gbazz

Funnily enough, I started writing a post last night, but never got around to finishing it. The title? “Procrastination, let’s begin!…later” A fitting end for a post about putting things off till later.

First there was Gunbound, then there was Myspace, and then World of Warcraft came along. While all of those were fun, they eventually wore off, proving that I do have an addictive personality, but it seems that my addictive personality has an attention span slightly better than that of a goldfish’s.

The latest in this long string of addictions comes in the form of Stickam, one of the newest networking sites that have appeared out of nowhere. The words under its logo read “The Live Community” which are a pretty much accurate description of what it does. Stickam lets its users communicate with each other using their webcams, either by having one user host a room which other people can join, or by someone forming a chatroom which anyone can join.

Now I personally like the idea of a web based video conferencing tool, but during the four hours I used it, I felt just a little bit like a creepy old man sitting across from a high school, watching all the kids do stuff as they left school. I mean, sure, it’s fun to sit there and talk to your friends, or make more friends over the net, but wouldn’t you be paranoid that someone was pretending to be something they weren’t while they’re talking to you?

Another thing that I noticed was the amount of people who leave their cams online 24/7. The whole thing feels like a few dozen mini-Big Brothers all squished together for the convenience of all the voyeurs out there who enjoy watching the drama in other people’s lives.

Anyway the whole thing got me to thinking about how the media has been talking about how the latest generation despise the chatroom and email as things of the past. Stickam seems to have given the whole chatroom thing a facelift, since they now have chatrooms open that can hold heaps of people, and stream video at the same time. So maybe the media was a bit hasty in giving chatrooms the “dead” label.

But I have spent way too much time on the computer. (Stickam is my life now) And I should be getting to bed. How weird would it be if I had a Stickam themed dream?

written by Brian \\ tags: big brother, chatrooms, Everyday, myspace, procrastinate, stickam, Tech, voyeur, World of Warcraft

One of the things that makes Wordpress so cool is the fact that you can customise it so much with all the plugins and widgets that other very special people develop. =]

Over the last 4 hours I’ve been looking for plugins and widgets and I’ve found a few that I really like.

Lightbox 2.0

This is one awesome plugin. To see what it does, click on one of the thumbnails below.

Lightbox provides your visitors a convenient way to view the images you want them to see without navigating away from your site. It works by preloading the images and overlaying them on the current page, so your visitors don’t get bored with waiting for an image to load and leave your site.

Jerome’s Keywords 2.0b

I know there are a fair number of tag plugins around, but I particularly like this one because it updates the tags that show up on your Technorati page. This plugin is a great one, but there seems to be some kind of SQL error when you search for all posts relating to a particular tag. This error has been much discussed on the plugin’s download page, but the author hasn’t up dated it yet.

Chip has released a modified version of Jerome’s Keywords, that’s meant to fix it, but for some reason I still get the error. I’m going to take a look at it later when I have more time, but for now I’m just hiding any links that lead to the tag search pages. (It’s been fixed^^.)

Chip’s Tag Cloud Widget 2.1

This one places a tag cloud on your sidebar, similar to the Technorati tag cloud shown here. The font size of the most commonly used tags is bigger, to indicate the amount of times that particular topic has been the subject of a particular post.

The widget works perfectly, but due to the problems with Jerome’s Keywords I’m currently hiding the tag cloud to prevent the page with the error from coming up. (Again, it’s been fixed.)

Brandon’s ZScreen 1.0

This last addition to the list is a handy little utility for taking screenshots. The reason this program is so awesome is the fact that it can take fullscreen, window and region captures, and the images are immediately placed on your clipboard. It was the region captures that got me, since I like screenshotting sections of sites to put on my blog.

Another cool feature was the ability of the program to immediately upload the capture to your site via FTP, which can be a major convenience. You can also set ZScreen up to automatically open up your preferred image editing program for a few touchups before you put it up on your site.

written by Brian \\ tags: "jerome's keywords", chipstips, huddletogether, lightbox, plugin, screenshot, widget, Wordpress, zscreen

I was walking to the bathroom this morning when I saw this copy of the resident’s newsletter Blu-tacked to the wall. Sorry for the crappy quality, I took it with my mobile phone. The newsletter is called Res.Com, and is a monthly production.

written by Brian \\ tags: Everyday

The position of Residence Manager here in the dorm that we live in has recently changed hands, and with this one change, many more seem to have tagged along.

While the whole “no girls in the guy’s dorm” rule has been around for ages, the previous Residence Manager was fairly lenient and turned a blind eye to it when she could, but now an official penalty system has been applied, where guys found to have let girls into the dorm are given a “notice of breach to their Occupancy Agreement” and if they exceed 2 breaches, they can be evicted.

Here’s a quote from the newsletter that came out today:

You as individuals are responsible for who you allow into the Residence - should security conduct a spot check and when asking the females ‘who let them in the front door’ and it is you, YOU will receive a notice of breach.

Protect yourself, and respect other residents by not allowing females to enter the building when you pass through the front door.

What do you think of that?

Another major point of contention was the fact that the new Residence Manager started coming into the guys dorm without announcing herself first. Now this may not seem like a big deal if you’ve never lived in a guy’s dorm, but to the guys who are on their way to the shower in their undies or a towel, it can be a major deal.

A guy’s dorm is exactly that- a place where guys live. Now you would expect that since guy’s live there, they would have a male dean, but for some reason the dean that we had (who never came onto the premises) has left his position and the residence manager has taken over both the men’s and women’s residences.

Here’s another quote from the newsletter:

My role is to manage both the Men’s and Lades Residence. To this end I will frequently be found in Men’s Res., so I would appreciate you re-gearing your thinking of the hallways as public areas, and only the toilet, bathroom and your room as private areas.

This quote was in relation to the fact that guys were complaining that she was coming in unannounced while they were in states of semi-undress. Since the majority of the guys didn’t like all of these changes, there was obviously a lot of complaining.

One of the students had a unique approach to protesting however, and he said that he plans to continue doing it. His method of protesting? Walking around in nothing but underwear.

written by Brian \\ tags: assistant, dictator, Dorm, outdated, protest, Rant, resident, rules, underwear, undies

I work as the resident’s assistant in the dorm that I live in, and I like to think that I’m pretty easy going with some of the rules. Things like keeping the noise down late at night have to be enforced pretty much, but ridiculous things like no girls in the boys dorm? Everyone turns a blind eye to that rule.

But the story I’m telling happened last night, after a big resident’s meeting, a couple of friends, their girlfriends and myself were sitting in the TV room watching Thank God You’re Here. We had just psyched ourselves up to go out and buy pizzas and ingredients for milkshakes before The Chaser’s War on Everything started on ABC, when who should walk in but the new Residence Manager!

Needless to say it was a very awkward moment, and everyone just sat there looking at each other, expecting her to suddenly go off at all of us. Surprisingly she just asked the girls to go when she left, which wasn’t what we were expecting, and she stayed till the end of Thank God You’re Here, which was considerate of her, but still made the while room feel really awkward.

Of course after she left with the girls, the urge to go get pizza was dead, so we just watched The Chaser’s War on Everything and a bit of the comedy festival over in Canada. Nothing was really funny though, since her visit seemed to have killed the night.

The thing that sucks though, is that we knew that she had come into the men’s residence (thank God for network chat) and the girls had gone into one of the boy’s rooms to hide, but after waiting in there for 10 minutes had come back out again to watch TV.

Surprisingly she didn’t tell them off, but just told them that both she and security would be doing random checks in the future, to make sure that there aren’t any girls in the men’s residence, which blows.

The other guys shouldn’t be getting into too much trouble, but since I’m an RA, and I was in the room with them, I don’t know what kind of trouble I’m going to get into. Oh well, I can only wait and see.

written by Brian \\ tags: assistant, chasers, Dorm, embarassing, Everyday, here, milkshakes, pizza, thank, war