Join the Accordion Revolution!

Are you familiar with the Accordion Revolution? Want to be? Your best bet at getting started then would be to check out Daniel Payne's, Learning the Newfoundland Button Accordion | Volume 1: The Basics. From the Facebook Marketplace:

Click for larger view

It's only $35.00 and is very well produced.

Then you can truly wear the t-shirt with pride.


Via Living Planet T-Shirts.

MySpacebook?

I like Facebook a lot better than MySpace. Facebook lets you connect with your friends and see what they're up to easily, without having to sift through any unrelated garbage, or what I'll call social networking byproduct - the waste that often gets produced when so many people with nothing better to do start finding inane ways to waste their time and the time of everyone their connected to. Bad social sites like MySpace suffer from this since the actual social networking side of their operation is lacking, and as a result this byproduct is produced to fill the void. Since Facebook has social networking down pat, there's very little in the way of a void that needs filling. Yet more and more often on Facebook I'm seeing instances of this waste cropping up in my messages inbox, on my wall and in my news feed.

"Check it out," one of the headlines declares, "Go to my profile and take a look at my new celebrity look-alikes!" Um, no.

"YOU HAVE OFFICIALLY BEEN HIT BY..

............|\
............| \
............|_\
...______|__________
...\___ A BOAT_____/
....\_____________/," a popular wall post begins, "which probably makes you pretty angry." Yeah? No kidding. So how about you fuck off throwing bullshit at my wall, dumb-ass?

Let me ask, do you go running up to your friends on the street and cry out, "Hey, I'm hitting you with a boat! Please! Talk to me!?" I doubt it. Or perhaps you approach everyone you know with the latest issue of Celebrity Crap Magazine and start flicking wildly through the pages while declaring proudly the names of all the stars you barely resemble? Probably not.

Such approaches to socializing, be they off-line or on-line, are impersonal. I know its not actually important to you that I specifically see the results of your latest tryst with time wasting, but rather that someone at least does and that they acknowledge it. To achieve this you spam these results out there to everyone you know, and in the process diminish the impact of your own actions, not to mention that of Facebook as a social networking service.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying Facebook should be for serious play only, but there's silly and then there's just inane. What's happening right now on Facebook is quite nearly the MySpace equivalent of the sparkling animated GIF. If we ever get to that point, people, Facebook will be lost. Sparkling animated GIF's are truly the point of no return. They've devoured MySpace, and they'll devour you, too, if you're not careful.

Please, for the love of Facebook, just be careful.

Feed Me

I've been a sort of half-assed, casual user of feeds for something like a year now. My Goggle home page is set up to receive feeds from some of my favorite blog and news sources, as well as a few pass-time items like word of the day and quote of the day, but the interface is clunky and limited at best. As far as browser home pages go its a knock out, but a true RSS reader, it is not.

I've just tonight made the rather simple leap to a full fledged reader, the stunningly simple and elegant Vienna RSS Reader, and the difference is everything. Now I can keep up on the latest news, technology, Mac buzz, recipe ideas, and yes even words and quotes of the day without the need to open my web browser; without even the need to go looking. Any feeds I've subscribed to arrive in my reader the moment they're available online, organized and ready for me to read/view right there on the spot. Along with the text you'd see on the web page if you were using your browser, embedded photos and even videos come through in tact and in place. I don't know why I didn't do this before.

An easy way to peg a website that uses feeds is that you'll see a little orange coloured square icon in the far right of your browser's address bar with a white little dot and two curved lines in it (looks like a little frequency pulse of some kind). That signifies the page is set up to offer a feed - any time that page updates with new content, a feed will be sent out to anyone subscribing to it with the updated content for them to view.



www.macinstruct.com offers an RSS feed, as indicated by the icon in the browser's addres bar. Clicking on it would give you a choice of how you'd like to subscribe.

If this icon isn't present, its unlikely a feed is available. Sites like Macsurfer's Headline News and Facebook, sadly, do not offer feed services. The former is the greatest daily culminating effort of Mac related news the internet has ever known, and the latter is a social networking site where the activities of friends are constantly offered as updates on your social home page. Both would be ideal providers of RSS feeds, but alas neither does.

The coolest thing about an RSS Reader? You could even subscribe to this blog.