is buying 1TB hard drives from Frys, one drive at a time.

How is twitter not just an rss aggregator that limits the blog posts to 140 characters? So maybe you can post from a text message via your phone. That’s novel, but not particularly earth shattering. Surely in 2008 it should be fairly easy to text from your phone to your blog if you so desire. Maybe it’s the social aspect to it? But I already follow my friend’s blogs, have the ability to comment on their entries (though I may not see all of the comments on all of their entries…). And doing an exceptionally simple search to find my friends solely based on email is neither novel nor nonobvious. The ability for me to log in with openid and you to use my foaf to find my friends would be much more robust. I guess it also has favoriting and replying to specific posts, but again replying to a post would be like making a comment on another’s blog, and favoriting I guess I just don’t really ‘get’. There also might be the soft real-time nature of it, whereas an rss aggregator has a pretty relaxed update guarantee. Surely that could be solved by liberal use of trackbacks or a push architecture.

Friendfeed seems equally as unoriginal. Honestly it seems more like an aggregator than twitter. Actually, looking at it right now, most of what I’m reading is an aggregation of twitter. Now don’t get me wrong; I love the notion of having the tiniest scrap of update of all of my friends in one place (like facebook’s news feed on steroids). And while I do think that is totally awesome, it is very much a natural and logical extension to what already was on the web. twitter is to blogs as blogs are to … geocities. It’s like we’re repeating ourselves that we couldn’t find enough content to publish in the 90s, so we eventually turned to blogging about the mundane details of our life, and now we’ve regressed to the point where we’re micro-publishing the inane blatherings direct from within our skulls. I mean I blog, but I don’t expect it to be terribly interesting. I digress from bashing friendfeed… How are rooms not just mailing lists of people with common interests, or newsgroups for that matter? Again you have the very heavy social aspect to it. And I totally applaud their functionality to make it hella simple for me to tell them about my flickr, netflix, delicious, linkedin, twitter, etc. But honestly shouldn’t those services already be exporting my feeds (and most probably already do). And again we come back to this notion that I should be publishing all of “my” sites (flickr, netflix, delicious, linkedin, twitter, etc) from a single source, where you can then crawl them and do what you like with the feeds. Granted you can’t comment on certain things, say on the last movie I got from Netflix. And maybe that is worth the lock-in, but I’m having a hard time biting.

It all comes back to my desire for a single authoritative profile, with no particular vendor lock-in based on any company’s implementation, information based on open standards, and decentralized. I should own all of the data and relationships contained within, instead of some company tos‘ing me to death. If I spent all that time building up my profile and finding my friends, why shouldn’t I be allowed to take that with me?

</rant>

I am super not happy. Over a month ago, I bought some hard drives on eBay with buy it now. I never saw the drives, and I’m wondering if I’ll ever see the rest of my money. I got back $200 from PayPal with their modest buyer protection, but after calling their customer service (who was a nice English-as-a-first-language lady who answered my questions as best she could) I have little faith that my $450 will ever be recovered by them. I paid straight through my bank account, so there isn’t any protection via my credit card company, but I might call BoA anyway and see if they can do anything for me. It’s been a while now, and I’m sure the longer I wait the harder it will be to recover the funds. :( I guess I’ll be sticking to the retail versions of things for a while, while I lick my wounds from a hard learned (and costly) lesson in seller feedback percentages and ways to protect myself better against possible fraud.

So there was some song in my head this morning that I was like “I should post that before I forget”. And then I forgot, and I couldn’t get random Coldplay and Third Day’s “I’ve Always Loved You” out of my head long enough for the other to come back.

I was totally a slacker today and played volleyball on campus for 30 or 45 minutes with some peeps from my team. Good times.

Things I forgot on Monday:

I forgot a Dr Pepper in the friend’s car I rode in to the airport. I hate to leave trash in someone else’s car.
I forgot my WSJ paper in the back of the seat in front of me on the plane. Again with the leaving trash for someone to pick up after me.
I forgot to bring a jacket to cool Mountain View. I realized I had done this about the time I was scheduled to be picked up and taken to the airport. I though I could have made it back home again to grab one, but I was already cutting it close and didn’t want to miss getting my checked luggage checked.

Nothing Earth shattering, but definitely a thorn in my brain.

More than once this weekend, I thought, I need to sit down and blog about X before I forget. And yet this is still not a real post. Had a good weekend, but still recovering. Odd how I get up way earlier on vacation than for work. Makes for a sleepy Thomas and taking an extra day off makes for a good amount of work to catch up on. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be a little more up for a more substantive post.

Why is it impossible for me to go to bed before 2am?

I finally watched A Fistful of Dollars last night. I wasn’t quite in the mood for a western, even less so one that was originally dubbed (I would have much preferred the sound track have been real and it have been subtitled — even if that was the way they made them back then). Despite all of this it wasn’t too bad. It’s been one of those classics I’ve been meaning to watch for forever, and now I can cross it off the list and move on to the next in the trilogy.

Yesterday: Coldplay – The Scientist
Today: Daniel Powter – Bad Day

When will I learn that flights get more expensive the longer you wait…