Identi.ca….?  I mean, I know twitter is pretty sad and never works… but Identi.ca is almost a copy of it!

The page looks different, yes, but there are a LOT of comparisons I can make.  Wait, let me start over. Identi.ca is another microblogging concept for your online use.  You can update identi.ca from the web, or from an IM account, but I haven’t found anyway to update it from your phone or other portable device. All updates you make can be 140 characters or less, just like Twitter. One cool thing about identi.ca is you can update it from Ping.fm.  But ARGH!!!  I can’t make my own profile customizable?!  Why not?

Identi.ca is still in the early stages of creation. Many things will be added “soon”, according to the Identi.ca FAQ.  But, as with all new beta websites, soon could be next week or next year.  Maybe Identi.ca will grow on me, I guess time will tell.

While using Stumble Upon during one of my boring moments, I ran across a really cool site called Musicovery.  It’s basically another radio site, with a twist.  You have a cute little dashboard embedded in the page.  On this dashboard you can choose the genre, decade, and mood of the music you want to listen to.  To try musicovery out, you don’t have to sign up or anything!  You can just start clicking around your browser for a different song.

If you do decide to sign up for an account, you can ban crappy songs and favorite the best songs..  Musicovery is full of eye candy and incredibly easy to use.

I just joined a few new social networks and whatnot, and this is what I thought of them.

You can now find me at Pownce.com.  Pownce is a lot like twitter… as in you basically update your status throughout the day and people can follow you.  You can follow these people back or leave them as a friend.  I like that in pownce you can add embedded pictures or even video to your post.  You don’t have to click a link to see a video someone wants you to watch.  I also like the layout of the page.  Pownce is easy to understand and easy to sign up for.  You can choose a theme for your page, but you cannot customize it.

Here’s the drawback.  If you want a customizable page, you have to pay $20 a year for the customizable theme and 250 Mb file size you can embed on a status update.  Regular gets 100 Mb upload.  Another thing that irks me is it’s damn slow.  The page is slow.  Updates take a long time to load on the page.

Ping.fm is brilliant!  As far as I know, there isn’t a profile page or friends to be added.  You simply use it to update your social networks.  Ping.fm lets you update to the following:

• Bebo
• Blogger
• Brightkite
• Facebook
• FriendFeed
• hi5
• Identi.ca
• Jaiku
• LinkedIn
• LiveJournal
• Mashable
• MySpace
• Plaxo Pulse
• Plurk
• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Xanga

It’s great!  That’s all there is to it.  You sign up, tell it what networks you use, and start posting.

The other network I joined was Stumble Upon.  You click a Stumble button in your toolbar and you are redirected to a site within your interests.  When you sign up for StumbleUpon, you get the choice to customize your profile to a different color, and you can pick tons and tons of interests.  Everytime you stumble, you can choose whether you like or dislike a site by pressing the thumbs up or thumbs down icons.

Last, but not least is Social Browse.   After you download the add-on in firefox for social browse, you browse the internet like you usually do.  Anytime you run across a site you’d like to share with friends, you click the social browse button on your toolbar.  Now, that link is available on your profile page.  The nifty thing is, any time you run across a page one of your friends linked to, their icon appears right next to that link, showing you that someone wanted to let their friends know about that page.  Darren gives an in depth discription about social browse here.

I played a really fun game the other night that I’d like to share because it’s a little addicting in that fun team player way

Synergy co-op Mode gives us an amazingly fun mod called Synergy.  You can use this mod for Half-Life 2, ep. 1, and ep. 2. To install it, you basically have to have the Half-Life games, with the SDK Source installed.  You then run the synergy installation and it’s all set!  Synergy mod even shows up as an independent game in X-fire.  It’s pretty cool

There’s a few kinks I found while playing the game with 2 other people.  There are a few places where the game skips (just a few puzzles, the end of a level, etc..). Another thing is the Half-Life games were obviously made for one player mode, and when you have multiplayer- it gets a little easy.

But it’s frackin TOTALLY RAD to run into a level with a team and take it out in minutes~!! omg!  Play it!!  It’s really fun to go through the Half-Life games on multiplayer!!!

As you all know, I recently moved in with my liek, rad bf. We had to sacrafice a few things already, just so two people could comfortably live in the same room together. We bought this little desk, and modified it to our needs. With that said, I now have dual monitors instead of just the one, and I also have a new Radeon X1900 video card.

I have to say having dual monitors is a really REALLY nice thing. It’s much easier to organize and multitask. I can watch a  movie on fullscreen and browse the web at the same time, or play a video game and chat in IRC side by side. The only downfall- video’s run best on the primary monitor than the secondary, and if you want to go dual- get the same kind of monitors. One of mine isn’t as bright as the other. It’s also a bit blurred which is a little bothersome…

After reformatting my computer, deleting a bunch of crap, and upgrading to this new hardware plus some new software… My computer is FINALLY running like new. I’ve been able to install all my games at the highest resolution and they run beautifully, without any rips or tears in the maps. I can’t wait to get my pwnage on!

Yay!  Another game review!  So I’ve been playing a really cute game called Pokemon Ranger on DS.  For all of you that are going lol n00b, I pwn you on UT…  well, I play fps too, but at the moment, my computer doesn’t have a video card inside it.  So I’m going down the line of hundreds of DS games I have and playin them all.

Pokemon Ranger DS is about your quest to become a great pokemon ranger.  You travel from village to village and are given missions from the senior rangers to help citizens and get to a higher level.  These bad guys called the Go-Rock Squad end up stealing special equipment from the good guy pokemon rangers team, and they use this to capture pokemon for their evil deeds.

The world you play PR in is pretty small.  You get to choose between a male or female character and name them as you want.  My characters name was Snubs (go figure).  Capturing pokemon is fun.  Now, you don’t throw them in a Pokeball and battle other characters.  You capture wild pokemon, they follow you around as you travel, then you use them once and they are freed.  Of course, you can capture them again if you want.  You can talk to all the characters in the game, and their conversations give me the idea this game is made for children and teens.

Leveling up is probably the main reason I’m still playing this.  I was able to get through the game in about 3-4 days, and every time I leveled up, I wanted to get to the next level.  :P  You also can get up to a Rank 10 in the game as a pokemone ranger.

My least favorite part about the game is the cut scenes.  The chat bubbles are slow (even on the fastest speed), and if something is happening that requires a part of the plot, you dont have the choice to skip.  This is annoying if you fail a mission and have to restart.  You have to sit through all the information again…

I’d give this game a 7 / 10.  All around a fun, cute game.  It’s easy to pass the time with Pokemon Ranger DS, and it’s a bit different from other pokemon games.  I wish I could skip cut scenes and I wish the game was longer. 

Mario Kart Wii

It’s a really fun game.  I definetly spent a good afternoon playing Mario Kart Wii with DK while he was visiting.  It’s the perfect game to just play circuit after circuit with a friend and pass the controller back and forth.  I think the races are a little easy.  We were able to unlock all the circuits in no time, getting first place in all but… I think 3 races.  Of course, the feeling of acheivement was great!  Everytime we unlocked a new car/character/racetrack, I got so excited!!  I wanted to keep playing all night!

Mario Kart Wii comes with a new nifty little wheel that you can set your Wiimote in, to ‘drive’ during the game.  We found the wheel to be incredibly stupid, and I tried various ways of playing.  Because the game is on Wii, you have the choice of playing with the wheel, wiimote, classic controller, etc.  I chose the classic controller and found it to be the easiest by far.  It’s just like playing the old school games from the old consoles.

The graphics are well done.  The edges around some characters and tracks are rough, but the coloring and scenery of racetracks from old games is pure awesomeness.  Nintendo kept some of the older racetracks!!  There are also quite a few new racetracks too, and I have to say, I love the new Rainbow Road.  It’s so colorful and pretty and ghey! lol

The music kicks ass.  Whenever you change menues, the music follows you.  It doesnt change songs, but changes the mood of the same track by just a bit.  It’s really cool! Hey! Listen!

The only issue I had with gameplay was that anytime you get hit by something, it seems like things pile up on you.  For example, if I got hit with a red shell, as soon as I get hit, I also get hit with a blue shell, a squid, a green shell, and I get run over by Bowser.  It happened to computer characters as well.  I’d hit them, and they’d get hit a few more times by other people.  It’s annoying!

All in all, great video game.  It’s perfect for families, parties, etc.  There isn’t any violence at all. It’s so fun!!  Even Molly Wood likes it. 

So I recently got a Palm Centro on AT&T and decided to write up a little review of my own on my new cell phone.

First off, the phone itself: My phone costed $200 with a $100 mail in rebate thru AT&T. Does anyone else hate mail in rebates? They’re somewhat retarded in my opinion. Obviously, I’m giving AT&T tons of money as it is already, seeing that I just renewed my contract with them. Hopefully my world will still be delivered when I move to Williamsburg Virginia, and I won’t have dropped calls that they insist do not happen often. The Centro is a pretty cheap phone for all of the amazing gadgets that come along with it. This is my first smart phone, so I was a little lost at first… I decided to do the geeky thing and actually go through the tutorial and read the handbook. Everything seemed pretty easy to do.

Although, I did have a rough time at first. I started out with a different palm centro. With my first one, I had downloaded hotsync and synced my phone with my computer. Luckily, all my contacts were saved onto my computer after I moved them to my phone from my sim card. A day later, my Centro continuously tried to HotSync even though my comp wasn’t hooked up to it. Weird, eh? After Darren did some very helpful research, I discovered this was very rare, but it’s happened before. I simply went in the next day and traded it in for one that works. This time, I didn’t set up HotSync. In fact, I didn’t even unwrap the USB cable for the phone. Evilness. So now all my contacts are gone, but still saved on my computer. I’m adding them in as I need them.

Buttons: I love the buttons on this phone. Once I started to do some SMS on the new Qwerty keyboard, I got used to it pretty fast. The buttons on the keyboard are a little small, but perfect for a girl with nails, like me. You can personalize the keys as much as you want! I took Darren’s advice and stuck the camera to the side button, and changed my main buttons to whatever I use the most. The camera looks great.. It takes about 3-4 seconds to run the camera.

One of my favorite parts of this phone is the ringer/vibrate switch. Since I have classes, I love the fact I can just switch a button to turn off the ringer. It’s easy.

Centro’s also can take micro-SD cards. Luckily, I had one from my handy dandy mod chip for DS, so I simply stuck some songs/pix on there, stuck it in the phone… oh yea, this was the aggrivating part. It took FOREVER to figure out how to copy those songs/pix onto my phone to use as ringtones/wallpapers, respectively. You have to go into the Web app, and link to the file, then save it as a ringtone, image, etc… It takes way too long to add pictures and songs to the phone…

I love the firmware. Palm is so user friendly. Everything you need is at your fingertips. Each menu item has a cute lil picture to help you figure out what it is. Each application has information available, and each menu page has helpful tools to guide you through your first time with the system.

I love the schedule/calendar. It’s so helpful. I found an easy way to set alarms by setting a calendar event and telling the phone how soon I want an customizable alarm to go off. All in all, great operating system, and great hardware. It’s so cute. Everyone I’ve shown my new phone to loves it. It just looks techy and geeky, and perfect

But one of the downfalls is the battery life. I read some reviews online before buying my phone and everyone said battery life isn’t that great. I can usually have mine last about 3 days, then I have to charge it. My old phone could run 5-6 days without a charge, so this is a little annoying for me…

All in all, I’d give the Palm an 8/10. I LOVE IT! It’s not perfect, it has flaws, and it takes some getting used to, specially if it’s your first smart phone. But the device is very user friendly and incredibly customizable. And I love it

P.S. I’m on twitter!  Follow me!

I dont recall ever being in an earthquake, but some of my friends up in St. Louis experienced one on friday.  The New Madrid Seismic Zone let loose a 5.2 earthquake at the early hours…  Kind of weird, in the midwest we aren’t used to hearing about earthquakes!!  The last big one was in 1812!

Here’s the Wiki link about the April 18, 2008 earthquake (Weird coincidence that it’s on the same day -different year- as the San Fransisco earthquake!).

On another note…

I got a Palm Centro!!!  Finally!  Great phone I must say.  It’s my very first smart phone, so I’m finally breaking my way into things a bit more tech savvy.  Yay for stuff I can afford!!  I’ll post a review of it once I get the feel for the phone/apps/etc…  I’ve just had it two days, so I don’t know if it’s the perfect phone or not quite yet.  I’ll keep ya posted!

I don’t know whether net neutrality is getting serious right now or not, but I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about it.  It’s kind of confusing to me…  From what I understand, net neutrality basically means consumers (thats me and you) are free to use the internet as we wish through whatever service provider we decide to use.  If we go for the same package, we get the same speed for the same webpages, no matter whether we use it for BitTorrent, youtube, or just email.  It’s freedom at it’s best.

Those that are against neutrality are those big communication companies who have tons of supporters and people that give them big money.  Those people that give them lots of money get fast websites, fast connections… fast everything.  Those that don’t give them lots of money get slow connections and websites.

Now, seeing that I’m a ultra geek who likes to watch videos, download tons of stuff, write blogs (duh) and whatnot, obviously I’m for net neutrality and internet freedom.  I don’t want to have to pay some big company who already has too much money, some of my cash that I need to save because Im a poor ass college student.  I don’t want my favorite podcasters having to pay a larger fee for their internet connection so they can keep their current bandwidths.

The internet started free, and it should remain free (once you’ve payed your monthly bill, of course).

Check out Amber Mac’s video blog about her view on net neutrality in Canada.

And here’s 90 day Tania and her friends talking about net neutrality in Europe.