The Obscure Deletion Option

So just a half hour ago, I found a way to request for my account to be deleted. It is a link to a form on the site that is hidden in the Privacy FAQ section, obviously intended to be that way. Facebook makes their money from selling your information to various entities, sometimes with malicious intent, so by filling out the small form, I've effectively told them that I've had enough. Whether or not this will out & out remove any of my presence is a mystery, but I'm not going to dwell on it.

I am looking forward to an alternative that is in the works. It is an open-source, downloaded application in which you will control the traffic of any information you wish to share. It's called Diaspora (die-a-spor-ra). I don't want to be a shill for them or anything, but what I like about it is that you don't simply give information to any entity, you put it on yourself. Facebook does what it wants with your information because they provide the platform for you to do so with the website (in other words, sites like Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, and so on are "middle-men" in social networking). Diaspora, on the other hand, will provide you with the means to make a platform to share whatever information you please, based entirely out of your machine. I don't know the whole story about how this system will work, but I've watched a few videos of the guys explaining it, and I like what I've heard so far.

So with that, nobody should bother contacting me on that mess of a website that has even produced a new disorder called "Facebook Addiction Disorder", with a list of symptoms & treatments to boot!

- G

Observatory Rant On Blogger Update (UPDATED)

It's still ugly.

This shit needs a lot of improvement, but I've made some amends on my own just moments ago. I've adjusted the size of the right sidebar to accommodate the last.fm widget, for one. Links are also better on the eyes, at least for me anyway :P. Also, any album reviews with an image of the album cover(s) will be limited to 200px by width & height, anything higher than that won't be accepted. The background repeats, but I don't want it that way because it looks ridiculous. I want it to scroll with the users' input. Oh well. Progress has been made at least. Google should have put some oversight on this template designer. I forgot to mention before that the Designer preview section doesn't even work! Not for me at least. And maybe it isn't compatible with Firefox, simply enough. I don't know nor do I care, because I'm fine with viewing any changes by clicking View Blog. 

Concept Album Preview

    The man of many dreams, a mind of many fractures, awakens from a painfully induced slumber. He sees that the world he assumes was once his home is a ruin. A journey through that ruin, with all of its angles, oddities, and traumas, reveals something sinister beneath the veneer of decay & death he sees around him. Like with any network interface, the scattered pockets of his sanity show him, against his knowledge, that the world in which he's found himself is not what it seems to be. Is it simply a fantasy of a mind that is truly deranged? Or is it the other way around? That is what the listener is left to decipher in this journey through a man's mentally deteriorating quest to seek the truth in a place that welcomes death and abandonment before life and growth. This is Forget, Regret; Power, Devour.