The Facebook Social

I thought I'd try out some more social networking lately, so got signed up for Facebook, and went searching for anyone I knew. The first thing that surprised me was just how many people I knew were already on there. Even my Mum was already there! Crazy. The next thing I noticed was just how much time people seem to spend on there. There's all sorts of mad applications people are using.

I thought this video was quite funny. Kind of sums up nicely how bizarre Facebook can be - the fact that you're browsing through peoples lives - sometimes people you hardly know.



Of course I found that video because someone in my family posted it on my 'wall' :-)

It'll be interesting to see how long Facebook's popularity lasts. 'My Space' is so last year. What strange social things is 2008 going to bring?

Home Server

Microsoft have had some strange marketing campaigns in the past, but this just tops if off for me: Stay At Home Servers - The 'book' advertising the new Windows Home Server product. Its just bizarre. Surely the market that you're aiming at to sell dedicated servers in a home environment is going to be pretty IT-literate. So why market it using a children's book? Seems mad to me.

The product itself looks pretty cool though. Remote Access to many machines in the house would be nice, but I dont like the idea of opening up TCP/80 and 443 for all and sundry. You're just going to get attacked morning, noon & night. And as for registering for a DNS name in the namespace http://myfamily.homeserver.com! Hello? Want to advertise 'come & get me' to hackers everywhere - what a great idea! :-

I'd like to run one up at home and have a play. I wonder whether you can run VMware Server on it too...

Reviewers Guide

Some of these add-ins look handy too:
http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/windows-home-server-add-ins/

There goes t'Internet

Oh dear, just got this email this morning from Telecom regarding their Global Internet Gateway:
"Tropical Storm hit the Oregon coast in the USA that damaged the southern cross fibre cables. It is expected to take some time to recover the damaged cables due to the severe weather condition.

You are likely to experience some congestion of your international service until this problem is resolved."

But searching for news about it hasn't revealed much. This is about all I could find: Qwest reports broad outages along north coast - OregonLive.com But that's just talking about phone lines.

I suppose if the major Internet links out of New Zealand are down/degraded then maybe the news can't get through :-)

Update:
"The area continues to experience high winds and heavy rain which have affected landline along the Oregon Coast. The stormy weather condition still prevents technicians from access to the damaged area."

Bummer eh, even the Internet is dependent on good weather!

Update:
Finally some news articles about this today:
"Storm downs Aussie ISP links"
"Blog: If the cable breaks"

This is quite interesting too: New Zealand ISP Topological Map shows the interconnects between the different New Zealand ISPs.

Halo 3 Service Record

I've been playing a bit of Halo 3 lately - completed the campaign first, then started multiplayer over XBOX Live. Just discovered the online stats - Bungie Online : Halo 3 Service Record. Its really nicely presented, just like everything in Halo 3 really.

The game history function and stats are cool - even has details of all the local multiplayer games I have vs Scott & Gareth. Very cool.

Now I've just got to get some good screenshots and maybe an action video to upload....