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By Keith, February 28, 2010 12:46 am

It’s the middle of the night, and I’m looking for things to do so that I don’t sleep.  I don’t want to sleep, because I’m on 3rd shift, which means I’m working nights and sleeping mornings.  While I sit here listening to a classical guitar stream from Shoutcast, I’m seriously considering going out on Facebook in a blaze of snarky brain-eating zombie comments Sunday.

I probably won’t do that.  Although very few people have voted in my poll regarding what I should do with my Facebook account, I’ll probably just go along with the response receiving the most (3) votes.  In the afternoon, I’ll check it again to see if there’s been any movement.  I suppose I could just leave my account active (if that’s what people want), posting only on special occasions like award ceremonies or zombie apocalypses and such.  It’s not as though Facebook will be missed by me all that much since most of my friends do have my email address and no how to reach me.  And I have this blog that I have been neglecting.  Oh look!  Actually, you can’t see it, but my notebook’s temperature is 49° F. </random>

The future is getting brighter.  Time I had spent elsewhere can and will be spent right here.  I’ve already removed my Facebook account from my TweetDeck client on both of my notebook’s primary operating systems.  That was a large step in the right direction in my separation from the book of faces.  After tomorrow, I’ll remove Facebook from my Speed Dial thereby adding another small hurdle to my accessing the site.

As you can see on the right side of the page, I’ve added recent Google Buzzes for people to see the type of stuff I frequently link to.  I wish Buzz would catch on with more of my friends, but I doubt most of them have any interest in learning  and adapting to yet another social network (if you can really call it that).  Buzz isn’t exactly straight-forward in its use, and doesn’t have a lot of shiny applications/distractions.  Its simplicity is exactly why I like it.  With a browser extension, I can easily link to a news story or anything online really, and drop a comment on it.  People who follow me can see the link, see my comment, and reply.  But it won’t catch on, not with my friends.

On a completely different note, I was watching Paul Merton In Europe, a show on BBC 5 (at least I assume that’s what the big “5″ in the upper left corner indicates) earlier tonight.  What a fantastic show this is!  Why aren’t there shows like this here in the United States?  Paul is traveling through Europe, talking to extremely interesting people doing extremely different things, and he does it with such flair and a sense of humor that I never get tired of watching his adventures.  Okay, enough chatter.  I’ll watch episode 1×5 now.  I believe he was heading to France next.

Have a good day light dwellers.

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By Keith, February 27, 2010 3:33 pm

The IOC will probably send a take-down letter for this post, because I used the word “Olympic” in the title.  F-em!  I’m watching their stupid Olympics, and gosh darn it, I’m going to blog about it too!

Other than Olympic hockey and short track speed skating, the winter games are quite boring.  We need to zazz them up a bit.  Take ski jumping for example.  What is there to see besides the guy’s hand twitching a little?  They should make it more like the Red Bull Flugtag!  Dress the jumpers up in some sort of costume.  I’d definitely watch a pterodactyl swooping down the slope, gracefully soaring into the air, then splashing into a lake of slush!

We need to fix biathlon too.  Anyone can ski, then shoot stationary targets, then ski some more.  We need to make it more of an outdoorsy woodsy survivalisty sport.  I propose we change it to marathon biathlon deer harvesting.  Basically, athletes would ski out into a designated wildlife preserve where they would have to track, shoot, field dress, and haul out a white tail deer.  Just to keep things interesting, several hungry grizzly bears (the shooting of which will earn a lifetime ban) should also be living in the area and given the scent of each skier.

Can anyone really say that they enjoy watching moguls skiing?  Sure it’s funny when a skier screws up their silly little helicopter jump and crumples into a heap on the landing, but it’s not polite to laugh at such things.  Let’s take the thrills (and spills) to a new level.  I give you freestyle mogul pole-dancing.  All of the excitement of moguls and jumps, but instead of the goofy little tricks off the jump, the skiers must perform a sexy double spin on a pole in order to stick the landing and finish their run.  National or ethnic stripper attire would be completely optional, but could certainly help the judges with the scoring.

Grecko-Roman (i.e. togas) ice fishing.  Need I say more?  Basically, the athletes must ski onto a frozen lake dressed only in a toga.  First athlete to cross the finish line with 10 regulation size fish wins gold.  How they amass those 10 fish is up to them.  No weapons of any sort may be used.

Snowboard cross needs to be fixed too.  Riders should be allowed to wear a satchel full of (pre-inspected for size and consistency) snowballs.  Halfway down the course, a line across the track would indicate that snowballs may be thrown at competing riders.  The snowballs would contain a colored dye that stains the clothes of a clouted rider.  Points for each clout add time to the run of a rider who’s been hit.  I think you can see how this would vastly improve snowboard cross.

Pairs ice moshing is a little like traditional ice dancing, but instead of sleep-inducing classical music, some sort of metal-core or death metal would be the norm.  Two pairs of skaters would compete at the same time.  Just like traditional ice dancing, pairs would pretend to skate along with the music, but in ice moshing, the goal is to knock down the opposing skater of the same sex.   Skaters may not touch an opponent of the opposite sex.  The skater who initiates contact (i.e. is judged to be more under control) with a skater of the opposite sex will earn a disqualification.  A fall would be defined as any body part other than a hand touching the ice.  If either skater in a pair falls three times, they lose the match.  For pairs ice moshing, I envision a round-robin tournament format with lots of sling-shot maneuvers and violent collisions.  On the podium, teams receive metals instead of medals, because it sounds very slightly more cooler.

You may now continue ignoring the Winter Olympics.

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By Keith, February 25, 2010 8:32 pm

Since my last post, I’ve been winding down my Facebook account.  First, I removed all of my personal information from my profile. Next, I deleted all but 2 photos.  I think they accurately summarize how I feel about Facebook.  They are my angry Mii and a picture of autumn leaves.  Finally, I deleted all access to my profile by applications and limited access to the very little that’s left to only myself.

What I may do is leave my profile active and just never post anything again.  If I do that, I’ll probably look for a way to disable Facebook messages, because I really don’t like receiving emails telling me I have a message, showing me what the message says, but not letting me reply directly via email.  An alternative would be that I disable my account and create a new account strictly for announcing blog posts.  That would stop me from spamming people on my friend list who really couldn’t care less.  It really sucks that I hate Facebook so much right now, because there are quite a few friends I enjoy keeping in contact with.  I suspect those connections would fade if I disable my account.  Hmm…

<looks for polling plugin for blog>

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There you go, democracy in action.  If you don’t like any of the choices, feel free to state your idea as a comment.