about the talking fish

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Writer. Wheelman. Occasional DIY mechanic. Walking collection of hang-ups. Hopeless romantic. Old-school. Analog soul in a digital world. I am all of these things and more.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Online mumblings

Ever since shunning online forum websites, I've become bored with the Internet, to be honest. What do I do now and where do I go whenever I successfully complete the archaic 36Kbps connection over my phone line? Nowadays the prospect of successfully connecting to the Internet has become more satisfying than the surfing of its contents---a rather odd development.

Since the holidays started, you could count my successful logins to Yahoo! Messenger on the fingers of one hand. It sucks. Yes, yes, we all know by now about the intensity-7.2 quake in Taiwan snapping all the undersea cables that are the backbone of connectivity to the Philippines. However, everybody else has remedied the problem somehow and returned to regular service---except Yahoo. So far the only thing I can access on Yahoo is e-mail, and that takes quite a bit of patience. Even access to Flickr (which is now incidentally a Yahoo service) proves futile.

I've visited Friendster more often recently and it's surprising how different some of my friends look like, just a few years after I last saw them in high school. My friend Tasha is nigh-unrecognizable in her photos; I had second thoughts about adding her as a friend on Friendster because she looked like someone else entirely...someone I didn't know. It was only when my friend request was done and I dug through her other photos that I was assured she was the same girl.

New friend requests recently popped up on my profile, most of them from people at work. Considering that I don't update my profile or other stuff on Friendster all that frequently (ergo, I don't attract much attention), it's a pleasant surprise that relatively new people in my life go out of their way to add me up.

I have no idea how the "featured blogs" thing works there, though. I was thinking that they would be otherworldly in content or writing style, but no, these so-called "featured blogs" on Friendster are some of the plainest and dullest blogs I've ever read.

Wikipedia has become a constant destination since I learned a lot of my usual sites (and yes, including this blog) are banned at the office. On a whim I tend to search for articles about celebrities I knew from the past or present---a sort of ongoing "Where Are They Now?" feature running in my head. So far, I've learned that Scarlett Johansson tries her best to make relationships work "in a monogamous way," Ed Harris has taken up an interest in directing, Ving Rhames' moniker is actor-friend Stanley Tucci's nickname for his birth name "Irving," Michael Clarke Duncan used to work as a bouncer...and other such unimportant but nonetheless interesting stuff.

Other than my blog and my Multiply page, that's pretty much it. Any suggestions as to what sites I can still visit on a paltry dial-up connection?

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