Yahoo is on crack. I’m annoyed.

Everyone who’s been reading me for at least 2-3 months probably remembers my little accident at FlickR. You know, the one where I couldn’t pick the country I actually live in, nor the country it split from, nor the country err…all six of these mini-countries were a part of. I thought that was a temporary glitch, so I didn’t do anything.

I tried to Google the phrase “why Yahoo doesn’t list Serbia” and even the easier variant, “Yahoo Serbia”, but the only results were ramblings about Kosovo, European union and various other Yahoo! News stories. There was no explanation why a person who’s from Serbia or Montenegro can’t select their country on any of the Yahoo network sites or any of the sites acquired by Yahoo! in near future.

I had enough of this and I contacted the support…the response I got was really, really lame and probably automatic:

Oh no! We appreciate that you contacted us for assistance, and I would love to help. However, I am unable to figure out exactly what the problem is.

In order for our MyBlogLog support team to resolve this issue, we will need to know as much of the following information as you can provide:

* Your Yahoo! ID

* The URLs for the blogs you author

* Your browser type and version number

* The text of any error messages received

* The exact steps taken that lead up to this event

Once I have all of the requested information I will investigate the error you are reporting.

ARE THEY SERIOUS?

Now I’m really glad that I don’t use Yahoo! Messenger, that I never had a Yahoo! email account or anything. Shame, shame on them.

Oh yes, PLEASE feel free to link to this particular entry, Stumble this story, submit it to Digg or whatever. I just added a plugin that does such magic. This is ignorant, ugly, stupid and it should be spreaded around, so more people would be aware of it. And of course that it matters.

MySpace? Ummm…whosespace?

Following comments to Mira’s most recent post, I came across Simon Owens’ huge rant, I thought I’d just finish Simon’s list (or at least extend it, in case someone else would like to finish it.

So, here are my additions to Simon’s 10-piece-list.

11.The front page of MySpace appears as an “Unknown error” 2-3 times a day.

12. They list “pagan”, “wiccan” and other similar stuff as religions, while if you happen to be an Orthodox Christian, which is one of the largest divisions of Christianity, you have to select “Christian-Other”. Come on.

13. They replied me to say that they’re sorry, but they can’t change “Yugoslavia” to “Serbia and Montenegro”. Then, when Serbia and Montenegro split, they didn’t respond to one single petition about us having rights to pick the countries we actually live in. My current location reads Beograd, Serbia, definitely not, Micronesia, Federate States Of. I didn’t want to put Yugoslavia and either way, that country was just a pale reminder of the huge happy one I was born in.

14. No RSS on blogs. No way to export or import shit in the civilised, real Web 2.0. way. So, when I post a blog here, I usually have to write a bulletin on MySpace, while my Facebook and LiveJournal have RSS and my friends on those sites know that I’d updated squirrelism.

15. No way to go to blog’s homepage when reading a blog entry. And that is downright stupid.

16. No limit in adding STUPID SHIT to one’s profile. Yes, seriously, I arrived to your profile to watch twenty-four YouTube videos.

17. The lame and shitty top friends concept. Whose idea was it to rank friends, anyway? I’m keeping my favourite musician as my number one, a work profile as number two and I added a couple of charities and nonsense links there as well, as I don’t want to rank my friends. A friend who’s totally obsessed with MySpace told me that he’d add me back to his top friends now that we’re talking again. I mean, WHAT? Do you really think I care if I’m your top friend or not? It sure is slightly flattering to me, but how are your other friends feeling?

18. Did I mention bulletins? At the very beginning, I did not understand what were those for, but now it seems that some people are using them for various exhibitionist purposes. Some of the suggestive responses I’ve seen in people’s surveys scare me. But surveys will need their own topic, as some of the repeating questions are just…marvellous.

19. The ego-factor. One of my closest friends has become a less close friend when MySpace became an important thing in her life. She was actually resisting to make an account there and then she realised what exciting work opportunities it might bring to her (she works in, let’s say, public relations). Now she’s responding with Haven’t you seen my calendar on MySpace? I was at [insert place here] for [insert the reason here]! when I ask I have not seen you in a while. Where have you been? Are you OK? Love you. Whenever I am ranting about her at home, I tell my parents that MySpace took her away from me.

20. Horrible spelling is spreading as the freakin’ flu. I don’t remember seeing misspellings such as actaully, mascarea, exems and such before. Now I almost tend to believe that people see misspelled words and think it’s the right way to write or, even worse, the cooler way?

That’s all I could think of right now. I will need one more entry to cover the phenomenon MySpace apparently is here in Serbia, but I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to people who don’t live here.

Also, I might write an entry to cover the (minor) good sides of MySpace.

Come to think…what was I thinking?

Sometimes I wonder what on earth was I thinking when I’d whipped out the database hosting my old blog. As far as I can remember, there was someone who offered me to transfer it to the new webspace, but I had dial-up at home, I probably thought I’m never going to regret it, it was March 2006 aka Iva’s month of panic for almost no reason (let’s skip that story as it’s even offensive considering what holiday is coming up for my western Christiain friends!) and I was fed up with my mood swings in 2004 and 2005; especially May 2005 when the good things and bad things were rotating as if two different people were blogging.

Now I’m looking those old entries up. And I am going to recover them, oh yes I will. I even want to write a story on what supersonicsquirrel.net was like, how many people I was hosting. I think I had more than 30 hostees overall. God, I had so much free time, today I wouldn’t be able to handle it! Back then it was like a freakin’ train station and some of them never even managed to actually finish their websites and put them online, some others disappeared without a trace, a couple were not even responding to my emails about still being alive.

Before I do all of that and much more, I have found the oldest entry [minus the test one], written in November 2002. Back then, there was a meme called What if…, founded by some German girl whose name I do not even remember. And I actually made a public blog solely to present my answers to that one. The girl was posting a different question from a book she read once a week and then she was looking up people’s answers. Below the cut you’ll find my answers and the dates I replied. In my next post, I will try to reply all of these questions, five years later and it will be funny to compare them and see how much I’d changed, even though the base of me, the core is still the same.

It was NOT long ago, but the way this world is speeding up, it needs a ticket and we all need to stop and smell the roses.

It was 2002. Many things were heading towards a beautiful happy ending, solely to crash like Titanic soon after. Queen mom died, Maria Naumova won the ESC, mobile phones rarely had colour screens, iPods were resembling small tanks, Brazil won the world cup, central Europe was affected by the biggest floods in the recent times and Switzerland joined United Nations.

I was nineteen years old. I had no major goals in life other than finishing university (not knowing I’ll remain stuck in the class year I entered at that time) and publishing something, someday, not even knowing what and when. Today I have so many goals that I could easily beat Juste Fontaine’s record on the 1958 world cup.

And, before you get scared of it: read the paragraphs above again and again and one more time.

Continue reading »

New theme, at last!

I spent about 24 hours drawing, making and coding this one. Macromedia Fireworks and Notepad, as usual. And, of course, the one and only Wordpress. Then I put it up and an error popped up in Firefox 2.x. and IE 6.x and all versions of Opera. It was only working properly in IE7. Two people were trying to help me and, in the end, it turned out it would work in Firefox after two footer layers are merged into just one and after clarification of the famous IE6 bug with layers that have a left margin, it now works in IE6 as well as Opera 8 and 9. I have no idea how it looks in e.g. Opera 7 and below and IE 5.5 and below. If anyone’s using any of those browsers, they’re living under a rock, anyway.

I do mean to tweak the whole site a bit more and actually add navigation where it’s meant to be (there indeed is a navbar, but there are not any links on it, I’m afraid…); as well as fix the comments pages and add some plugins so I could play with them.

Either way, what do you think about this Squirrel Pad theme? I am quite pleased and I’m glad I let my imagination explode, in a positive way.