Well, that spur-of-moment decision to purchase the Rio S10 player is turning out to be one of the best things I've done lately. After finding out that I can only stuff about about a dozen tunes onto the built-in 64MB memory, I went out and bout a 256MB SanDisk SD memory card, went back onto puretracks.com and brought in my CD collection to pillage songs from and convert them to WMA, and presto! My own portable radio station...all Ryan's hits, all the time :-) I should have done this years ago!

Well, you may ask, what does Ryan put on his first-ever CD burned from downloaded tracks from puretracks.com? Well, my tastes in music are rather eclectic:

Patsy Cline: Walkin' After Midnight
Patsy Cline: Crazy
The Mamas and the Papas: California Dreamin'
The Mamas and the Papas: Monday, Monday
Belinda Carlisle: Circle in the Sand
Belinda Carlisle: Heaven is a Place on Earth
The Go-Go's: Our Lips are Sealed
The Go-Go's: We Got the Beat
Sonique: It Feels So Good
OMC: How Bizarre
Bryan Adams: When You're Gone
The Brian Setzer Orchestra: Jump, Jive and Wail
Elvis Presley: Viva Los Vegas
Sheryl Crow: Leaving Los Vegas
Peter Gabriel: Sledgehammer
The Police: Every Little Thing She Does is Magic
The Police: Every Breath You Take
Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Relax

Like I said...eclectic :-)

I wandered into a&b sound today just to browse, and walked out with one of their doorcrasher specials: a Rio S10 digital music player, which handles both MP3 and WMA files. So I'll give it a whirl and see how it works out...it was a cheap introduction, and if I really like it, I'll upgrade to an iPod (Canadians don't have access to iTunes yet anyways :-( ...)

Meanwhile, I am installing Mozilla Firebird on my work PC, again because I am getting so fed up with Microsoft's Internet Explorer failing to load images. I'll give it a test drive for a week or two, and report back to the blog on what I think of it.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer is driving me crazy...after a few pages, it refuses to load images, especially after browsing through all the thumbnails at friendster. It's gotten so bad on my less pwerful home PC that I finally threw up my hands and switched to the Opera browser. Problem solved.

Spent my lunchhour buying and downloading some tunes from puretracks... it's kind of fun to be able to create your own CDs (even if you can only play them on the computer)...

Puretracks was officially launched yesterday...Canada's first (legal) download music service. And me with a brand-new work PC, complete with CD burner. Hmmm...guess I should test out my new equipment (in my off-work hours of course). I'm really glad to see the music industry wake up a bit; a service like this should have been launched several years ago. Now they're madly playing catch-up while everybody's on KaZaA (or however the hell you spell it)...

Currently reading a book recommended to me by someone on the Social Software Tribe on tribe.net: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software...very engaging reading. The author talks about systems that demonstrate adaptive behavior, such as ant colonies, urban areas, and character-recognition software. A very engaging read.

Friendster - Home: "You are connected to 1,136,432 people in your Personal Network, through 79 friends."

Now this is bizarre but strangely compelling: grouphug.us is an anonymous confession site. Post your own confession, anonymously, then read others' anonymous confessions.

How you know that your Friendster habit has gotten waaaaaaaaaaaay out of hand :-)

Friendster - Home: "You are connected to 1,027,426 people in your Personal Network, through 56 friends. "

More proof that there is something very, very seriously wrong with today's Catholic Church. When I come across crap like this, I want to go out and bitch-slap a bishop.

Well, it's nice to know that I'm not the only one doing this :-) ...

Jackie Spinner writes for The Age: Click for clique - www.theage.com.au: "Counting friends — the contest"

Mike Nguyen admits he’s addicted. Nearly every day for the past five months, the 27-year-old has logged on to count his friends and the friends of his friends. And their friends. At last check, he was up to 210,185 in all.

Lawyer Andy Kamage, 31, has been counting for only a few weeks. She is connected to a mere 17,000 people, or “friendsters”, the term for cyber-acquaintances made through Friendster.com, an online networking service that has burst on to the urban hipster scene this year.

Friendster was conceived as a twist on online dating, but many have treated it as a giant parlour game to see who’s connected to the most people. “It helps you quantify how popular you are,” says Jen Chung, 26, a New York marketing strategist who has 432,475 friendsters. “People get bent out of shape if someone they don’t think is as cool has more friends.” As with all flashing pop-culture trends, Friendster has already spawned a backlash. There’s a website called Introvertster that bills itself as “an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing them online”. Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist and the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, says people are “deeply fascinated about how they are connected to each other.

“It’s a funny obsession,” says Watts. “But they’re obsessed in a way that doesn’t require them to think about it very much … a momentary pleasure.” Nguyen got hooked on Friendster after a friend sent him an email asking him to join. “Next thing I know, I’m on it, and it’s become a pseudo-obsession.” “Kamage, who has never met Nguyen but is connected to him through his cousin, said she would never sign up for an online dating service.

“It’s free entertainment,” she says. “It’s an interesting diversion.”

Here's a blog I quite like: jason ronbeck > out of control

The Onion: '48-Hour Internet Outage Plunges Nation Into Productivity'...God ain't this the truth :-)

Actually, this person's post kinda sums up my ambivalent feelings about Friendster: "Maybe I'm wrong. But my first impression of Friendster is that it sucks. I mean, you have to invite friends in order to do ANYTHING on that netowrk. 'Invite Friends' = give out your friends private email addresses. NICE. Ok, ok, they SAY they won't sell, lease, give out, share, your email address, but suppose the database gets hacked or they change their rules? I would KILL anyone who gave out my private email address to something like friendster. I certainly wouldn't do that to a friend. So, since I won't violate my friend's privacy, I can't invite anyone, and since I can't invite anyone, I can't DO anything on Friendster. "

Well, I've spent two days tinkering with Friendster and Tribe, and perusing the comments that bloggers have made on both systems (which, I've discovered, can be a very effective way to get a sense of what's going on).

Friendster is great--provided you can plug into a large network without too much work. If you're starting from scratch, it's frustrating, and you feel like a loser just because you're not part of the "right" group...sounds too much like grade school for my liking.

Tribe has one thing going for it: you can join public "tribes" (groups) without having to know someone to get in, so you can get down to business without wearing yourself (and your Rolodex) out. Also, if you can't find a public tribe you want to join, you can create your own, which is a great idea. Why bust your gut trying to connect to someone else's node on the network, when you can create your own node? That's more along my line of thinking :-)

Both Friendster and Tribe are beta software. There are clear signs that Friendster is going o start charging for its services at some future point, whereas Tribe has vowed not to charge users for its services unless it can't make money from other streams such as advertising and special services.

Verdict? I'm keeping my Friendster account, but I think I'll be spending more time--and having more fun--on Tribe.net. And I will be watching with interest as both services grow and develop.

Now... I am going to put all this away and focus on my life off-line.

From a Fortune article by David Kirkpatrick: Fortune.com - Fast Forward - I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends of Friends of Friends: "There may be a new kind of Internet emerging--one more about connecting people to people than people to websites. The blog phenomenon, where blogs link to blogs, is another aspect of this same trend. Mark Pincus, an investor in Friendster and founder of Tribe.net, calls this the early phases of the 'peopleweb'--a user-controlled network of identities and relationships that transcends any one site or company. How that web will take shape remains murky, but in the explosive growth of social networking we are surely seeing the future, using the Net to connect people with bonds of trust and friendship--and maybe sex. "

As I highlighted in a post below, it's the communication, not the content.

Here's a good series of blog posts by Marc Canter on social networking and Tribe.net vs. Friendster (admittedly from a Tribe perspective/bias): Topic: Tribe.net

This is hilarious...BlogsCanada, the Canadian blogs directory, complete with faux federal government banner LOL

Here's an interesting one to bookmark and explore further: Popdex : the website popularity index

Quote from the Abstract Dynamics article on Friendster: The Idiot Savant (Friendster Triumphant): "Now Metcalfe's Law actually isn't much of a law, its a conjecture that, at the moment, is pretty reasonably supported by empirical evidence. What it says is that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of members in the network. Now Friendster's network is shockingly large. Close to 2 million accounts at the moment, and still growing fast (exponentially?). If Metcalfe's law is even close to true, the value of the Friendster network is increasing tremendously each day. And quite honestly I just don't see how any competitor is going to be able to build up a comparable network. "

Interesting article from the blog Abstract Dynamics on the head-start that Friendster has over competitors such as Tribe: Abstract Dynamics: The Idiot Savant (Friendster Triumphant). I spent a couple of hours last night exploring both Friendster and Tribe..I think I prefer Tribe, but it's kinda hard to judge when you are only linked to one other person :-)

Well, here's a sign of the times: our library just received a new Prentice Hall book... New Biology for Engineers and Computer Scientists, a primer on the essentials of new biology (genes, proteins, cells, the Human Genome Project, etc.) for intotech geeks making the shift to cash in on the biotech gold rush. "This book provides an effective tool to teach new biology to those engineers and computer scientists wanting to join the biotechnology workforce." Actually, it's a good read, although at only 286 pages the overview moves very quickly, perhaps too fast for some.