Month: September 2006

I was surprised to read that there are rumours that the criminal (please read the article here before continuing) may have learned the hostages names via myspace.com.

Fast fact -> Myspace.com is a site where you make your own personal profile and enter your interests into it -> music, movies, whatever, as well as make postings (ala blogging). You can also identify yourself via where you live, what high school you went to, etc. Danny and Carol showed me Myspace.com when I was up there visiting and it was neat to see how many people went to our old high school. Also, the big thing about myspace.com is the linkages between friends that you can make. There is a list of who you consider your ‘friends’.

Other than that, I don’t know much about myspace as I haven’t really used it before. I prefer my own blogspace for my rants, whereas some people just like to use myspace!

Back to the point of the story, if the rumours are true and the killer found out the identities of these young girls via myspace.com, this will unleash a MAJOR backlash in terms of privacy issues on the Internet. The Internet has long been a place mixing anonymity (think nicknames, chatrooms, etc.) with highly personalized information (myspace.com, blogs in general, your photos on-line). Granted, it’s the user’s choice as to how much information they provide, but I don’t think that the users of the Internet are really informed on how much privacy there is out on the Internet.

I have had a lot of experience dealing with privacy issues and youth. My job (as I started out) as a moderator of a message board of youth across the nation. There were always privacy concerns, and we ensured that there were no personal information exchanged on this message board for the public eye to see.

There needs to be more information drilled into the youth, and even us adults as to how much information we should really be placing on the Internet. Even I start thinking about what information I should be putting on a blog. At no time do I ever put someone’s full name on my blog. Not even my own. But if someone really wanted to dig down and found out where I lived, it would be extremely easy considering the landmarks I speak about, the restaurants I go to, etc. Or, I bet they could figure out what my first name and last name are by reading a few dozen posts even though I never place the two words together.

We, as bloggers, should be more conscious of what we place in our entries and, even though it goes against the whole concept of the Internet, should learn to censor ourselves. I read somewhere that someone once said that you should never post anything on the Internet that you couldn’t tell your own mother. 😉 This handles the whole ’embarassing picture’ scenario, but what about someone saying ‘never post anything that could lead someone to your home.’ This is a serious matter.

I had an interesting call the other day from Holly in which she wanted us to change a blog entry on a sister site because it used her full name and someone had discovered the ‘I heart Hollyisms‘ site via Google one day. Sure, it’s fun to have a few laughs, but what if a potential job employer decided to Google Holly’s name and found out all the funny things she has said over the years. It could affect her job. Or, at the very least, get her the promotion as everyone will see what a great person she is. 😉

I don’t think it will be the last we see on this subject. I think in the next coming weeks there will be a major retaliation against the Internet and its privacy amongst youth. What we should focus on, my faithful readers of Palmer’s World, is to think about how much information you post about yourself, and if you are comfortable with it. I personally know that I am comfortable with what I post about myself, but if I ever mention any of you and you feel that you are not comfortable with the amount of information I have relayed, please let me know and I will edit accordingly.

As this moment though, I’m thinking of a few things that I’m going to continue to do:

• Not post anyone’s full names.
• Not post anything about specific mailing addresses or phone numbers, email addresses, etc.

Other than that, I’m sure there’s a SLEW of things I should do to increase the amount of privacy on this blog…but at the same time, I am comfortable with people knowing that my favourite bar is the Heart and Crown. 😉

I’m not writing this to scare anyone, but perhaps everyone should take a step back and really look at what information they are posting on the Internet. If the rumours prove true, and a girl was shot in the head because of her information on a Myspace profile, then everyone has to stop and think for a moment. If you have children who are on the Internet, talk to them about this and make them realize that by typing in what high school they attend, what could be the consequences. It’s an extreme example, but it’s an extreme case that just happened.

One of my loves currently is not packing a lunch on Thursdays because there is this little farmer’s market set up down the street from my building every Thursday where they sell Pad Thai for $2. You can’t go wrong!

Unless you go to the tent yesterday and it’s pouring rain out and they have decided not to set up shop. That’s plain mean.

Hopefully they come back next week, as $2 for any meal is a steal of a deal.

In perfect timing with the Ontario government push for no expiry dates, I received a letter from Black’s Photography last night!

I brought it with me to the Barley Mow Pub to open it in front of Mike and Krista and lo and behold, a nicely written letter was inside along with a card for 50 free 4×6 prints! This was a surprise as I had only asked them to reimburse me for the 35 that were missing.

Score: Writing Letter Campaign: 2

Overall, I think the letter pretty well said what we thought it would say (ex: Accounting fiscal year-end balancing, yada yada yada) but I can’t really recall as we were swayed by ONE CENT WINGS!!! That’s right people, we stumbled upon the motherload of wings at this pub unbeknownst to us.

Unfortunately, the hot wings were insanely hot and my stomach fought back in turmoil against this chili pepper conconction (which resembled spaghetti sauce with chili peppers). I could only manage to eat 1 pound of the wings which sucked since I had not eaten any dinner yet and had to wait until 8PM to eat these wings.

Can I complain too much about ONE CENT WINGS? Not so much. 😉

However, in a moment of moronity, I forgot my letter from Black’s on the table along with the gift cards! Thankfully, they managed to find the letter and I will pick it up today. Perhaps tomorrow considering we’re going to see ERIC CLAPTON tonight!

Hey hey, we all know Jen is anxiously awaiting a review of her shindig on this blog so without further adieu…

Saturday night brought us to a little Carling Hi-rise apartment action. At first I was thinking this was a place where I will come out and my car would be jacked, but it turned out to be a decent spot (at least once we got inside and not in the dark, dark parking lot in the back!). Jen’s new apartment is pretty wild. I enjoy the window connecting the kitchen and living room – always a must.

THE VIEW! The view is pretty cool. She is right next to the Queensway and on the 21st floor so you get to stare at the traffic. But the city is a cornucopia of bright lights, haze from the outlying suburbs (hello Orleans!) and just an amazement to marvel at. I heard it’s even better during the daytime where you can see the entire city with the Gatineau hills running along the edge. Beauty! Who says the world isn’t better from the top?

Lot of treats to fill up on so this guy was feeling pretty bloated after a few hours of gorging. I chatted tech talk with Duncan and Matt for a bit and then I was introduced to one of the finer game shows in this world – Deal or No Deal. AWESOME! So simple, yet so beautiful. The makes of a great show, and Howie Mandel can do no wrong. We all love Howie. “Oh, this is a really good first deal if I must say so.” Do say so and let everyone laugh at the lowest possible deal there ever was!

I also stumbled upon Episode II on a French channel which still didn’t earn the appreciation of Vero. So I switched it over to Terminator 2 which I haven’t seen in years but could quote every line from. After 30 minutes, we decided to call it night.

Pros: Awesome food, great company, excellent hostess (with the mostess!)
Cons: Matt having to leave because he is lame and had to go to bed around 9.

Thanks to Jen for the wicked cool door prize gifts on our way out! They will make a great addition to the house! To those who couldn’t make it to the party – suckas. We got the goods…what do you get? Nothing.

Update from my previous post here.

I haven’t heard anything from Black’s Photography yet, but I wanted to share you an important article that my friend Maren sent me.

Click here to read it.

Essentially, the provincial government of Ontario is looking to ban expiry dates on gift cards/pre-paid cards from stores as they screwing the customer. Alright, I’m paraphrasing here.

I find it surprising that something that affected little-ole-me is actually a giant issue within our provincial government. I can only say that I support them in their venture to abolish this practice.

This weekend I had an impromptu splurge moment and decided that I was sick of downloading a new TV show only to have the error “ERROR: YOUR HARD DRIVE CAN’T FIT THIS SWEET, SWEET EPISODE OF ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. YOU SHOULD LEARN HOW BURN STUFF ONTO DVD, BLANCO NINO.”

Burning stuff onto DVD is fine and all, but hey, why bother when you can pick up a snazzy external 320GB hard drive?

I was doing some research here and there on my trusty price checking websites -> pricenetwork.ca and redflagdeals.com
and at first was thinking of buying a SATA2 hard drive for $108 and an external hard drive case for $60 which basically comes out to $200 and I just realized I’m starting to talk techtalk so I’ll tone it down a little.

Then to compare I thought I would see if there are any external drives out there for cheaper and lo and behold, Best Buy had this sweet deal on for $119.99 with a $50 mail-in rebate. You gotta hate those rebates, but whatever. It’s still money in your pocket.

Pros: Well hey, it’s portable! It looks nice also. It’s also cheap.
Cons: Well, it isn’t SATA (Serial ATA) which cuts down on the speed it will transfer data at. But as I was saying to Duncan and Matt, I’m not too concerned with the milliseconds piling up over time (whereas Duncan was totally against this train of thought and wanted the fastest within a reasonable price range. Two different ways of thought, who knows who is right?!). Who cares if it’s going to take me ten more minutes to transfer an entire season of Star Trek onto the hard drive?

Also, I was a little concerned at first as to the name brand – Digital Research Technologies? Who the heck are they? Turns out they are an affiliate of I/O Magic and just slap random hard drives inside. Turns out it’s a Seagate inside which I have no qualms about.

So it’s my first external drive so I’ll let you know if I run into any problems with it. I bought it because I figured in the future, I will be buying a laptop and the hard drives on the laptop are very small in size for what I like to be able to do with them.

“One young woman admitted she and her friends went so far as to bury several bottles of liquor near the fountain more than a week before the concert and planned to dig them up once they got inside.”

Awesome. Why have I never thought about doing something like that for an outdoor show? In fact, next time Lumberjack Fest rolls into town, I’m planting a keg behind the glass.

Taken from this article.

Three Days Grace, Theory of A Deadman, Mobile and Idle Sons.

Ottawa Civic Centre – Monday, November 13 – 6:30.

Tix go on sale this coming Saturday, unless you have the presale password, which I have not found yet, but I have only found out about this ten minutes ago as I spied someone’s newspaper and said “WHAT THE HECK?!” and scrambled to find my own which I hadn’t read yet today, and sure enough, there it was in all its glory.

Get yo’ own tix fools. It’s general admission on the floor so I don’t have to worry about getting you tickets. Mike, this doesn’t apply to you as you live with me. I’ll get you a ticket.