The H1N1, here holding a tasty complementary H1N1-beverage that came with each model sold.

The last remaining H1N1 know to exist was last seen roaming the deserts of Mexico.

photo credit: borrowed time | demi-brooke

The Facebook apps, like the infamous “Funwall” are a real pain, and I have started to remove, block or turn off email alerts on all of them.

I do believe that Facebook needs to do something drastic about the third party apps though, like turning off email alerts for all of them (and letting whomever wants it to turn it back on manually) to avoid users tuning out because of Facebook fatique, but I also pray that my contacts will find it in their harts to turn down the spam volume just a tiny bit, and perhaps not forward quite that many personality tests and quizzes to me, it is starting to get a little old (and frankly, most of these apps has been designed by retards.

But even though my feelings towards Facebook is fairly cold right now, I still love Facebook for the fact that it puts me in touch of all the people I know/knew in my home town. I actually feel some … comfort … in knowing that if I wanted to, I could easily reach people I went to school with, or simply log on to see what they are doing. We are even using Facebook to organise a highschool reunion right now!

Now compare Facebook to the supposedly next “new thing”, Twitter. The people I connect to on Facebook are people who are not necessarily supernerds and “early adopters”, and is far from even creating an account on Twitter.  The last time I checked Facebook had over 1 million Norwegian users, and Twitter had just over 500, so I guess Twitter has some SERIOUS catching up to do, if it can (or want to).

Twitter lacks the tools for connecting people in groups or events, so I doubt that Twitter will be anything close to have the user mass of Facebook (in Norway) any time soon, if ever.

I love microblogging myself, but it seems like 90% of what people write about are 140 character ads for their own stuff (or undisclosed endorsement for products, I have even seen several examples of weird product placements, and I’ll take cute kitten video spam on my Funwall any day over that.

(This post is a reply to recent post to “Are you fed up with Facebook?” from Mashable.)

I still haven’t quite figured out what the hell I am supposed to do with Twitter. I signed up with Twitter a year ago, but because so few people (I knew) used it, I had actually removed the Twitter sidebar extention I had installed on Firefox. But then all of a sudden, just a few weeks ago, people started adding me. Or, as Twitter (and Tumblr) say: “Follow me”. What a strange term to use?

Followers? As in dicilples?

So with the three people who added me just today, I have 16 people following me. Think about it! That is four more than Jesus! But after the first millisecond of exitement, I started to feel the weight of responsibility on my shoulders to actually twitter something insightful! To weigh my words better, to say something profound to my new “diciples”! And at the same time I feel ashamed of my previous Twitterings, like:

Mr Krick, you are staring at my tits!

See what I mean?

Weeding the scriptures!

It is a huge responsibility to have Followers. So now I am going through my Twitterings for the last year, the words I muttered to myself in the dark screenlit hours of the night, trying to entertain, well, the notion of someone listening. Trying hard to find something worth keeping, perhaps repeating now for the enlightenment for my 16 FOLLOWERS! But I am hard pressed to find anything worth keeping.

Maybe this one?

Stuffed and semidrunk. Happy and fat. Listening to babys breath. 09:30 PM April 06, 2007

I feel that this is something even Jesus could have said. If he had a newborn daughter, and had just eaten himself silly on roasted lamb at his mother-in-laws house.

Or perhaps this little gem:

All I say is true and false and meaningless. 12:54 AM April 07, 2007

That is pretty clever, and perhaps SHOULD have been said by JC, it sure would have made the bible a little more sensible. But he probably didn’t say it and neighter did I, since it is a quote from the fantastic book Illuminatus.

Besides those two posts, my twitterstream is pretty shallow and, yes, meaningless, and more or less consist of twitterings about movies I was watching at the time, or silly quotes, or different social websites I was testing at the time. Shameful stuff. I have to get my act together.

I wonder if all people who for some reason gets Followers have this problem, trying to take back the funny silly things and fart jokes he probably made in the company of his 12 (haha!) diciples. Perhaps Jesus went into their bags in the middle of the night and stole their notes, perhaps buried the ones he didn’t like in a heap of rubble, like I am considering deleting the most embarrassing moments in my twitterstream now that my colleagues are FOLLOWING me on Twitter

Just a thought

Update 30.03.2008 (23 followers)

This is something you don’t see in your inbox every day, apparantly Senator Barack Obama is now following me (and 19000 + other people) on Twitter. Now I really must remember to behave. Perhaps I shouldn’t have posted that fake Eleanor Roosevelt quote…

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Update 02.04.2008 (30 followers):

Twitter is getting press in Norway, lately by jounalist Jan Omdahl at dagbladet.no , who asks if Twitter is the new Facebook. There are over 1 million Norwegian Facebook users, but currently, by the etimates made by NRKbeta using twitdir, the number of users who has registered as Norwegian is a measly 500. But there are probably more, and judging by the number of new people following me, it is about to explode. Cool!

Both Dagbladet and NRKbeta has superb writeup about Twitter, but feel free to read my first test/review of Twitter and why it works so well, apptly titled Why Twitter words / Screw productivity.

]]> http://pappmaskin.no/2008/03/follow-the-twittering-guy-with-the-beard-and-long-hair-and-stuff/feed/ 3 http://pappmaskin.no/2007/11/summary-of-my-total-knowledge-of-german-culture/ http://pappmaskin.no/2007/11/summary-of-my-total-knowledge-of-german-culture/#comments Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:53:00 +0000 Morten Skogly http://pappmaskin.no/?p=1274

"Look Harry, a telephone!"

1. Derrek (old detective series that used to run on Norwegian tv). Taught me everything I know of the German language, which is surprinsingly much! I once talked to a german girl for one hour, me in english, she in German, and it went really well. People listening in gaping  :)
2. Hitler (really evil guy with a mindblowingly ugly mustache and a penchant for bad painting ). Probably the worst human being to ever have walked this earth.
3. Leni Riefenstahl – Documentary filmmaker for Nazi Germany. I had the misfortune to see one of her films at Tromsø International Film festival some years ago, and fell asleep after 30 minutes. Don’t know if that says more about me or her abilities as a film maker, or if I simply find Hitler Germany tedious.
4. “Jah Helga ich komme” – Ah, the fond memories of German soft porn on RTL. For some reason RTL was included in the basic cable tv package in my home town, and now and again they would air the most ridiculous shows with Germans in Lederhosens trying their best to shame their country and the human race in general, running around half naked and jumping in haystacks etc. Ooooh, Helga, slap my buttocks!
5. Yodeling. Yodeling kicks ass!
6. Die toten hosen – Great punk rock! I was on “Interrail” one summer, traveling around Europe on the cheap,  and met two Germans that I travelled with through Portugal, and they had tapes with Die Toten Hosen that I swapped with my own mix tapes. We went swimming one day and the waves where hitting the shore so hard that my swimming shorts actually got ripped down the side. I had to hold them together with my hands. When I threw them away I just had to shout “Die Toten Hosen” (dead pants). Drew laughs, good memory. Homepage: http://www.dietotenhosen.de (PS: I have no idea what they are singing about, so if it is something evil and offending, then flame THEM, not me, mkay?)
7. Herman Hesse – I had a long “religious period”, and one of my favorite books where Siddharta by Herman Hesse. Stephenwolf is also pretty good. (Weird youtube clip here)
8. Update, 10th of february 2009: Learned something new: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun” – a famous quote usually “credited” to various Nazi leaders, like Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, is actually (maybe?) from a theater play called Schlageter by writer Hanns Johst , first performed for Hitler’s birthday in 1933.
9. Beer festivals! WTF!

This picture is taken at the Polar Centre on Saltfjellet in Norway, a beautiful area on the highlands where a lot of tourists stop on their way the North Cape. Seems like their grey water (etc, possibly sewage) is poured out into this vulnerable landscape just 30 meters from the entrance to the Polar Centre. Makes me embarrassed to be Norwegian.

Boing Boing: Can anyone own “Web 2.0?”:

O’Reilly Media have taken a ton of criticism for attempting to enforce a service mark against a nonprofit group in Ireland that wanted to have “Web 2.0″ conference.

The winner of The Top Candidates, a swedish television show aired on SVT, decides to donate his winnings to Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay – The worlds largest BitTorrent tracker:

The First State Financed Tracker

So, finally SVT payed up, and the money from Petter’s win at The Top Candidates has found it’s way home.

Obviously SVT didn’t like it that the winner decided to donate his money to two pretty controversial organizations.

One of them The Pirate Bay and, especially, the other “The Invicible Party”, which you’ve probably heard about in the news if you’re a swede.

So they decided to give the money to Petter himself instead, which also makes him have to pay taxes for it, leaving us with only $4 656 USD (35 000 SEK).

As we’ve written earlier, the money went to a new database and search server. We’re also trying to cut down on the advertisements.

Oh, by the way, SVT is Sweden’s public service tv station, so I guess this makes us the first state financed tracker. Pretty cool, huh?

The links to the 8.02 preview version of Opera that I came across in their forum is dead, and the blogosphere seem to be silent on the subject since july 2005.

Please drop a comment If you have any juice on this subject.

Faster, more efficient downloads in Opera technical preview with BitTorrent

photo credit: andyket

photo credit: Thomas Hawk

The World Health Organization has used its amazingly brainy researchers to figure out that we need to spend a-whole-lotta money trying to prevent poor people from smoking and eating themselves to death! But they also conclude that “it won’t be easy”! Now THAT is an understatement!

New Scientist Breaking News – Chronic disease is biggest global killer: “But Prentice notes that changing people’s diets, particularly those on low incomes, will not be easy as there is a necessity for them to buy cheap, high-fat, heavily subsidisedfoods. “One of the main problems is that developing countries are at the mercy of huge multinational companies,” he says. For example, he says edible oils like vegetable oils can now be produced extremely cheaply compared with 30 years ago.”

Personally, I have only one thing to say to fat dying smokers worldwide: Goodbye, and good riddance, tards.

photo credit: nukeit1