Brandon Notices

Earlier this month, the search engine Cuil (which I've never heard of before) released Cpedia, the Internet's first "automated encyclopedia." When I told my friend about this, he asked, "I'm sorry, what's an automated encyclopedia?"

According to the website, you give it a search, and "For each query, Cpedia algorithmically summarizes and clusters the ideas on the web and uses this to generate a report." I summarized this to my friend: "It apparently finds information online about a topic, then mashes together questionably relevant content." Right now, the site is in its alpha phase, but perhaps they were a little hasty in releasing it to the public, because hardly anything on this site makes sense.

For example, check out Cpedia's article about mowing the lawn (archived). The first paragraph starts out reasonably encyclopedic, if not a bit too conversational, but quickly falls into criticism of lazy people who don't like mowing the lawn. Then, a later paragraph reads, "When outside, especially when doing yardwork (like mowing the lawn), use a dust mask and close-fitting goggles to keep allergens out of your nose and eyes. So I did things like mow other people's lawns, shoveled snow and even had a lemonade stand from time to time." I don't see how these two concepts even follow! It just seems like random sentences somewhat related to mowing the lawn are put together haphazardly.

What made me laugh the most was a quick read-through of the article's table of contents: Physical Activity, Cinderfella, Memphis in January 2008, Chore. The Cinderfella section says, in its entirety, "Cinderfella did not like living with his family because they made him do all of the work around the house like washing the car and mowing the lawn." The Memphis in January 2008 section is an apparently irrelevant diversion: "When the company relocated to Memphis in January 2008, Mr. Hudson, 52, decided not to move." What company? No context is given in the article, but at least the site provides a link to the article it pulled the sentence from.

The article about microwaves (archived) says absolutely nothing about electromagnetic waves, or how microwave ovens work. Actually, it reads more like a sales pitch for luxury hotel rooms and appliance shops.

You'd think that there would be an article for everything, since an automatic encyclopedia could theoretically create an article upon request. However, while there is an article for running red lights for fun (archived) (which contains information only about blondes being the life of the party), there exists no article for tickling porcupines.

Cpedia's about page says that the purpose of the site is so that users don't have to look through search result links; they can instead go to Cpedia and get "a summary of the topic." I feel that an automated encyclopedia is an interesting idea, but the articles it comes up with are often so confusing and meaningless that it just doesn't work.

Whenever Facebook makes a major update, usually to the layout, I notice many people joining "Bring Back the Old Facebook" groups on Facebook. I feel that these people's protests are usually a bit hasty, and that they haven't given the new layouts a good chance. Some of Facebook's changes over the years have been good. I'm a fan of the combination of the Wall and Mini-Feed on everybody's profiles, because everything is tied together more chronologically. (What you did and what people wrote to you used to be in separate lists on your profile.)

But I've been a user on Facebook for nearly four years, and I have had enough time to think about the various changes that have been made to the site. And in some ways, I want them to bring back the old Facebook.

Now, it seems much more difficult to find people on Facebook. There used to be a great feature where you could list your classes, and then see who else was also taking those classes. It was a great way to find classmates if you needed to discuss something for a class. Or if you didn't know your friend's name, you could just browse through your classmates. Facebook removed this feature when they introduced applications. They said that somebody would certainly create an app for it, but without a default standard, it's no good. Recently, I was trying to find one of my classmates on Facebook, but I wasn't sure how to spell his last name. I guessed a half dozen times before I finally got it right.

Facebook has also removed most of the advanced search options. You can search for somebody by name, and narrow it down by school or location, but that's about it. I'm pretty certain you used to be able to narrow search results down by age, religion, relationship status, etc. Now, you can't filter results like this. It makes it harder to find the sort of people you might be looking for. That's not a good thing for the most popular social networking site.

In your profile, you used to be able to click on something in your favorites lists—such as a movie title. Then, Facebook would take you to the search results for that movie, and it would show all your friends who also listed that movie. Then, it would show other people in your network, too. It was fun to see who liked the same shows, movies, and books as I did. (Now, instead, it's more likely to take you to search results listing fan pages for the movie or book, made by random users.) Facebook even had a sort of game on the site about favorites. It was called the Friend Game, and it would present you with somebody's favorite movie, song, quotation, or something else, and you had to guess whose favorite it was. That was a fun game; it's too bad it's gone now.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to complain about this last point: There is too much clutter on Facebook now. Ever since the introduction of applications and fan pages, it seems that some certain percentage of my friends seems determined to join every application, become a fan of every possible silly thing, and fill my News Feed with irrelevant stories. It's a neat idea that someone playing a zoo game could ask their friends to feed it while they're away from the computer for a few days, but I just don't care about some stupid digital baby tiger. There used to be the option in the News Feed to have certain types of stories appear less frequently—like I could have pictures of my friends appear less often—but there is no option like this anymore.

Over time, Facebook seems to have become a bit easier to use, and more people are on it than ever. It's just a shame that Facebook has removed such great social networking features.

When I've used Windows Live Messenger, I never expected for any of the text ads on the bottom of the window to insult me, but I guess I was wrong!



Calling me an ass is no way to get me to click you!

Okay, okay, what's actually happened is that the rest just got cut off. The rest of the ad reads, "Associates, Master's, Bachelor's."

In other news, an Elebits sequel is apparently coming to the DS.

I was bothered by all the apps sending me notifications here on Facebook. But just a moment ago, I got a wonderful notification that totally changed my mind. It said that one of my friends compared me with one of her friends and thinks I am a better potential father. I'm so glad I got this! I don't know with whom she compared me, nor do I even know the name of the app that sent the presumably automated notification, but I now know that this is what they mean by "social networking."

I just feel sorry for the poor sap who got the notification that said that somebody "has just compared you with one of her friends and thinks you are a worse potential father."

When I was searching my computer for pictures to put on my bulletin board, I came across a few Garfield comics.

People on the Internet have done some really crazy things to Garfield comics. The first weird thing is removing Garfield's thought bubbles. This changes it from being a comic about a geeky, losely man and his snarky, pissy cat into a comic about a deranged loser who talks to his cat.

It turns this:


into this:


A bunch of other messed-with Garfield comics are available at the Truth and Beauty Bombs Forum.

Something else that's funny to do with Garfield comics is to randomly select panels from different comics and combine them into one crazy, far-out strip. Sometimes, they don't make a lot of sense:


Sometimes, they do make sense, or at least create very surreal comics:






As you can see, I've had a lot of fun playing with the Garfield Randomizer. The only thing I didn't really like about the Randomizer is that it was apparently designed to only pick panels from comics between 2001 and 2004. I tweaked the code so that picks from nearly all of the comic strips (1979 through 2007). The only problem with this is that the artwork sometimes changes dramatically through a randomized strip, and you'll even sometimes see a panel that isn't colorized. But I suggest doing this if you dare to see the most absurd comics in your life. If you want to see the entire strip of one of the panels, right-click on one of the panels and click Save Background to save the entire strip to your computer.

While I'm at it, I think I'll mention the Garfield search engine. This is neat to use to find specific phrases in a Garfield comic. Search for "Irma" and you'll see all my favorite comics that take place in the diner.

A computer program I came across this summer has completely changed the way I use the Internet. It's Microsoft's Windows Live Mail, and it's currently in the beta phase. Even so, it seems to work remarkably well. Windows Live Mail is an e-mail client, and it's very clean looking; there are no ugly ads or anything. There is one specific feature, however, that has revolutionized how I view content on the Internet: web feed aggregation.

I'm a fan of many websites on the Internet, but it was always tedious to have to click on each of the items in my Links folder to check if the authors of those sites had updated with any new content. Web feeds fix this problem. Basically, they deliver new content to you whenever it's available, as long as you have an aggregator--a program that gathers web feeds together. Windows Live Mail is an aggregator, and a good one at that. Internet Explorer 7 also has a built-in aggregator, but I think it's rather limited.

The thing I like best about Windows Live Mail's is that it has an option to show you only your unread feeds, and it lists them kinda like e-mails. You can open a feed, read it, and then read through the rest of your unread feeds. It's nice to not have to dig through a big mixture of read and unread articles. Another thing I really really like is that you can choose to have Windows Live Mail display the article directly as a webpage (instead of a summary and a link to the article), and it does this right within the program. Right now, it won't display JavaScript or Flash; that's something I hope Microsoft makes available for the release version.

Be sure to check out this blog's feed if you're interested in web feeds.

I found something in my MySpace blog settings that upset me a little:



Why do several of the options give me the choices "NO" or "NO"? Why not "YES"? What if I want to say yes? Why even give me the option if you won't let me say anything other than "NO"? Come on, MySpace, what's your deal?