LinkManDX.com

With the recent phenomenon of Web 2.0, a lot of new companies are trying to innovate, while either failing horribly and ending up exactly like something else or doing that, but completely intentionally. The biggest problem facing this is that they all want to be Google. Google currently has some of the best advertising assets (Huge search engine, Youtube, etc.), and it’s become a problem for most, including Microsoft (lol?) to solve.

That last part intrigues me. Microsoft? The people who did Windows? Yes, they’ve decided that it’s their duty to stop a company from achieving a monopoly in a market that they shouldn’t really care about. Either that or they thought the insanely hight profit margins on software weren’t good enough. Either way, they’ve been trying to fight Google for the longest time, basically saying “Me too!” to nearly everything they’ve done, or just buying another company which actually does it either better or worse and slapping the Microsoft name on it.

As soon as a genuinely good website comes out that offers a genuinely good service, Yahoo! buys it and either ignores it while placing it on Yahoo servers or trys to change it but fails horribly. The big difference between Yahoo! and Google is that yahoo thinks merely having the sites is enough, and Google thinks that having the sites and a nice organization of them is enough.

I go to yahoo.com and I’m bombarded with links, most of which I don’t care about. I go to google.com, and it’s a search engine. I go to docs.google.com, and it’s a office suite. I go to analytics.google.com, and it’s all about site statistics. It’s extremely logical. Meanwhile, in the Yahoo camp, I go to flickr.com, and there’s no sign of Yahoo, besides the “Yahoo Company” logo at the bottom.

Either way, they’re all failing to match Google’s success because Google has already done it. They’ve already succeeded, so other companies need to come up with a better and more innovative way to compete other than doing the exact same thing as Google.

Every new web site seems to be the same to me–a collection of user-generated content that includes social networking features which is also green, and allows users to keep blogs. Buzzwords seem to apply everywhere. What do each of these mean?:

User-Generated Content: Underqualified armchair experts share their ideas on things.

Social Networking - I’m not even sure what this means, as this is quite broad. It can mean everything from “you can have friends” to “you can have friends and share things with them”.

Green - We save CO2 by running lower powered servers. Ignore the fact that we run a floor full of them, we still run lower powered servers.

Voting on Comments - Every unpopular idea gets voted down so the average user cannot see it and therefore thinks that nobody is capable of independant thought on this particular web site.

Blog - You can write a journal about which user generated content you like. Like viewing a page of the comments you write, except — oh wait, that’s all it would be.

Full integration with Facebook - There’s an application which shows what you last dugg/blogged about/socially networked, as opposed to what full integration would be, which would be the actual page being in Facebook.

What a lot of these sites seem to lack is common sense. Voting on comments itself is a stupid idea. The idea of a comment is someone’s opinion on something, and if it’s unpopular, then you can bet it will be voted down until it’s hidden. Also, why fully integrate with Facebook? Is it too hard to type your domain name? Thirdly, the idea of friends on news sites seems kind of stupid to me, when all most people will be doing is reading stories. This ends up being a sort of concious botnet of voters, bound to get 90% of stories submitted by that person to the front page.

So today I was bored, and was figuring out what to do. Then, I realized I was on the internet. I came up with this list of things I would do:

1. Apply for *nix shell accounts, list the reason as “I want to DDoS my enemies”.

2. Start combo threads on /b/ with no intention of finishing them.

3. Go on a random IRC channel, say “Something interesting happened today”, and not say anything after that.

4. “Then, when I found out it was my sister, it only got hotter”, enter, “Oh shit, wrong convo”, enter on AIM, MSN, etc.

5. Try to burn the rope.

6. Make up a conspiracy theory on Above Top Secret, watch amazed as people buy it.

7. Write an article on Wikipedia about a person who doesn’t exist, and watch the talk page.

8. Make factually incorrect statements on a Wikipedia talk page, make up a source, and watch as people argue whether or not it’s true.

9. Troll people saying Morgan Freeman is alive.

10. Go on Digg, and write a completely vague comment on a political story that mentions the words “change”, “hope”, and “future”, watch as it hits triple digits in + diggs.

As a guitarist, every so often I can’t go to a local store, so I have to hike up to a Guitar Center, or the large musician store chain. This isn’t the best option for me (As it quite often is crowded, and they try and sell you Monster Cables), but sometimes I consider it a necessary evil. Most of the time, it’s for an effect, but every so often I’ll want to test gear.

If you go to any guitarist forum, you’ll see the “Assholes in Guitar Center” thread, where this generic story is told:

“I was in Guitar Center, playing blues/Clapton/jazz with a Telecaster/Strat/Gretsch through a Mesa Boogie/Vox, when this metalhead came up to me, told me I suck/can’t play for shit/am holding the guitar upside down. He then put a BC Rich/cheap Ibanez/Dean through a Line 6 Spider III/Marshall MG/my face, and bastardized Master of Puppets/Green Day/Slipknot. I came back with the full song and solo for [previously mentioned song/artist] four times as fast with twice the notes, and he started to cry. Everybody cheered for me, the people working there gave me a free PRS, I got laid, Jimi Hendrix came down from heaven, Pete Wentz suffered a heart attack, and I became the lead guitarst for Metallica.”

Half of these stories are complete bullshit, but there are some terrible people in Guitar Center. Most are just new-ish, while others just are closed minded. This is why I don’t really go there to test gear, but when I do, I try and avoid these people.

The Internet is home to a vast array of different types of people. There are some who are good, and some who are bad. The bad people are usually funnier. Here, I shall present a few internet archetypes.

1. The attention whore.

You know, the girl on myspace who takes pictures of herself in the mirror. That fat girl on Youtube who did that terrible lip-synch of The Final Countdown with a Guitar Hero guitar. Thirdly, Paul Fetch. They go to the internet as a medium for what they call “expressing themselves” in ways that they can’t do in real life. The thing they fail to realize is that they can’t do this in real life for a reason: it’s retarded. For example, take the second person in my list. She clearly can’t play guitar, or sing. She also can’t dance. Since these all are true, she decided to go to the internet, and post a video of her lip-synching. Presto, instant popularity. On the internet, there is such a thing as bad publicity, and this is it.

Famous Example: Lonelygirl15

2. Trolls.

You’re on a forum. You see a creationism vs. evolution debate, and feel like pwning some fundies. You go in there, only to argue against what seems to be a brick wall with the magical ability to type. He probably is a troll, or someone who pretends to be a retard because he thinks it’s funny. Sometimes it is, if a lot of people fall for it (See: backwards d guy on /b/). It’s often stupid though, as everybody gets it immediately (You know why they call it the XBox 360?), and you get a case of trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls, which makes a thread unreadable.

Famous Example: Bloodninja

3. That nice guy.

You know, the douchbag who’s always trying to be “helpful” and “nice”. The one who shows everybody up with his “kindness” and “compassion”. The nerve. He’s the one who always answers questions correctly, and will tell people (In the kindest way of course) to stop flaming the noobs. They’re the ones who always end up being the mods and admins, which makes their annoyingness even more annoying, as they actually get power, and aren’t corrupted by it (What is wrong with these people?).

Famous Example: See any forum for this guy.

4. Noobs.

The ones who fall for trolls, flame the nice guys, and sometimes end up as attention whores. Noobs often like to speak in capslock and in different colors, which annoy the eyes. They speak in a language often unreadably, whch gos liek dis. as u kn c, dis is hrd 2 red. Please kill me.

Famous Example: Anybody who goes to ebaumsworld who isn’t a troll.

5. Internet Superhero

Whether it be a hacker, a Youtube vigilante, or just some guy who made fun of idiots on IRC, Internet Superheroes are the people of legend. We’re talking the big guns: bloodninja (Most famous troll ever), that guy who started to scan college textbooks into the Pirate Bay, and many many others. They were funny, they were awesome, they were inspiring to the rest of us. They, indeed, are the stories of the internet.

So on my old site, the biggest hit drawer was Guitar Hero vs. Real Guitar. Because I’m such a whore for hits, I’m going to re-write it, making it better, faster, and stronger. Also, I say Guitar Hero or GH to mean both Guitar Hero and the guitar on Rock Band, because typing that phrase a thousand times will make me go insane, which doesn’t translate well on a blog.

So, you may have seen the Guitar World Video of Michael Angelo Batio smashing a Guitar Hero guitar and palying something that sounds like a SNES threw up. Although I’m not a shred fan (Mindless and sloppy but quick is not awesome), that seems to capture the opinion of some guitarists, that Guitar Hero is the spawn of Satan (Or God, depending on if you’re asking a Satanist or not), making their “job” look “easy”. I highlight both of those terms because they are used extremely loosely.

Only a retard will say Guitar Hero is harder than real guitar. And trust me, there are some people out there who feel that way. But they’re wrong, and for one simple reason: the right hand.

A lot of Guitar Hero is harder than real Guitar morons will tell you that the left hand is harder. Although it may feel like that way sometimes (beginning of One solo, intro to Number of the Beast), right hand technique on guitar basically proves them completely wrong. Let’s examine.

The “hardest” (Once again used loosely) right hand technique on GH is alternate picking, or going both up and down. This is much easier than alternate picking on real guitar, because you don’t have to deal with the resistance of the actual strings on a guitar (Which is the only reason tremolo picking is even considered slightly difficult on the real guitar). You’d think that’d be all.

But it’s not. Sweep picking is the motion of making a chord but actually playing single notes. “WTF?” you say? Well, you play 2 or more string with one motion, playing one (or more, if you hammer on/pull off) note per string. In case you haven’t figured this out already, this is hard. Many professional guitarists can’t even do this.

Also, skipping strings is hard on real guitar. Although not considered extremely difficult, making sure you stop and strike the right string quickly is a difficult skill.

For left hand technique, chord changing on real guitar’s difficulty is squared whereby you have to make sure that you have your fingers on the right strings in the right places, as just opposed to the latter on GH.

To conclude, real guitar is clearly harder than GH. Like I said earlier (or at least implied), only a small minority of GH players think it’s harder, but I thought I’d at least write up why they’re wrong.

So I decided today to change to Wordpress for some reason. Turns out that the UI is much much better, and Drupal was giving me a crapload of problems (Like taking more than 16 megabytes in the PHP memory to upgrade. Seriously, what?).

The old posts are not on this site (until I can find a way to put them on there), but I have preserved the old database for posterity (namely: if I get bored one day and decide to release them).

Install process was easy, hardest part was deleting old Drupal files (files directory had files in it, yet FireFTP reported none. k.).

Mandatory Twitter Link: http://www.twitter.com/linkmandx

Before I start, yes, every criticism in this post is a complete and utter hypocrisy, because this, indeed, is a blog.

No need to tell me that now.

A few years ago, someone developed a technology called Really Simple Syndication (Not joking, that’s seriously what it’s called), or RSS, which allowed the dynamic (Meaningless buzzword) delivery of content based on the time it was submitted. This allowed for people to read the news without actually scanning headlines and finding interesting stories on the internet. When the people got a hold of this, they turned it into a way for all 2 of their main readers to check in on how well they did on their exams, and how badly they crushed the other team in basketball. This was called “web logging”, which was shortened to blogging.

Go to blogger.com. Click any of the “Blogs of Note”. Then, click next blog. When you hit something in your own language (this took me a while, don’t worry), read it. Try and understand the artistic vision of the writer. If it’s a post about their daily lives, feel their emotions. If it’s a post commenting on something, try to completely understand their opinion. Now, ignore what you just did because nobody else on the internet is willing to do that.

Rules for bloggers:

1. Assume nobody has any idea what the fuck you’re talking about. I don’t feel like looking up the history of your premarital exploitations, just give me a tl;dr.

2. Assume nobody cares about what you’re talking about. Teach your reader to care. Maybe then they will.

3. Assume nobody reads it. Chances are, they don’t, unless you try and drive visitors. In the beginning, I fought for every pageview I got, and continued that for months. Now, I still only get an average of 5 a day.

4. Write in normal English. If it takes effort for me to read it, I won’t. Nor will anybody else. Nobody gives a fuck that you saved 30 seconds writing it if it’s illegible.

5. Write about something interesting. If you’re funny, be funny. If you’re not, don’t be. Don’t try too hard.

The blogosphere is a term for the collective of blogs. Whenever somebody famous does something wrong, it gets angry, like Cthulu after (his? her? its?) alarm went off. Unlike the beast mentioned in the last sentence, Chtulu actually manages to destroy things (and lives, infrastructure, etc.). Usually, there’s a bunch of rabble in the blogosphere, and then it dissipates. Like a candle in the wind.