However, I think that is going to finally change. Now that Randomlog has been dissolved, I need another place to pour that random creativity into. Where should that be? Right here, right? No, I won't be posting Pink Panthers here because I know they are heavily despised. No, come back! :P

Now, Randomlog, as seen above and from the results of this week's poll that have already come it, was not a very popular place. I blame Pink Panther. :P However, I really liked both the Caption'd thing and the My Life Is Happy segment (which I never actually explained), so what I've decided is that I'll post a Caption'd along with every week's poll results and I'll just post My Life Is Happy pieces, as well as other randomly fun stuff, directly to my blog. Won't this be fun?

Because four Caption'd images have already been exhibited, I won't be cheap and spend four weeks showing images that have already been seen. I'll post those four images today PLUS a new one, and every week from now, I'll post one. Doesn't that sound great? prays

What I Like About... Starch

Gleefully Descrated

What I Like About... Tina

Robes

And here's the new one!

Tina's Creation

Yay! Anyway, my final topic in this extremely long poll post is that I really didn't like what I did last week with combining a poll post with a real post. It just produces too many problems. Therefore, while last week will not count as breaking my annual goal, I will no longer be posting ONLY on Saturday. I have to post at least one more time during that week.

Really, I think my problem with poll posts is that, because I don't post other things that frequently, there's so many of them. With this (hopeful) new posting regime, this shouldn't be a problem anymore. Yay! Let's see how it works out. :)

Okay, guys, last week's poll about a new poll process has completed and the unanimous result was to showcase the poll results along with a normal blog post. So, to try it out, here we are!

Do we need a new weekly poll process? Yeah, don't post the results in a post. - 1 vote(s)! Yeah, post the results along with a normal blog post. - 4 vote(s)! Yeah, something else, please comment! - 0 vote(s)! Nah, it's good the way it is. - 1 vote(s)!

The poll process really does need some revamping, especially seeing as it's one of the oldest parts of Four Island. Before Quotes, before Fouripedia, before the modern day Fourm, there was The Poll Of The Week. And now it's a half-deaf hyena with vocal issues. You get what you get. Anyway, the reason I'm talking about this is because I'm not sure that this is a completely satisfactory solution. My main problem with it is that I'm going to have to mix together two different topics into one blog post. I'm insane about organization and.... yeah. Really, this shouldn't be a problem as some old poll posts were embedded seamlessly into mass posts before, but still. Also, now I have to either: hold off posting main posts for Saturday or update the poll on Saturday but not post the results until later in the week when I update. And does this post count as my weekly required post for my annual goal? It's a bit of a mess, really. What do other websites do with polls? Please comment on this! I know you all hate commenting, but please! :P

Now, for the main content of this post: A few days ago, I went insane again (this is becoming rather standard.... :P) and created a new blog called Randomlog. It's pretty much just weird. So far, there are three different categories of posts on Randomlog:

• Viewer Content: This is what the blog is really about. I've created an email address (randomstuffthatyousendme@gmail.com!) that I want people to email random stuff to. Like, anything. Poems, drawings, quotes, viruses, tissues, whatever. Then, I'll make some content out of it. This'll be fun! :P
• Pink Panther: This is a bit of a throwback from a looooong time ago, but basically, this is a daily post thing in which I play MadLibs, fill out every field with the phrase "Pink Panther" (sometimes I may modify the phrase to fit the word type--Pink Pantherly for adverb, for instance) and then post the result. Not something that you couldn't do, but I did it and you didn't! Oh! :P
• Caption'd - As seen in The Elizabeth Randomnesses, I have a fondness of finding funny pictures and adding captions to them. Yep, that's what this is. :P It updates on odd-numbered days and so far, most of them seem to come from What I Like About You :P

So, well, there's Randomlog! Make sure you send in stuff to randomstuffthatyousendme@gmail.com! Yay! :P

Oh, and just a note, this week's poll on Randomlog is the hundredth poll on Four Island! Wow! :D Note that this doesn't mean that this is the hundredth week that Four Island has been up--we've experienced a few downtimes and I've neglected to update the poll a few times. :P

The Story Of How Starla Can Never Upgrade Her OS Painlessly (Yes, an IRC joke. Don't you love those?)

Ubuntu and I, we go way back. We have history. Ever since I fell out of my chair at 2am because Ubuntu was able to identify my wireless network card when Gentoo and Debian couldn't, I've been a solid Ubuntu user. However, there is one part of our history that always goes wrong: upgrading. As detailed in my last Ubuntu post, my Ubuntu upgrade process can be rather horrendous. In fact, Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 may have been the worst upgrade experience for me, but after that, everything was lovely. Ubuntu 9.10 worked out fairly well for me, after I fixed the mouse problem.

This time, it appears that the completely opposite has occured. When I started to upgrade Ubuntu, as expected, I was having trouble. The upgrade failed a few times due to my dismal Internet connection and Ubuntu's busy servers and eventually, the Update Manager failed to show the Upgrade button. I switched to using the command line, but after a while, that stopped working too. Eventually, I decided to do what I had done for Ubuntu 9.10: download the alternative CD, mount it and use the packages on it as a foothold. While that worked for me last time, it still took a couple of days to download the rest of the needed packages.

Not this time. As soon as I started the upgrade, I got "30 minutes remaining." O_O. A half an hour? Only a half an hour? Impossible. It couldn't be. But it was. 30 minutes later, all 1014 packages were downloaded and had begun to install. It was amazing. I don't believe I've ever undergone such a fast Ubuntu upgrade.

However, this seemingly amiable upgrade may have been a warning of what was to come. Needless to say, Ubuntu 10.04 has not been very nice to me. Let's go over the specifics, shall we?

• One of Ubuntu 10.04's "new features" is a new boot process which is supposed to make booting much faster. For me? My computer definitely takes longer to boot than it did before, which is annoying considering how long it took before.
• And that's if it's a completely normal boot. Two days ago, when I started my computer, fsck ran because it hadn't checked my disk in a while and it took TWENTY MINUTES. YES. Don't blame it on the large amount of data on my drive--after twenty minutes, the progress had frozen at 90% and I was eventually forced to restart the computer. This, I think, is ridiculous.
• Previously, applications that hid in the system tray could be restored with a simple click of the icon, while right-clicking made a context-menu appear. Now, several Ubuntu programs like Rhythmbox and Transmission instead show the context-menu on left click, and nothing on right-click, forcing you to use a context-menu to open your program. Not a show-stopper, but definitely annoying.
• When I close my computer screen and open it back up later, EVERYTHING STARTS FLASHING. It's insane, makes it impossible to see what you're doing and lasts a while. Why is this? Does Ubuntu think that my programs aren't bright enough?
• Something in the upgrade has broken my copy of gnome-globalmenu (which I use to simulate a Mac-like menu bar) and now, certain programs like Gwibber do not work. This is disappointing, especially as Ubuntu 10.04 has a lot of added features for Gwibber with the addition of the MeMenu.

There are definitely more problems, but they're hiding from me. Anyway, I hope that the next version of Ubuntu (oh god, it's 6 months away....) is better.