Twist of Fate

Can't shake off this sense of foreboding the whole day. I wanted to wean myself out of facebook to avoid toxic memories, but, something drew me to check.

Bingo.

My childhood friend from Malaysia posted a shoutout saying that she lost her ex-lover. I just had to message and comfort her somehow. I thought it was her fiancé who died, turns out, it was her ex-husband who used to sleep around and beat her to a pulp.

She was torn.

She said that she had called him up last October 3. The neighbors noticed a stench and promptly called the police. The body had been rotting for 3-5 days.

I barraged her with questions: "Murder? Heart attack?"

She wasn't sure and is willing to go through the postmortem investigation.

I told her that, somehow, what happened was poetic justice for what she had to go through in the past. The pain and shame she had to endure for love. She agreed. 

"You're finally free," I typed.

"See you next week. Let's pick up my fiancé from the airport. I'm arriving a day ahead and I want you to meet him." 

"Lemme look at my sched," I said though I couldn't pencil it in yet. Well, I want to see how my love advice worked on her. Funny how it works on other people...Talk about letting out my inner Amélie Poulain.

Melihat anda.

A Life On Facebook

A LIFE ON FACEBOOK from maxluere on Vimeo.

Stop Sending Me Mafia Wars Gifts

...Not that I don't really mind since I no longer play this app. To tell you frankly, I don't care if I level up or if I get more energy packs--these are just cold reminders that you could only remember me, if you do, whenever you need to send gifts to your Mafia friends en masse. Is this what we have become? That our friendship has been reduced to a mere sending of a virtual gift? Whatever happened to our daily chats? Emails? Offlines? 

I miss you. You, who have weathered the ups and downs of our relationship through the years. You, who have written countless letters with little mementos tucked in the envelopes. You, who have promised to be a part of my wedding day. You, who I have considered as a sister. You, who shared my secrets. You, who have chosen to tread a different path.

Your letters are still with me. Treasured. Silent witnesses to our long-distance love.

via mintdesignblog

Chorva the Geek

Desperation. It's been days since facebook has been officially blocked in the office. No login window no matter how hard one refreshes the page. ARGH!

Blame the applications (aka Every Employer's Nightmare). 100% this is the reason why facebook is blocked AGAIN. Not only does it cut efficiency with most of the workforce logged into Farmville or Cafe World, it's a big time waster especially if they do nothing but chat all day. EVERYDAY.

Then again, there are some valid reasons why one should chat on facebook, if most of your business contacts are in your network and this social-networking site is an effective business tool. Ever since I've been organizing my upcoming exhibit, I've realized how important it is to have all the artists and photographers in different groups for easy access. 

And yet, facebook is still blocked in the office. 

There are still other chat platforms, the conventional email and phone calls to get the message across, but, facebook is still the crutch that I need. So how does one get on facebook without getting a VPN (Virtual Private Network)?

Remember the applications? Google any of the fb applications and click the link. Tell me if you could access the login page. If you have, you've found your back door key. There's a downside though: limited browsing. You could only go so far as the app, the homepage or your profile page (as long as you haven't personalized your facebook URL, you're fine). Can't view the news feed or your profile page? Change "www." to "apps." Accessing your friends' profiles or trying the fb internal search engine won't work either. One could still access facebook chat once logged in, but, if you want to compose a more lengthy email, you can't access the fb inbox. 

There are some limited browsing features that I still haven't explored yet, so feel free to share some tricks.

Hamlet à la Facebook

McSweeney’s, ‘Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)’ by Sarah Schmelling

My Mom's On Facebook

How to Manage Your Online Life When You're Dead

By Gaëlle Faure

Before her 21-year-old daughter died in a sledding accident in early 2007, Pam Weiss had never logged on to Facebook. Back then, social-networking sites were used almost exclusively by the young. But she knew her daughter Amy Woolington, a UCLA student, had an account, so in her grief Weiss turned to Facebook to look for photos. She found what she was looking for and more. She was soon communicating with her daughter's many friends, sharing memories and even piecing together, through posts her daughter had written, a blueprint of things she had hoped to do. "It makes me feel good that Amy had a positive effect on so many people, and I wouldn't have had a clue if it hadn't been for Facebook," says Weiss.
And she wouldn't have had a clue if she had waited too long. She managed to copy most of her daughter's profile in the three months before Facebook took it down.

Like a growing number of grieving relatives, Weiss tapped into one of the most powerful troves of memories available: a loved one's online presence. As people spend more time at keyboards, there's less being stored away in dusty attics for family and friends to hang on to. Letters have become e‑mails. Diaries have morphed into blogs. Photo albums have turned virtual. The pieces of our lives that we put online can feel as eternal as the Internet itself, but what happens to our virtual identity after we die?
It's a thorny question, and for now, the answer depends on which sites you use. Privacy is a major issue. So are company policies to delete inactive accounts.
Facebook amended its policy a few months after Woolington died. "We first realized we needed a protocol for deceased users after the Virginia Tech shooting, when students were looking for ways to remember and honor their classmates," says Facebook spokeswoman Elizabeth Linder. The company responded by creating a "memorial state" for profiles of deceased users, in which features such as status updates and group affiliations are removed. Only the user's confirmed friends can continue to view the profile and post comments on it.
If next of kin ask to have a profile taken down, Facebook will comply. It will not, however, hand over a user's password to let a family member access the account, which means private messages are kept just that.
Rival MySpace has a similar policy blocking account access but has fewer restrictions on profile-viewing. (This inspired an entrepreneur to create MyDeathSpace.com, which started out aggregating profiles of the deceased and has since morphed into a ghoulish tabloid.)

Click here for the full article.

Oh Crap! My Parents Joined Facebook

By Dan Fletcher

There's no buzzkill quite like getting a friend request on Facebook from Mommy and Daddy dearest. Not to mention the philosophical quandaries that result: Do I accept? If I accept, do they go on limited profile? If they're on limited profile, what do they get to see? Will they bug me and my friends? For many, the easier solution is just to bail on Facebook entirely.

This phenomenon — a growing one, as Facebook's demographic rapidly grows gray — is the subject of the (aptly named) site MyParentsJoinedFacebook.com. The product of two Los Angeles 20-somethings, Erika Brooks Adickman and Jeanne Leitenberg, the site collects the downright awkward things that can happen when parents invade your virtual space.

The two call their project a "loving" one, spurred by the fact that Leitenberg's family contacted her Facebook friends. Both are quick to say their relatives are not the problem — Brooks Adickman says her parents aren't even "allowed" to join Facebook — but they recognized that others might not be so fortunate. "No matter how embarrassing your mom is, there's someone who's a thousand times worse," Leitenberg says.

Ain't that the truth. The pair has managed to assemble some of the most cringe-inducing cases of invasions of privacy and oversharing. When your parents are acting as the grammar police for your status updates, it may be time to bid Facebook adieu.

Brooks Adickman and Leitenberg say they're prepared for this contingency. They've already registered MyParentsJoinedTwitter.com, making them well situated for the next big thing. "When parents start joining, the party's over," Brooks Adickman says. "Hopefully Jeanne and I will be there to document wherever the migration goes."

Ultimately, though, the women say their site isn't meant to dissuade parents from joining in on the online fun. Leitenberg says her relationship with her father has even — gasp! — grown closer since he joined Facebook. Instead, sites like MyParentsJoinedFacebook are meant to help parents avoid common pitfalls. "We want people to know that when they get that friend request, it's O.K. to say yes," Brooks Adickman says.

Want to read the full article? Click here.

Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

If I Owned Facebook