Jaded with the Internet

These days I go online and look at the Internet and go to my usual sites and spend hours clicking away until I realize I'm basically looking at nothing. I'm clicking at the Refresh button and seeing no change when I expect something fresh to appear.

The pathetic thing about this is I go online almost everyday.

I am seriously bored with it.

Perhaps it's time for me to get off my bum, forget about the Internet and all its stupidity, and just do something physical for a change.

Look it up

Over the past few months I've become genuinely surprised, frustrated and annoyed at how lazy people have become searching the wealth of information the Internet has. Here we are, swimming in a veritable ocean of information, and yet people still keep asking the same dumb questions - persistently.

Worse, people are becoming gullible and believing all these myths circulated by email, forums and whatnot. They don't even realize that a lot of these said myths have already been tested and debunked.

I have to wonder: Am I the only one nowadays who can appreciate the value of "looking it up?" As a kid I was brought up by my dad to find the answers to my own questions. Back then I criticized him for taking what I thought was the easy way out of my nagging, but now I realize he was actually teaching me a very valuable lesson.

So those of you out there reading this: Before you nag other people with questions about what you don't know, let your fingers do some work for you. How hard is it to go to a search engine, type in a string of words into a one-line text field, and hit the Enter key afterward? You will not believe how much "work" people think you put in when you simply show them the results of your Internet search.

Death of a dream?

People who've known me from my high school days know that I've had real experience doing the dirty work of writing, designing layout and preparing to print a magazine. Indeed, all this experience really influenced me in choosing my courses in college. I tried to continue my enthusiasm for the magazine into college, but got tripped up by my inability to follow beats in preparation for writing a decent news article.

College aside, my time with Counterpoint was definitely one of my most productive spells I've ever had in my lifetime. As layout editor, I was in love with the entire process of making a magazine from a bunch of articles and photos, trying to synthesize all of them into one cohesive, attractive-looking whole. Working with Adobe PageMaker and InDesign since the sixth grade taught me the importance of a proper "preflight" check of a project before sending it off to the print shop, and the creative power one can wield with only two inks -- usually black and PANTONE 121 CVU for me (a bright yellow to everyone else).

Fast forward to today, and I am saddened by the realization that the Internet has saturated our lives so much that entire magazines and newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and San Francisco Chronicle are closing up shop, opting to become entirely "Internet-only" publications.

I never really got the hang of HTML. Sure, I hard-coded an entire website once in the past with nothing but Notepad, but I found the whole process exceedingly clunky and nowhere near as intuitive as using PageMaker/InDesign. I am aware that the Internet opens so many other ways of turning a web page into eye candy, but most of the animated banners I see on websites do them no favors as coherent wholes. Novelty for the sake of novelty, I'd say. From a design standpoint, I've always believed in keeping things simple -- my tools involving nothing more than typefaces and drawn objects.

Back in high school I thought I could make a living as a layout editor for a magazine. That probably isn't the case in the US any longer, with magazines slowly slipping into obsolescence, taking one of my greatest ambitions along with them.

This says it all, really

A suggestion: Rewrite the banner to account for text-speak, too.

Online mumblings

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?