Secret Birthday

How the internet can get you in trouble:

Me: Hello!
Chris Colleague: Hello!
Me: Happy Birthday!
CC: How did you know it's my birthday?
Me: It was on the internet, on Facebook.
CC: Oh, bugger.
Me: Were you not telling anyone?
CC: Yeah, I didn't want to have to buy cakes.
Me: Is it the big one?
CC: Yeah, 30.
Me: Hey everyone, Chris is 30! Cake time!
CC: You get.

And that's why they warn you not to put personal information on the internet.

More Facebook

Since I last wrote about Facebook, I have used it quite a lot. But it is mainly a complete waste of time albeit a fun one.

There are a lot of applications you can add to your profile that seem to effectively do nothing except give a way for you to prove to the world how much spare time you have. For example you can identify endless music clips on iLike and nothing happens except you get a bigger score than all your friends. Or possibly your "friends". Or in Pirates you can pretend to be a pirate (Arrrrr!) and click a button that says "sail" a lot. And that's about it. Or a million other things, all equally pointless, except for the way they say to the world how little you have to do in it.

I might as well sit here (on my spinny chair) and write successive posts that contain nothing more than numbers that are one higher than in the previous one.

Or similarly, I could write this.

But sod it. It's great.

In other news... shiny iMacs!

Making Friends Is Easy

I joined Facebook earlier this week. It's quite fun but possibly serves no useful purpose at all apart from letting you pretend you're friends with loads of people and haven't completely lost touch with them at all, honestly.

I joined Friendster years ago which as far as I can tell is a very similar sort of thing. I asked lots of my friends to join too and most of them refused so it was a bit rubbish - I was clearly well ahead of the times. Now social networking is the zeitgeist and everyone's doing it.

Facebook lets you join Networks of people who
a) were at the same uni as you or
b) work at the same company as you
c) live in the same place as you

I haven't done this yet because
a) you need a valid uni email address - I can't remember mine (it was 10 years ago!)
b) might do this but it feels a bit tragic (it's not like I can't look up people at work already, when I'm at work!)
c) there isn't a network for York

so I remain unaffiliated for now.