Yeah, so this photo sharing, social network, web two point oh thingie? It's interesting to watch the dynamics of the networks. Take, for instance, my second Flickr spam (I deleted the first):

I deliberately didn't put that one on Flickr because doing so would just make it easy for my Flickr friends to click over to this guy. Since the friend who tell me they actually read this blog and the circle of friends who use Flickr are nominally disjoint, this guy is less likely to get traffic from my posting the image on my site instead of my Flickr photostream.

That said, this guy looks like he falls into the camp of "get as many contacts as I possibly can by adding everyone as a contact.". He has 4597 contacts at last count:

In as much as I really don't have photos that are that interesting, he's clearly not adding me as a contact for my amazing use of a digital camera.

I noticed a similar phenomenom at Orkut. I followed Bharat's example and made myself a fan of everyone who added me as a contact/friend. To my surprise, almost everyone I was a fan of listed me as a fan back. Even some people who I knew only peripherally from college.

It's another example of the strange (to me) social dynamic where if someone says something nice about you, you're more likely to think of them positively. Same situation where a person is more likely to notice and find attractive people he's been told are attracted to him first. An "Oh, you like me? Hey, I'll like you back." sort of thing.

I recently added a person I don't know personally to my contact list. I felt really uncomfortable doing it, but he has cool photos, and I like to view them in my contacts photostream page. The message I received suggests such is a reasonable excuse, but it was still weird. Except for that guy and other person who is a friend of a friend, I know all of my contacts.

After all, they're part of the Web Two Point Oh movement.

Doin' cool shit.

Note to self: when waiting for the train, don't sit under the schedule posted on the wall over the bench.

Sure, you'll be guaranteed lots of visitors.

But they'll be greeting you with their crotches.

A friend of mine is psychic.

Oh, no, not in the sense he can read your mind or tell your future, but in a much better sense. Well, for him, anyway. He's able to sense when the actions he's about to take will result in something unpleasant, when he has no discernable way of knowing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Sure, I can accurately predict if I slam this hammer head down on my hand, my hand is going to hurt a lot and probably break. And I know if I shoot up a syringe of insulin into my leg, I'll go into insulin shock. Sure, these are true and obvious unpleasantries that result from actions I choose to take or not to take.

But, that's not quite the circumstances I'm talking about. I'm talking more like, "This is a small decision in nominally inconsequential to my life. Two days later, it's the difference between joy and despair." I've watched him three times make a choice, retract that choice, then some time later, witness the brilliance of his decisions.

I'm completely sure that Mike will tell me that this friend is just more in tune with his surroundings, that he picks up on subtle clues that most people miss, that he's just blinking. And that very well may be the case.

But, it doesn't make me less interested or fascinated in or jealous of his ability. Especially when he doesn't even know he's doing it: as near as I can tell, he's completely oblivious.

Kinda like David Schmidt's guardian angel. Now that's a long story.

So, I'm driving to the train station today to catch a ride up to the Laughing Squid 10th Anniversary party, meeting up with Messina beforehand to finish up a client project. I am, of course, running late, and leave the house at 2:09 for the train at 2:19.

The drive to the train station takes 7 minutes, but that's a drop-off time, not a "park, pay parking fee, buy train ticket and cross over to the Northbound side of the tracks" time.

Did I mention I was running late?

I hit every red light between my house and the train station. EVERY. SINGLE. FREAKIN'. LIGHT. I was behind the slowest driver EVAR. Okay, not ever. But he was clearly taking in the beautiful Sunnyvale scenery, picking his nose, and pondering which nostril to spelunk on his drive.

If he had actually driven the speed limit, I would have made every light. Instead, I missed each and every single light. Every one was red. Every one.

Yes, I'm complaining. Best stop right now.

After the sixth light, out of seven, I couldn't help but wonder if these were signs to which I should pay attention. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't believe in an all powerful entity that actually pays attention to single individuals and their mad dash to train stations.

But every light?

Every single light?

Behind people who really could drive the speed limit so that both of us could catch all the lights.

Eh. Maybe these are the not-so-subtle signals that my friend has learned to pick up on and subsequently act upon. He'd probably start wondering about things after the fourth red light, thinking, eh, maybe he didn't really want to go, or didn't really need to catch this train, or you know what, maybe today would be a great day to stay in bed sleeping all day.

I made the train. Barely. I was between the two pedestrian-don't-cross gates just as the train came into view and the bells went off and the gates started dropping. The only way to cut it closer was to be on the wrong side of those gates when the train showed up.

So, heh, 20 seconds to spare!

I turned on stats on my site yesterday. I don't care about them particularly much, so I never bothered with them. As mentioned many, many times before, this site is for me, blah, blah, blah.

Well, it was an eye-opener.

Every ten minutes, the IP address 64.56.206.254 hits my RSS feed.

Every. Ten. Minutes.

64.56.206.1 is squaretrade, but the block maps to:

OrgName:    Savvis 
OrgID:      SAVVI-2
Address:    3300 Regency Parkway
City:       Cary
StateProv:  NC
PostalCode: 27511
Country:    US

ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.exodus.net:4321/

NetRange:   64.56.192.0 - 64.56.207.255 
CIDR:       64.56.192.0/20 
NetName:    SAVVIS
NetHandle:  NET-64-56-192-0-1
Parent:     NET-64-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Allocation
NameServer: DNS01.SAVVIS.NET
NameServer: DNS02.SAVVIS.NET
NameServer: DNS03.SAVVIS.NET
NameServer: DNS04.SAVVIS.NET
Comment:    
RegDate:    
Updated:    2004-10-07

Eh. I have no idea who that IP address is from, but I assure you, I don't write enough on this site to ping the site every 10 minutes.

If that is your IP address and you're here to figure out why the feed stopped, I blocked your IP address. Pull it back to once an hour, and not between 3:10 and 7:00am (because clearly I don't post at that time of the day), and I'll unblock your IP.

I turned the stats back off. I still care little about them.