We are so much more.

As some of you know, I stopped blogging for a couple of months. I even considered quitting for good. The main reason being that I am so much more than my social media persona. There are so many more layers of myself. Most of us project a very different image of ourselves on social media and it is rare when your social media persona is congruent with the essence of who you truly are. So why do we do this?

Over the years I found that the person people like to read about on my blog is only one tenth of who I am. In reality it is very difficult for me to be a fucking delightful person All. Of. The. Time. After a while it feels like this is all that people want from you. That this is only what people want to read about me and my life. We never project a true image of ourselves on the internet. We don't post the truth when we are really depressed. Instead why pretend everything is fine. That all is ok when it is not.

I think we do this because we are scared that if we reveal that side of ourselves that the people on our friend list will judge us. It seems that most of us seek approval and acceptance on social media which is a shame. We don't want to sound weak. We don't want people to know our true thoughts and feelings. We want to present a facade to the world. We want to appear to be the person people want to see in the cyber world. We pretend we are better than what we actually are.

Let's face it, life is not always a ray of sunshine. Sometimes things are rather shitty. We might have issues at work, in our relationship and/or with our families. Yet, on social media, it is very rare that we will reveal this. And the people who do we see as attention seeking or pathetic. They are the people who depresses us and the people we see as complainers and we judge them for sharing. Furthermore, we also judge them for "over sharing" and this is why most of us don't share our troubles and only put on that fake social media smile.

I have found that I have done this quite often on social media. I have always tried to be delightful and funny on my blog. I wanted people to laugh, I wanted people to smile and brighten their day. I wanted, and still do, people to like my blog.

The truth is that this is only a small part of who I am. I rarely blog about my struggle with depression and anxiety. Like I said before I didn't blog about this because I did not want people to judge me. I also know of quite a lot of people who will be judgemental. But the truth is we do not share this part of our lives because we are either ashamed of suffering from mental illness or we are afraid that if people knew they will see us differently. We don't want to share that part of our lives with people, especially not total strangers.

It has been said that many comedians suffer from depression. Often this is a side of themselves we do not see or would not even believe to be true. After all they are so funny and energetic on stage. We have come to accept that they will make us laugh and assume that they're always like that. We don't want to know about their issues off stage because, god forbid, that will make them seem less funny. The same goes for us - bloggers.

People don't want to read on social media about your shit depressing day. This is why we, most of the time, I never share it. The person we present ourselves to be on the internet is the person we want to be. The person we want other people to believe we are.

I have decided that I will no longer confine myself to the persona people want to believe I am on the internet and social media. I will own my life. Sure I will still not completely reveal all of myself because there is a thin line between privacy and revealing too much. Certain things should remain private. But I have decided to not always appear to be the comedian and delightful person you would like at your dinner party because that is not who I am. I am the person who would rather spend the night at home than go to a party. The person who do not like crowds because they make me anxious. The person who isn't always happy and content. I am who I am and if people do not like me, well then they can go fuck themselves.

Coming to this decision probably comes with age and maturity. It is also quite liberating when you have made this decision. I do recommend it for most of you. Be who you are. Be who you were born to be. We are more than our social media personas.

Till next time.

No I Don’t Want to Friend Your Cock

I have been on Facebook since 25 June 2007.  That is like forever in the cyber world.  I have been on Facebook longer than what most people’s relationships last; longer than what most people, including myself, stay at the same job.  Through the last five years I had my fair share of dramas on and with Facebook and I have learned that there are people on Facebook who have very serious fucking mental problems.  Reflecting back on my, sometimes tumultuous, history with “The Facebook” I could not help but wonder, are people really as fucked up in real life as they seem to be on the web.

During the last five years I have been banned from Facebook twice.  Yes banned! Twice!  Coincidentally, both times were preceded by some rather disturbing hate mail I received from some very fanatical religious freaks who took great umbrage at my mere existence.  These were the same freaks that, in all probability, reported me to the gods at Facebook who in return instead of investigating the “complaints” rather opted to disable my account.  Both times it took weeks and a torrent of emails for the Facebook gatekeepers to come to their senses and to reinstate my account.  The most recent time they threatened to banish me was because I had too many friends.

You see, Facebook has a 5000 friend limit.  I have reached that limit a couple of times at which times I were instructed by a faceless bot message to clean up my friend list OR ELSE.  Do you know how long it will take me to scrutinize my entire friend list?  It would not take days – it would take weeks!  The last time I was threatened to clean up my friend list was in August last year and it took me a whole week to delete just over 300 people.  My criteria were simple:  If you don’t have a profile picture of yourself, you were unfriended.  If your name is “Gay Love”, “iFuck a Lot” or “BJ King” or anything ridiculous like that you were gone.  And if you have your private parts as your profile picture you were unfriended.  And this leads me to my next point.  Why do some people think you are on Facebook to hookup?

My Facebook profile clearly reads “married” under my relationship status.  Surely the people who inbox me on Facebook can’t be illiterate?  I have gotten countless messages over the years ranging from people who were soliciting sex from me, wanting to know if hubby and I were into gang bangs, asking how big my dick is, what fetishes I am into and the best ones were “ASL” (age sex location).  Now if you need to ask me that on Facebook you are either just fucking retarded or super lazy!  I mean honestly, don’t these people read your profile before sending you profanities and wanting to have carnal knowledge of your body?  If I don’t know you chances are good that I also don’t want to play occupy the anus with you especially if we are not even on the same continent.

And then there are the people on Facebook who firmly believe that their dicks are their best physical attribute.  They are so very proud of their little sausages that they prominently display it as their profile pictures.  Now if you invite me as a friend and all I can see is your erect pointing the wrong way cock that’s barely disguising your unkept bush and hairy balls, chances are good that I will not accept your request.  Chances are even better that I will report your profile to Facebook and the message you will get in your inbox from me will read “No, I don’t want to friend your cock!”  I mean seriously, would you walk around in public with your crown jewels hanging out of your pants?  Doing it on Facebook is pretty much the same thing, don’t you think?

But Facebook don’t just have overly horny folks, they also have the spammers.  You know who I am talking about.  Those people who like to post products on their timelines, obsessively tag you in photos of brands, inbox 50 people at a time with “You can win a iPad 3” and those folks who troll groups and pages and post links to websites ranging from pornography to dating sites.  I believe there is a special place in hell for these fucktarts right next to telemarketers, homophobes, Hitler and Robert Mugabe.  I don’t know why Facebook don’t ban them.  Most of their profiles are fake anyway and this is why I never accept friend request from girls posing in sexy positions that have a lot of friends but never post anything on their timelines except for spam.

The other crowd of the people that occasionally annoy me on Facebook is the folks that clearly need to be in therapy and never mind airing all of their dirty laundry in public.  Sure sometimes it is entertaining reading their status updates in my news feed.  Following their mental meltdowns during the course of eight hours or reading how they are trying to get rid of their one night stands the next morning is quite entertaining.  But have these folks no shame?  Are they not aware that their friends are reading these status updates and are judging them?  Some days while reading my news feed on Facebook I feel so much more normal and mentally stable in comparison to some of my internet friends.  Watching their shit go down in real time feels a little voyeuristic, but hey if they post it who am I not to read it.

Lastly, I have a certain group on Facebook which I have been trying to close down now for well over a year but with little success.  Apparently winning a war in Iraq is easier than closing down a group on Facebook.  I decided to close the group down due to spam, people using it as their personal sex hookup spot, endless “add me” posts and a few other unsavory reasons.  I have closed the wall, banned hundreds of folks and outright threatened people.  Yet, the group continues to grow and currently have well over 22 000 members.  It boggles the mind.  Why would people stay in a group where you can’t do anything?  Moreover, why the hell would anyone want to join the group either?  The group is called “Gay” but should be called “Whores Orgies & Spam” instead.

Yes, Facebook is filled to its cyber brim with some fucked up people.  Perhaps some folks on Facebook think that I am fucked up, the lord knows I too have my moments.  But no matter how fucked up some people are, I keep on going back to some of my more favorite messed up friends’ profiles.  I do this because their problems and the fact that they are so vocal about it make my problems seem less severe and it’s fun to read and sometimes to watch it happen.  After all, only on the web can people truly embrace and express how fucked up they really are, something they dare not do in their real lives.  It’s just a pity that sometimes, when they least expect it, the two worlds collide and often times it does so with less than desirable consequences.

Till next time.

Hacking Facebook

This past weekend I just realized again that the Internet can be a dangerous place.  Yes we access social media from the relative safety of our homes and offices and as such we are lulled into a false sense of security.  However, on the Internet there are many dangers lurking in the dark crevices of your ASDL line, and there are many people out there with malicious motives looking to harm others.  So I thought it appropriate to look at some ways we can protect ourselves on Facebook and measures we can take to ensure that we do not fall victim to people will sinister motives.  Some of the security measures are simple but it can go a long way in protecting yourself from hackers, viruses, phishing and malware.

On Saturday I had the unfortunate experience of being accused of hacking someone’s account.  I was utterly taken aback by the allegations and rightfully offended that I had to learn of the allegations from a third party.  Deleterious allegations were made against me, but I did manage to contact the person who was hacked and I do believe that we came to an amicable understanding and the person realized that it was not me who hacked their account.  But, this being said, this incident just again impressed upon me how careful we all must be while networking on Facebook.

Since I started my blog in 2009 I have fallen victim to several internet attacks by people who had issues with me and my blog.  Since then I had my Facebook account disabled twice, suspended once, hacked once and there has also been several attempts to hack my blog too.  To add insult to injury I have also received too many hate mails to count and I am sure that as I type this malicious reports are being send to Facebook about me.  Unfortunately, this is the price you pay if you blog, especially if you blog about contentious issues and if there are people out there who hate you, your blog and hate the LGBT community.  Some of them will go to any lengths to harm you physically and if they can’t do that, you will be attacked on the net.  It’s all part of being a blogger.

Over the years, having been a target for cyber attacks I have done the best I can to protect myself and my Facebook interests.  This first safety measure may seem like the simplest one but it really is your first line of defense.  Make sure that you have a strong password.  I really cannot emphasize this enough.  “Password” is NOT an appropriate password and neither is your birthday.  The stronger your password the better the chances are that your account will not be hacked.  This also counts for any website you use where a log in password is required.  Changing your password on a regular basis will also serve as additional security for your account.  Also never give out your password to anyone, not even people you trust.  You don’t give out your internet banking password so why should Facebook be any different?

Make use of secure browsing.  It is important to enable this security feature on Facebook to secure your private information.  When you enable this feature your traffic on Facebook becomes encrypted which makes it harder for hackers and spammers to gain access to your information without your permission.  Never click on suspicious links.  It could ruin your day.  Many people’s Facebook account have been hacked by these links such as the “Dislike button”, “Pink Facebook”, “Check out this shocking video” and “Look Who Viewed My Profile” to mention but a few.  The moment you click on these links your profile is compromised and everyone on your friends list can also become victims.  When such a link is posted on your profile delete it immediately and warn your friend whose profile posted it to change their password right away.

Be mindful of what email you use for Facebook.  The email you use for Facebook should be distinct from the one you use where security is more critical – such as online banking and Paypal accounts.  If you use the same email on all these platforms and your Facebook account gets hacked your more secure account could then also be vulnerable and the result could be costly.  Also be careful of phishing scams.  Should you have accidentally clicked on a malicious link or app you normally will get directed to a mirror site that is almost a perfect copy of Facebook’s log in page and you will be asked to log in again.  When you do this your email address and password gets recorded and you just gave a hacker all they needed to hack your account.  This is why it is very important to always check the URL.  Make sure it reads https://www.facebook.com.  Phishing site’s websites’ URL will always be different and may look like www.facckbook.com.  So watch out for this.

If you have a group or fan page on Facebook make sure that you have another admin on your group or page, someone that you trust.  If your account gets hacked, disabled or suspended and you don’t have another admin your group/page will be a ship drifting in the ocean without a captain and it can easily be hijacked.  Having an alternative admin will prevent this.  When your account is suspended by Facebook all the posts you ever made on Facebook will also disappear until your account is restored.  Facebook does this as an emergency measure when accounts are hacked to prevent unauthorized posts being made.  When my account was hacked posts where made on my profile that were horrifically homophobic.  This is how my friends knew to warn me that my account was hacked.  My account then went dark until I reclaimed it again (click HERE to read the four things you should do if your profile is hacked).

These are just a few safety tips that I think we can all benefit from when using Facebook.  There are many more like adjusting your privacy settings and reviewing what apps have access to your account.  But I think the ones I mention in this post are the most important ones that everyone should apply to their accounts today.  My friend’s account that was hacked was a real eye opener for me.  Apart from the fact that I was blamed for it, and I know nothing about hacking, it is unfortunate that it happened.  I don’t know why there are people out there who do things like this or what hackers think they achieve by their actions.  But it is sad and a very scary that we have to go to these extends to protect ourselves from them.  So my kind readers (the ten of you), please go to your Facebook accounts today and make them safe.

Till next time.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Do you sometimes get the feeling that Google maybe knows you too well?  Do you also find it creepy how Google sometimes complete your sentences (not much unlike your partner does) when you do an online search?  In this day and age when we are so completely connected with smart phones, tablets and laptops and having so much information at our fingertips with vast amounts of apps, software and gadgets, I could not help but wonder, is this messing with our brains.

There are many days that I sit in my office surrounded with gadgets and I wonder what my office would have looked like in 1983.  My laptop probably would have been replaced with a typewriter, my email inbox with a physical inbox, my iPad replaced with a filofax and my iPhone with a pager.  When I think about it, I must admit, it makes me anxious.  I have become so used to technology and being effortlessly connected all the time that the thought of not being connected sends shivers down my gay old spine.  I know that people managed just fine without it, back in the day, but I am sure many of us cannot imagine our lives without it.  But this begs the question, with technology making our lives so much easier, what is the price we are paying for it?

Every day I see people in meetings, when having a smoke break with colleagues and even at home with friends and family.  I see how technology is adversely affecting us.  I see how technology draws us in and how it is making our real world attention span shorter.  It seems most people cannot go more than 20 minutes without checking their phones.  I am no different.  I check my phone even though I didn’t receive any push notification.  I check my phone even though I didn’t get an email.  I check it and I don’t really know why.  Do we do this because we are bored?  Do we do this because we are so afraid of missing something that we constantly have the desire to be connected?  I am not sure what the answer is, but we all do it or at least know people who do.

Then there are social media.  Being a social media whore myself I cannot be judgmental about it.  I am on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkeIn and Instagram, to mention but a few.  Social media is a great way of connecting with old friends, staying abreast of world events, networking for work and getting sneak peeks into the lives of celebrities.  But with it also come a plethora of dangers.  As you know, a couple of months earlier I discovered with a shock that I was friends on Facebook with a monster who cut up his boyfriend and ate a piece of his ass and taped it.  As it turns out this was not his first murder and he is in fact a Serial Killer.  As in life there are many dangerous and demented people on the internet, but unlike real life you can’t always tell until it is too late.

You can be anyone or anything on the internet.  Technology has evolved to the point that some people can life completely separate lives on the web with things like Second Life.  They can create a character for themselves, work, shop, have relationships and even have sex all in the comfort of some basement somewhere.  They can create a life for themselves that exists only on the internet and in the process become recluses who may lose the ability to interact with people in the real world.  Sure not everybody goes to that extreme, but ask yourself how many people with whom you chat with on Facebook on a daily basis you have or even plan to meet with in real life.  Ask yourself if that is any different from the folks who embrace Second Life?

Even scarier is how the advancement of technology will affect us physically.  Just the other day I heard a debate on the radio while driving home where one guy said that not so long from now we will have technology embedded into our bodies.  We will enhance ourselves and instead of having a handset for your smart phone it will be build into our hands.  We will have technology build into our bodies that will replace the gadgets we currently use.  This is not as farfetched as you might think.  It is already been done to body parts.  In the United Kingdom a man who lost his hand in a Jet Ski accident have been fitted with a fully functioning bionic hand.  But imagine when we get to the stage when we will voluntarily amputate our limbs to get fitted with a bionic limb that is better and stronger than our organic human one.

We have already seen this in sports.  Sure these athletes did not voluntarily amputate their limbs but the artificial limbs are better than the human limbs.  Just look at the athlete Oscar Pistorius.  In last year’s Olympics he competed with able bodied athletes, something that would have been unheard off ten years ago.  Is it so farfetched that in a couple of decades from now we will stand in line to get the newest version of the fully integrated hand, eye or leg, much like folks queued for the new iPhone 5?  Is it so farfetched that in a couple of decades from now all our homes will have WiFi and that all our software for our enhanced synthetic body parts will update while we sleep?  It is frightening, but as some experts believe this will happen.

I am ashamed to say that I really do think Google is making us stupid.  Who of us have not used Google to check the spelling of a word?  Not known something and then quickly Googled it so that we sound smart and knowledgeable on a subject matter that we really know nothing about it?  Maybe stupid is not the right word to use here, perhaps lazy is more appropriate.  Technology and the internet has made us lazy and in a few decades from now life as we know it will be vastly different.

With the advancement of technology we as a human race are figuring out and creating machines and gadgets that make life easier for us, but the one thing we are not realizing is that we are also making ourselves redundant in the process.  The more gadgets and machines we create the more the human factor is being taken out.  Soon machines will take over most of the function we as humans perform and the real question then is, who will the real Master be?  The creator or the machine?  I guess the answer to this question will have an exceedingly complex answer as half of the human body could, by then, be synthetic and a machine itself.  I am just very glad that I will not be around by then to have to figure this one out.

Till next time.

Facebook thinks I’m a Pornographer!

Oops I did it again.  This week Facebook blocked me for 24 hours. This is their version of sending you to the corner for being a very naughty boy.  Apparently, some fucktard reported a certain photo which I uploaded to my fan page resulting in the gods at Facebook thinking that I am a “pornographer”.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my porn just as much as the next fag, but there’s a time and a place for porn and Facebook is not the place for it.  Besides who goes onto Facebook armed with lube and tissues ready to molest themselves?  Not me, that’s why we have Tumblr.  But I digress…

As you know I have made some enemies through the couple of years that I have been blogging (3 years to be exact).  Having enemies and people who hate you isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  I take it as a sign that I am doing something right and sometimes their hate mails are seriously funny, especially the ones that like quoting Leviticus.  But every so often one of those people does something that seriously inconveniences me.  Sometimes they report me to Facebook and on occasion I am punished for it like the dirty bad boy that I am.  In the last 3 years I have been banned from Facebook twice, have been blocked 7 times and even received an email from Facebook accusing me of Hate Speech.

Now we all know there are some seriously fucked up people on Facebook and I have blogged about this before.  Those folks who are offended by the world, lives in a bubble of ignorance and waves around their intolerance as if it is an Olympic event.  It really is a pity that their profiles don’t come with a mandatory idiot warning and that there isn’t a Facebook app that can block them outright.  But the world needs idiots and whether we like it or not – they are here to stay.  Besides if there weren’t any idiots who would we laugh at?

With my latest incident on Facebook I have come to the conclusion that maybe some folks need to download themselves a sense of humor.  Because whoever got offended by a naked man’s butt cheeks and is incapable of thinking that the “offensive” picture is funny needs to go on some strong medication.  Have these people not seen some of the really nasty shit other people upload to Facebook?

I have blocked and banned so many people from my one Facebook group because of the stuff they post there.  I have had to report and delete hundreds of pictures of cocks, cum, fisting, water sports, vaginas, and stuff people like to shove up their assholes.  I didn’t see those people get blocked or banned from Facebook.  Could it be that Facebook have a problem with pictures that are not hardcore enough?  If the man had a dildo hanging from his rectum would that have been ok?  One can only wonder.

The previous time Facebook gave me a timeout was because of a picture I uploaded of nuns painting a naked man.  Again the only thing you could see was his very nice and tight ass.  That too “offended” someone so much that they just could help themselves but to report it.  I wonder whether that person did it before or after they masturbated.  It seems that Facebook has double standards and that some on Facebook, especially heterosexuals Christians, are more equal than others.  Since I created my Fan page I have encountered numerous problems due to people reporting my page.  The culprits were mostly the fanatical religious far right.  The same people who also have fan pages devoted to their anti-gay rhetoric and dire tripe.  The same people who propose that all homosexuals should be killed and that we are abominations.  Yet these people are allowed to preach their hate on Facebook and that seems to be ok.

The world seems to be filled with double standards especially when it comes to gay people, so why should Facebook be any different?  With over 8000 likes on my fan page and with over 700 people having shared the picture that got me blocked for 24 hours, I couldn’t help but wonder whether we are being picked on.  It’s not my fault the photo went viral.  It’s not my fault it was fucking funny.  Did the person at Facebook who ultimately decided to block me not use his/her discretion and realize this was a malicious report?  Could that person not see the humor in it or was the decision to block me based on my fan page’s name and the fact that it is dedicated to LGBT news and issues.  Was that person homophobic?  Who knows…

One thing is for sure – I will not lose sleep over this.  This queer has more important things to worry about other than scared little homophobes trolling Facebook trying to take out one homosexual at a time by maliciously reporting them.  If that is the only thing that gives them pleasure in their sad little lives then who am I to take it away from them.  I will much rather focus my attention on what is really important: Recruiting homosexuals to ensure that Queer HQ is prepared and well resourced for our end game – Taking Over The World!  Suck on that Homophobes!

So Facebook thinks I am a pornographer, who the fuck cares.  I don’t know what type of porn they are watching or downloading but something gives me the idea that they are doing it wrong.  At least my 24 hour ban is over and all is back to normal.  As for the person who reported me, I have three words for you: Go. Fuck. Yourself.  Just try not to do it in front of a mirror; we don’t want you to offend yourself now do we.

Till next time.

The Psycho Who Friended Me

We live in a sick world.  Sure this is not breaking news, but sometimes I have a tendency to want to forget that this is true.  Last week I read an article about a certain washed up gay porn star called Luca Rocco Magnotta.  This sick puppy allegedly killed his boyfriend, videotaped the murder, then proceeded to cut the corpse into pieces and then mailed a hand and a foot to certain politicians in Canada.  You may think this is the worst of it but you’d be wrong.  The worst part of it is that, unbeknown to me, I actually was Facebook friends with this psycho, at least until I unfriended and block him.

Luca Rocco Magnotta also goes under the aliases of Vladimir Romanov or Mattia Del Santo, but his real name is Eric Clinton.  It is believed that he killed his boyfriend, Jun Lin, while videotaping it and then uploaded the video to a certain snuff and gore website.  The video shows a man with an ice pick stabbing another naked, bound man.  He dismembers the corpse and then performs sexual acts with it which can only be described as horrifying.

If you have never been exposed to dead bodies or images thereof I strongly recommend that you do not search for this video or its images online.  It is horrendous and you cannot unsee what you have seen.  There were earlier signs that Luca was not mentally well.  For nearly two years animal activists have been looking for a man who tortured and killed cats and then posted videos of this cruelty on YouTube.  It wasn’t until Lin’s murder that Montreal police released a photo from one such video that clearly shows that it is Luca in these appalling videos.

Luca would take kittens and place them in a clear plastic bag and have them suffocate while he filmed them.  He has drowned cats and kittens in videos and even fed a live kitten to a snake.  Clearly, he is one demented individual who is cruel and have no respect for life.  Lucas was a ticking time bomb whose natural progression would be from animals to humans and Lin tragically became his first human victim.  So how did I learn that I was Facebook friends with such a sick and dangerous person?

Well, after reading the news reports of this ghastly murder I decided to search for Luca on Facebook.  And lo and behold I found his profile and saw that we were friends.  I was flabbergasted!  I don’t ever recall accepting a friend request from him nor seeing any of his status updates.  Was this really him?  I wondered.  So I started reading his timeline and to my further horror discovered it was indeed him.  Even more interesting I saw that, even though he was the subject of a massive man hunt by Interpol, he updated his current location to Paris on Sunday at 18:39.

Not only is he a murderer he is stupid too.  You know the world is looking for you but you go into an internet Café and then tell the world where you are.  Maybe he wanted to get caught.  I was tempted not to unfriend him as my professional curiosity urged me to wait and see what he was going to do next.  But in the end I was overwhelmed with my utter disgust for this man and mortified that I was in any way connected to him.  So I decided to unfriend and block him just in case he felt like fleeing to South Africa and decided to look me and hubby up.  I will not look good dead and dismembered and I really never want to be featured on that disgusting snuff video website.

So in the absence of having sight of his status updates I followed the news closely.  On Monday afternoon Luca was finally apprehended in Berlin.  Naturally he was arrested at an internet Café reading news articles about himself.  An employee of the Café recognized Luca and luckily the police were close by and Luca was arrested without any resistance.  He will in all probability be extradited back to Canada where he will be charged with several offenses one of which will be first degree murder.

It is a pity Canada don’t carry out death penalties anymore.  Luca seem to be a good candidate for execution when he is found guilty.  Unless he can prove that he has a psychiatric disorder I don’t believe that he would be likely to be rehabilitated.  After all he did write on his wall “Once you have tasted human blood there is no going back”.  And I believe him.  He will kill again if he is allowed to remain as a member of society.

Whether I have any other homicidal friends on Facebook, I do not know.  It is just shocking when you read about a horrific crime and then later learn that you have the wanted murderer in your friendlist.  It just once again goes to show how small the world has become due to social media.  Now, not only can you reconnect with old school friends, you can be friends with Interpol's most wanted too.

Till next time.

Facebook Manners & You

Did you not know there were rules for Facebook etiquette?  Well there are.  Here are the 10 rules of Facebook Etiquette.  Remember having good Facebook manners and the “Electric Friendship Generator” will be more fun for everyone.

The BlackBerry Apocalypse

Slap me in the face and call me Sally. I have to admit that I have the Techno-addiction. My BlackBerry have become like an additional limb and an electronic enhancement to my frontal lobe. I use it extensively and I never quite realized to what extend it has become an integral part of my life. After all, a wide variety of personal electronic devices and cyber platforms are all conveniently integrated and instead of having to carry around several different gadgets you only have one. And when that one device fails you, as I found out this week, you are screwed, screwed without foreplay, an explanation, consideration, KY or the option of a happy ending.

What makes this worse is the fact that when are at the precipice of such a electronic fail fuckfest you don’t even realize it and once you do there is nothing to prepare you for what is to come. My BlackBerry has not been working for the last three days and RIM (Research in Motion and NOT that thing you do to your boyfriend’s ass) ignored us. In the wake of the worst outage and Public Relations disaster by BlackBerry and RIM, and looking at my lifeless BlackBerry not being as smart a phone as it was four days earlier, I could not help but wonder – is this the beginning of the end for BlackBerry?

On Monday I was preparing for a business trip which I was leaving for on Tuesday. This time I was planning on driving instead of flying (carbon emissions & reducing my carbon footprint and all) and as such I needed to load the relevant addresses and coordinates onto my Garmin GPS on my BlackBerry. I managed to load two addresses successfully before the first inkling of the impending crisis arose.

As I was searching for the third address I got a “server connection error”. I tried several more times and got the same error. Thinking it was only a temporary glitch with Garmin, I decided to take a break to check my Twitter account. The last Twitter feed was recorded at 12:04pm. Oblivious to the fact that the BlackBerry apocalypse had started, I tried to refresh my Twitter feed and nothing happened. I checked my Facebook and that was dead too. So I hard rebooted my phone and at 13:12 it became clear - my phone was busted!

Firmly believing it was a problem with my phone; I logged onto Twitter via my laptop and asked whether anyone of my followers knew of any problem(s) with BlackBerry. Then the floodgates opened and #BlackBerry was being flooded with angry messages. BlackBerry was down in Africa. “What the fuck? How is that possible?” I thought.

Then Twitter messages streamed in from Asia and Europe, BlackBerry was down there too! Naturally thinking that BlackBerry would be aware that millions of people’s services were down, I checked out @BlackBerryHelp on Twitter. @BlackBerryHelp was tweeting everything except about the outage. If I didn’t know any better I would have thought BlackBerry didn’t know something was wrong. Naturally, my next step was to check out RIM’s website hoping to find a press release or at least some information about what was going on. What I found was astounding.

For two days RIM did not respond with a concise explanation. Only yesterday did they decide to release a vague explanation about this international crisis. Apparently some “switch” failed and the backup “switch” failed also, resulting in an epic fail for BlackBerry affecting Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada, North America and South America. Curiously, RIM also added that they have not been hacked and that the integrity of their systems has not been compromised. In the meantime all the pompous IPhone users were laughing their asses off at all the distraught BlackBerry users, but the biggest giggles I think must have come from Steve Jobs. As for me I was still being screwed and it was no laughing matter.

Being away from an Internet connection I was completely cut off from the outside world. No Facebook, no Twitter, no News RSS feeds and no damn GPS. I was out of town, at a place I don’t know from shit, completely isolated and I had to go places blind. Do you know when last I actually used a real map? Back in 2004, that’s when! I had no BBM, had no clue what was going on and I was reduced to using text messages. TEXT MESSAGES!

My 48 hour business trip could have easily gone awry had it not been for my natural instincts and a vague memory of how things were done back in the mid 90’s. I made it to all my appointments and manage to find my way back home. The 600 bucks speeding fine I got (which is a whole different blog post altogether) I also blame on the BlackBerry blackout! When I got home I went onto the Internet to try to learn more about the outage. I discovered that more sinister than RIM’s lame ass excuse for the blackout is the conspiracy theories that were surfacing. Maybe you have heard some of them.

Isn’t it odd that BlackBerry experienced the worst week ever just as Apple is about to release their new IPhone and applications that will rival and exceed that of BlackBerry? Isn’t it peculiar that BlackBerry had the worst recorded outage in recent history barely a week after the passing of Steve Jobs amidst fears that Apple’s stock price would plummet, but now BlackBerry’s stock price did instead? Why did RIM insist on saying they were not hacked or compromised, maybe they were. If they had been all affected BlackBerry users may have been unknowingly pick pocketed and your e-mail-, social media- and even bank accounts could have been compromised, your passwords stolen and not to mention all that “personal information” stored on their servers possibly now not being so “personal” or “private” anymore. Is all of this just one big coincident, I’ll let you decide for yourself?

With what must have been the worst week for BlackBerry since they started back in 1999, I cannot help but wonder if they will ever fully recover. I am sure that their Public Relations crisis management or the lack thereof will be studied in business schools for years to come. As for consumer confidence, I am not sure it will ever be fully restored. After all, this is not the first time this has happened, but unfortunately for them this time it happened on a much larger scale. The fact that there was no communication from them in this regard also did not help matters or boost confidence either.

With RIM already struggling with delays in getting new phones out, a tablet that's been a dud, shares that are approaching a five-year low and sales noticeably down, could this be the beginning of the end for them? I guess only time will tell. As for me, I am due for an upgrade in 2012 and whether I will choose BlackBerry again is largely undecided. I do love my IPod, maybe it is time to get a matching IPone?

Till next time.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Social media have proved to be the most powerful medium of our generation to communicate, share, educate and connect.  Recently we saw revolutions, riots and protest organized, mobilized and carried out via social media.  With this in mind I'd like to ask all of you who have a social media presence, what are YOU using it for?