Jim and Mel

These are two images I came across. If you know anything about Jim Henson or Mel Blanc, both of these will have meaning for you.

Both these images are powerful and say the same message.

I wanted to save them here because I think they're both important to see.

Ancient forum account unearthed!

I think this officially qualifies as the oldest forum account I have still in existence. I was able have the password resent to me so I was able to login. It's a phpBB community forums account.

Check it out:

I reg'd that account 7 years and 10 months ago.

How I found out about the account is that a click-through showed up to one of my web sites from the phpBB boards, I clicked through the referer and ta-da, there was that ancient account profile. Amazing.

I thought, incorrectly, that the oldest account I had on those forums was from 2005. Nope. I had registered one 3 years prior in 2002.

Evidently I only logged in once, just once, and never went there again since that time until now. Why I did that I have no idea.

The one post I made on that forum was about - get this - Geocities and Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting and how the SMTP didn't work with phpBB at the time.

Maaaaan is that stuff old. Haha. :) 2002 predates pretty much everything we know as norms now. Video sharing, photo sharing, social media.. none of that came until years later. In the blogging world, there was none save for LiveJournal.

As a small end note, I really, really wish I knew about LiveJournal back in '02 because I would have started blogging two years earlier. I officially started doing the blog thing in '04, but it would have been so cool to have had a head start. Oh, well. :)

Nice knowing you as you once were, Reddit

You know how I keep saying that YouTube has the absolute worst community on the Internet?

Did you know it's so hated that there are actually people warning others not to post shout-outs to Reddit from YouTube (PDF) so that it won't infect Reddit with YouTube's stupid?

There is no community on the Internet that does not hate, and I mean hate YouTube with a passion, and Reddit is only one of a very, very long list of community sites/forums that wish YouTube would die and stay dead.

Unfortunately for Reddit, the glory days of it being a good community may be fast coming to an end, because YouTube is becoming increasingly aware they exist. As such, it won't be long before Reddit is permanently infected with YouTube's stupid.

I give it a few months before you start seeing a bunch of "YouTubers" completely destroying Reddit. The snowball is already in effect, and it's gaining in size.

That's it, I'm going back to MySpace

Sometimes I get emails from Facebook like this:

This is one of those spam-yet-not-spam-yet-still-spam Facebook notifications. The email is real and from Facebook, but the likelihood of this "person" being a spammer is about, oh, 100%.

I've said many times before that I hate Facebook and this is yet another reason to add to the list of why I hate it. My profile is non-public and completely blanked on purpose, yet I still get these types of emails. What does this mean? Facebook's security is complete shit. Even if you purposely set your profile to private and you disconnect all apps from sharing any info, you will still get spammed.

At least on MySpace it's very easy to tell who's a spammer and who isn't, but on Facebook the spammer profiles are purposely set to "You can't see this unless you add me". If you add, blammo, a big dish of spam with a side of malware/spyware to boot because their profile is probably configured in a way to instantly try to hijack your browser the moment you view it.

I'm seriously considering getting a MySpace account again. Yes, for real. Being it's not the #1 social network anymore, spammers don't pay as much attention to it so it's actually safer than it used to be.

Even though MySpace is #2 now, it's much more social than Facebook. It's far easier to meet new people there because many feel more comfortable using that system, yours truly included.

We all know MySpace is an empire built on spam, but at least they're up front about it, so we're actually more comfortable with the ads there. Facebook was supposed to be that "cool, private thing" we were all supposed to love, but it turned out to be worse than MySpace ever was.

Because of this I may be getting another MySpace account soon, and use it for what it was designed for - to be social. I'm not social on Facebook because the system is way, way too creepy. MySpace has its creepiness to it as well, but like I said, they're much more honest about it.

This is why I save email

I try to convince people that saving emails - all your emails - is important, but it falls on deaf ears whenever I speak of it. I accept that. But every now and then a thread (PDF) comes along that proves it is important.

I've known all along that for all intents and purposes, your email address is an unintended journal of your life - and much more so than most people realize. Girls you've dated, forums you use to post on (notification replies are sent in email), blogs you commented on, things you've bought, things you've sold, communication from friends, communication from ex-friends, co-workers and on and on and on. It's all in your email.

To even think to just simply hit a key and trash that is unthinkable as far as I'm concerned. ARE YOU NUTS?

"Yeah, but there's some stuff in there that reminds me of when things were not-so good and I'd rather not remember that."

You will totally regret deleting that stuff. Seriously. Don't do it.

Every time I've lost email it absolutely floored me in a real bad way. Three times I've lost a ton of email and each time it happened it really, really pissed me off because there was absolutely no way I'd ever get it back. All those memories. Gone forever.

It honestly irks me how some people consider all the stuff we do in our digital lives to be complete throwaway material.

The above linked thread is about Gmail. Many of the comments there are from people who have been regularly using the service since 2004 when it was brand new. That's SIX YEARS of stuff. Your stuff. And you want to delete that? Are you KIDDING? Seriously?

Maybe someday people will realize that digital history is real history, and you need to save it. Considering it costs nothing to do and it takes almost zero effort, you really have no excuse.

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