Julia

I am not a fan of my own name. Therefore, I change it and I change it often.

Last Friday, I decided to change my name again. This time, my email address. In that name change process, I declared Name Change Friday on Plurk. People started to respond to it. I did not mean for everyone to change THEIR names. But hey, it was fun.

@topsurf decided to plurk her name change and it gained me some new Plurk friends in the process. There are others of course who balk at name changes. (Those would be the party poopers. They know who they are)

So now, I think we will have Name Change Friday EVERY Friday. Until people get tired of it. Or tired of me and my name changes.

The rule of the Name Change Friday is that there is NO RULE!

Change your name into whatever you want. Some add fish, fishy, fishes or the like. Obviously, that is to honour me being the HotFish. Others just use other plurker's names and rotate their name change every so many minutes.

If you are on Plurk and want to have some name change fun, join us tomorrow and every Friday.

Sometime yesterday afternoon or was it the day before? I cannot remember now... anyway, I have gone over to what could potentially become twitter's back up/replacement. 

There was digg, there was del. and there were many others. Of course there is a newish thing now: socialmedian If you are so inclined, you may join it using my username there: hotfish (but of course) as your invite code.

The invite code expires on Friday, 23rd May 2008. So hurry! ;)

Often times, I decide not to choose sides. Choosing sides can sometimes cause you sleepless nights, lose friends... Yesterday, I saw tweets regarding colours. One direct message letter, I was pointed towards the cause of all the commotion. You might want to consider reading this blog post. It explains a LITTLE better. :)

It is all in fun and for no reason at all.

Oh, yes, I am on this team. If you are on twitter and have not chosen a team... well, for the love of god, get moving! 

It is now official. I have deleted EVERYONE off my Facebook account. I have deleted/deactivated/removed (Because I have no idea what the hell) ALL applications, mini-feeds, etc as well. My Facebook account is now deactivated properly.

I said properly because in a spur of the moment some months ago, I deactivated my account leaving everything and everyone intact. Then of course it dawned on me that was stupid because I was still there. I am still on people's friends list and I can still view their feeds/news/status updates etc.

I did not visit Facebook all that much anyway. I was swamped in various invites for applications, scrabulous games, etc. I like my Facebook friends. They are also largely, my twitter friends. I just have no desire to hang out on Facebook, join various networks, etc. I just prefer to remain fairly anonymous online. If, for example, I decide to join a school or work related network online, it will be totally separate from my online social-networks that I have carefully cultivated over the past few years.

Why?

The reason is simple. Employers google you. The chances of being found out that I spend countless hours online tweeting, seesmic-ing, Yahoo-ing, blogging and the like are great if I were to link all of my online profiles with my real life.

That is not to say I am not who I am in real life. Far from it. I just believe there is such a thing as TMI. Be it on or offline, I do like to keep some aspects of my life unknown to the rest of the world.

Last week, YahooLive! was the talk of my seesmic and twitter friends. Suffering from the monkey see, monkey do syndrome, I had to go check it out.

YahooLive! is a text and video chatroom. You log in with your Yahoo credentials, create your room name (Channel), turn on your webcam and voila! You are broadcasting live from your home or office. It is similar to the Yahoo chatrooms where you have various audiences or chatters in whichever channel. The difference is, instead of picking one chatter who might decline your advances for a private chat and/or webcam broadcast, you get to choose and rotate among four users in your room to watch and have a real-time conversation. You, as the channel owner, are able to moderate your guests. You may ban or kick any user you want instead of waiting for someone else to take care of the troll.

It is only a week old and it does have it's glitches. For one thing, I was able to broadcast via Firefox when I first logged on but now, I find that I am only able to do so via Internet Explorer. Even then, my audio was cocked up. I am not very sure if it ws my sluggish satellite connection or the bugginess of YahooLive! but it was rather annoying because I had to type instead of just talking to my audience. It defeats the purpose of being there in the first place. For the record, when I broadcast my webcam via Skype or MSN, the audio works fine so I do not think it has to do with my webcam.

I was perusing my Pownce pages a few months ago and someone asked if anyone wanted a photophlow invite. I had no idea what it was but of course, later found that it was a chat room whereby you can view flickr photos and have discussions about them. I do that quite a bit (whenever satellite connection and time permit) with my friends on MSN.

Now the problem with photophlow is that you need your friends (or contacts on flickr) to be there in your own room. (I have a room of my own again. YAY!) in order to have that kind of conversation that you might have on any IM. But no matter, I go to the main ante room and meet new people and view more photos. :)

If you have a flickr account, like viewing photos and making friends, check it out!

After being offline-ish the past few days, I logged on to various websites I belong to and while looking at MyBlogLog page, it hit me - we are all WHORES! Yes, attention whores. Not that it is a bad thing. We want to connect, meet and get to know new people online and hopefully have the resources to meet them offline. How else are we to meet these new people if we are not out there, making our presence known?

Indeed.

The easiest way to make our presence known is to join twitter, Pownce, jaiku, to name a few (OK, I am really getting tired of adding linkages. Sorry) find and (actively) interact with others while of course providing links to our various blogs and flickr photo pages, etc. 

I have not used a webcam is ages. Mainly because I (kinda) stopped talking to a few people with whom I video-chat on a regular basis. Another reason was that my webcam died and recently, I lost one of my laptops due to it crashing. Recently, however, I kept seeing many people Utterz-ing and Seesmic-ing. So I found one of my old webcams (I have decided not to buy a new one because the last semi-expensive one I bought ticked me off) and the result as you can see from my previous post was a video utterz! This morning, I decided to dive into my (kinda first) Seesmic video.

I think I might actually start liking my own voice now?