Alan Is Good

Haiku Monday April 27, 2009

Snowman melts away

His legacy now inside

The darkest flowers

Haiku Monday April 20, 2009

Success, happiness

Despite loss, against all odds

No higher feeling

Brother and sister vs. the world

Today the verdict is out on the people who run the Pirate Bay.  A Swedish court found four men guilty of assisting and promoting other people’s infringement of copyright laws.  While the men insist that nothing will change for them or for the file sharing world, many downloaders and freeloaders alike are concerned that the days of file sharing my soon come to an end.  

I have exclusive footage from the courtroom scene, here’s the video:

Lately I’ve noticed a few updates and notables to some of my previous posts.  None truly warrant an entire new post on the matter, so I’ll just jot them down here in this update post.  It’ll be like those reality shows on VH1, where they have the “Reunion Special” and everyone gets together for 15 more minutes of drama.

The Darker Side of Google Latitude

I wrote about the dark effects of this new app, but I didn’t consider the lighter side!  Yesterday TechCrunch wrote about a San Francisco woman whose purse was stolen, with her iPhone inside.  Sure enough, she was a Google Latitude user.  She called her sister who had access to see her location at all times, and they were able to track down the criminal, arrest him and get the purse back.   Check out this CBS video covering the story.  Epic!  Turn on your Google Latitude function and let a family member have constant updates to your location.  You never know!

The Fate of The Facebook Relationship Status

Facebook has since changed the layout of their front page, and for a time I thought this nullified my relationship status posts.  It seemed like the only way to check on relationship status was to actually visit a person’s page, which so few of us do on a regular basis.  Then I realized that the relationship updates do show up in the Highlights box on the right side of the page!  In my personal life, I found it in me to hit the “Like” button for a recently ended relationship of a long time friend.  It also put the status update at the top of the highlights list for the week.  

Additionally, with the “Comment” option on these relationship updates, I’ve been seeing more and more threads unfold from them.  So far they have all been light hearted, fun comments, like ‘ooo,’ or ‘who’s the lucky gal?” but I have yet to see snarky or vindictive ones.  My appreciation for my friend’s breakup probably falls under that category, but I’ve made several justifications internally for why I did it.  

Skittles Tastes the Fail Boat

Skittles is again using the Twitter Search results for “Skittles” as their homepage at Skittles.com.  At this point who knows what their strategy is.  They have the age filter, but no word filters or anything.  It’s like they just said, “Umm, I dunno.  Put the Twitter results up again, I guess.”

Cisco Fatty and Social Media Censorship

Many bloggers wrote the standard ‘this is why you should watch what you say on Twitter,’ or the ‘how to lose your job via Twitter’ postings, but I didn’t really see anyone take my stance.  My stance – you know, the one that was featured on Brazen Careerist and was one of the most popular posts of the week!  The only other update to this post was that horrible cisco fatty video on YouTube.  Very high chance of being offended, even higher chance of chuckling hysterically.

TIME Magazine’s Most Influential Person of . . . LOLwut? 

The voting for this is still going on, but it’s all for naught.  4Chan’s founder, moot, is ahead by an astronomical amount.  Here’s the latest tally, from TIME’s website: 

Of course, it doesn’t end there.  Just to show the world the power of the Anonymous, they also went ahead and strategically voted up the rest of the top 21 such that they acrostically spelled out MARBLECAKE, ALSO THE GAME.  Do you see it?  The phrase means nothing, really.  It’s another meme that’s lulzy.  Just the muscles of the Anonymous being flexed for the entire world to see.  The day that a viral campaign or digital PR effort is somehow supported by the Anonymous is the day that the marketers responsible for the campaign become quite wealthy.  

No Further Updates

This concludes the VH1 reunion special “AlanIsGood Blog Posts.”  See you next season.  And by next season, I mean tomorrow.

To learn something new.

To everyone in Generation X, Y, Z, or whichever generation you claim, my youthful and optimistically informed advice is this: resources are too abundant and life is too short to allow a day to pass in which we learn nothing new. No new skills, no new tricks, not even a slathering of petty facts and trivia? Shame on you, reader. There’s still time in the day to turn it all around!

This post may seem trivial, but its the formal announcement of AlanIsGood University’s grand opening. The only thing better than learning something new is to teach others what you already know. I have all the tools necessary to start releasing some simple 101 course videos on all the quirky little things I’ve been talking about on here, like Facebook, Twitter, photoshop, RSS feeds/readers and Flash-based goodness. I won’t pretend there’s already an in-depth structure to it, but I will start with 101 how-to videos and slowly progress to some pretty advanced techniques and practices in each topic. Take or leave what you will – but someone out there is going to learn something new because of it.

Oh yeah, there’s been a slight adjustment to the branding and color scheme of AlanIsGood.com. That’s because I’ve learned a lot more about photoshop and Flash this week!

And not a teacher in sight.

Haiku Monday April 13, 2009

Hi, this is Gamestop

Do you carry Battletoads?

PLEASE STOP CALLING! *click*

For more information about the Battletoads meme, go to

tinyurl.com(slash)battletoads

In honor of a conversation and joke between @m3rkvry and myself about newspapers’ failing business model and the success of online ads and publications.  

To Peter Parker: upload your snapshots to Flickr and TwitPic, and see if you can get some photosharing site advertisements on your blog.  Good luck!