Hot on the heels of getting my first Twitter “follower,” I just got my first MySpace “friend,” a (supposedly) 21 year old female from San Diego.

Unlike the Twitter follower, though, I won’t be giving a shout out, mainly because I believe it is a spam type situation. The profile has no picture and the only information entered is a text graphic which talks about how shy she is, but her friends encourage her to post nude pictures, which, of course, MySpace won’t allow, but if you’ll just click through to this dating site and search on her name….

Yeah, right. SPAM! So why’d I allow the friend request? Eh, no-one else has requested, I’m tired of seeing only the one default friend (the mythical “Tom”), and I’m “seeding the tip jar,” under the theory that maybe this will help bring in more, hopefully legit, “friends.” MySpace is a numbers game, and my score is too low to be picky.

But that doesn’t mean I’m going to give said spammer any links from here — though, of course, you can go to my MySpace page and follow the trail down the rabbit’s hole if you like. (I almost wrote “down the spammer’s hole” but given the nature of the spam, that just sounded way inappropriate. :/ )

Coincidentally (or not), the only other communication I’ve so far received on MySpace was also spammish in nature. Someone (again, supposedly female) sent me an email saying she hoped I was single and would write her. Oh, but don’t respond here, she’s using a friend’s account, write her at this completely separate and untraceable Yahoo account….

Yeah, right. SPAM! Ah, if only it were true, but it has all the earmarks: generic in nature, “I’m using a friend’s account,” trying to take things to another location (outside MySpace’s reach), no truly personal information available about the sender (or the friend, for that matter), and most of the “friend’s comments” on the “friend’s” page were spammish in nature, as well (”Wow, this really makes you $90 gazillion in 3 days! Check it out!”). And, really, why would a 20-something girl be emailing hoping to date a nearly 40 year old man when there is so little information about me on the MySpace page? It’s ridiculous.

They can sometimes (not in this case, but still…) make these things very convincing, but I’m not biting, sorry.

Posted: April 12th, 2008 under Blogging, Websites.
Comments: 1

If you follow me on Twitter (yeah, right), then you know I’ve been sick the past couple days. I hate being sick. Not that many people enjoy sickness, but I hate it with a passion.

I take illness as a personal affront. I’ve spent so much of my life sick, particularly in my first 16 or 17 years, that I almost feel I should now be exempt, as if we’re each given a certain allotment of sick days, and I met my quota a couple of decades back. Any illness that comes near me now should be in violation of some cosmic law and subject to immediate extinction. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way.

These days, I probably don’t fall ill more often than the average person, maybe once or twice a year, but it still riles me. It brings up all those wasted years, all that I lost, all that I missed out on. It reminds me that I am still subject to all the faults inherent in this flesh, all that is “common to man,” and that even worse could still await me.

So, while I erroneously think past suffering should somehow exempt me from future suffering, I know that the only permanent escape from sickness is death, if death isn’t the ultimate permanent sickness, that is.

Posted: April 7th, 2008 under Life Journals.
Comments: none

I’m twitterpated. No, not in the sense used in Disney’s Bambi. I’ve joined the Twitter website.

http://twitter.com/GeneNash

What’s Twitter? Um, it’s kinda like a mini-blog limited to 140 characters, in which you say what you’re doing right this minute!!! Yeah, I don’t see the point of it either, but it’s popular and I’m a good little sheep.

Baaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!

Speaking of being a good little sheep, I also just joined MySpace. (And if you don’t know what MySpace is, for goodness sake pick up a newspaper or magazine once in a while!)

http://myspace.com/genenash

Posted: March 29th, 2008 under Life Journals.
Comments: 2

Okay, so here’s my new blog. *SIGH*

I soooo did not want to do this. But, my original blog site, JoeUser, has made such drastic (and extremely ill advised) changes that I can no longer consider it a blog site. It’s being transformed into the social networking component of the software company’s new site-plex. JoeUser is now, in a word, garbage.

So, here I am, unwillingly thrust out into the cold, unforgiving blogsphere, naked and alone. That’s the way it feels, going from the safety of a community, where I could mingle and disappear into the fleshy mass of “the many,” to standing out here all by myself, a one man band with nowhere to hide and no shuffle to get lost into should I so desire. I should have done this years ago, but there is something comforting about the warmth of the crowd.

For now, please excuse the design of this blog.. I grabbed a pre-made template off the web just to get something up and return to blogging again. The only alteration I’ve made so far is adding the purple (my favorite color) gradients to the top and bottom. I’m currently designing and populating other sites and hadn’t anticipated having to restart my own blog from scratch. Over time, I’ll slowly morph this into something almost entirely different, but for now I have to put this up and get moving again before too much inertia sets in.

Except for the occasional repost or the rare thing related strictly to that community, my old blog is dead. This is where you should be looking for me.

 
(P.S. The 300+ blog articles I previously wrote are, for the time being, still at the old site and can be read there.)

Posted: March 4th, 2008 under Blogging, Welcome.
Comments: none