Tag: geekiness

Performancing!

I recently installed Firefox 1.5 on my parents’ computer and was idly browsing for extensions when I came across Performancing. This is an extension that allows you to blog to WordPress, MovableType or Blogger from within Firefox!

Performancing for Firefox

Experimental support is also there for LiveJournal and MSN Spaces or a custom blog based on known blogging APIs. I just found a flaw in this extension though. Actually it’s more like a lacking feature than a flaw. There is no way to delete or go back and edit a post you make through the Performancing extension. You will be forced to do that from within your regular blogging service’s interface. Also, there is no way to change the date and time of your post. And, Performancing is only for Firefox 1.5.

These are minor quibbles nevertheless, and considering that the extension is still in beta, its bound to get better! I’m already in love with it, although this is probably the last post I can make with it for a while since I’m heading back to Bombay tomorrow.

*sigh*

But dammit, this is so coooool!

Update: I’m just so stupid! There is a History tab which allows you to edit your last few posts and delete them even!

Science can be sexy!

Being a wonk (as Brits would say) or a nerd/geek is usually a bad thing. If you’re too interested in science or (god forbid) you choose that as your profession, you can forget about ever being called hot or sexy. You’re more likely to be that boring person in stuffy clothes and glasses that stands in a corner at party and bore people to death whenever you open your mouth to talk.

Well guess what? That stereotype is going out the window! Not only do some women find geeks hot (yay!) but even a magazine like People rated a scientist (a geologist, yawn!) as one of the sexiest men alive in 2005! Dr. Michael Manga who is at the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley rubs shoulders with Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Viggo Mortenson and Matthew McConaughey among others in the latest issue of People.

While idly browsing the net for any other articles on Dr. Manga, I also came across inkycircus, life in the nerd girl world, a blog by three women science journalists which categorises their blog-post about Dr. Manga under “men whose babies we want to bear!”

New Features!

For lack of anything else happening on this blog, I’ve spent most of last night plugging in some new (and mostly useless) features! 🙂

Well, basically, I’ve just tweaked the way commenting works and I’ve included Google/Blogger’s version of trackback which they call “Backlinks” (opens in a new window.)

Next, if you look to the right, you’ll see there’s a list of comments made on all the posts on the main page. If you click on the Date-Time stamp, it will take you to the item page for that blogpost and the relevant comment. Clicking on the usernames will take you to their Blogger profiles.

Also, the comments now appear on the main or archive pages too when you click on the comments link below a post. And (what I like the most) is that now I also list all the people who have commented on an entry!

Wheee!

Social network madness

Wasn’t the acronym YASN coined at least two years ago? So what’s with all the new social networks springing up? And why don’t any of them work well? Gah!

What I am on…

I was also a GNE prototype player and someone might eventually invite me to Wallop too..

*sigh*

UPDATE: I forgot to add Hi5 (a piece of crap) to the list and I’m also now on Wallop. Yay me!

I used to be able to handle this…

There was a time I was pretty cool with whatever went on in the world of computing. I was a mad code monkey that wrote programs in assembly for fun, wrote DOS utilities, batch scripts and some simple database programs (for a library and a hospital.) The Internet came to India and I was on top of things since a geek friend and I hacked into the VSNL server in Bangalore and created accounts for ourselves. (Well, not really, it was simpler than that, but if I tell you how simple, I can’t brag then, can I?) That time has long since passed.

All my friends went on to be computer engineers and I studied biology. I finished a bachelor’s degree in biology and got a master’s too. My metamorphosis from computer geek to biology geek was complete.

Nevertheless, I still played with computers a lot, never did any coding ever though. I surfed and surfed and then surfed some more. I had a million (some would say zillion) accounts wherever they were free and some paid accounts too. I was active on newsgroups, on fledgling social networks, played online games, and chatted with friends across three networks and IRC. Phew. And all this while being a grad student at university.

Today though (and for a few months previously) I can’t be that active anymore. I barely make the time to read and reply to email. I check friends’ blogs for updates maybe once every two days as opposed to several times a day! I rarely ever login to orkut when I used to be on for most of the day earlier. Yahoo! Messenger which would have me logged in even while I was asleep, hardly gets a workout these days. And I login to MSN only to play Minesweeper Flags with friends.

So why am I boring you with all this? Well, it’s just so if I don’t comment on your latest blogpost, don’t read your new 360° page/blog, don’t reply to your email as often, you know why! 😉 (Yes, Yahoo! 360° yet another social network is out and I have a page there…)

The funny thing is, just about this time last year, I was writing this post about how cool (sort of) my online existence was! One year later…

The family that bots together

Kingdom of Loathing was this funny, weird, and fairly simple (in terms of interface) online game I played for a few months last year. Many of us from flickr/GNE really got into the game and spent a lot of time on it. We even had a clan of our own.

Then, quite as suddenly, many of us got bored with it. Some though, were still very into it. Notably Shambly Hermit. He kept playing and playing and eventually worked his way into the 1337 crowd. He is now a member of some warehouse whatever clan which apparently controls a lot of what happens in KoL.

Shambly also spends his time commissioning art and avatars for other KoL players. He also runs my two players on KoL. Shambly is the dog you never know is on the internet. (I bet his dog is online too!)

Isn’t it Hobvias?

So then, striatic has been going under the name of Hobvias Sudoneighm for quite a while and a week or so ago, yeöz finally twigged onto it because of a Google search he did. If I recall correctly, in a moment of uncharacteristic eloquence, he said he was a moron.

Today, striatic was quite excited to discover that a Google search for Hobvias Sudoneighm presented yeöz’ pic as the 5th and 6th search result. The hobvias thing to do was a Google bomb to help yeöz climb the rankings. My fellow conspirators in this endeavour are Shambly Hermit, striatic and Emily. (With hopes of recruiting more Flickrites.)

edit: We’ve just been joined by Meer 🙂 And I’ve learnt that co-ordinating a Google bomb is hard work. Out of the five of us doing this, three of us are linking to one page and two others linking to another page. Aaaarghhh!

Google’s Game, Set and Match

The fun folks at Google now present for your viewing pleasure… Google Sets.

Enter in a group of things you know belong to a set and then click a button and Google predicts other items that might belong to that set each linked to a Google search for that word.

I played around with it, and found it to work pretty effectively. Some funny stuff, try putting in “walrus manatee dolphin” and click on large set to see someone unusual amongst all the sea creatures. 😉

Or you could try putting in “one two three four five” and see how Google counts!

Can you see me now? Good!

It’s always funny looking through the referrer logs for this blog. Especially the searches that seem to turn up my blog. Here’s a random selection…

From AOL Search:

MP3s are for previewing purposes only

From Google (obviously the most)

pylons fluorescent tube
neena gupta+hot pics
download arul in wma format
hindu flickr
lesbian lj icon
shivanee blogger