mattgriffin.net

I don’t have much to say about it yet, but Virb looks pretty cool. Could be a replacement for the more and more troubling Facebook. Here’s my profile.

There’s been a lot of fuss about the recent revisions to the Facebook Terms of Service (TOS), and for good reason. I am firmly of the belief that they need to change the terms to be more in line with other social networking sites to reflect the fact you must always retain ownership of your content. Right now, THEY OWN YOUR STUFF. Don’t like that idea? Start talking to everyone on Facebook about it, and then sent FB itself your thoughts. This is utter BS and it needs to change now.

If you care about ownership of your content on the Internet in general, and on Facebook specifically, READ THIS RIGHT NOW.

From the article:

Other sites point out in their terms of service that you still own your content: Facebook doesn’t mention that little fact. Facebook also neglects to remind you that you’re giving other Facebook users rights to your Facebook content, too — YouTube, for example, makes it clear that other people besides YouTube have a right to use and spread around the videos you upload. In general, other sites’ terms of service just have a more helpful tone.

UPDATE: Facebook has since reverted to the previous terms. That being said, I still don’t think this is entirely over.

Pre-order this book if you know what’s good for you.
Trust me.
Lev is a genius.

I recently purchased an MSI Wind U100 (from amazon.com, naturally) and while it took a little getting used to, I completely love it. It came with Windows XP installed, it’s quite possible to install several alternate OSes on the hardware. I picked my favorite *nix based OS. While it did take some work, it only took about 90 minutes to get it to a very stable install. I think the easiest install of an OS that I tried was Ubuntu. I hadn’t tried Linux since a version of Red Hat about 8 years ago, and WOW has it come a long way. I was pleasantly surprised at how mature Ubuntu is and how intuitive it is to use, assuming you’ve used a modern OS before. But I digress…

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I posted a little bit about this the  yesterday, but I am completely infatuated with Lala.com. Anyone who I was hanging out with last night will attest to this. I think I mentioned it at least a dozen times over the course of dinner and drinks.  Anyway, Lala is a few things. It’s a streaming music site, as well as a store, with a little bit of Last.fm social networking baked in.

More after the break…

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Steam, originally uploaded by matt griffin.

The photo I’m currently using for the background of this site. Hard to believe I took this over 4 years ago…

I just added a music page to the site. If you’ll direct your attention upwards to the top of the page, you’ll see a MUSIC tab. Click there and you’ll see some music I’ve been enjoying lately.  I’ve taken the recomendation of some people I know and started using Lala.com, which seems pretty cool.  Like any good drug music dealer, they give you 50 credits for free, so go ahead and try it out.  I think you should be able to listed without signing up for anything from my page, but to be honest I’m still figuring it out.

Anyway, give some tunes a listen and let me know what you think or if you’ve got any music recommendations.

Occasionally I’m asked what iPhone apps I use on a regular basis, and in the interest of sheer laziness, I’ve decided to just list a bunch of them here. In no particular order.

Evernote
Free.
I love Evernote. I wouldn’t love Evernote for the iPhone if it weren’t for the desktop and web clients as well, but the three of those combined come together like a note-taking Voltron to kick all sorts of information storing ass. Did I stretch that metaphor? Yes. Does Evernote care? No. It just captures and stores. And syncs. Unconditionally. Did I mention the OCR it does to images? Take a picture of some text, sync, and later search that text. Sweet.

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That kitteh means bizness.