Recently in rants Category

I was tagged as a "coworker" on Facebook today.

I keep a spartan profile with only my name and profile photo displayed, so I was outraged to find that by tagging me as a coworker, my employment information was added to my profile. By someone else, against my will no less. I could only remove the tag after the fact, and even then, it only removed the information from my own profile, and not my coworker's. Severing ties with that coworker (unfriending) didn't help either.

I also tried to find a way to prevent myself from being tagged in this fashion. Users have the option to prevent tagged photos of themselves from being shown. Users also have the option to prevent others from checking you into places. However, there is no option to prevent others from tagging you as a coworker and adding that information to your own profile as well.

This sucks.

A little over a week ago, Amazon told me that I would not be receiving my Canon 5D Mark II until after Christmas. Perhaps I should have been more patient, because I would have received it today had I not cancelled my order this past Monday and purchased a Nikon D90 instead.

I was getting a little antsy about the Nikon D90. I ordered a slew of lenses and accessories for it but even after all the accessories I ordered (days after I ordered the camera) had arrived or had been shipped, the status of the camera itself was still unknown.

UPS had a lens delivery for me yesterday, but I didn't go home to sign for it since I didn't have my camera yet. When I called UPS to hold my package for pick-up, I thought it was odd that there were 2 packages in my lens shipment. The lens is not supposed to be that big.

The second box actually contained my camera! It turned out that Amazon forgot to mark my camera as shipped... either that, or UPS is in possession of a time machine, because my order history shows the following:

Shipment Date: December 4, 2008
Delivery Date: December 3, 2008

I went to pick up my camera and lens from UPS at lunch today. I haven't opened the box yet, but I'm pretty excited about having it in my possession before the weekend.

Do I regret not getting the Canon 5D Mark II? I don't know. I don't have one and I've never had a DSLR before so I have nothing to compare it to. But I've spent less on the Nikon D90, 3 lenses, 4 snazzy filters, a fancy flash and a bunch of other accessories combined than the price of the 5D Mark II body alone. I'm pretty sure I will be just as satisfied with my little D90 because it's not the camera that makes the photographer.

Addendum @ 11:24 PM: Okay, I'm actually glad I cancelled my 5DII order. It turns out that Amazon messed up big time. No one who ordered the body only got theirs yet, and everyone who ordered the kit with lens got the body only. :-( Funny that Amazon thought the "body only" boxes had lenses in them even though the boxes are clearly labelled, "lens not included" and they didn't believe there was a "body only" version even though they are selling them on their web site.

I have been a long time user of Evite. In the past few months, Evite has been on a fritz... undergoing personality changes, gaining new features that don't work, breaking features that did work and popping up ads all over my desktop. It's like a distressed child's cry for attention and help.

I was annoyed when the carpool feature did nothing but spam my inbox. Okay fine, I used Evite before they had that feature. I can get along without it.

I thought it was the last straw when they introduced the flip-book style invitations where you had to turn the pages of the e-card to see all the details of the event. But they repented and rolled back that "upgrade" so I forgave them.

But then they mangled my recurring event for Game Night at my place. First they sent a notification that my recurring event had ended and that I would have to schedule another series of recurring events to continue it. Okay, fine. I was going to stop using Evite anyway.

But the week after, Evite sent out an invitation for the event. Okay, whatever. I was going to have the event anyway.

And the invitations kept going out after that, all on their own, even though the recurring event for Game Night had supposedly ended. Unfortunately, sometimes the invitations inexplicably went out for 3:00 AM (Game Nights happen on Fridays at 8:00 PM) and other times Evite would randomly invite my friends to come and play on Wednesdays. I tried to cancel the events, but all I could do was cancel the invitations one by one as Evite automatically spewed them out. There was no way to cancel the entire series of events (because it had supposedly ended.)

And then just last week, the rogue invitations finally stopped. Yay!

Now I can dump Evite for a better alternative that doesn't require invitees to sign up for an account in order to respond to invitations. So far I've tried Renkoo, Crush3r and setdot.

Renkoo is cute but it is really buggy and it doesn't work for some of my friends due to the AJAX platform that Renkoo is using.

Crush3r is simple and promising. They added a recurring event feature when Mike requested it, but it doesn't really allow you to be lazy and schedule a series of regularly recurring events à la Microsoft Outlook Calendar.

setdot also works but the closest thing they have to a repeating events feature is an event cloning feature, which allows you to create a new invitation by copying an existing event. Again, I don't want to have to think about what day of the month it's going to be a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks,... 52 weeks from today.

If anyone knows of an event invitation web application that doesn't require invitees to sign up for an account in order to respond to invitations and has a feature to easily manage regularly occurring events, please let me know.

Several weeks back, I got an email informing me that my AsianAvenue.com email address will cease to work in mid-june because the site was shutting down. I hadn't used that email address in years so I didn't really care, but what caught my attention was that they were opening up a brand new social networking site — asianave.com — in its place. I seriously thought that no one in their right mind would attempt to bring the community back to life following its gradual decline after the dot-com bust. The original AA crowd had since moved on to bigger, better and less ethnically targeted communities: xanga, friendster, and now facebook. I was curious about the brand new AsianAve so I signed up for an account.

AsianAve didn't look that interesting so I went back to facebook, but then I started getting friend requests in my email account. I ignored them at first but as more and more friend requests came in, I decided to login to AsianAve one more time to see who these people were. Maybe they were my long lost pals from the old AA days.

No such luck. I didn't know any of these people and what's worse... they were 30-year old guys in the Bay Area looking to hook up!

But then I carefully considered my reflexive disgust at their old age and reality sunk in. These guys were only 3 years my senior; I am no longer the naive, wide-eyed, barely legal fresh meat I used to be. In fact, I am no spring chicken.

So here I am, wondering how I let the best years of my life slip by while I desperately cling on to what's left of my 20's.

As far as I'm concerned, 25 is over the hill. I can't even begin to think what 40 will be like. What do I have to show for the last 27 years of my life? I previously thought I was ahead of schedule in terms of achieving my life goals, but now I don't really know. It seems like I haven't experienced that much after all. No wonder why the average North American person lives for so long.

I would be very angry at myself if I died tomorrow because my obituary would be very boring. It feels as though I've squandered my youth in a bland and meaningless existence. Looking back, all my memories are of myself studying hard, working hard, trying hard... I don't have any recollection of myself playing hard. If I squander the next 27 years of my life as well, I won't have any stories to tell my grandchildren... if I even end up with any.

I've been thinking a lot about the people who matter in my life because I'm having trouble keeping in touch with everyone who matters to me. I try to say hello to my former classmates once a week, even if it's just a quick IM conversation. I try to lend an ear whenever friends I've left behind in Canada or New York ponder over a conundrum in their personal or professional lives. I try to be "there" for everyone I've been friends with as much as possible even though I now live over 3000 kilometers away. Trying to stay close to those who are far away is really, really tough. Even tougher than maintaining a romantic long distance relationship.

I still read the blogs of people I used to subscribe to on Xanga during my college years, albeit much less frequently. Why do I care about these people and feel obligated to catch up on their latest adventures at least once every couple of weeks? We're not friends, but their accounts of their lives have enriched mine so I feel that I have a connection to them. They blog because they want to be read, so I continue to humour them with some of my attention. I'd feel bad if any of them thought that I ditched them, even though they have hundreds of subscribers and could probably care less about this infrequent visitor.

The people who matter to me are the people who kept me afloat during hard times and those who reassured me that it's okay to be different when I was trying to find myself. I feel that I owe each and every one of these people some of my attention, but sometimes I wonder if my feeble attempts at reciprocating the care and advice I have received are well-received by those I hold in high regard... or am I just a pest now that I'm happy and well-adjusted?