Web Grievances

Whenever a title contains “grievance” one prepares for the worst, so I’ll try to keep the whining to a minimum.

It seems I was over-hasty to laud the virtues of Imeem, as Kyle and more recently, I, have discovered its frustrating limitation. It appears that user-uploaded content only plays as a 30-second clip when embedded in Facebook profiles, thereby destroying one of Imeem’s primary attractions. I may have wrongly guessed at the selection process for this limitation (user uploads) but one can be certain it is determined by a rubric most foul. As such I am unable to add “Epiphany” to my profile in its entirety, a delightful song from Stephen Sondheim’s musical (Perhaps somehow related to our own dear Walter?). You may have heard of it, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Rachel took me to see the film adaptation the other night and I enjoyed it immensely. Johnny Depp handled the songs quite nicely, as you can hear below.

Going back to Facebook, does it bother anybody else that you can’t view all of an application’s content on somebody else’s page without adding it yourself? I find this extraordinarily exasperating as I might like to see who else resides in your “Pile o’ Chums” without having to append the sickly code to my page as well. That user added the application and allowed it to access their information, so why does it have to see my info to display theirs?

Finally, I just finished reading Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, one of the early champions of science fiction. I’d had this book on my personal reading list for years so it felt great to finally get to it. All in all it was a fine novel and it encouraged me to think, a quality I absolutely adore in literature. It also introduced me to “grok,” a word for which I am already finding applications.

Merry Christmas to all!