As If Google Isn't Already That Friend Who Crashed on My Couch Ten Years Ago and Won't Get His Own Place

...I give you Google's self-driving car concept. Is anyone else as skeeved out by this idea as I am? Has Google not already penetrated enough far reaches of my existence, not unlike a friend who asked to crash out on my couch ten years ago and still doesn't have a job?

Really, come off it, Google. First of all, your demonstration video is way too Geek couture - as if Arturo doesn't look silly enough whipping a giant iPad out of his Miami Vice jacket, it depicts a car that's a hybrid of Ghostbuster's Ecto 1 and a certain time machine Delorean. What the hell is that weird spinning laser thing on the roof? I half expected Arturo to dump some banana peels into the Mr. Fusion machine in the trunk before climbing in. "Drivers? Where we're going, we don't need-" cue dramatic drop of the silver sunglasses - "drivers!"

Second off, I've seen "Scent of a Woman" one too many times to get into a car driven by anyone with less than perfect vision. But no driver at all? Please. Now why don't you make like a tree, and get outta here.

Threaded Comments and Comment Ratings: Facebook's Improvements Energize the Nerd Class

Facebook is making waves - or, more appropriately, ripples - by adding a few new features to its comments section.  You know, the comments section: the place where people who, in sixth grade, were rejected by Jenny Hempstead when they asked her to go to the spring jamboree dance and they never got over it - the place where those folks go to talk under cover of anonymity.  Now you've got four brand-spanking new features in your beloved comments section to warm the cockles of your adolescent heart:

1.) User Network - This addition allows your location, school or company name to show up under whatever comments you leave.  This component should be a windfall for pedophiles, stalkers, and flunkies tasked with finding dirt on their work colleagues.  Ah, police state creep: you've got to love how we're edging ever closer to zero privacy.

2.) As of this post, there is no #2 featured on All Things Facebook, it looks like some sort of error. So far, this is my favorite improvement to Facebook.

3.) Comment Voting - As if our society doesn't drill into us enough that we must, against all odds, be liked, I give you the Comment Voting feature.  It appears that people can give positive or negative votes to comments they like or dislike. Or something. This, to me, is akin to neighbors fingering neighbors in Post World War II Communist Russia.

Ok, really - I don't give a monkey's shoe shine what Patty B. thinks of my negative comment re: David's Burning Man picture.  Me: "Ok David, I get it: you went to your first Burning Man. How many pictures of you must I see with your shirt off hot boxing it with a bunch of hippies?" Patty B.: down arrow.  Really, Patty B.? A downward arrow? Do you have to listen to my friend David go on and on about how "lunar orbit-like" his first Burning Man was??  I think not. So butt out.

4.) Feedback Rating and Comment Count - The only positive glimmer I can see out of this whole "improvement" business is that the Feedback Rating whatchamadoober might actually cut down on spam (somehow; don't ask me how). Your Feedback Rating will show you the percentage of comment votes that were positive.

Again, as so many times in life, I can hear the drill sergeant's voice from "Full Metal Jacket" ringing in my ears: "What is your major malfunction, Private Pile? Did your mother not show you enough affection when you were a child?!" I truly feel that things like feedback ratings have been installed because of a clamoring from the attention-starved crowd.

The Comment Count shows how many comments a commenter left in the comment thread. Is it really just a coincidence that the words "comment" and "communist" sound so similar? Discuss.

5.) Threaded Comments - Zeroes can now have sub-conversations with each other. Cue the Psycho music. Ree! Ree! Ree! Ree!

Pflupfy's bottom line: whether or not Facebook had installed these upgrades, the world would've marched on to its happy hoofbeats.  

Pflupfy's Rating: F-      

YouTube: Broadcast Yourself…Or Not

I'm on day 2 of seeing just how much of my precious time I can waste trying to upload a Quicktime video to YouTube. I've tried everything. Literally. And I don't misuse the word "literally" as so many latchkey-raised half-brians do today, for emphasis; no, I say it because I've taken out all the stops on this one.

I cut the video down (don't even get me started on the stupendously time-intensive process required to cut videos into pieces using Apple's Final Cut Express) into three bite-sized pieces that are way under 15 minutes long and 2 GB (YouTube's overly-restrictive file size; come on YouTube, what do you think we're trying to upload, a video of War and Peace as reenacted by mice? even though that's a fantastic idea?).  I've also installed Mozilla Firefox onto my Mac OS X laptop, installed Google Gears, yadah yadah yadah. 

And now, after 48 hours of sheer time wastingness, I discover that you can't upload MOV videos to YouTube. As it turns out, I've got to lay down $45 to buy a thing called SoThink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash to convert the files into FLV format.

Wonderful.

YouTube, let me give you a little advice: make your crap easier to use. Quicktime movies have been sweeping the nation ever since Christ was a corporal, so get on it. I don't care if you have some hissy feud going with Steve Jobs (I have no evidence to prove this is the case, but it feels right). Since it's the more creative types who most often make videos anyway, and I'd bet a prune to a post office box that most creative types use Mac's, it stands to reason that you'd stop being raving lunatics and let us upload MOV files without having to get some crummy conversion software. I'm sure you're in bed playing footsie with SoThink, I'm sure you've made SoThink your bitch and taken it on a walk, and that really chafes my money maker. 

So now I'll probably try to upload my crap-ass video to some other milquetoast outfit like Vimeo, but I'm sure I'll circle right back to where you find me now, head in the microwave and one finger hovering over the "Add 30 Seconds" button.   

Adding a Background Image to Your Blogger Blog: Just Forget It

Ok, so I have this amazing image I wanted to add as my background to this blog. It depicts the Greek god Zeus riding a pegasus bareback while clutching a thunderbolt. He's rearing back to throw the bolt at  an army of men down on earth. This image, to me, oozes total dominance. Forget whether or not I have permission to use it: I'm sure the National Gallery in London has other things to worry about. I want this image!

Except, of course, it isn't happening. After spending nearly an hour trying to get the brainless image to upload, I've given up. Just look at the coding necessary to get this little hum-dinger uploaded:

body {
background:#fff url("direct URL of the image");
background-position: down-left;
background-attachment: fixed;
background-repeat: no-repeat;margin: 0;

Not to mention the fact that you've got to get the bleeding thing uploaded into Picasa first, and the brother-humping URL it gives me doesn't do jack when I paste it into the above code.

What am I, a character from the critically-panned, cult classic 80's TV show "The Whiz Kids"? Coding is for men who've never touched the supple flesh of a woman. Not for people who have lives, like me. In third grade, when we were given an assignment to write a simple code that made a blocky-looking cow walk across the screen and eat a pile of pixelated hay, my cow ended up blasting off into the sky. Really, I've always despised code. It's never made an ounce of sense to me.

Must it be this difficult to illegally upload a copyrighted picture of Zeus destroying mankind?

Wormtongue Rubs Saruman's Feet, Whole World Goes Crazy

So today, Mark Zuckerberg, the coolest kid in the world who's actually a full-grown man, revealed his solution to what he calls "The biggest problem in social networking": the new version of Facebook Groups. Now, I've never used the old Groups, but judging by the 17,000 pages Mashable dedicated to the launch today (Mashable: the Wormtongue to Zuckerberg's Saruman), the new Groups feature is way better. Somehow, it will make people more social. Which is a bit like Willie Wonka telling you his candy will solve world hunger. Yes, candy will sustain you in the absence of other food, but it's not really living, is it? You know what else makes people more social Mr. Zuckerberg? Not being on a computer.

The strategery behind the new Groups - which Zuck (and I only use the condensed version of his name for ease of use, not because I idiotically think of him as the free-spirited kid next door) admits will not catch on like wildfire right off the bat - is to get a core group of people using them, maybe 5 to 10% of Facebook users. Or, in other words, all of the 30 year olds in the world still living in their parents' basement. He hopes these doorknobs will eventually invite their friends to join their groups (Zuck might be waiting awhile on that one) and these friends will help "define these subsets of the social graph" as Mashable writes on their website.

Up to this point, most interactions on Facebook were either one-on-one messages or were status updates where all of your friends saw the inane crap you wrote. But now, I guess, you can have conversations within groups (i.e. you can tell Suzie and Steve and Bobby that you had a PB&J sandwich for lunch, and not all of your friends will see it), so the new Groups feature sits right in the middle of the two prior functionalities.

Ah, Facebook.  You know what this whole media event reminds me of? When you were a kid, do you remember the first time you recorded yourself talking into a tape recorder and then played it back? Remember how weird and embarrassing it was to hear yourself, because you'd thought all along that you sounded so smart inside your own ears, but, to your astonishment, on tape you sounded like a lobotomized Charlie Brown? I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg ever has this feeling while up on stage, talking into his McDonald's drive thru headset. When he waxes existential about what the true definition of a friend on Facebook is, does his heart crinkle with remorse? Does he ever wonder what it would've been like to find the cure for Leukemia, an invention actually worthy of a $5 billion paycheck? I wonder.   

Tech Dump Manifesto

Yes, I appreciate the irony of writing a screed against the tech industry on a blog.  Haha.  Laugh if you will.  But it's a small price to pay in order to get my message out.  What is my message, you ask?  Through my blog, I will plead with the neo-evangelists of the tech persuation to leave me the F alone.  To get out of my face.  To stop forcing all of us normal humans to brand ourselves, for cripes sakes.  If I wanted to brand myself, I'd have my initials seared into my butt by now.    

And let me say this: although my fellow tech-haters may be small in number (now), we are loud of voice and strong of will and we will never, ever stop until every person promises to only check Facebook once a day.  Promises to shut the hell up about their stupid iPhone.  Or, at least, promises to stop talking about The Social Network movie.  Seriously guys, please stop.

Each week I plan to post an entry about a new app or device everyone is madly in love with, but which is obviously stupid.  Think of the postings as invitations back to the grown-up world.  I will enlist, be they willing, fellow tech-haters to write guest spots so you can see that I'm really not some lone nutjob shaking his fist at the sky.  We are a silent majority of people who hate social media, and we are tired of having ex-girlfriends trying to friend us on Facebook.

See you soon.  And please do not Tweet this or share it on Facebook or any other dumb thing.  Just click the orange X up in the right-hand corner of your screen like a normal person.  Thanks.