Procrastic Fantastic

Facebook is great fun, its everything MySpace and Bebo promised to be but never quite made it. Right now, everyone’s (lazily) remaking profiles and migrating to Facebook, and messing with some of the fun applications that Facebook allows 3rd Parties to create. I myself am working on on of these, but more on that later. My favourite application so far is Scrabulous, a turn-based implementation of scrabble that you can pick up and start and leave off at will. However, one of the dictionaries appears a little too lenient….

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Last Friday we bade an emotional emphatic goodbye to university life - at least for now - and so, the job hunting begins. I’ve submitted my details to Monster, Eolas, Jobs.ie and I’ve began looking for connections on bebo social professional networking community, LinkedIn. Did you know your average CEO has 29 direct connections on LinkedIn? Well, I have 2. More to come hopefully!

Another upshot of this job search is that GG.com will probably have to change. It needs to say “Hire Me!” rather than “argue with me about ethical issues of suspect importance”. CV and Portfolio sections will be added soon I guess.

I’ve been working away on UCCDating.com since September 2006, creating a software application called AcademicAmore. The pitch goes like this:

• AcademicAmore is a tool to create a social networking community, similar to (and in some areas, more feature-rich than) MySpace, Bebo or Facebook. The differentiating factor is that it is designed to be used in a locality - re-introducing the real-world factors of social interaction.
• The real-world angle of the project is controlled by a fully customisable interface, a wiki-style guide to interests and places in the locality of the community, and an events calendar provided to enable users to meet-up at an event that interests them. All of this can be tied in with a Google map to give a visual guide to who and what is going on in the community.
• Users can create their own avatar, similar to WeeMees or SecondLife.

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I’d just like to clarify that I have no conection with the people who have been using my email address to send out ’spam’ emails asking you to buy AFML stock.

It is extremely easy to fake the “from” field in an email - essentially anyone with a bit of programming knowledge can send an email from anyone, to anyone. It is a flaw in the concept of email, and is at this late stage highly unlikely to ever change.

The spammers like to pretend that they are from a reputable website, so they send emails from addresses like ijif@GavinGolden.com.

The company in the email, Aerofoam Metals, have released a statement that they are trying to get the spammers to stop. What may ultimately stop the spammers is that the stock market have stopped taking trades on AFML, making it pointless to send the email.

So I took Courtenay’s advice and signed up for Last.fm. Wow. Its orsm.

Apart from just listing what you and your buddies are listening to, it gives you a radio station that plays songs recommended just for you. I’m now a Doors fan! Heres my weekly top ten artists (will update regularly).