I have an ambivalent relationship with social media. I like it, I encourage people around me to actively use it but I have some problems with it. There are many more or less similar services and catching up with friends on different services is not as easy as it should be.

An example scenerio: I have 3 friends on 3 different microblogging services. To stay in touch, I have accounts all three of them. When I have an update, I have to update three of them so that all friends can see it. Guess what it would do to my friendfeed; one message repeated three times. To avoid it, if I update 3 different accounts with different messages, my 2 other friend on other services won’t be able to see some of the updates and … etc.

This fragmentation and duplication of the messages are the main problem of social media. It is terribly time consuming as well as addictive. Monitoring all your feeds, sorting out and filtering useful information from useless soon makes it tiresome routine. This is the point I end up quitting my social media watch for a while, only to return some time later, baffling immense number of updates I have no way of catching up.

Ok, this is mostly because neatness is not really my forte. And applications I tried didn’t help the situation, either. I use Posty to manage and monitor microblog feeds. It allows me to view only the last 20 message. But I need to see all new messages since I last checked. Posty won’t let me. And I don’t know if any other application that can work on Linux do. Gwibber don’t have a feature to show public timeline, and I love to check timeline for randomness’ sake.

Can I add one last complaint? So hard to follow a conversation if three or more people are involved on a microblogging platform, harder when using microblogging application. It would be lovely to see a conversation among there or more people in a threaded way or something.

I’m searching for one central place to control this wild wild social media beast and more control over what I’m sharing to whom.

If you want to learn about DoFollow movement, you can check out: What are DoFollow blogs?

What positively attracts my attention when I first hear ESC entries  are mainly three things:

Language of the Song: +1 points for the songs in their native language. Because, some songs in English honestly make me wish to forget all the English I know, so that I won’t be hearing the terrible, cheesy lyrics. Besides, while the increasing trend is English lyrics, songs in native language sacrifices the lyrics’ chance to be understood  and relies on the universality of music to convey feelings and atmosphere of the song is some challenge to be rewarded.

Stage Shows: Participants discovered the power of the flashy stage shows in the last years. This still causes poor entries (with cheesy lyrics and overall lack of originality) accompanied by a pack of dancers on the stage. So, another +1 point for the songs that doesn’t rely on dancing hot girls/boys on the stage as its sole strength.

Originality: “I feel like I heard it somewhere before” is a sentence I don’t want to utter for an entry. This year, some entries I will define as “Disney movie music”  are plenty and despite my good intentions to give them a chance, I feel like I’m hearing the same song. I’ll leave that group of entries to fans of the genre to evaluate.

I have two favourites this year. One is Bistra Voda by Regina from Bosnia, and the other is Fairytale by Alexander Rybak from Norway.

Regina’s entry is in their native language and although you don’t understand the lyrics, expressive vocal draws you into the melancholic mood of the song.   They definitely don’t need a flashy show for this song, just go there and sing. It reminds me of last year’s Turkey entry Deli quality-wise. So I expect Bistra Voda will be overlooked while some boring song gets all the points.

Rybak’s song on the other hand tells a light-hearted story and is supported with a show where Rybak dances around playing his violin accompanied by a group of dancers . His performance reminded me of a wandering bard performing his song at an inn tavern. Ok, I admit I read too much fantasy novels but title of the song’s itself is fairytale, so I’m not the one to blame for my winding imagination…hehe.

And there are some amusing entries, too. Serbia for one I can remember and enjoy. Czech’s gypsy themed entry is another one, fast paced and catchy. And Belgium’s Copycat gets all sorts of negative comments as a weak and repetitive song, but I really like the humour of the song (minus the cartoon character on the video).

I gotta mention Israel‘s entry. Not one of my personal favourites, yet noteworthy. Seems like song has some sort of mission, considering the everlasting conflict on the land that it was born, a reminder of agonizing struggle over years and a call for peace and harmony. It contains Hebrew, Arabic and English lyrics mixed. I don’t think song with a message will bring them much points but I appreciate their peace seeking efforts through music.

Some other notes of my first impressions on other entries:

Turkey: To my great suprise, this year’s entry appears on people’s top 5/top 10 lists. I really don’t like the song, lousy and Shakira-like, nothing interesting (likewise Greece entry). I loved last year’s entry very much.

Macedonia: Finally, it is time for some rock’ish sound in the competition, since Finland betrayed my hopes for some good metal song this year, this one have to do. But wrong side of the rock for me.

Now to mention it, after Lordi’s improbable-but-true victory with a very metal song and heavy make-up, Finland sent another one last year with no such success. Therefore this year they decided to try one with electro-rap hybrid (which is catchy). Since I tend to favor rock/metal sounds, I kept my expectations high for such song considering Finland is like a homeland to metal genre.

Russia: If they make Plushenko skate at the background this year too, they may have a chance

Estonia and Slovakia: tries symphony idea this year. Among two, Estonia is better at it.

Consequently, I’m rooting for Bosnia and Norway this year.

MF is ready for mid-autumn  and coming-of-winter by its newly picked theme; Daydream the original source. But the one I prefer widget support added version. It has a minimal and clean look and still elegant. I’m vastly happy with Daydream theme which perfectly fits my mood; it widens the looks of the forest and adds a refreshed atmosphere just as I’m cleaning out all unnecessary burdens that narrows my living space greatly. Besides, “daydreaming” is one of the words that I favor much.

It’s such a vast topic. Even right at this moment, hundreds and thousands of violations of the very basic human rights occur as we repeat our daily routine.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

-Article 3 of the (UDHR) -

Just some quick free associations; Iraq (twice; one for G. Bush, other for G. W. Bush), Bosnia, Palestine, Tibet, Vietnam, North Korea, Lebanon…

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

-Article 5 of the (UDHR) -

What about Guantanamo Bay detention camp ? And those horrible, unacceptable, shameful photos from Abu Gharip?

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

-Article 9 of the (UDHR) -

See above and also this one…

This horror and terror is someone else’s daily life out there… And the links on this post are not even close to show the real amount of the abuses of Human Rights.

Today is a day of awareness for Human Rights on the blogosphere. Just being aware of it is a good start itself, since violation of human rights has both a global face ( see above examples) and a local face which occurs everyday in our neighbourhood. Maybe there is something you can do in your power to help one of your acquaintances.

You can find and read various good and valuable posts related Bloggers Unite – Human Rights event here. Feel free to participate to the event by commenting to the posts and joining the discussions. You can also let me know if you write about the subject by commenting this post.

I wanted to write about new album of Nightwish (and Tarja Turunen) after their break-up but wasn’t able to do that. After seeing new video of the Nightwish I felt the urge to write. “The Islander” is one of the two songs that I particularly like (The other is “Last of The Wilds” which is instrumental) in the Dark Passion Play. That’s why I rushed to watch the video. Video perfectly fits the mood of the song and the lyrics. All that surreal and dreamy atmosphere completes the song. Anette’s voice is pretty good in this one, blends well with Marco.

Dark Passion Play is overall a good album, much better to my taste actually. Yes, Nightwish has changed, for the better. They are closer to the mainstream than ever in this album probably. But all the elements are much more harmonious. My picks (in addition to the above) are “Sahara” and “Bye Bye Beautiful” (and “The Escapist” I might add).

To watch the video, just click on the image.

I already mentioned the plot one of my previous posts and story strictly follows manga storyline yet. This season will be 26 episodes.

I don’t remember when I first heard about Open Source Software / Free Software terms. Probably very long ago. When I began to seek more information about OSS/FS, I was so impressed by their philosophy. But I got the impression that one need to be geeky techie in order to use one of the GNU/linux distros without much pain. At that time, formatting a pc was a great deal for me. Besides, Windows XP was fairly good. Instead of using a distro and risking my computer and nerves, I began to try Open Source softwares. In the days of XP, everything was peaceful enough for not to think about using another OS other than XP, although I was so annoyed by endlessly various security issues, malwares, spywares, adwares… etc. How come an operation system, which we pay quite a big amount of money to obtain can be so insecure?

Then, Vista came out. It was rumored to be the ultimately secure OS of the Windows family before it was released. Rumors turned out to be wrong. Besides, Vista still has compatibility issues. I saw and heard many people prefer XP over Vista. What a failure! My experience with Vista? Well, I hate it; I hated it from the first moment I had to use it. System requirements of Vista is totally absurd, and its performance doesn’t worth it. I miss my XP so much. And I’m stuck with Vista and I’m unhappy with it.

This is how I decided to convert to GNU/Linux based OS on my notebook.

But my first attempt didn’t work out quite well, though. Everything went pretty well during installation. ( I will not mention my weird experience when attempting to make a partititon for Pardus – the distro I decided to try- using Gparted and end up waiting like 23 hours for it to complete the process. I must have done something quite wrong.) I eagerly booted my notebook after installation, GRUB screen showed up and… well nothing happened. Grub kept itself at “Stage 1,5; loading…” with no error messages or anything. I didn’t find anything useful for me in the forums, since it has no error messages. I thought it is because I did something wrong while trying to set up a dual boot notebook. I re-installed the OS and re-installed as a single boot; no chance. On every try, I couldn’t go far than Grub screen. I gave up and installed Vista back.

The only issue before my new attemp to install another distro is the need to back up the files, settings etc. I will try dual boot solution once more. It seems a bit early for me to make linux my primary OS, but I won’t know until I use it properly. My next target is Kubuntu ( I don’t know why exactly but I tend to prefer KDE over Gnome. It’s probably because I’m told KDE is more newbie-friendly) and I also want to try Mandriva. But I believe, I will try Live CD versions for a while.

As you might follow, Tarja of the Nightwish was fired from the band by receiving an open letter from the fellow band members in 2005. It was a very (very) brave move, I thought, when I first read the news, I even shocked. Like most people, I was thinking Tarja, as a lead vocal and precious female member of the band, is an element inseparable from band’s image. For the most of the average listeners (and fans) Tarja equaled Nightwish and vice versa. I wasn’t particularly upset, though. As for me (and maybe it’s just me, but) I felt lack of enough expression of the emotions that lyrics intended to convey (from time to time); her beautiful opera-trained voice conceals them.

Actually I was totally impressed the way Nightwish members explained what was wrong between them and Tarja. They stated that they value the mental satisfaction the most when they are doing their job. ( We don’t see this around much, right? As for me, whenever I say something similar, I’m blamed for being a dreamer.) Apparently, they had began to feel in different ways for some time on this matter. Maybe Tarja had became realistic while other members still running after Neverland. ( I’m on the side of running after Neverland myself, so I sympathize more with remaining members of Nightwish. Be able to keep that enthusiasm toward their job worth appreciating. ) . Also, it seems that Tarja was already set her mind on leaving the group, so she did not really “fired” anyway. It sure must be hard on her, the way she had to leave was not the easiest way. But one cannot gain anything without loosing something else.

After the break-up, both sides went on their separate ways. First thing Nightwish did was to look for a female vocal as they stated their open letter. They didn’t specify any qualities that their former singer had for their new vocal. On the other hand, Tarja focused on her solo career. At this point I quit following the development of the events.

Here is the harvests of the break-up; Nightwish, with their new pretty vocal says “Bye Bye Beautiful” to Tarja (awesome song by the way) and Tarja answers; “I Walk Alone” (another awesome song). I will be talking on their new album, hopefully, on next post. For now, I need to digest both albums more.