Raving and Drooling – A lion’s tail

Ok, this is the perfect companion to my recent “You need to get off Facebook” post. You may know that one of my pet hates is people who waste their entire day tending virtual crops on Farmville (among other stupid virtual activities). But how many people are doing it ?

Well, at Farmville’s peak, it is reported to have had around about ONE HUNDRED MILLIONS USERS. I’m not kidding… A HUNDRED MILLION people were sitting around tending virtual farms. And that doesn’t even count the amount of people in countries like Vietnam and China who are tending virtual farms on other sites because Facebook is banned in their country.

Seriously. Can you imagine what would happen if ALL of those people had to plant a single head of corn for every week they spent using Farmville ? Just imagine it. It would solve world hunger in a second. It’s amazing the way electronic activities can storm the world and become a global phenomenon, but imagine if they had a REAL impact. What if Farmville popped up a message every week and said “It’s time to plant something real now. With the money we have generated from advertising we have posted you some seeds in the mail. Go and put them in the garden now and we’ll remind you to water them every day that you log in. You can either use the food to lower your weekly grocery bill or you can donate them to people more needy than yourself who don’t have the time to waste 21 hours a week on Farmville like you do”. It could solve world hunger in a second, if Zynga actually gave a fuck about people instead of conning people into tending virtual crops in order to line their own pockets with cash.

Is this possible ? Could we ever use a worthless online activity to encourage people to perform good deeds in the real world ? Even if only 10% of all Farmville users grew a few items of food in their backyard and planted something new every week and donated their crop to charity, it could feed millions of people. Wouldn’t that be AWESOME ?

So, for every 20 hours you spend on Farmville, Zynga send you a packet of seeds and you spend 5 minutes planting them and 2 minutes a day watering them, and the end result is that starving people have food. Fuck. Is that possible ? Can we do that ? Apparently stupid people with time to waste online is a harvestable product in itself. Something that could be harnessed for good and not just advertising profit. Suddenly Zynga and all its users could not only make money, but be responsible for saving lives. Win-Win, right ?

People are lazy. Many don’t even remember to feed their fish sometimes. But they sure as hell remember to log into Facebook and tend their virtual crops regularly don’t they ? Because they are constantly REMINDED to do so. Maybe that’s all we need. Someone to say “Hey, go outside for two minutes and water your corn. It’s almost harvest time and a REAL starving child is relying on that food”.

Also, if someone poked me and said “Hey, I’m going away for a week, would you mind dropping in and watering my REAL lettuce crop ?” I wouldn’t feel the insatiable urge to hate them, de-friend them, and make a voodoo doll in their likeness and stab it repeatedly. That’s all I’m sayin’.

I’ve been critical of Facebook before. I’ve closed my account twice, and deleted all my friends and removed all my personal information, because I just got SICK of people being FAKE on it all the time. Much of my hate that I level at Twitter applies equally, or more so against Facebook. In particular, I hate when people post stupid, “socially aware” messages in their status. Your status is supposed to be just that – your status. Where you are, how you’re feeling and maybe what you’re doing (if it’s interesting enough to want to share).

It’s not meant to be a place where you can copy and paste bullshit Hallmark-style nonsense where you pretend to care. People post these pretentious, cheesy little messages about the importance of being a nice person, or a little message about being aware of mental illness that they saw on someone ELSE’S status, most likely with a message at the bottom that says “If you care about this, please post this as your status for at least one hour”, so that you feel like if you DON’T post it, you are an arsehole and you DON’T care.

Sometimes people just post garbage. I have a close friend who seriously abuses status messages to send meaningless messages to his girlfriend. He once updated his status to say “Honey, can you pour me another drink ?” as part of a dozen-update evening. It completely spams your homepage to the point where you have to consider ignoring certain friends’ updates. I like this person and I’d like to know what they do in life. I just don’t need to know when they pour a drink, have dinner, take a shit, or go to bed. I don’t care if you feel sleepy, or if you think it’s hot today. Not if you’re going to tell me shit like that a dozen times a day.

And I ESPECIALLY don’t want to know that you just attained level 53 in Frontierville and that you desperately need someone to give you a hammer. You can block games-related messages, but the very idea that you have to opt-out of this nonsense is absurd. Some people I know have over 600 apps installed, so I literally have to just tell Facebook “Block all app-related messages”, which is a shame because it is vaguely possible that those messages could serve a useful purpose. I’ve just never seen that happen.

I know people who keep Facebook open all day, and that’s ok. That’s fine. Keep it open so you can stay in contact with people if you want. But maybe don’t spend all day playing Farmville. Honestly, if you spent 4 hours a day playing World of Warcraft instead of taking care of your kids and cleaning the house, people would probably look down on you. But for some reason most people just ignore it when you spend that amount of time tending your virtual farm or playing a pet game that involves producing unusually shaped dog poo. NO I WILL NOT WATER YOUR LETTUCE CROP WHILE YOU’RE ON HOLIDAY !

Yes, I DID re-enable my Facebook account. I just don’t use it regularly. I make it send its email to an address that is no longer in use, and I might log in once a month just to make sure noone desperately needs me. This year I have made only one status update, and it’s almost mid-year. I don’t need to tell you that I’m sleepy or bored, because you probably have a lot of friends and if everyone did that you would be flooded with updates. Maybe I might let you know if I’m living in a foreign country and post you a video of where I live, just so that people I really care about can go “Oh, that’s what’s going on in pawz’s life.. he’s in Bangkok”. I’m just not going to announce what I had for fucking breakfast, nor am I going to pose and be pretentious by posting stupid feel-good messages about shit.

And I’m not going to tell you what I “like”. If you know me, then you know what I like, or we can chat and I’ll tell you. I don’t need to announce it to EVERY SINGLE PERSON I KONG. You’re not going to see the message “pawz likes Tiger beer” and go “Oh wow. I think I’ll have a Tiger because pawz likes it”. And it shouldn’t be a conversation starter. If you need me to tell you what sort of beer I drink in order to have a conversation with me, then we’re probably not really friends. If my beer preference mattered to you, you would just ask me. I don’t need to broadcast it. Get to know me by getting to know me, not by reading a stupid one-line pseudo-advertisement.

And I don’t care about your fucking causes either. Yes, it’s great that you’re a fan of the World Wildlife Fund. But are you REALLY ? Or did you just think that’d look good on your status. Do you donate ? Do you subscribe to their newsletter ? If it’s something we might share in common, there’s a good chance I already know you might be into that, and it’s something we’ve probably already had a conversation about. When I was at Kuala Lumpur airport in Malaysia, I noticed they have huge posters that stretch from the floor to the ceiling advertising the fight against people smuggling. At the bottom of every advert it invited people to “Like” the Facebook page the government had setup.

Really ? You want me to “Like” not liking people smuggling ? Apart from that being a double negative, so what ? Where’s the button where I can say that I DO like people smuggling. I want to press it just to make you question my announcement. Who the fuck would actually LIKE people smuggling. Why don’t you just announce “I LIKE not killing babies with an axe”. Really ? Wow, coz I thought everyone DID like killing babies with an axe. Way to state the fucking obvious. Do you really think that clicking a button is a form of positive action ? Do you think that people smugglers, smuggling child prostitutes into Australia are going to go “Oh shit. 1,843,857 people DON’T like people smuggling ? I had no idea. I should find a new line of work !”

No you dolt, it means NOTHING. It is NOT affirmative action. It does NOT change anyone else’s viewpoint, or send aid to the needy. Not liking people smuggling by hitting a button is precisely as effective as saying “Pray for Japan” on Twitter after a quake, a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown. IT MAKES NO GODDAMN DIFFERENCE ! You are contributing nothing to the world except creating more spam. So don’t do it.

I get the argument people make when they say “I don’t want to be on Facebook… but I have to be. Even my GRANDMOTHER is on Facebook”. Yes, I understand that. I have friends in foreign countries that I don’t want to lose touch with if they change their phone number or their email address and forget to inform me. That’s why I’m on Facebook. Because it’s a good way of connecting with people. But I only have 12 friends on Facebook. And one of them is a cat. No, seriously. A cat.

But being on Facebook to stay in touch with granny doesn’t excuse you if you use it to announce that you hate broccoli, or that you just harvested your corn on Farmville, or that it’s hot today. I don’t care. If we were chatting, I’d be happy for you to tell me that stuff (well, apart from the Farmville thing), so if we are chatting, tell me. Tell me something because you have a REASON to tell me it. Not because you just want to announce it to your 848 friends.

More friends is just more people you don’t really care about. You don’t really need to stay in contact with that smelly kid from grade 4 who you spoke to once in the cafeteria. It really won’t help your life, and in fact, all it’s going to do is make you judge him or yourself. Life is a game, but you don’t need to be constantly comparing yourself to people you really don’t know. Sure, stay in contact with the people truly important to you. But that doesn’t mean you have to literally “friend” every single person you meet in your life. If they are not someone you would accept an invitation to dinner with, then they’re not your friend, so stop pretending they are.

A kid called Ross Gardiner who is an English teacher in South Korea made a great little video back in late 2010 that was featured in a recent documentary on Facebook. I’m not saying you have to follow his advice and delete your Facebook account. But just think about what he says in this video and ask yourself: “Do I really need to tell EVERYONE everything and have 848 friends ? Or would it be better if I just had a few friends that I really care about and actually have the time to give a fuck about ?”

Think about it before you make that next status update or confirm that next friend request from some idiot you never really liked anyway. Now, I’ll let Ross say it even more eloquently and without speaking a single word. I especially recommend you turn out the lights, turn up the sound, and view this video fullscreen for maximum effect. It’s well done.

Attention Scott Mintred. Please rejoin the interwebs.

I have no idea when I first found your site, but it was fucking ages ago. Way before I found David Thorne’s. I won’t blow smoke up your arse by saying your site is good. It’s pretty average. But I still sorta like it because you really don’t give a fuck and you’re happy to let people insult you online. Well. At least you were up until October 2010, at which point you seem to have made this weird “I’m throwing in the towel” page where you claim that none of it is real and that you were just trolling people.

Well, yeah. We all got that. But admitting it is a bit lame. There’s no need to throw a “boo hoo I’m not really like this” tantrum and quit writing. I guess people finally got to you, though I suspect you won’t admit it and will claim that your life just got too busy.

The internet needs people like you who call it as they see it (even though I don’t always agree with your opinions) to counterbalance the pretentious bullshit that people like David Thorne spout all day. Could you imagine Mr Thorne ever allowing comments on his site ? No, because people would call him out on his bullshit and suddenly he wouldn’t get the attention he deserved because the journalistic outlets that constantly praise him would suddenly have reason to doubt if all his nonsense was real.

Get back on the computer, and find something to write about. Unless you’re in a mental institution, in which case, start bribing an orderly to post your crap to me and I will publish it for you. I might even visit. As long as you save me some of your better medication. (slip it under your tongue and they might not see it) Then again, it’s probably best I don’t go to the USA. I’m not very welcome there.

Best wishes,

pawz.

YouTube turned 7 years old today. It’s 7 years to the day since the first video was uploaded.

Yet, YouTube has become a sea of mediocrity. Gone are the days when you could go there and watch classic music videos. Even fair use has no place there, with even a small piece of copyrighted music use causing your video to be yanked from the internets. The best things about YouTube aren’t there anymore. And what are we left with ? A billion vloggers, cat videos, people reviewing other people’s reviews of other people’s videos, more cat videos, strategically placed viral videos, and even more cat videos.

YouTube is so boring, and people are more easily entertained by its idiocy than they were by television in previous generations, because at least you couldn’t waste time watching TV at work and then sharing it with your friends on Facebook or IRC. But now, in the age of “Like” buttons and auto-tweets, sharing the latest idiotic video you’ve just seen seems to be necessary no matter how boring it is.

How much utter SHIT is on YouTube ? Well, YouTube has no hesitation in telling us on their press page. Let’s review a few of the more staggering statistics.

• 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.
• Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on Earth
• More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years

That last one is pretty amazing right ? So, YouTube has put the art of video creation into the hands of the masses, right ? That’s a good thing, surely ? But wait. I have two more staggering statistics to quote you. It’s impressive how much video has been uploaded, but how much time do people waste on YouTube ? This much…

• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute

Yes. I am deadly serious. The 3 billion hours figure is very hard to comprehend, right ? Humans aren’t good at dealing with big numbers. Our minds go to mush. But that second one just floored me. 500 YEARS worth of human life is wasted, EVERY SINGLE DAY, by people watching YouTube videos just on Facebook alone !

I mean, I hate how much time is wasted on Facebook in general, but I’ve never been able to quantify it. But that figure… that is just incomprehensible to me. Over 500 years worth of YouTube on Facebook. So how much is the total viewing time of YouTube ?

Why, it’s 11,000 years worth of video PER DAY. That’s all.

All I can say is, turn off the YouTube people. You are wasting your lives.

I take pretty regular backups of all my sites. But while I did a backup just before new years, for some reason only my database was backed up. Everything else stopped being backed up in October. So while the stories I posted are all here, any images or files uploaded since October are gone.

FUUUUUUUUUUU !!!

So annoyed. I’ve done so much work lately. Not really on this site, but on others. And it’s gone. All of it. Fucking gone. How did this happen ? I just don’t know. My hand-written script is supposed to analyse each site and only back it up if changes have been made. But I guess something happened to my date stamps back in October, because only the database was backed up. GODDAMIT.

Oh well. Anyway, if you notice some images missing from the previous posts, well, now you know why. Sorry ! Shit happens hey. I’ve also had some downtime for the last week as I had to move my server from Perth to Los Angeles because my current provider were just failing me miserably. GOMEN NASAI !

So, this isn’t really specifically about the Sunrise program on 7, but they happen to be one of the offenders of this crime who particularly annoy me. It’s something that annoys me a lot. Shows like Sunrise like to act all high and mighty by saying “We’ve got a donation line where you can ring in and make donations” so that everyone thinks they’re awesome. But how easy IS it to donate ?

Well this morning they had a story on about how a charity in Logan had been ram-raided and thieves had stolen piles of food bound for needy families this Christmas, and the thieves basically destroyed the freezers and ruined much of the food they didn’t take, meaning the annual Christmas party the charity hosts for disadvantaged families would struggle to go ahead.

I felt sorta bad about that and I thought to myself “I don’t have a lot of money, but I’d donate five bucks to that. If everyone else did too, they’d have plenty of money to host that event”. Sunrise proudly exclaimed “Go to our website to donate”.

Dutifully, I grabbed my tablet and opened up the website, and scanned the page for some time looking for the link, which was not prominent in any way, and buried in some obscurely named story title, when it should have been a big button on the front page. When I finally found it and clicked on it, it took me to a page which just said “Call this Brisbane number between 10am-2pm Monday to Friday”.

What ? I have to wait until 10am ? And then call a phone number and wait on hold and then give them my credit card details ? Are you fucking MAD ?! Where’s the PayPal link ? Where’s the Flatr link ? Don’t you realise how hard you’re making it for people to donate ?

Apart from the fact that the show aired at 7am and the donation line isn’t open until 10am when everyone is at work and will have long forgotten about the story, the fact is, I don’t want to ring up and talk to someone. It’s uncomfortable. I just want to give money quietly and anonymously without speaking to anyone via a simple click. Plus, speaking to a real person makes you feel guilty about donating a small amount. You might feel pressured to donate more than you intended.

If they had a PayPal link with some fixed donation denominations (as well as an optional way to choose your own) they could just say “Ok we’re taking donations. Everyone grab your iPadz and go to our site and click the button to donate $5″ … and it would be EASY… and QUICK. People wouldn’t have to think… they wouldn’t have to sit there with their reading glasses on holding their stupid fucking credit card up to the light at weird angles to try and read the numbers on it.

If it was EASY and QUICK, everyone would do it. You would think “I’m going to spent that much on the way to work getting coffee. That’s nothing. I’ll click that button”. You people need to understand… the easier you make payment and the less though required behind it, the more readily people will give you money. Apple know this and that’s why the iTunes and App stores are so damn successful, because it’s easy as hell and you just need to tap one button and instantly the funds are transferred.

Well gaiz, you can act all fucking high and mighty and pretend you’re doing some good by putting a goddamn phone number on your website, but until you’re going to a minute’s extra effort and putting up some sort of proper electronic, online payment link on your site… you’re not really trying and I’m simply not going to wait until 10am and sit on hold to read some bitch my credit card number, which means I’m not going to donate, which is a shame because it would have been a worthwhile cause.

You know.. I was at the pub the other day and I had to pay for a domain through a registrar that I don’t always use. Now my normal registrar takes PayPal, but this one didn’t. Which means I would have had to get my wallet out of my back pocket and sit there holding my stupid fucking credit card up to the light for five minutes trying to read the unreadable fucking numbers, just to make a $10 payment. Now, it’s annoying enough getting your thick-assed wallet in and out of your pocket to pay for your beer. I’m simply NOT going to do it for online shit. You either accept PayPal, or you can go fuck yourself. I moved that domain away to a new registrar simply because it shits me to tears to have to pull my credit card out and enter a zillion fucking numbers and dates and CCV’s and name and address and shit.

ARE YOU FUCKING LISTENING ? This shit applies to all you people. Breakfast shows, charity organisations, even people trying to sell stuff online. MAKE PAYMENT EASIER. MAKE IT QUICK AND PAINLESS. OTHERWISE I’M JUST NOT GOING TO PAY YOU. UNDERSTAND ?

Dammit, for some reason I lost a bunch of the last post. It didn’t autosave properly I think, because I wrote a lot more. I’d like to tell you in detail everything else that happened but I lack the time right now. I suspect you’re not going to get your usual 20,000 words a day out of me blogging anymore as I have both work commitments and a wife now, not to mention a life and friends, so that’s going to make things hard. But I’ll continue posting photos. Merry just takes photos like there’s no tomorrow. Everywhere we go, she’s just *click* *click* *click* at everything, which is great because it means she’ll photograph things that I would be embarrassed to shoot for fear of looking like a silly tourist, but she’s not bothered at all.

Anyway, I’ll write more later. I don’t have a lot of time right now, I have to get some work done. Phuong is eager for us to come out today. She’s been chatting with Merry on Skype heaps. We all had a three way video chat last night for lulz, even though Merry and I were in the same room. It was just funny to have a three way video chat with Phuong who was at a cafe in District 1 begging us to come in and hang out with her.

To be honest I’ve never even had a video chat before, so that was totally new for me. I’ve talked about wanting to do with with Suki though, so that was good practice and it’s good to know that this little netbook is capabale of running Skype properly to do video conferencing because now I know I can give her this laptop when I go home so that she can learn how to use it and we can chat online. I’m sure she’ll work out how to do it. Hell, Merry was like “Install Skype. I want to video chat with Phuong” and I sheepishly said “I’ve never used Skype before or done a video chat. But I set it up and we all chatted. Phuong on Windows, Merry on a Mac and me on Linux. That’s sorta cool, hey ? Cross platform software for the win !

So here’s a photo of Merry chatting with Phuong.

I received some sad news today. A friend from IRC died. I didn’t know him long, but he was a friend and we talked every day. His name was Joe Schwentker, but we all knew him as “chibihogoshino”. I met him on my favourite anime channel and later when I went on to create another anime-related channel for our bots and such, he was one of the first people who joined and he was one of the three founding members.

He was a crazy guy. His Google profile lists his superpower as “sleep”, his interests as “astronomy, photography, linux, oss, eff, freedom” and the one thing he can’t find on Google as “love”.

He used to get into these crazy, long, enthusiastic discussions with the other guy, EOF-sensei about building a habitable dome under the ocean and the two of them would talk about it until the early hours of the morning, discussing and arguing the pros and cons of the technology they would use to build it and operate it.

One of the last long conversations he ever had with me was when he said that he wanted to know how to create a one-click install cd for his Linux distro so that he could reinstall it easily if he didn’t have internet. I thought he was crazy and kept saying “What’s the real reason chibi ? Do you know you’re not going to have internet sometime soon ?” He avoided the question and said it was just in case the zombie apocalypse came or nuclear war broke out and I got mad at him for being so obscure and not explaining himself.

We talked all the time. He was a cool guy into Linux and photography and stuff. And one day, he just disappeared and stopped coming. At first we thought nothing of it, but as the weeks dragged by we all wondered where he had gone. I put a comment in the topic saying “Where are you chibihogoshino ?”

Then just today someone said they heard. Back in May, Chibihogoshino, or “Joe” died of a suspected brain aneurysm. I went back through the logs to see what the last thing he ever said was, and it was this:

[10:25:15] <pawz> http://tiny.catpa.ws/uploads/2011/05/waitresses.jpg <--- and here are what the waitresses look like
[10:25:39] <chibihogoshino> i want one
[10:26:55] <chibihogoshino> brb.. need more vodka
[10:30:03] <pawz> gotta go
[10:30:28] <chibihogoshino> ttyl

And that was the last I ever heard from Joe. "ttyl". The next day his client joined IRC and someone claiming to be his brother just said "This is chibihogoshino's brother. Did anyone know him ?" and noone was awake or paying attention and he left without saying anymore.

Well, today, EOF-sensei brought to my attention this article. The site isn't online at the moment so here's Google's cached copy:

Ubuntu Tennessee remebers Chibihogoshino

Joe Schwentker, better known to most of us by his IRC nickname “Chibihogoshino”, passed away on Tuesday May 17th. Joe’s brother informed the group via the IRC channel. The cause of death is believed to be an aneurysm.

Joe will be remembered fondly by Ubuntu Tennessee and its members fortunate enough to make his acquaintance.

We weren’t sure whether to believe it at first, but the Tennessee Ubuntu chapter members confirmed it. EOF-sensei looked him up on Ancestry.com and it said this:

Name: SCHWENTKER, JOSEPH
Date of birth: 08 Jun 1977
Date of death: 17 May 2011
Age at death: 33
Issued by: Ohio

We’d like to think that maybe something happened and chibihogoshino had to go underground. Maybe he was about to be busted by the police and go to jail and that’s why he was asking about how to install easily linux without internet access. But as much as we wish that was true, the most likely explanation is that he just died unexpectedly at the youthful age of only 33 years old, the same age that I am now.

Chibi, you will be remembered. Even in the short time that I knew you, you became a good friend and when you disappeared, we all missed you and wondered where you had gone. Even our bots miss him and they talk about him sometimes.

<pawz> chibihogoshino ?
<Nyamo> hmmm… chibihogoshino is cool..
<Sawako> whysat chibihogoshino was pretty weird
<Sawako> pawz, where chibihogoshino has been lately ?

At least you went out doing what you wanted. Sitting on IRC on your Linux box drinking a bottle of vodka. It may only be a bit after 7am as I write this, but I’m going to have a drink for you my friend. You may not have found love on Google, but you found friends on IRC. You will be missed.

Joe Schwentker aka "chibohogoshino"
08 Jun 1977 - 17 May 2011
Rest in peace my friend.

Why do people waste my fucking time ?

Someone referred me to a local sports club saying “These guys a need a cheap website and are interested in talking to you”. So I talked to them at great length, sending some half a dozen emails back and forward, explaining things to them and taking a massive amount of time to outline what sort of site I could provide for them, and when it came time to quote them, I offered to do their whole site for about $90 Australian since they were a non-profit sporting club.

I didn’t hear from them for almost a week and I was like “Wtf ? Why haven’t they gotten back to me ?” so I emailed them and asked what was going on and why they hadn’t responded. Their reply ? “Apologies but I don’t need anything done at the moment.”

WTF ?!?!?!! THEN WHY DID YOU CONTACT ME AND WASTE HOURS AND HOURS OF MY TIME EXPLAINING SHIT TO YOU !?!

I am SO FUCKING SICK of time-wasting speculators who just want to probe you for information and then go “Nah, I don’t really need a site. I was just curious”.

What the FUCK is people’s problem that they think it’s OK to email you and speculate and go “Yeah we want a website, can you tell us what you do and send us examples of your work and explain the technology and send us some costings ?” and then you spend days doing so only for them to turn around and go “Nah. Don’t actually need a website. I was just yankin’ your chain”.

Ok, so noone EVER fucking emails me and says they enjoy my blog, even when I outright BEG you to. But I must be doing something right, because my traffic is up 25% this month, and in the last month I had visitors from…. wait for it ….

86 COUNTRIES !!!!

I mean, I had four people from Tunisia check out my site. People from Bulgaria, from the Bahamas, from Oman and Belize and Seychelles. Not only could I not find Oman on a map but I’ve never even HEARD of Belize or Seychelles. Where the hell ARE those places ? Also, Belgium is really high this month and the weirdest thing is that 77% of all the people from Belgium who visit my site are return visitors.

Who are you ? Can someone from Belgium please email me at pawz@teamroot.net and tell me why you read my blog ? I’d love to know ! And most of you are from Kapellen apparently, as 33 of my visits came from there. How is that possible ? I’ve never heard of Kapellen before, and I figured out why when I looked it up on Wikipedia. It only has a population of 26,000 people. Who’s reading my site in Kapellen ? Please, please email me and tell me. I really want to know.

The people come from such interesting places. Even just in Australia there are people who read my site from towns I’ve never heard of. Gawler ? Seriously ? Where’s THAT ?! I would have thought that most of my Aussie readers would be from Brisbane. Nope. Almost twice as many people are from Sydney. And more than 70% of them are return visitors. I don’t even KNOW anyone from Sydney. Who ARE you people ?!

52% of people are finding me via Google in different countries. Scarily, 11 people this month found me by googling for my name and the word “Saigon”. You can’t hide on the internet, can you ? Yes, lots of people are still finding me because they’re looking for “sleeping girls drooling”. God you lot are weird. But the number one thing people find me for is for my stories about the “hedgehog’s dilemma”. Apparently everyone is frustrated about being hedgehogs and they come to me for advance. Good luck with that though, coz I don’t have any !

Also, my friend Lyra linked to me from her site “Hello Saigon”. She posted one of my photos and a few people have made their way to my blog from hers. Here’s where she posted my photo. http://hello-saigon.com/2011/07/21/lovely-sunset/

That was so nice to read her post mentioning me. So thank you Lyra for both posting my photo and giving me a free plug ! Lyra has actually added me to her blogroll and I’ve added her to mine. She’s the first and only person that I have linked on my site because I love her blog so much. She’s a real kindred spirit in the sense that she seems to spend just as much time as me writing about Saigon.

So that was all pretty cool, but I’m just so impressed by my readership. It’s great that it’s up 25% this month, but the amazing thing is where people are coming from. 86 countries ? That blows my fucking mind. I cannot comprehend that people are reading the crap that I say in 86 countries around the world.

That is soooo…. fucking….. cool !

So hell to everyone in Belgium, India, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, Norway, the Philippines, Poland and everywhere else that you are reading my site from !

No, not forever, but for a day at least, we hope.

Why ?

Anonymous have declared war on Facebook. They’re gonna fuck that shit up on the 5th of November 2011 and Facebook is gonna go DOWN like a paid-off boxer taking a dive, except… not by choice.

I could say more, but I’ll let Anonymous say it instead:

“One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right. Think for a while and prepare for a day that will go down in history. We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”

Indeed. I’ll help with that shit. Let’s fuck those Facebook losers up good and proper.

Lots of things about Saigon are “same same” as anywhere, be it Brisbane or New York or Auckland. We still mostly eat the same sort of food and drink the same beers and listen to the same music. For the most part anyway. Some things aren’t exactly the same. In Vietnam they pedal pushbikes with their hands and they row boats with their feet. No, I’m serious !

Today I was out walking. I went to pickup a picture I was having framed but it wasn’t ready. When the woman at the Kodak place say me she goes “Oh. Troi oi ! Sorry. 5pm, ok ?”. Grrrr. I don’t think she sent it off to get printed yesterday so now I have to wait all day for it. Oh well.

I wandered down the street hoping to buy a T-shirt because I had been wearing the same one for three days and if I walked into the bar in the same shirt again the girls were probably gonna avoid me in disgust so I needed to pick up something new.

I stopped into KFC to grab a Zinger burger and an old American couple were trying to customise their order. I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m standing there behind them, hung over as a motherfucker, watching this old lady try and explain that she didn’t want one item in a combo and wanted something else instead and a different drink. LOL. It’s hard enough to do that shit in your own country where they speak your language. Trying to customise a meal deal in a foreign country ? Why bother. Not worth the effort. The man turned and gave me this wry smile as if to say “Yeah I know. My wife is crazy, right ?”

The KFC menu in Vietnam is fucking AWESOME I’m telling you. Seriously, go to their website and check it out. It’s epic. Not only do they deliver and you can order online, but they have a MASSIVE menu with hundreds of items. KFC here sells fish fucking tacos. I’m not joking. They sell fish tacos. I remember hearing about those in “My Name is Earl” where Earl said if he started a band he wanted to call it “Fish Taco”. Well they exist. KFC sell them. Fish fucking tacos. Can you believe that ?

But you know what sucks about KFC here ? They don’t have KFC chips. You know, the big thick-cut fries with seasoning ? The best thing about KFC ? They don’t have them. They have thin McDonald’s style fries without seasoning ! Nooooo ! Not same same !

Anyway I have to cut this story short because I have to go check out of my hotel. I guess I’ll write more later. I went back to Bui Vien street and found a little store that sold T-shirts and I bought the one I wanted. As soon as I saw it I went “Yeah. That’s great. I want one of those”. It is a simple shirt with a simple sentiment written on it that girls in Vietnam often use to describe themselves.

It’s a way of saying “I’m just like everyone else. But I’m special. If you get to know me, you’ll find I’m unique”. But it says it in typical Vietnamese-English in the exact same way the girls always say it and it’s a classic phrase that cracks westerners up but it just appealed to me this morning because it’s sort just how I guess I am. What does it say ?

“Same Same. But Different !”

You know what Wiki trolling is ? It’s where people go and write deliberately contentious or incorrect or silly information on otherwise legitimate Wikipedia articles. Sometimes they do it ever so subtly, and sometimes they do it very blatantly. I stumbled across an example today that made me laugh. These edits often stay online only for moments. When I saw this one, I immediately pasted the URL to some friends on IRC, and when they looked a minute or so later, it was gone. Lucky I got a screenshot then hey ?

The article is about the “27 club”. It’s a term given to all the influential rock musicians who all died at age 27 such as Jim Morrison, Kurt Kobain, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. And the less influential ones, like you know… Amy Winehouse. Well, since she joined the 27 club on Saturday, she has an entry now. And someone defaced it. Here’s how it looked when I looked at it:

And here’s how it looked about a minute later:

Oh c’mon. The troll version was much funnier. Ok, maybe not to Amy’s family, but it wasn’t mean, and the rest of the internet had a chuckle over it, if they saw it for the split second it probably existed. Sorry to Amy’s family though.

Twitter is funny isn’t it ? Not because it’s trying to be. Just because it so often IS. I was on Twitter, posting something (yeah, I know, that’s rare for me) and I thought I’d see what people were saying about Norway, so I searched for #prayfornorway, because you all know how I feel about that stupid #prayfor… hashtag. But I guess it’s become so institutionalised that now it’s the way to bring disaster to people’s attention.

Anyway, many of the tweeters are horrified that #sorryjustin, a series of tweets about Justin Bieber is trending, while news of Norway is not. Twitter is just so fucked up like that. They say they have this super advanced algorithm. Yeah ? You know what we all call it ? The Bieber Algorithm. Because Bieber is the only thing that ever trends. World war three could break out and Bieber would still out-trend it. I suspect Twitter only exists as a marketing machine for Justin Bieber. They admitted once that Bieber tweets account for the resources of three entire racks of servers. Here’s what some people are saying about Bieber today.

But there’s another interesting Twitigeous phenomenon I observed today. (That’s my own word btw. I have copyright on that and Google will back me up on that. I made it up to describe people who are only religious on Twitter) Celebrity prayer. You know how everyone says they are praying for stuff on Twitter ? Well it seems that while a twayer (A Twitter Prayer of course ! I own that one too) can you know, save lives and stuff, apparently a celebrity twayer can move mountains ! What do I mean ? Well, people around the world are begging Justin Bieber to tweet a prayer for Norway.

Yeah. I don’t know what will happen if Bieber prays for Norway. Maybe the dead will rise up from their graves and … no nevermind. Too soon to be making jokes like that. Anyway, this girl said it best:

Well, you’re actually half right there _Ashleeiigh. Technically I think that if you are religious, you should probably be ACTUALLY praying to your god over Norway, but apparently that’s what constitutes a prayer in the 21st century. The internet has reduced our prayers to 140 character messages including the all important #prayfor… hashtag. In today’s busy society we don’t have time to actually PRAY. We just say we pray. We tway (Yes, I obviously own that too, that’s the present tense verb of the noun twayer).

But, I personally (like my good friend Nick Cave, who said it in his great song “Into My Arms”) do not believe in a god that accepts prayers and alters the fabric of causality in the universe based on what people desire and ask him for. I would love that the world worked that way and just praying could make things happen, but in my opinion it doesn’t and If you do believe that, I feel a little sorry for your naivety, no offence. But anyway, what I wanted to say is that twaying (mine also) does have positive benefit. I’m not sure if god has Twitter (Yes, I capitalise Twitter but not god. Does that piss you off ?), but everyone else on the planet does.

And when you tway for Norway (haha, don’t you love accidental alliteration ?) online, people see it. It puts the disaster in people’s minds. It creates awareness. What good does awareness do ? Well. It couldn’t do harm, that’s for sure. It’s difficult to quantify exactly how this awareness is better for us, because I’m not a sociology professor, but in my opinion it causes us to break stride and think for a moment.

Even if that awareness does no good for the people of Norway, it does good for the people who read that twayer. It elevates the consciousness. It puts our shitty lives in perspective and it makes our own problems seem a little less dramatic. I’d even like to think that maybe someone else who is on the verge of snapping and doing something crazy takes a step back and sees the pain this event caused and thinks twice.

So go on, tway. I know I’ve previously been heavily critical of people twaying, (praying on Twitter), but on reflection, I think it’s a good thing. Don’t be under the illusion that you are doing anything religious, that’s for sure. But I think the concept of prayer is evolving in this internet age and is become something else. It doesn’t involve actual prayer to a god. It’s just about sharing with others that you’re thinking about a person or a group of people.

And we all like to know that someone is thinking about us, right ?

The ADSL has been very bad in Vietnam in the last two months. It was ok before that, but recently it’s gone to shit. A lot of people have been complaining, but someone posted on PMH Neighbours today asking about it and I felt compelled to write a little post. After I did, someone else commented and said “Fantastic, well explained review”, so for some reason I felt I should share it with you. So here it is, first with the OP’s question, and then my answer.

What do you guys have for your internet connection? I am at SST with the ‘ADSL Super’ package and it is everything but SUPER! I asked for what they have the best and they gave me this (500.000VND/Month). It is unlimited access but the connection is really painful, going up and down, I even have to reboot the modem few times per week.. So I am wondering if that is a PMH problem (like the crap phone reception we have here) or if it’s my package that is not that great. I noticed that it got worse when the raining season started..

Can you let me know what do you use and how happy you are with it or any other suggestions?

Here’s my reply:

It seems to be all of the Vietnamese ADSL network lately. It’s not specifically an ADSL problem, because you don’t normally loose line sync, but you will have authentication problems and as you say, need to reboot your modem. If you get a better quality modem, you can make sure it reconnects, but the problem is that the whole network is flaky.

All I can say it that it may get better, or it may not. If you are willing to shell out for a fibre connection (be prepared to pay 1.5 million a month though) your problems will almost certainly go away. But the ADSL just sucks right now. For everyone. I’m with Saigon Tourist Cable Network, and it’s pretty good. Does anyone else have any comments ? I’d be interested to hear about other people’s experiences. Who’s good ? Personally, I’m just going to get fibre installed later. Just not sure if I’m staying at my current place long enough to make the installation worth it.

I mean. That was just a random comment and a little of my technical analysis of the situation from my brief experience, but apparently people appreciated it. I like sharing my wisdom. It’s rewarding. People appreciate your insight sometimes. When you share a little knowledge with people and they thank you for it, you sorta feel like a little bit of a guru. :”)

I often wonder who reads my blog. Well, must be a few regulars because I just checked my stats and I had over 2,000 hits in the last 30 days, of which 52% were return visitors. The majority are from Australia, but a large percentage of readers are from the US, but I also apparently have a reasonably high readership in Singapore, India and Brazil and even Russia accounts for a few hits. They’re real people too. I’ve been helping a guy in Hong Kong implement my duplicate image detection code on a website who found me from my blog. While he obviously found me due to the technical info on my blog, others find me for all sorts of interesting reasons.

This month, the most popular search term that is bringing people to my website is the phrase “life is good”. Apparently people are Googling for that and finding my recent post with that title. The other keywords that bring people to my site ? “bar number 5 saigon” and “secrets bar hcmc” of course ! Also fascinating is that more people find my website using google.co.in than google.com.au – yes, more people are googling for me in India than in Australia. Go figure ! Out of curiosity I try searching for “bar number 5 saigon” on google and eek ! I am right there near the top, just under the bar’s Facebook page. Web stats are such fascinating things. Who would have thought that I’d have so many readers from India and Singapore ? Or that they’d be finding my blog because they were searching for “2010 live action short film that ends with girl hit by car” or “bar that serves bundaberg rum in hcmc” ?

Whoever found me by googling for “6¨¨¨¨ynxxxxx” puzzles me. How’d that happen ? Did the cat jump on their laptop when they were out of the room and then step on the mouse button and cause them to somehow end up at my blog ? Oddly, if you Google for that phrase, I am there, on the second page of search results. Yes. Disturbing isn’t it ? I don’t even know what those characters are. They look like quotes but they’re not. Whatever they are, they’re not on a regular english keyboard I can tell you that. They’re some sort of extended character.

There are some classics too. Someone found me by googling for “bidet for dogs”. Someone else Googled for “can dog drool make you blind”. I’m not fucking kidding. That is for real. I’m not sure if it’s more disturbing that they Googled for information about whether dog drool can make you blind or that they found my site as a result. You know what ? I’m the first result on Google if you search for that. You don’t believe me ? Here’s proof:

21 people found me by searching for “thy secrets bar hcmc”. Scary. I wonder if one of them was Thy googling herself ? You know that if you search for that, not only do I take up the first TWO search results, and I come up higher than any travel site or bar guide website, but I come up higher than the bar’s own web site. Jesus Christ ! It scares me to think that people I know in Vietnam might be specifically googling for themselves to see what i’ve been saying about them. Someone else Googled for “girl named nhi at bar number 5″. The most common word in the search terms list is “hedgehog’s dillema”. There’s dozens and dozens of people who have found me with searches that include those words. It’s actually the most popular search term that brings people to the website.

It’s quite fascinating how many search terms will put me at the top of Google. I’ll put a list of search terms at the bottom of this article. The bizarre thing is, I come up as the first result on Google for most of these searches. Most of them aren’t even things I talk about. Who would have thought that if you searched for “girls sleeping and drooling” on Google that I’d not only be the number one hit but that my blog is actually the first SEVEN hits for that query ? You think the Internet is a big place and that you couldn’t possibly be that unique. But while there may be over 160 million sites on the internet, apparently if you’re googling for information about the toxicity of dog slobber or girls who drool in their sleep, I am the number one place to go according to Google.

You know how loyal some of my visitors are ? 367 visitors this month had been to my site more than 200 times. Wow. I have THAT many regular readers ? WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE ? You know what else ? 1297 visits came from people who had previously visited less than 24 hours earlier. 20% of people spend more than half an hour a day reading my site. Hahaha, you’re wasting 1/50th of your entire day reading my crap ? You suckers ! 24% of my visitors use a Mac (Good on you !) and another 23% use an iPhone or an iPad. In fact, far more people view my site using an Apple product than using Windows. Only 1% of people use an Android phone to view my site. That’s because Android users are fucking idiots. People are browsing on their Blackberry (shouldn’t you be working ?) and on PalmOS devices. One person even reads it on his PSP. The most popular browser by far is Safari. 15% of all my readers read my site on a mobile device, by far the largest percentage being on the iPhone. Almost three quarters of all the mobile users are using Optus as their phone provider. Idiots.

You know what is really weird ? One of the top ten referring sites that is sending visitors to my site this month is a Russian Bittorrent forum. I decide to visit it, so I Google to find the particular post that mentions my site. The site is completely in Russian. What the fuck ? I have to know what they’re saying about me, so I go to Google Translate and translate the site into English. They’re talking about the mp3 scene, and discussing old groups like RNS, and someone has linked them to my blog where I wrote a very long post about the early days of that scene and they’re discussing me. Yes, people in Russia that I’ve never met are talking about me on the internet. Can you believe that shit ?

My biggest source of traffic is Facebook. Since I don’t use Facebook anymore, that means that other people are reading my shit and then posting links to my site on Facebook. I bet they’re prefixing the links with shit like “You should read this crazy shit I read on this guy’s blog”. The second is Google. And they come from Google all over the world. Check out this list of search engines that have sent people to my blog. They’re in order of amount of visitors sent.

google.com
google.co.in
google.com.au
google.co.uk
google.de
google.co.nz
google.co.pk
google.ca
google.co.id
google.com.my
google.co.cz
google.fr
google.co.th
google.com.eg
google.com.tr
google.hu
google.bg
google.co.il
google.com.ph
google.com.vn
google.dk
google.co.iq
google.co.ru
google.be
google.ch
google.co.kr
google.com.br
google.com.hk
google.com.qa
google.com.sa
google.com.tw
google.com.ua
google.es
google.fi
google.ge
google.gr
google.hr
google.it
google.pt
google.ro
google.se

That is fucking creepy. I don’t even know what half those countries are. Uganda, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Finland, The Ukraine, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand. Ok it’s interesting that 21 people came to my site from Google India, but it’s even more amazing that 3 people came via Google Egypt and 4 via Google Turkey. People are reading my blog in countries that I’ve never even heard of. I didn’t even know they had internet in Bangladesh, let alone that people from there would visit my blog. Hey, I know I’m an international many of mystery and I say fascinating things that are of interest to many people, but seriously, in the last month I had visitors from 74 different countries. So, I’m being read in 74 countries around the world am I ? That’s some pretty impressive readership distribution. Excuse me while I step outside. I’m not sure there’s enough room in this hotel for me AND my ego.

On average, people who find me via Google read 1.41 pages per visit. Which means they’re coming to me based on almost certainly unrelated searches like for information on whether dog drool making you blind, and they’re staying to read more, often dozens of pages. I can understand that. I’ve done that too. One of the things that made me want to start blogging was one day I was searching for something on Google and for some bizarre reason I stumbled across this girl’s blog. She had moved from country Victoria to inner-city Melbourne and she was relating her tales of experiencing the hectic public transport for the first time and such. It was just mundane chatter about what she did that day, like getting her hair dyed and ears pierced, but it was fascinating. She was a fairly good writer and her stories, despite being just day to day meanderings, were like a real insight to me into what it’s like to be a young girl moving from the country to the city for the first time. That was about the time I decided I wanted to start a blog of my own. And here I am, several hundred thousand words later.

I hope whoever you are, you enjoy reading my stories about life and love and what it’s like to live in Australia and Vietnam. If you happen to read this post, and you enjoy what I write, please drop me an email to pawz@teamroot.net and just say “Hi. I’m one of those people who read your crazy blog”. Publishing is such a one way medium, and while search term analytics can give some fascinating insights into who visits my site, it’s no substitute for someone randomly emailing me saying “Hi. I read your site all the time. I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoy it”.

Now, here’s a list of some of the funniest search terms that people use to find my site:

drugged me and cut my hair <—– ok i have talked about this
girls sleeping and drooling <—– what the FUCK ?!
black girls drooling on youtube <—- why do i have so many people searching for me based on searches about girls drooling ?
a girl just ask me who the hell are you?
anime live action movie futuristic main character doesn’t remember
vietnamese whores
bidet for dogs <—- lol wut ?
can dog drool make you blind <—– god that cracks me up
can you busk in west end brisbane?
can you smoke hookah after getting a tattoo
chill out music (africa) lion albinos
crazy shit to say to strangers
cuz i look like a bloody idiot that’s why
don’t mind me, i’m just a hedgehog with a dilemma
fuck on the sea
don’t eat the last cherry
goddamm funny sexy shit
government step to conserve lion tailed
have you had my lunch yet penis vietnamese <—- WTF ?? Excuse me ? Penis for lunch ?
how to deal with hedgehogs dilemma
how to say i am going to sleep late tomorrow in vietnamese
i had a lion’s tail in my dream
i met a man on the internet who vows he loves me then doesnt call me for days <—- awww someone wanted dating advice
i need to know when is the good time to shut the fuck up <—- you won’t learn that from my site, lol !
i think you drink i think you should shut the fuck up
i want a story about a lion was standing in the middle of the road
im gonna om nom nom <—- really ? me too !
im up while the rooster still drooling
in love sleepy happy cool! loving sad sexy confused angry excited drooling naughty <— I am the number one result on Google for this query !
is there mcdonalds in saigon
japanese old man sex young girls
koizora vs a walk to remember <—- this would have been an interesting read for them
korean love songs <—- ok to be fair i do talk about this a lot !
lion tail rabbit
live and learn or die and teach by example
meaning of name suki <—- i actually get quite a lot of these
I met a girl at the park and im gonna see her again and i don’t know what to say to her <—- more dating advice
messing with girls when they are sleeping <— i swear i’ve never talked about that subject !
police abuse of power
pwning someone with a song
reunification of vietnam tank through gates
she showed me her thingy for money videos <—— uuuuhh ?
sleeping girls played with fun real night <—— sounds like fun
small lion toys that when you pull their tail they vibrate sold
sony racketeer influence and corrupt dramatica <— the scary thing is, TWO people searched for this.
the best gift of my life
the hedgehog’s dilemma and personality type <— there are actually about 50 searches that relate to the hedgehog’s dilemma. it’s actually the number one search term
the meaning behind kingyo hanabi short film version <— at least they would have gotten what they were looking for
tick tock, you walk, we walk time is going by & my heart’s going to burst !
we are all hedgehogs <—– i know. I know.
we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl <—- considering how many sites out there that have these pink floyd lyrics online, I am fascinated that someone found my page based on this search.
what does it mean when i say i love you and she says ok night bye <—– more dating advice
what not to leave in your hotel room?
what on lions tail do you smoke <— what the hell ?
when a person say she is she lion
why i cant log into my facebook account on my iphone in vietnam
yoona sexy pole dance
what does it mean when i dream about lion’s tail
you’re a fuck up she said

Last night Bang wanted to show me some photos of her and her friend on Facebook. The usual DNS trick wasn’t working, but that’s cool… I’m resourceful. I just edited my hosts file and mapped the address to the IP manually so she could get onto Facebook. She showed me the photos, including one of her friend who was a cute girl. She said that everyone said they look like twins and I must admit, they do look alike. Her friend also works at Secret Bar but she’s is in Canada on holiday right now and she’s going to be back next week and I said “Great, you can introduce me”.

Anyway, Bang’s not stupid, and after she finished viewing the photos, she logged out. But then someone else wanted to see them, and she logged in again and forgot to log out. I noticed that she left without logging out. This morning I was like “I wonder if it’s still logged in”. Yes, it was. LOL. I have free reign over her Facebook. She’s lucky I’m a nice guy and I wouldn’t mess around with it. Some people would be like “Omg, this is too much fun… I’m going to sign her up to all sorts of hilarious groups and send messages to her friends and put indecent photos in her photo albums”.

Fortunately for her, I wouldn’t do that. I opened the page, realised it was still logged in, laughed, and closed it again. I did look at a photo on her wall that she’d shown me last night. I would post it here because it’s a cute photo, but since I didn’t take it, nor did I ask for a copy of it, that wouldn’t be right. I’m not going to post her photos on the internet without her permission. I wish I was evil so that I have lots of fun messing with her Facebook. But I’m not, and I’m not going to betray her trust in me. Still, tonight I’ll have to show her that she’s still logged in and tease her about it.

Not smart. Don’t log into your Facebook on someone else’s computer and then forget to log out. If the person’s not as honest as me, it could have disastrous consequences. She’s lucky I’m a good guy. That’s all I’m sayin’.

I was reading one of the three WikiLeaks books that I have with me while I’m traveling in Vietnam tonight because I was hoping it would make me tired and prepare me for sleep. It was interesting as usual and I read for most of the night. Just as I was finishing up and preparing to try and sleep, I came across a mention about Vietnam. Apparently while WikiLeaks claims to possess many documents on Vietnam, few if any have been leaked so far.

There was one document from the embassy in Hanoi disclosing some frank information about how the US government wanted to take advantage of Vietnam’s favourable attitude towards Americans and use their desperate need for higher education facilities to exercise “soft control” over Vietnam by influencing their students. I suddenly thought “I probably shouldn’t leave this book laying around in the open in my hotel room. You never know how the government here might react if they realised I had three different books on WikiLeaks and discovered my Australian press card. Hell, they might very well think I work for WikiLeaks since Julian Assange is a member of the same journalist’s union as me.

A quick look online reveals that there are certain WikiLeaks document analysis websites which have been blacklisted here. Ok, that clinches it. I bury all my WikiLeaks books at the bottom of my suitcase. I begin typing this post and then decide that’s probably not a great idea either. I’ve been warned by people here NEVER to discuss the Vietnamese government on Vietnamese internet, and I’ve checked and noticed that the ISP my hotel uses are one of the ones that go to extra efforts to block Facebook beyond what some others do and they are also mentioned as being “government sponsored”. So I setup an encrypted tunnel to my server in Australia to post it through that. It’s not like I’m saying anything bad, it’s just that, this is Vietnam. You have to be more careful here. Noone knows my blog address, and I’d prefer not to trigger any sort of monitoring software they have that might flag any website that contains the words “Vietnam government” and “WikiLeaks” in the same sentence.

Better safe than sorry.

While laying in bed at 4am staring at the ceiling this morning an idea occurred to me. One of the things I’d like to be able to do on Google Maps is to locate restaurants that serve a particular type of food. I’m hanging for a good bacon and egg breakfast in Saigon, but it’s just not something you can easily do. It’s not a primary product advertised by restaurants and therefore you can’t search for it, and it would be pointless to just search Google itself, because then I couldn’t restrict it to just my local area or see where the results are.

What we need is “Google Dining”, and this is how it should work: Restaurants add a little piece of code called a “meta tag” to their website on pages that feature their menu, and Google indexes the contents of those pages separately. When someone goes to Google Maps and types in “Bacon and Eggs”, it looks up it’s cuisine database and drops pins on the map at all the places nearby which serve this food.

Furthermore, it could also use the prices to allow you to request “cheapest bacon and eggs” and it could place the pins in ascending order of price, with the place serving the cheapest meal appearing as the first pin. Also, Google could include a simple feature of Maps so that when you clicked on a restaurant, you could add a rating to it to indicate how good your dining experience was there. It could even use GPS location for security (like Facebook Check-In) to ensure that you really are at the restaurant when you write this review. Then, you could type in “best bacon and eggs”, and it could show you in ascending order where you can get this meal, with the places with the highest user ranking appearing first.

Throw in Google Street View and you can search for a food, add price or quality criteria, click on a restaurant, see a photo of the establishment, and even bring up the full menu so you could decide what else you’d like. Want to get really tricky ? Let restaurants add an “inside photo” and call it “Google Table View” or something so diners could see what the atmosphere of the restaurant was like before visiting.

The point is that currently, the business data on Google Maps is rudimentary. You can search for a business based on the name, the service provided, or the rough products they sell based on what the company has entered when they add themselves to Google Maps. But Google could provide more detailed abilities to add service-specific data as well. In this case, the restaurant wouldn’t even have to keep their listing specially updated with Google Maps, they would merely need to add a tiny bit of code to their website which linked their menu or their product list to their Google Maps ID code, and voila, Google would know exactly what they sold and how much it cost.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, how about “Google Car Parts” ? “Google Computers” ? “Google Spa Treatments” ? The list is endless. Ultimately, allowing business owners to specify on their webpage what the list of products they sell are and link it to their Google Maps identity, Google Maps could mine the rich data set of information that the evil mechanical spiders at Google Search had already indexed from the company’s website, and interpret it as what it is – a list of products and prices, and it could instantly allow for the searching of this information, including ranking based on price or location, right from Google Maps.

I have no doubt Google have thought of this as they have many smart people working there. They just haven’t done it yet, and it would seem to me to be such a staggeringly simple idea to implement. All they need to do say “Ok, if you have a product list on your website, just wrap these invisible HTML tags around it and add this code to your meta data, and instantly your updated, indexed product and price list will be available to all Google Maps users”. The sheer usefulness of being able to say “Ok Google, I need a new rear brake light for a Toyota, please show me on a map where I can buy the cheapest one within walking distance from me” and have it plot them on a map for you would be phenomenal.

I think the way I have described this would make it so elegant and simple to implement. It requires no complex forms that need updating by the business owner. It just links two existing Google services by having the business add a couple of lines of code to their website, and Google is instantly able to cross reference data from websites straight from the Maps application.

So come on Google, how about it ? It’s easy, effective and world-changing. You promote the use of this tiny bit of code, and instantly we have a mass of instantly mineable price and product data available right from Google Maps without businesses needing to do anything other than put their Maps code onto their website. And when you implement this, and you decide to send me my commission for outlining how it should work, you know where to send the cheque. After all, you’re Google. You know everything !

The other day while here in Vietnam I tried to visit a link on Facebook to something about food that I found on Google and noticed that it couldn’t connect. I tried again last night on a different internet connection and again noticed it still wouldn’t connect. I thought “I wonder.. could it …” and Googled. No sooner had I type in “Facebook ban” than Google revealed to that yes, Facebook has been banned in Vietnam since some time in 2009 because it was occasionally used to write illegal political commentary anonymously.

They have an alternative site run by the government called http://go.vn which requires you to provide your full name and government ID number to use it, so that they can track you down and throw you in a dark communist prison if you say anything they don’t like. Check it out, it looks very much like Facebook. The interesting thing though is that many posters, especially from Nokia such as the one I’ve pictured here, still advertise Facebook as a feature of their phones, when in fact you can’t access it.

You have to have a license from the government to run a website here, even a personal blog. Actually, probably especially for a personal blog, and of course you need to provide them your government ID. So for example, making jokes like I did to some friends that a certain political leader looks a lot like a certain maker of fried chicken from Kentucky prooooobbbbably isn’t such a good idea, and I don’t think I’ll be expressing that thought out aloud… or in writing… or even thinking it. They can probably read your thoughts, they’re tricky people.

As to the lack of Facebook ? You go guys ! More power to you ! I wish we could ban Facebook in Australia too. That would be epic. What would all the bored housewives and unemployed people do all day if they didn’t have Farmville ? Oh my god… they’d have to… I dunno… clean the house or something !