I kinda like using Netvibes.  It’s has been my start page for a long time now.  I’ve started using it as my main RSS reader.  I’ve switched readers now a few times - sue me - I’m fickle.  Anyway, I’ve put up a Veyron’s Universe page so you can see some of the things I read, and of course pull in some of my feeds into your Netvibes.

Give me a scribble on the page if you like it.

-Veyron

I have signups for Ping.fm. It allows you to update a lot of services like Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce at one time. It is in beta right now. If you want one, contact me to get one.

-Veyron

So, I scored an invite to the private Wuala online storage thingie. Seems kinda interesting. The more you share of your own available storage space, the more you get in the cloud space. Might be useful for storing things. Also has a social sharing thing. It’s in private alpha or beta or whatever it is these days. Comment here or email me if you want an invite. First come first serve until I’m out of them….-Veyron

One new things I’ve been playing with is Flock.  It’s the FireFox web browser but with a lot of extra bits in it.  Normally I’m not into extra shiny bits like these, but it seems that Veyron has accumulated a lot of social demands.  It has a blog editor built into it, it can log into other social web sites, like Facebook and Twitter.  It uses del.icio.us for bookmarking, and it will hookup with Flickr and Photobucket.  It basically does a lot of interesting things.  That at it seems that most of the Firefox extensions work with it.

Give it a try, you might like it.

-Veyron

Blogged with Flock

I’m changing around the spam comment suppression system.  I’ve taken out the captcha (which for some reason seemed to do nothing to slow them down) and I’ve switched over to Defensio for cutting out the spam comments.  If your comment does not appear it might be a problem with it.  Email or comment to me and I’ll look into it.  So far it seems to be working.

Those guys are going to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes….

-Veyron

Okay, I’ve been tagged by Timothy to come up with eight random facts meme.  It’s from Johan Yugen.  I’m game, here is apparently the rules:

(1) Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves. (2) People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules. (3) At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. (4) Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1) Veyron has more than one alt.  In fact, here is a dark secret….  Veyron is an alt.  Of course, is an alt of an alt an alt?  Hmmm, this is sort of a philosophical discussion that Dalien should take up.  Ooohhh…  This I suspect will start a buzz.

2) Veyron has a fairly organized inventory, but it has been getting a bit messy lately.  I need to spend a few hours, probably about four on a clean up operation.  It was a worthwhile endeavor to start out being organized.  I also have a pretty clever system for changing clothes fast.  I also concur with Vint about the tagging system she’s talking about….

3) I stalk people.  :)  Yeah, it’s true.  Can’t help it.  It’s the busy-body in me poking through.  Not really in a bad sort of way, but if I get to be really “interested” in someone, I have ways of doing research on them in Second Life - even in real-time….  Although I do not stalk people in real life - uh just Second Life. 

4) The narrator is slightly jealous of Veyron.  Veyron is slightly jealous of the narrator.  Go figure.  The grass is greener on the other side of the septic tank syndrome?  I know who avies in Second Life who have almost completely different sized busts in SL as they do in RL.  One has a large chest in RL, so they want a small one in SL; the other has the opposite.

5) The narrator is sort of shy in Real Life socially, and Veyron can be shy too, but will take a deep breath and then charge full speed ahead.  After all, moderation is for monks (nuns)?  I have gone pretty wild at a few Dark Eden parties….

6) I am a tease and a teaser.  Just in case you didn’t notice….  But maybe I’m being redundant.

7) I regret not spending enough time with all the people I know and love in Second Life.  I know a lot of you.  There just is not enough of me to go around.  I have about 150 avies on my friends list, and it’s hard sometimes to spend enough time with all of my friends.  I sometimes feel a lot of guilt about that.  ::sigh::  And I’m not even Catholic.  Similarly, I feel I don’t have any people I dislike or hate in Second Life.  Really.  Hard to imagine that.  Maybe I’m mellowing with age.

I’m also behind on a lot of things I need to get done.  Seems like a lot of people are also behind.  Life is short.  I also need to do something for London (I promise to get it done) and I’m being lazy about getting photos done.  And I need to do something about some skins…  I leave that one to some people’s imaginations.  Seems too much like work…. 

Now, who to tag next…  Hmm…  So, I am going to tag, Tiessa,  Amanda, TheDiva, Gideon Television, Jellybean Madison, Zoe, Lillie, and Chloe. 

-Veyron

I’ve unfortunately become a member of a litany of social networking sites. Lets see here… Facebook, which seems to be a sort of knob turners dream site of time wasting. Myspace which I signed up for some gawd knows reason - oh yeah, so I could stalk some people more effectively. MyOpera I signed up for - why? Probably because I was bored at the moment. Hmm, oh yeah, I think I was tinkering with synchronization with Opera.

The directory sites like Spock and Wink. Oh, and this sorta strange Plaxo thing.

The micro blogging sites Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku which are all linked together - why three of them - I have no idea, I suppose because I can. At least I was smart enough to have Pownce feed the rest of them. There’s also my BlogHUD thingie which is also kind of a micro blogger, but designed for Second Life.

Now there’s the virtual world social networking sites. I signed up for this Koinup thing, but it seems to be down to it doesn’t like me. SLProfiles.com, which actually seems to be useful, as it fits in with your Second Life profile in world. SLUniverse mostly to be able to bitch about Second Life and tinker around with other things like Snapzilla, which is sort of link BlogHUD. I haven’t done much with Snapzilla lately, mostly because I keep forgetting about it.

But that’s not all… Then there’s some other sites to support this blogging madness… like Del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, Digg, SLTopSites, plus more I’m too tired now to list. (Oh yeah, and Flickr.)

Now some more upstairs Second Life social networks have come along. 2LifePeople and RezzedNet. I’m not sure what I think of the two new ones, mostly they seem to be light on features. I’m also not sure what I’m suppose to do with them. Facebook has an interesting application in it that links Second Life accounts to it and does some other features. Of course Facebook is sort of like this whizzbangy machine that makes a lot of noise, smoke, lights and makes pretty colors but in the end doesn’t really do anything - other than consume a lot of time.

Okay, where was I going? Oh yeah, ummm… Then there’s my blog, which circling back seems to be the root of most (but not all) of the above. Sort of a Ying and Yang - who is feeding who? Oh, and while I’ve been writing this, I’ve been invited to Ning. I’ve also been invited to Orkut a month or two ago, but I resisted… I know where I was going, spreading too thin. It’s getting more and more obvious I’ve got too many things flying around and I can’t keep it all up to date.

-Veyron

I know, I just love Google.  I can’t really get enough of it.  I’m not sure exactly what it is.  Maybe because they are not the evil empire….  So, I love their stuff.  Anyway, I heard of some great new products they are working on in their labs.  Some of them I’m really excited to see coming up.   The first big one is the long rumored GDrive.  Google is going to all you to store all your stuff online.  Now, this should be pretty cool, because gawd knows, I have a lot of stuff.

But what really got me going was the new rumored social network for lapdancers called GString.  I don’t know how well it will compete with Facebook and MySpace, but I know Zoe and I will be signing up.  Oh and I’m sure Tiessa will too, just on general principles.

They have also announced they are working on a broadband service that is faster than the speed of sound. The GWhiz is coming very very soon.  I’m not sure how it’s going to work with the Google TiSP or Toilet Internet Service Provider though.

Another Google shot from the Googleplex was just announced is a new mobile service called G.e.ni.us which turns dumb kids into Harvard geniuses - by giving them answers to every single question possible, via mobile phone texts.  Hmm….  Yes, but can’t they speak textish to like grad speak?  I’m not sure if the Google Gulp project is related to this or not.

Lastly, Google has just announced the opening of a new research wing derived from the Google Romance project at their HQ called the GSpot. So far only females have joined up, as all of the male employees have failed to find the signs for the GSpot….

-Veyron

I’m behind…  No, not that behind.  I’ve got too many web social thingies going on and I can’t keep up.  Mmmm, and I’m not sure I really want to try to keep up.  Zoe sort of seems to burn out now and then from it.  I’ve been vainly trying to find a way to consolidate it all into something more manageable.  Something I can keep under control and not be a big consumer of time, yet still be fun, and I can actually keep up with.  So far, no luck.  But I might as well keep trying….

I was hoping this new beta service, Twine, might be the solution.   From the descriptions of the thing, it sounded like it might be the answer.  But I still haven’t been able to finagle an invite, and I’m not sure it’s the thing.  In it’s place I’m giving Plaxo a spin.  It has this Plaxo “Pulse” thingie that promises to solve world hunger or something like that.  We’ll see.

The ironic part is that Veyron has a much busier social life than the Narrator does.  Something that was not anticipated when the madness was all started….

-Veyron

Okay, I think I’m getting close to Social Network overload - maybe there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.  You know it’s bad when you see a new web application like Fuser come along - which helps aggregate email, IM accounts and social networks, and you’re upset it doesn’t aggregate enough of them.  Anyway, Alja Sul?i? has a cool blog post on some tools to integrate Facebook with Second Life.  I have a Facebook profile now, but it seems to me to be a bit weird and quirky - not sure if it’s really my thing.  It certainly seems like a lot of work to keep it kept up to date.

Maybe these tools might make it more interesting….

-Veyron

Okay, I’m going to close the poll for the next blogger party at 9pm SL time. That is in the next few hours. So, if you haven’t voted yet, now is your chance…. Looks like we’re going to have prizes and maybe more at the party. Should be a good time….

Time to pick a new theme for the upcoming blogger party.  On the sidebar on the right, you should see a poll for the theme options.  This months options are:

• Tinies
• Film Noir
• Western
• Sports
• Robots

All look kinda interesting, except Tinies - which I have no outfit for, but I could of course shop for….  Now, what to vote for….

-Veyron

So, I’ve been playing with Twitter and now Pownce.  But Pownce is still in beta, and you need an invite to get into it.  I have invites to get in.  So, if you need or want to get into it, send me a feedback, comment here or an email and I’ll get you an invite.  At least until I run out of them.  It’s first come, first server.

Gee, then you’d get an official Veyron Pownced invite - think how valuable that will be in the future.  You can tell you grandchildren about that.

-Veyron

Hmmm, no this is not possibly the worst Star Trek episode ever made… it is a new odd search engine called Spock. It’s designed around finding people (and I guess now avatars). I’ve got Vint, Zoe and Codie (and it looks like Timothy) now hooked into this giant machine, you too can join in the madness. My entry can be found on Spock linked to other people. Now the amusing part it you can add tags (and sort of remove tags) and information for other people. Just think of the entries for Dalien, Gideon, Tiessa, and (gasp) Prok! Better get there before someone else creates your entry for you….

-Veyron

Okay, I was a bit torn about posting a link to what is obviously either a scam for Second Life vendors or more likely a rip off to anyone dumb enough to buy it.  Does anyone know more about the site SecondLifeCheaters.com?  I found the link on a bloggers Google Adwords.  Obviously not endorsed by the blogger I found the ad on.  Am I behind the curve on this site?

-Veyron