Four Island

Welcome to our prettyful weekly poll post.

I hope you've enjoyed this week's poll post.

(We were right. 8()

I do have iNet access, just our ISP is stupid. That's right. Blame Optimum.

Anyways, as you no doubt know (because at the time of writing, only Hatkirby can be on the site, and later, this post will be old and archived), the commenting system's changed. Now it's more of a threaded discussion section, instead of being flat.

You didn't see anything

On Plurk, recently, I read "problogger asks what's your coolest domain name that you've got that you're not using yet?". There's a link in there to a pending blog, Techgirlogy.

Currently, all it is is a Wordpress blog, automatically focused on an "Under Construction" page with one comment. One of the funniest comments I've ever read on a blog:

Hello... I Googled for girl on girl, but found your page about Under Construction... and have to say thanks. nice read.

Lebanese Girls

The "Lebanese Girls", of course, was a link to another website.

Strangely, I read about this type of spamming only just recently on Lorelle (Comment Spam Alert: I read a similar article...), and incidentally, the comment on the Techgirlogy site matches one of the prompts listed on Lorelle exactly (well, except for the filler word, of course).

Perhaps blogs should implement some kind of filter to filter out any comments with content that matches any of the examples given on Lorelle. I don't know, just a suggestion.

Um, sorry about the random poll for this week. In fact, I thought of a suitable, non-random poll just minutes after creating this week's poll, but it was too late. In fact, I think I've already forgotten the new idea.... Poop. Anyway, here are the results:

....and falls down a man-hole - 15 vote(s)! ....gets hit by a car - 4 vote(s)! ....eats an icecream - 6 vote(s)! ....trips and does a somersault - 2 vote(s)!

This week's poll was taken from Gryphic's Poll of the Week suggestion on the fourm. See, polls you suggest do get in sometimes. Sometimes. If they're good. And if I can't think of a poll for this week.

Also, since I'm moving tomorrow, this poll may be up for more than a week. Possibly two weeks. It'll be strange, and I hope it doesn't need to, because the POTWs are a handy way to tell how old Four Island is.

The time of happiness is over, let the drear begin.

In two days, some time in the afternoon, Four Island will go down. This is expected. However, this isn't some short lived downtime, Four Island is expected to be down for around two weeks.

The reason for this is, I am moving back to America, back to New York. I don't expect to have internet access for about a week or two until after I get there, so, in the mean while, think.

Today is the last time I will see any of the great friends I've made while in Australia, and a final chance to say goodbye to them. It is very likely that I will never see them again, though it is also likely that they will continue to go on the Fourm. Never destroy the link between close friends, because it hurts. Badly.

I will miss living in this wonderful country with these wonderful people and I hope they miss me in return. Though I miss America as well, life won't quite be the same when I move back.

So let me take the chance to say one more goodbye to all of the people I've met here and to all of the people I've bonded with:

Goodbye.

Hatkirby

I will miss you all oh so very much.

I used to have these RSS feeds up on my Bookmarks Toolbar. Every five minutes or so, I'd scan through them, checking to see if there were any new updates. Most of the time, there weren't.

This became very tiring. I spent quite a lot of time everyday just checking my RSS feeds. Wasn't there an easier way to do this?

And then I found Google Reader. It's amazing. You can subscribe to feeds, categorize them, view short summaries, the works. I've sorted my feeds into "A-List", "Friend's Blogs" (which ironically includes Four Island), "Comments" (comment feeds), "Linux" and "Other".

Now, you may be asking, how does this increase productivity? What am I getting out of Google Reader? It may seem like I'm only getting a little more productivity because now all of my feeds are in one place. But, no, there's more.

Soon enough, I found the Google Reader Watcher Firefox plugin. It sits in your status bar, checking Google Reader every five minutes (this is adjustable). If it finds any new feeds, it announces this fact and puts a number in your status bar (the number of new feed items). When you hover over this number, it shows you the feeds the new items come from. All you have to do is click on the number and you get swished off to Google Reader.

So there you are. No more constant checking of RSS feeds. Now, you're instantly (or, at least, within 5 minutes) notified of any new items in your feed list. And, I've noticed my productivity go much higher because of all the time I've gained by not checking RSS feeds every five minutes. Now, the plugin does that for me.

I'm back with a short, question post. This time my question is so: What's the difference between a thing like tumblr and a microblogging service like Twitter? I only ask because they seem so similar.

Well, you know the drill. If you know the answer, please leave a comment on this post.

Also, no one has replied to my previous question. If you would like to (and please do so), you can see it at Slashdot...?

And in other news, we just hit 10000 hits yesterday! YAY! Four Island's growing so quickly! Thanks again to all of the people who care to come on Four Island to read posts, comment and use the Fourm.

I dreamed up a new Four Island project a couple of days ago called InstaDisc. It's amazing, I think. I'm going insane over it, I need to do it.

Basically, it's a way to find out about things on the internet like new posts on a blog, new comments on a blog, new posts on a fourm, in a quick and easy manner.

For more information, please visit its project site. Please especially visit the description of the conception of the idea, and most importantly, the Specification.

Please feel free to comment here about InstaDisc. In fact, I encourage you to. Please, do. I'm really excited about InstaDisc and I want to know what other people think about it. For instance, if you have any ideas on how I could improve the specification, please comment. If you want any features in InstaDisc, comment and add a ticket. Please give me feedback as I'm, as stated previously, very excited about this project.

And please, dear goodness, don't let me procrastinate.

I don't think I've ever made clear where I am on the OS war point of view. However, unlike most in the blogging world, I don't make sport of trashing Microsoft. Microsoft's a good company. It makes Windows XP. I like Windows XP. (I hate Windows Vista, but that's another story) No. The company I've decided to hate is not Microsoft, but Apple.

For one thing, Apple is cheap. It sells you an expensive computer that looks stylish but can't do anything good. Then, take the example of the MacBook Air. It's tiny, but you can't remove the battery. You have to get it "fixed". Yes, they call it fixed. Hear that? It's your fault. Apple accuses you unfairly.

Then we have the iPod, senselessly tied to iTunes. The iPod Nano Nike thing. If the battery runs out, well, too bad for you. You need to get a new one. Safari. Besides being a bad browser, it's HTML parsing engine is WebKit, which is actually a thinly disguised version of KHTML, the parsing engine KDE uses. So, Apple steals as well.

I can't really get started on how much I dislike Apple. BOOOOO APPLE IS BAD BOOOOO. expects to be on the receiving end of some flame wars soon

Also, also unlike most in the blogging world, I prefer IE to Firefox. This is mainly due to the fact I grew up with IE, but might also be related to the fact that now that I have to use Firefox (as I use Linux), it crashes about every 5 minutes. That's inconvenient, to say the least.

Sometimes, I get a little bored with standard blogging. Like, post a post. Post a post. On and on. Let's try something new.

And the deblatog was born! (Word coined by yours truly) A Deblatog is cross-blog argument in which many blogs can join in and argue senselessly about a set topic.

For instance, say I start a deblatog about "Pie". I ruthlessly argue that Pumpkin Pie is a delicious way to enjoy pumpkin. Then, someone else (say.... Gryphic), posts a post on her blog with her side of the argument. While she does that, she makes sure to Pingback the original deblatog post.

Then, someone else (say.... Timbo94) decides that Apple Pie is much better than Pumpkin Pie and writes a post about it. He then Pingbacks Gryphic's post, but not my original.<!--more-->

All of a sudden, Smiley appears and decides that we're all wrong and pie is disgusting. He Pingbacks Timbo94's post, not Gryphic's or mine.

Smiley's posted some interesting arguments, so I decide to write what I think about them on my blog again. I'll Pingback his post, but not Timbo94's, Gryphic's or my original.

Where this is going is that you can start out at my original deblatog post, read my side of the argument, and then click on the Pingback to go to the second side of the argument. It's a chain, and it allows other bloggers to post on something when they can't think of anything else to blog.

After reading that, you have to decide this. Either, I have an awful ton of spare-time, or I just couldn't think of anything else to post.

The only other random point I should put here is that, if my obsession with Pingbacks isn't obvious yet, I don't know how much better to put it.

I. Like. Pingbacks.

Wh.... who voted no? No, just kidding, it's ok. I'd rather have honesty than fabricated beliefs designed to only make me happy. I'm happy someone voted No. It proves that their telling the truth. Whoever that is, you've just earned one point.

Yes - 12 vote(s)! No - 2 vote(s)! Huh? - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent - 4 vote(s)!

Yes, this week's poll is very random. Remember, if you don't like random polls, I only put them up because I'm currently lacking a Poll idea. If you have any ideas, please post them to the Poll of the Week fourm on The Fourm.

I'd also like to tell you people that I think I finally know what Gryphic means in Welcome to My Life when she says:

My friends have no idea.

Gryphic

They don't, and I could never tell them. I only need to say that I've had a horrible week this week. I've explained it further here.

If I do go on Yaplet or The Fourm today, I might be very annoyed, or simply depressed. I'd be annoyed because FIREFOX IS A BEEPING BEEPHOLE, and if you people argue against that statement, even if you think it's false, all you'd be doing is annoying me more. You may think you know Firefox, but you haven't had it crash EVERY FREAKING 10 MINUTES while typing a LONG post! The slowdown's even worse that.

I'd be depressed for, well, read the think in the link above. I'm sorry, people, for what I've done, and I'm especially sorry to Gryphic, for yelling at you yesterday, and Pyro, for asking you to watch the tape. I've just had a very bad week. I hope you can forgive me.