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I joined Facebook rather late compared to most people I know. I always thought that if I wanted to contact people online, I’d just use email or instant messaging. If I wanted to share photos, I could email them or put them up on my website or on one of many sites dedicated to that purpose. I didn’t think it was necessary to join some “social network” in order to stay connected to friends.

That all changed in February 2007, when I finally cracked and joined Facebook. I remember the first month being pretty exciting as far as online events go. I would get emails every day telling me someone added me as a friend or someone added new pictures. This quickly died down once I was linked up with just about everyone I know. It was kinda cool to reconnect with some old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, and to see what people were up to. I found it easy to get sucked in, and I know a lot of people who were obsessed with Facebook for a while.

A year later, Facebook is not nearly as exciting or relevant, at least among my group of friends. I remember back in the day there would be so much activity on my news page every single day. Now I can go several days without checking Facebook and find that very little has changed.

Another reason I think Facebook “jumped the shark” is allowing third-party applications to be installed. I was never emo enough to have a MySpace page, and I liked the clean layout of Facebook, which is part of the appeal that led me to join. While there are some interesting apps out there, most of them are ridiculous and annoying. Oftentimes, if I want to leave a message on someone’s wall, I’ll have to scroll through their zombies, vampires, pirates, ninjas, funwall, superwall, daily babe, top friends list, booze mail and stripper name just to find it. All this clutter is reminiscent of the many hideous MySpace pages out there, and ruins the sleek, original design that I liked about Facebook so much.

The way I see it, Facebook has become a marketing machine, with little relevance to my life anymore. I’m disgusted that it’s been valued at 15 billion dollars. Facebook is no longer cool, but I’m still hanging on, and I won’t be deleting my profile anytime soon.

After being reconnected the other day, our Internet access went down again. We called Rogers back, and there was a recording saying there were known outages in the Whitby area, so we figured that was it. However, after three days with no Internet access, we called back to be informed we were suspended for a week because we still had a virus on one of our computers.

As I mentioned yesterday, I agree with the idea as long as we are given notice. When Rogers just cuts us off without any warning, it does nothing to help us. Now we’re stuck without Internet access until February 11th.

It’s pretty inconvenient, and I think Rogers could have handled the situation better.

The other day, we had a message on our home phone from Rogers High Speed informing us our computer had a virus and they would be temporarily shutting off our Internet access if we didn’t get it fixed within 24 hours. I think my dad mentioned something about running a virus scan, and that was the last I thought of it. The next day they cut us off and we were without Internet access for a little while.

Apparently Rogers runs scans on their network to search for viruses, trojans, worms and open ports on their customers’ computers. Although it was inconvenient to be cut off, I do agree with this practice. Many viruses and worms will send emails or try to send data all over the place, wasting resources and infecting other machines on the network. So by cutting us off, Rogers is preventing other people from potentially getting infected, and they are probably saving themselves some bandwidth at the same time.

Getting reconnected wasn’t too bad, except for a half hour wait on the phone to talk to an actual person. They simply told us to run a virus scanner, make sure everything is clean, and then they reconnected us. They also warned us that future virus problems could result in longer suspensions or termination of service. I don’t necessarily agree with all of Rogers business practices, but in this case I guess they are just doing their part to ensure we are responsible Internet users.

Last.fm is a free music community website that tracks the music you listen to and makes recommendations for new music that you might like. I joined back in May of 2007, and I really like the concept.

The site uses a technology called “audioscrobbler” to collect information about the songs you listen to, and in turn creates a profile of your musical tastes and listening habits. It’s easy to use, and all you have to do is register, then install a plugin for your music software. The plugin sends information back to Last.fm’s database, and the information is then available on your profile page. Last.fm creates detailed statistics, displaying the top artists and songs you’ve listened to, and the last ten songs you’ve “scrobbled.” There is also a “taste-o-meter” displayed on other people’s profile pages, that compares your musical tastes with theirs.

I don’t really use the “social networking” aspect of the site too much, since everyone uses Facebook for that, but it’s another nice feature that I could see being useful to some people. I really like the fact that I can look up information about the music I listen to, seeing artist bios, related or similar artists, and how many times they’ve been listened to by other users. The recommendations Last.fm gives is probably my favourite part of the site, because it has introduced me to a lot of new music that I otherwise would not have heard of.

Overall, I’ve been very impressed with Last.fm since joining about eight months ago. In that time, I’ve “scrobbled” 10,000 songs, learned about a lot of new music, and gained some interesting insight into my music listening habits. If you’re a big music fan, I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

I like video games. I’ve played them my whole life. I’m not what you’d consider a “gamer” by any means, but I’ll definitely play a bit when I have some free time. I’ve always been against those who condemn video games, saying they are a bad influence on kids. These are usually the same types of people who blame murders on the messages found in popular music.

I’m not going to get into the social aspects behind all of this, but I recently came across a couple of articles that talk about people saving lives because of what they learned in video games.

The first incident involved a young boy from Norway, who “feigned death” to prevent a moose from attacking him and his sister. He learned this technique from playing World of Warcraft. I don’t know anything about WoW (thankfully), but apparently this is a skill used in the game to pretend you’re dead so you aren’t bothered by enemies.

The second event involved a man who witnessed a car crash and was able to treat the passenger’s injuries based on what he’d learned playing America’s Army. The man reportedly stated “I have received no prior medical training and can honestly say that because of the training and presentations within America’s Army, I was able to help and possibly save the injured men.”

That’s interesting stuff, and I think it helps show that video games aren’t all bad, and can actually have a positive effect on people.