Well, Facebook, you've finally done it. I've put up with your increasingly noisy, unattractive, and cluttered design for a while now, but today I finally decided I'd had enough. Facebook Apps are a terrible idea. Not a new opinion, I know, but apparently you're not getting the message. They are big, ugly, cluttered, and obnoxious. They constantly send me messages and invites, notices, and messages about crap I don't care about.

There's a reason I've avoided MySpace like the plague for all these years: Normal Person + Network of Friends + HTML = Bleeding Eyes. It seems related to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Let's call it the Screen Vomit Corollary. At first, it was a phenomenon restricted to GeoCities, AngelFire, and AOL websites. Then it spawned MySpace. Now it's reached its poorly designed and crudely animated tentacles into Facebook.

So am I leaving the Facebook? No. I'm weak. But, I am doing the next-best thing: using it for free. I've downloaded a Greasemonkey script which removes not only all 3rd-party apps, but also removes all advertising. No more per-view revenue from this user, no siree-bob! The logical course would be to abandon the Facebook. Unfortunately, the power of its network is too great. So, for now, I must sit and wait for the inevitable emergence of a Better Way to do social networking, and the great migration that will undoubtedly follow.

I mean, seriously guys, between this and the whole privacy thing, you're digging your own grave here! Come on!

So Michigan's email system is down. Again. This has been happening at least once a day for the past few months. When I try to refresh my inbox, I get this message:

Which can be roughly translated to:

I hate you too, ITCS.

Well, bad news kiddies. As of the end of this semester, the U of M is no longer supporting plain ftp connections to ifs space in favor of the more secure sftp connections. What this means to you is that I will no longer be able to host my webpage on the university servers, since FrontPage does not support sftp. Not only that, but moving back to the crappy old angelfire space I had is no longer an option. All the archiving I've started to do on this site has caused it to grow to mammoth proportions, and the free 20 megs of space they offer is no longer sufficient.

So the gist of the matter is this. I have three choices:

1. Put the site in perpetual limbo at the end of the semester. That means keeping up what is currently up, but no new updates.
2. Severely cut back the content and move back to crappy Angelfire.
3. Dish out the cash for decent webspace.

Personally, I find C the most attractive option. However, it's also the one that will cost me money, which is somewhat problematic, seeing as how I have virtually no income stream. If anybody out there has any suggestions, I'd like to hear them. 99% of you know how to reach me, and the other 1% can email me at howet@hotmail.com.

The good news is, I figured out why I was having trouble uploading my latest update to Geocities. Those fartlickers decided that they would stop supporting FrontPage 2002 on their free sites! What the heck! Sure, I may not have paid anything for the space I was taking up on their site, and sure, it may cost them lots of money to keep their thousands of free sites FrontPage 2002 enabled, but dangit, it's just not fair! Well, I showed them. I took my profit-sucking page and let the good people at Angelfire host it! Ha! That'll show them!

I just love how whenever geocities screws something up, or whenever a page exceeds the minimal bandwidth geocities allows it, the resulting error message is always accompanied by an ad to "Sign up now!" for your own free site. That makes sense, because being informed that the site I'm trying to look at isn't available due to the restrictions set by geocities makes me really want to sign up with them.