Shyzer.com

If you haven’t heard of Facebook.com by now, you’re obviously (A) Not on the Internet more than an hour a day, (B) Not a college student, or (C) Have absolutely no friends and spend all your time brooding and plotting to blow up your campus. If you happen to fall into one of those categories, then I’ll be kind enough to give ya a quick rundown about the site so that you too can seem hip and cool and feel like a young kid again. Started back in late 2004 by a Harvard student, it’s basically a college social networking site that is the ninth most visited website on the Internet, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Open only to people with college e-mail addresses, you can create an account, link up with your friend’s accounts, upload and share photos, join groups, and “poke” people in a somewhat sexual manner, among countless other things. I joined back in October of ‘05 and since then it’s added another 4.6 million students and received a $13 million dollar investment by a group of Silicon Valley wizards. Also since October of ‘05, I’ve spent way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many hours on it. At one point, I was logging in 10 or 20 times a day to check up on things. I even have my own Goob Fanclub Group.

One day I might tell you about the time I became a Facebook God and had unlimited powers on the site, but that’s not what this post is about (Although I’m sure Fellner can tell you all about how depressed I was when I was suddenly stripped of my new found powers). No, this post is to share a little story about a group of kids one upping the local police.

Not every college is on Facebook, but all the important and big ones are. On most campuses, statistics place the Facebook saturation rate somewhere between 50-90% and recently, college officials have caught on to this. Since registration only requires a college e-mail address, they too can create accounts and make fake student pages with the real intention of spying on students. There have been a few reports of people being busted for drug and alcohol use thanks to pictures they’ve posted on their Facebook profile. A student at Fisher College in Boston was expelled last year for his online criticism of a campus security officer. Officials at the University of California Santa Barbara, said they would discipline students living on campus who posted information or photographs on their profiles that involved illegal activity like under-age drinking. At North Carolina State, RAs wrote up 15 students seen consuming alcohol in photos on Facebook. The list goes on and on.

And then there are the students at George Washington University who decided to fight back and launch a “Facebook Attack.”

It all started last year when a party was shut down by campus police. Students found it odd that the cops had known about it and then began to realize that the only place they’d heavily talked about it was on Facebook. So, a few months ago, they decided to strike back. They planned another party and talked about it only on Facebook, therefore ensuring that if the cops came this time, the students were being spied upon. They created a group, left tags on each other’s boards, and talked non-stop for weeks about how awesome their “Beer Bash” was going to be.

So imagine the look on the police officer’s faces when they burst through the doors only to find a group of kids standing around eating cake and cookies with the word “Beer” painted on them in icing. Luckily for you, though, you don’t have to imagine. Pictures of the party surfaced on the net soon after and I’ve stuck them in the newly reformatted (although not yet finished) Shyzer Gallery. Have a look here., so Google around for them. My absolute favorite is the last one, which contains the stunned look of one of the cops. I just wish I could have been there.

This whole topic raises an interesting issue, though. I used to tell Fellner I couldn’t wait until the Presidential elections of 2024 or beyond. I always thought it was interesting to imagine how sites like Myspace, Livejournal, and the such could come back and bite a politician in the ass. Bush and Kerry and Dean might be a little too old to have run a website while they were growing up, but my generation isn’t. When it comes time for my fellow peers to start running for office, people are going to dig up what they wrote in their blogs, what they posted on message boards, what they said in chat rooms. Everything, and I mean everything, put on the Internet is archived somewhere. Whether it be in Google’s cache or archive.org or a server’s backup in downtown Atlanta, chances are if you want to find an Angelfire site from 1999, you can, especially if you have the resources most powerful news agencies have. We make such a big fuss over what our politicians have maybe said in an interview or possibly said in a speech. Now think about having daily writings from an angst-ridden teenager who went on to clean up his act and run for political office. Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever typed and posted on the Internet. Now imagine seeing that run as a headline in the New York Times or USA Today. I’ve kissed any possible political career away with Shyzer, but that’s fine with me. For other people my age, they might not be ready to write off a certain career choice already and yet they might have already done so without even knowing it.

But Facebook is bringing this scenario to us in the present day, even if it’s only in a smaller scale. Reports are now surfacing that big-time companies and possible employers are getting into Facebook to check out prospective employees. Like I said, all it takes is a college e-mail and any bigwig in a Fortune 500 company surely can call up his alumni rep and get a college address to his old school. Ten minutes later, he’s pulling up Brad Johnson’s profile on Facebook and finding pictures of Johnson’s Johnson on there, right next to another one of him drunk and passed out in his dorm and reading about his “appreciation of the festive greens.” And just like that, there goes Bard’s chances of landing that internship.

On-line privacy debates are nothing new. From the recording industry suing Internet Providers for ISP records, to the Bush Administration’s attack on pornography, to employers being able to read their employees e-mails - It’s all ongoing. But the recent rash of Facebook incidents shine light on the new question involved. Where does the privacy line lie with minors and those releasing their pent up, youthful expressions and indiscretions?

Looks like we’re lumped together with the porn peddlers, the illegal downloaders, and those who are lazy on the job. Good company.

Now I just can’t wait for those 2024 Presidential Debates.

The cool thing about living in northern Virginia is that we’re an hour and a half away from the nation’s capital and all its historic wonders. The bad thing about living in northern Virginia is that we’re an hour and a half away from the nearest airport, which coincidentally employs my mom full time and is our main mode of any transportation involving multi-states or countries. So when I have to get up at, oh let me see, 0500 to drive to the airport and then drive home and then drive back to the airport and then drive home again, it can involve, what some might say, a tad bit of driving time.

When my mom goes to work, she’s gone for three to five days at a time. Growing up, that meant we had a babysitter come stay with us for those days since my Dad was usually off touring as well. Today, it’s still the same. My mom goes to work, the kids need somebody to watch them, and therefore a babysitter shows up. However, since I moved up here a few months back, I’ve talked my mom more and more into letting me watch them instead. It saves cash, which is always a good thing, and I like it better anyways with just me and the kids.

Colton has a tendency of suddenly spouting off random phrases, sayings, and entire conversations he’s overheard recently out of the blue. It’s hard to pick up on too, because usually half of the words that tumble from his mouth are actually spoken in a as of yet untranslated Native American tongue that sounds something along the lines of, “bicabakatiktaopikadubadubada.” His ramblings honestly sound as if he’s tuning the radio somewhere up in his brain, trying to find that right frequency that will allow him to emit comprehensive consecutive syllables. Therefore, the hard part is not trying to understand the gibberish, but trying to pick up where the radio surfing suddenly turns into real words for a few seconds before racing off into the black void of twaddle and static.

A few weeks back, our mom had left for a trip early in the morning and I had a few errands to run “in town,” so that afternoon I piled the trio into the passenger side of my truck and the adventure soon began. During the drive, Colton demanded we stop talking so that he could tell us a story and off he went channeling the dead, or at least that’s what it sounded like. We had no choice but to sit there and muffle our laughs and nod along with him when finally after a few minutes, he seemed to find the station he was looking for and began issuing orders to us.

Colton: “Guys, it’s time we had a wild party.”
Goob, Juls, & Clay (in unison): “What?”
Colton: “Yep, that’s right, a wild party. Ryan, you’re in charge of the music. Juls, you need to get the disco ball. And Clay, you bring the punch.”
Clay: “Well wait a minute, what’s your job?”
Colton: “Oh me? Um…I’ll take care of Mom!”
Juls: “But Mom already went to work this morning!”
Colton: “Well, looks like my job’s done! See y’all at the party!”

And with that, he was off into his own little world again as the rest of us burst into laughter.

One of these days, I hope we can figure out where he gets half the stuff he comes up with. Until then, I’ll just sit by the radio and see what’s on.

Current Count: 103

Since the day this post was created, Shyzer has received visitors from the following countries:

Afghanistan
Algeria
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Belgium
Bermuda
Bolivia
Brazil
Britain
Brunei
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Canada
Chile
China
Columbia
Costa Rica
Cote D’Ivoire
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Estonia
Europe
Faroe Islands
Fiji
Finland
France
Germany
Ghana
Greece
Greenland
Guatemala
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Ireland
Isreal
Italy
Japan
Jordan
Kuwait
Laos
Latvia
Lebanon
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malaysia
Malta
Mauritius
Mexico
Morocco
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nigeria
Norway
Oman
Pakistan
Panama
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Qatar
Romania
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Serbia
Singapore
Slovakia
Slovenia
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
Taiwan
Thailand
Trinidad and Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Uganda
Ukraine
Uruguay
United Arab Emirates
United States
Venezuela
Vietnam

Allow me to take a moment to say, “That’s damn cool.”

Loyal Shyzer-ian Fellner forwarded me an e-mail last week from his Aunt and it still has me chuckling.

This past summer I wrote about going down to Charleston to spend some time with Fellner and his family at the beach. Some of his fellow relatives in attendance were his aunt, uncle, and four cousins from Kansas City, all of whom were quite fun and enjoyable to spend time with. Fellner’s cousins were especially adorable since they were all below age 9 or so, with the youngest, Gabrielle, clocking in around 4 years old.

So you can imagine the humor aroused when Fellner forwarded this to me:

I had to e-mail this story before I forgot it. At bedtime, when we say our prayers, all the kids get to “bless” whoever they want (God bless Mom, God bless Dad, etc.) The other night, we were saying prayers and it was Gabrielle’s turn to bless someone. We had already blessed all the family members so she was trying to think of someone else. Out of the blue she said “God bless Goob, that Kevin brought to the beach.” It was hilarious - I was surprised that she even remembered him and don’t know what made her think of him.

That’s right folks. You spend a week with me and the impact I have on you is so enormous, you’ll be making sure the Big Man is looking out for me. Which is great for me, since we all know how spotty my church attendance is. But luckily for Gabrielle, I like to return each and every favor I receive, so tonight she’ll be getting a little somethin’ somethin’ in the prayer department.

Hopefully I send it to the correct God, though. I can’t count how many prayers I screwed up on and accidentally sent to that damn Ganesha! An elephant with four arms…what will they think of next?!

I received my Virginia voter’s registration card in the mail today. It makes South Carolina’s look like a Picasso and the only thing the Palmetto State has going for theirs is that it’s blue. Virginia’s is a long, bland white strip that won’t even fold properly thanks to non-perforated edges.

Screw new roads in D.C. or better rural schools, I want something that I won’t mistake as a crummy business card in my wallet. I think I’m gonna refuse to vote here until a candidate campaigns for new voter registration cards.

I’ve been working on Shyzer for the past 8 hours and I just asked myself if I’m not sitting here wasting my time.

It looks like I’m gonna go with the Flickr Pro account. I actually installed the 4Images program I talked about earlier and it works just fine, but the thought of uploading all the photos and thinking of captions and crap for them again simply was not an appealing thought. Plus it just doesn’t look right, what with the way the categories and photos are displayed. Plus, Flickr is so much cleaner and with the promise of no outside ads being run and unlimited storage / bandwidth, I think it’s the smartest decision. That’ll clear 600megs off my server and free that room up for some other things I’d rather share

I figure I may as well stay up all night at this point and keep working on Shyzer. My problem is that I have so many ideas and things that I want to try to do, that I fail to focus enough and get anything accomplished. Here’s to hoping I can finish at least one of these ideas by the end of the week and have something to show for it.

I always thought it was odd when I walked in a restaurant and saw one of those little “How are we doing?” cards on all their tables. It seemed like a waste of the paper they were printed on, for who in their right mind would think that a small postcard filled with “unsatisfactory” marks would sway the minds of those sitting in a corporate office? And who even filled out those things, anyways? I’d never seen a patron complain to their waitress and then fill the thing out. Usually a new meal and a free Oreo dessert was all it took to make most people happy.

And then one day I received a letter addressed to Mr. Delay.

About eight years ago, Atlanta Bread Company opened a small deli in the local mall and it was all the rage. I admit, they made some damn good sandwiches, but for a broke high school kid, they were a little pricey. One night, however, Chong and I were walking out of the movie theater and decided to grab some dinner before heading home. We strolled over to ABC and were about halfway through our meal when I noticed the small rectangle out of the corner of my eye. I have no idea what movie we had just seen, but it must have been a comedy, because I remember being in one of those giddy and punchy moods. You know the one, where everything is funny and God help you if somebody near by says the word “duty.”

Alex ran up to the counter and grabbed a pen and we proceeded to fill out the card with remarks such as “Our pickles were too soggy” and “The music here is gay” and “The checkout lady didn’t smile OR suggestively wink at me when I paid her my money!” At the end, it asked for our name and address. We settled on using “Art Vandelay” as our name, yet for some reason we actually used my real address.

About two weeks later, we were strolling through the hallways in school when one of Chong’s friend ran up to him and punched him in the chest. “What the hell did you do,” she demanded from him. Knowing a pissed off, psychotic girl when I saw one, I decided it was high time I get the hell away from this scene before it turned ugly, so I began to walk off. “Oh no, you’re in this too! You both were sitting there laughing your asses off while filling out that questionnaire!” It finally dawned on me that this was Chong’s friend that worked over at ABC. However, still being truly confused since we doubted our little review could have caused such a reaction, we asked her to elaborate. “We got a freaking 15 cent pay cut because of you guys! And somebody from corporate is coming to inspect us later this week. Whatever you morons wrote on that card pissed somebody off!”

We were stunned. They actually took that thing seriously? We figured the name would be signal enough that it was a joke since everybody and their cousin in that day and age knew “Art Vandelay” was the fictional character from Seinfeld.

Once we got home later that day, Chong came over to my house for a few minutes and we sat chatting in the kitchen as I ruffled through the mail. I remember stopping in mid-sentence and bursting into laughter when I saw who the envelope was addressed to. I ripped it open and looked at the letter just to see if they’d made a mistake on the outside.

Nope. They’d addressed the darn thing to a “Mr. Delay.” The letter went on to explain how they were very sorry and how they’d make sure to investigate into the poor quality of the food, the low level of customer service, and the “inappropriate” music, among many of the other silly things we’d complained about. We must have showed that letter to everybody we knew and beamed proudly when people asked if we were the ABC idiots. I’ve got no idea what happened to it, though, for I can’t remember actually seeing that letter in many years. It’s one of those many things you look back on and think, “Damn, I really wish I had kept that, if for no other reason as a reminder of how retarded and yet how much fun we used to have.”

However, I still don’t consider this issue resolved since I never got my free Oreo dessert. Maybe Mr. Delay needs to write another letter.

I’ve officially reached the end of my patience with the Shyzer Gallery software (which is oh-so-cleverly named Gallery) and am going to be ditching it. They came out with an “upgrade” back in September and frankly, the only thing it upgraded were the number of headaches their software would give me over the course of a week. I’ll spare you the mumbo-jumbo, but as it currently stands, it takes me 8 minutes to upload a single picture.

Eight minutes per fucking picture.

No thank you.

So, I’ve spent today backing up my pictures and am going to spend tomorrow moving over to something else. As of now, I am considering switching to either 4images, Coppermine, or pay $24.99 for a Flickr Pro account. I would go with one of the two free software, but they both could have me wanting to strangle myself just like Gallery has over the past few years. And while Flickr costs money each year, there are some cool plugins with Wordpress that I could use.

I thought about taking the damn pictures down altogether, but once I thought about it and looked at the stats, I actually realized how many people visit the darn things each day. So since people seem to enjoy them, I’ll keep them around - albeit in a new format - and anybody who wants to see me in a freaking dress at 0300 on a Tuesday morning will still be able to come to Shyzer and have a peek.

And just as quickly as it arrived, Puke Fest 2006 faded off into the night. I think my favorite part was when I was talking to my socks, which I thought were my cat. Good times. I expected the house to be in a post-Katrina like state with clothes, toys, and food scattered throughout the rooms. Luckily, it wasn’t too bad and I was able to bring it back to “mom approved” specifications with only an hour or two of work.

I would write more, but I can’t see much since I’ve had to throw my contacts out since I’ve been wearing the same pair for, oh, about 18 months now. When I completely lose my eyesight at age 35, I’m gonna have nobody but myself to blame.

Puke Fest 2006 is in full swing and I must say, I’m ready for it to end. I woke up this morning feeling kinda quessy and by the end of the Patriots-Jags game, I was just coming back into reality. I was so delusional today, I thought it was around noon when it was really 2100.

Some might think I’m sharing too much information when I tell you that for 7 hours, on the hour, I puked. It was like clockwork. Kinda cool actually. But no, my friends, I think the “too much information” label should be applied when I tell you that once I spewed up the Pepto Bismal that I had taken and it didn’t taste that bad the second time around!

And somebody give Juls a medal for taking care of the house while I was bedridden.