Archive for September, 2006

New gaming store in Bowling Green

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 30, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

There’s a new gaming store in Bowling Green called New Frontiers. I stopped in earlier today to see what they had available in the store, since I had heard from Jenny, Meghan’s sister, that the store had opened earlier this week. Really, the only reason I had heard about it was because the store owner had stopped into Finder’s to talk to the owner there, because he had worked at Finder’s while he attended undergrad at BGSU, and Meghan had spoken with him.

New Frontiers has materials for tabletop wargaming, miniatures, roleplaying, collectible card games, a small selection of your non-standard board games, and a Xbox 360 center. One of the main reasons I stopped in was to see if they had any Settlers of Catan items, which they did. So, to help out, I bought the Seafarers of Catan expansion box and a set of dice; Blue translucent with white numbers if you must know.

I also signed up for the New Frontiers Gaming Club, which cost $20 and is good for a year. The benefits include:

  • 10% off purchases and an additonal 5% off preorders
  • $1 and $3 off of 3-hour and 8-hour Xbox 360 time blocks, respectivly
  • $2 off even fees and $5 off Hobby Guild 6-week classes
  • Access to afterhours gaming (9Pm to midnight) on club night
  • First option on limited seating events

Now, I’m not sure if I will utilize many of those perks, but considering that I could, in the next year, purchase the Cities and Knights of Catan and expansion, as well as a handful of gaming books and other games, I’ll probably save over $20, so it’s worth it.

I also may go occasionally to the board game night. I was told that it is for people to bring their board games in, so I would probably take Settlers of Catan with me and get a game or two going. After all, I want to be that person who collects games and teaches family, friends, and strangers how to play them. I might as well start now. I might occasionally see if Meghan wants to go, as this would give us a chance to play some more Settlers.

New Frontiers is located at 125 N. Main St, Bowling Green, OH. If I recall correctly, it’s between the Clazel and Trotters.

What’s happening to Chatsum?

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 25, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Chatsum has been one of those “web apps” that I enjoyed using when it came out, as did some of the students in the office. I’ve commented on Chatsum before, but in short, it lets you chat with other users who are visiting the same webpage you are, which is interesting to say the least.

Chatsum is dying though.

I haven’t been using it much, but I do occasionally open the extension to take a look at what is going on, which typically isn’t much, aside from comments on how, as said on Chatsum:

marcmarc (2 days ago): chatsum puts an emphasis on actual “chatting” though it’s not popular enough to actually do that

I wish that wasn’t true, but there hasn’t been much done or said by the developers on the Dev blog] or the personal sites of the main developers George or Lee. One reason nothing has been done with it is that in the most recent Dev blog post, George mentioned that he was going to San Francisco at the end of July for Yahoo!’s 2006 Design Expo. Perhaps Yahoo! managed to get the rights to Chatsum but prevented George or Lee from commenting on it doing so. Perhaps they were approached by Microsoft, a rumor that the users on orkut started/heard before Lee or George knew. Who really knows? Their absence and/or lack of posting just adds more confusion and creates more questions.

George has his e-mail on the website… maybe I send him one.

They crossed some sort of line

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 13, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

That Facebook group I mentioned at the end of last week has apparently been deleted within the last half hour or so. I’m curious as to what guideline or part of the terms of service they violated, or if this was just something that the Facebook admins decided that they had to do to prevent the posting of images and video of the event on the website. I’m sure that would cause the deletion of the group. I also doubt it was because of the counter groups, which are varied, as they don’t appear to be as many.

Prior to this, Brody Ruckus, the creator of the group, had his account suspended.

I sent an e-mail to the Facebook team, but I doubt I’ll get a response. As someone who finds how people use the Internet interesting, I’d like to know what the group did to get banned. Much like on any social networking site, I’m sure there’s all sorts of groups that a few people would deem inappropriate, and some groups that a lot of people would deem inappropriate. However, without the Facebook team offering any information about what happened, except maybe to the group admins, it’s hard to know why exactly.

And why not: voting is open in regards to this event, which can be found here. However, the site appears to be down.

23:12 Update:
According to a comment on digg, the site/event was a front for www.ruckus.com. I also got the following reply from Facebook:

The group was removed not because of the content but because the
creator was using the group to acquire e-mail addresses as a marketing scheme.

Ok, so those comments are interesting to consider. Now, the Wikipedia article is protected/locked, but the talk page has plenty to say. So, it should prove interesting to see if this was really something someone wanted to do to actually have a threesome (not that we may ever truly know), if it was a publicity stunt by the Rukus music service (though I’m not exactly sure how that works), or, much like Lonelygirl15 at YouTube, it is all just an elaborate look into how people react and what not.

I also figure I should pull some information from the wiki talk page, just because it could disappear. The below is from the Hoax section:

There doesn’t seem to be a Brody Ruckus in the Georgia Tech directory.

* The Brody Ruckus in question is Facebook member number 12822071. It says he is part of the Atlanta, GA network, but his member number begins with 128, which is Georgia Tech’s school prefix. (least significant 5 digits are the user number unique to the school, most significicant 2-4 digits are the school ID). Not sure why he isn’t part of the Georgia Tech’s network. Cheesy
o He WAS part of the Georgia Tech network, until people noticed that there was no such person at Georgia Tech. This is all a big scam, a publicity stunt for a new college music downloading company called Ruckus Music, which has a partnership with Georgia Tech. 159.178.251.46 11:02, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
o 128 means he registered under Georgia Tech, and 22071 means he was the 22070th person to register a facebook account at Tech. Though Brody deleted this information from his feed, the person before him (Matt Fogel registering under the pseudonym Rockefeller Q. Einstein) registered at 11:39am on September 5th, 2006. I can’t see the person after him, but the person after that (Dr. Phillip Thompson) registered at 3:39pm on that same day. That day was also the day that Brody created the facebook group (at 2:45pm). This means that “Brody” created his facebook account less than three hours before the creation of the group. This leads to the conclusion that he either never had a facebook account to begin with and decided finally to join facebook after making this bet with his girlfriend, or he created a new (fake) account to pull this hoax. Given his familiarity with facebook it would seem that the latter is more likely. This also explains the complete lack of information on his profile and why nobody at Tech has ever seen or heard of this guy. Whether or not this is a hoax, however, clearly the phenomenon alone is worthy of a wikipedia article. Jaardon 12:52, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

This has been discussed on facebook. Not only does is Brody not a member of the network, Georgia Tech is a partner with Ruckus Network, an online music service that is free to all students at partner schools. Several facebook members have done fairly extensive searches of Georgia Tech’s records, as well as local phone listings and listings for various large cities and internet sites, and can find not only no Brody Ruckus whom is a student of that school, but no evidence of Ruckus being used as a surname. Moreover, as of…7:00 AM…Brody Ruckus now has a link requesting people spam our talk page to try and get an article of him on wikipedia. Hewhorulestheworld

* Also, Brody’s domain name is registered anonymously. Why someone would plaster their name all over a website, a Facebook group, and tons of merchandise, and then feel the need to be an anonymous domain registrant is inexplicable–unless they wanted to hide the fact that “Brody Ruckus” is not the his real name. 159.178.251.46 11:08, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

5 years… and we haven’t killed terror yet.

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 11, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

toothpaste for dinner

I thought of this toothpaste for dinner comic today. I thought of this last night while watching the New Jersey Giants play the Indianapolis Colts. I say “New Jersey” because that is where they play. End of story. Continuing on…

Anyway, it would have been kind of hard to forget much of anything about the terrorist attacks of 9/11, what with the movies, tv series, graphic novel, magazine and newspaper articles, and the Internet. The upcoming stories list has included 9/11 articles for the last couple of days. I think if I belonged to a hive mind, I’d have a better chance at forgetting.

It makes me wonder: did the attack on Pearl Harbor cause this much constant remembrance? That attack on December 7th, 1941, pulled us into World War 2 completely.

Interesting fact: to the Japanese, the attack was launched on December 8th, not the 7th, as they were on the opposite side of the date line. Let me say now, that’s why the International Date Line should be where GMT starts, and then have it wrap around, instead of starting in Greenwich, England, and going 12 hours up and down.

But I digress.

Certainly not without their respective conspiracy theories, did the attacks on 9/11 receive the same response as that attack in 1941? It’s hard to tell, since less than a year after the event, everyone was being introspective of that day, and drawing conclusions. Hell, they were doing that days and weeks afterwards. Even if those people in 1941 thought or did similar things, most of the conclusions they made are gone. Sure, the media outlets may have not been as vocal about certain things back then, or the government had a tighter control on information, but still, the fact remains.

Thanks to the Internet and 24/7 news/talk shows, the 9/11 attacks have constantly been mentioned and talked about. We haven’t had time to get introspective without taking enough time to see what has happened. They say that most events can only be studied through the lens of history a couple decades removed from the events themselves. Many don’t want to wait that long.

In regards to the Internet, have you noticed that some places have archived the front pages for different websites from that day, such as Google? It’s kind of like keeping the newspaper for the say an event happened. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

On September 11, 2001, I was assisting students in getting connected to the network in Founders. I think I had class. A lot has changed since then, but then again, somethings haven’t. It was a sad thing that the attacks happened, but nothing I can do, say, or think can revert what happened. Perhaps forgetting for a year or two might give people a better idea of what is happening in the country and world around them.

Ah well. Maybe everyone will remember “love thy neighbor” one of these days. Probably after we have defeated the bodiless “terror” we’re waging war against.

Facebook Feed: The Conclusion

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 8, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I briefly heard something about changes to Facebook today, but only recently got around to checking Facebook. Once I logged in, I saw the following:

An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we’ve seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings - to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in - helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Today (Friday, 9/8) at 4pm edt, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark

This also appeared on the Facebook blog. The Students against Facebook News Feed group has a good compilation of media related to this Facebook event. That group appears to be just under 741,000 users at the moment, and it appears to be slowly losing members. This is just as well, as the discussion board for that group has, and probably continue to, be full or topics that are meant to anger people.

And now, to counteract any remaining positive use of Facebook groups, I unfortunately point you to If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome, which has reached just over 99,000 members. Someone even submitted it to VH1’s Best Week Ever. Oh, and in the last couple minutes since I started typing this update… the group broke 100,000 members.

Well played, I guess.

Bad Behavior has blocked 300 access attempts in the last 7 days.