I absolutely hate the word “blog”

Here’s hoping this Facebook email thread needs no real intro:

—–Original Message to Facebook—–
From: Virginia Culler
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: PRIVACY-BUGS: “Wallster” app — spam/worm

User id: xxxxxxxxx
Description of problem: I received a message from an alleged Facebook app called “Wallmaster”, informing me that a picture from my profile had been used on xxxxxxx.com.  This appears to be a very sketchy site.  The friend who allegedly sent me this message did not in fact send it (I have informed her of this fact), and the app does not appear to actually exist.  I’d like to forward you the email, but you don’t seem to up-front about providing an email address (understandably).  If you’d like to provide me with an address to which I could send the email in question, you’d probably be able to crack down on this a bit better.  As it stands, I can only paste it in:

2008/11/10 Facebook <wallmaster+m1mh~hdm@facebookmail.com>

Lauren wrote on your Wall:

“has anyone emailed you to let you know your faceboook pic was just featured on dinascript.com”

To see your Wall or to write on Lauren’s Wall, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/xxxxxxxxx

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

___
Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to:
http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks and let me know if I can be of additional help!

–Virginia

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3

_____

Hi Virginia,

As part of the new site design we have updated the “Friends” box to offer more customization options.  To edit these settings, simply navigate to your profile page and then click on the pencil icon in the upper right hand corner of the “Friends” box.

The Edit Box that appears will allow you to specify how many friends are displayed and which friends you always want to show.  If you want to ensure that friends from certain networks appear, you can select those networks in the “Include friends from” section.  Finally, checking the “Show Networks Section” will display a list of all of the networks your friends are in.

We hope that you enjoy these changes and welcome any feedback.  Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Daisy
User Operations
Facebook

_____

Me again.  So what just happened?  Did you actually READ my message, “Daisy”?  Taking bets as to whether or not this is yet another Facebook virus — ten bucks says “Daisy” doesn’t really exist (unless it’s like a subtle nod to Kubrick, and Facebook is actually powered by HAL?).  Ah well, now I know all about the new Facebook (TM) customization options.  So there’s that!

I’ve wondered for the past couple of years why Google didn’t have a Web browser, and I guess now I know… they were working on it, just not talking about it. Chrome is their brand-spanking-new, just-released-yesterday browser that’s built by design for today’s Web, which is heavier on applications than when the Internet first came to power fruition.

Along with the release came a nifty little e-book, which is geared more towards other developers than to consumers. Despite this fact, it’s a fun read that gets into some of the more complex aspects of the project’s programming, while still being peppered with cute jokes and references.

The e-book was made public a bit too early, according to Google. However, they immediately jumped on board and made the comic public.

And how is the browser holding up? So far, sorta good… and sorta buggy. Not exactly a shock, the day after its release — but I was hoping to be blown away! So far I’ve experienced at least one crash that brought down the entire program, even though they intentionally designed thing such that crashes would remain isolated in the tab where the problem originated.

That, and performance has been VERY slow so far, compared to the semi-recent Firefox 3. Like painfully, get up and do something else while the tab loads slow. And this has been the case for a lot of lower-memory tabs that performed super-fast in other browsers. GAH!

Plus — and this is just a language nerd’s pet peeve — the text in almost all of the warning/message banners is cut off. Not the case for Grant, though. I’m running Windows XP Home Edition and I have a wide-screen laptop, and I don’t do any weird text magnification settings… and I don’t think I have *that* unusual of a set of circumstances. How come he gets complete, pretty-looking text and I get pre-beta-looking stuff? No fair!

Don’t get me wrong, though — Chrome is already set as my default browser, and I trust that it will only get better with time. (I did read the book, after all.) I just hope the speed thing gets resolved soon!

Not exactly the first time, but still.  This was pause-and-shoot worthy. Especially given that these days, the mere mention of Sarah Palin’s name is a standalone punchline. Even the women on the skincare and makeup forum I frequent had to take a stab.

Anyway. On a political note, Imaginary Readers, allow me to introduce you to Grant’s new blog. (Here’s hoping he doesn’t mind the Imaginary Plug.)

Grant will most likely write about politics far more frequently than I will. He will also write about video games and movie reviews and… aw hell, go click it. He’s funnier and wittier and taller than I am. Well, in many contexts/shoes, anyhow. So there you have it.

He’s also figuring out how to do a lot of custom CSS stuff from scratch, which makes me jealous and impressed. Who knows — maybe I can get him to work his newfound skills on this tired old blog. (Kidding, kidding — he’s the one who helped me co-design this hack-of-a-theme just a few months ago, so I could update to a non-WP 1.0 design.)

I feel like I’m in a Volkswagen commercial. I’m sandwiched between two other bus commuters who were previously both yammering loudly.

But they finally shut up and both started listening to music. And for the past two-ish tracks, we’ve all been subtly tapping our feet/fingers/neighbors in PERFECT TIME with each other.

Aww, Loud White Tapper just got off. Way to ruin the groove, buddy.

In other news, this post was brought to you by the new-ish WordPress iPhone app. Testing, one, two…

Grant’s video iPod recently suffered a broken headphone jack, but he was eight full months out of warranty coverage. Still, he took it to the Apple store to see what could be done, and they gave him a new one on the spot. Their reasoning? “It looks fresh out of the box [because you've always kept it in a case so it's not scratched up]“.

Yep, a brand-new iPod, no questions asked. I friggin’ love those guys.