I spy with my little eye…
…EVERYTHING you do online!

Do you use: Flickr? Facebook? MySpace? Amazon? Buzznet? imeem? iLike? Flixter? Picasa? Windows Live Spaces? Hi5? Pandora? Digg? PictureTrail? Multiply? Twitter? Stumbleupon? Friendster? etc.?

I have just discovered a way to basically spy on everyone you know online. How, O Wise & Paranoid Tololy, you ask me? Just join Spokeo and it will tell you exactly what everyone you know is doing online by tracking their activities across tens of social networking sites.

The site’s name is eerily similar to SPOOKY, and for good reason. I have just joined, because you know how I am like paranoid and so I am attracted to paranoia-related things, and Spokeo has made me ultra paranoid but also more careful. You’ll only find me on Flickr because I am anti-Facebook & Co. for security and privacy reasons, obviously.

Just remember, you are being watched and you don’t even know it. Chew on that when you socialize online and always be careful. Nobody likes to get punked.

Extremely interesting:

Brain division could help explain stereotyping, religious conflict and racism.

How do we know what another person is thinking? New research suggests we use the same brain region that we do when thinking about ourselves — but only as long as we judge the person to be similar to us. When second-guessing the opinions and feelings of those unlike ourselves, this brain region does not get involved, the new research shows. This may mean we are more likely to fall back on stereotyping — potentially helping to explain the causes of social tensions such as racism or religious disputes.

Neuroscientists led by Adrianna Jenkins of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, made the discovery when trying to deduce how the brain weighs up the thoughts of others. As Jenkins explains, judging how others are feeling is a valuable social skill, because we have no way of seeing inside another person’s head. “How do we go about bridging the gap between our minds and others’ minds?” Jenkins asks.

The answer seems to be that it depends on whether we feel we identify with that person or not, Jenkins says. In other words, how our brain handles the question of someone’s attitude to anything, from traffic jams to impressionist art, depends entirely on how we feel we relate to them as a person.

Source

Apparently, in some parts of the world women can only grab attention when they strip naked.

Via BBC News:

A group of Liberian women refugees who have held naked protests by the roadside are to be deported from Ghana, a minister has told the BBC.

Hundreds of the women were arrested on Monday and taken away from a refugee camp in 10 buses, witnesses say.

They were protesting at plans to send them home with $100 - they demand $1,000 and to be resettled in the West.

“$100 is not anything you can start life with. We are all lost,” one woman said.

Stripping naked is a traditional form of protest amongst poor and powerless women in Africa.

The women reported being beaten by police. But hey, that’s not so bad. In my country, they get shot or stabbed to death for doing far less than protesting naked on the roadside.

I applaud these Liberian women for their courage. It seems a woman always has to invest in her body to survive in the world. A sad state of affairs.

What’s up with all this dust? I got dust on my car, dust on my laptop, dust on my desk, dust on my shoes, dust on my eyelashes, dust in my mouth, dust in my nose, dust in my heart. There’s dust everywhere. It’s like Invasion of the Dust these days.

I should never again argue when someone says Jordan is a desert.

“My feelings for you shame me into silence. The truth of this and your name will never be revealed. It is you who has made me realize the failure of my life. The thought of you fills me with longing and at the same time, a burning humiliation that produces scar tissue and dead brain cells. Your existence mocks me and I am unable to confront this. You have no idea of any of this. None of this is your fault. It is completely with me. It is you who makes me see what I really am. I am weak and out of touch with myself.”

- Henry Rollins

Do you think it would be a positive or a negative thing if pharmaceutical companies came up with a medicine like Viagra for women? You might want to read this article before making up your mind:

A Dose of Desire

Where is the women’s version of Viagra?

The short answer: They’re still working on it. A bunch of companies have tried and failed to create “pink Viagra,” as it’s often called. Other companies have drugs in late stages of clinical testing, including a gel that recently began a make-or-break nationwide study with several thousand women. Give us five years, maybe less, say the most optimistic researchers and doctors. Though it’s unclear exactly how many women would ask for a prescription, no one doubts that the first company that gets to market a remedy for female sexual dysfunction, as it’s formally known, will earn a fortune.

A modest-size but fervent group of psychologists, academics and public health advocates contend that FSD isn’t an authentic medical condition, or at least not the sort of problem that should be treated with drugs. These aren’t the obtuse male physicians who for decades have been telling women distressed by their lack of libido that “it’s all in your head.” The anti-FSD crowd is mostly women, many of them self-described feminists. The most prominent is Leonore Tiefer, a psychotherapist and clinical associate professor at New York University, who has long decried what she calls “the medicalization of women’s sexuality.”

“Drug companies want to say to women, ‘You don’t need to know anything; you can have the satisfying sex life that you seek — people dancing on TV, the whole bit — without knowing anything. Just ask your doctor,’ ” she says. “I resent that, because there are specific harms that come from being ignorant and dependent in the world we live in. There may be lots of people who aren’t interested in sex, but is there a medical reason for that, and do we diagnose that?”

Arousal for women does not always lead to desire: Even Pfizer had a hard time grasping that concept. The company tested 3,000 women over the course of eight years before finally abandoning hope, in 2004, that Viagra itself could be the female Viagra.

“What we know is that very little of what’s going on with women and sex is below the waist,” says Anita Clayton, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Psychiatric Clinical Research and co-author of “Satisfaction: Women, Sex and the Quest for Intimacy.” “Almost all of it is above the neck.”

I can’t help but smile at that remark; “above the waist.” I suppose for women to be more interested in having sex with their partners, a pill should be made to help them with juggling housework, raising kids, excelling at their jobs, being socially perfect, AND being content with their partners’ practical approaches to sex, if that is the case.

So now you tell me, will Pink Viagra be good or bad?

To the people who visited us this evening:

Sod off! Your expensive car and your expensive clothes, your degrees and your social status, ALL mean nothing since they have obviously not improved your sickening attitudes towards a woman who could have, in a parallel universe, been a potential bride for your son.

You come to visit us, in our house, when you have already been told that I am not interested. Yet you come, and you make it appear like you want to genuinely get to know my family for whatever social purposes and you make it seem you understand that I am not going to be sized up like a sack of potatoes. You come and we receive you, then you dare ask why I am not present. You, old hag with a PhD, mother of a 30-something ‘independent‘ engineer looking for a wife, YOU bluntly say you want to see me so you can describe me to your son. How lowly of you! Do you think all women are as cheap and available as you once were?

Did they not teach you that women are not objects? That even if you find a 100 who are willing to serve you coffee when you honor them with your visit, and let you look at them up and down, and let you go back home and call your little momma’s boy and tell him “she has short hair, she’s petite and she has a nosering and a ton of earrings, we’re not buying”, that even if you find a 100 women letting you do that, you do NOT find that marriage worship in my house?

I know why you came. You thought you could embarrass me or my family with social crap. You thought if you came and asked for me, I would somehow be polite enough to go out and meet you because it would be socially inappropriate otherwise. In the meantime, do you know what I was doing in my room? I was studying in my pajamas and eating ice cream. You see, I do not care about you or about your little king, just as much as you do not care about my intelligence and feelings. Quid pro quo, mofos. This one is not so polite.

You wanted to see me and you didn’t. It’s offensive that you imagined I would be willing to be treated like that, but then again, you don’t even know me. Did you honestly think my family will force me to shyly parade in front of you? Or that they will shy away from telling you that I will NOT bother to see you because your king is not with you, and that even if he was, I will not see you anyway? Why did you lie then, and say that you wanted to get to know us only?

You, old hag –daughter of some minister, you must have done rounds like this before. I am sure you have a candidates’ list of all the houses and the girls you have seen for your ‘boy,’ and I am sure you looked at everything in these girls. I am sure you know exactly which one of them has a longish nose, which has big ears, which has a lisp, which has an attitude, which has boobs too small for your son’s taste; I am sure you know all that.

You expected me to join your list and be proud of it. You thought I would be happy because your son will consider me as an option, if I was lucky. You imagined that I will let you degrade me such that when the king finally decides to come do the rounds with you, to check out the candidates you shortlisted for him and size them up again, I will be on cloud number nine because, oh my god, a man I don’t know shit about is considering me for his wife.

By refusing to be another BODY on your list, I retained my value which balanced people appreciate. I am not yours to buy, and I will not be part of your king’s imaginary harem when you describe these other women to him. You do not know me, and you never will. I am above your petty list, your examining stares, your twisted sense of social conduct, your disgusting expectations. Moreover, I am kingdoms above your little king.

I don’t know exactly why crap just keeps on happening to me in all its possible forms, but it does. I emit, attract, and absorb negative energy.

When I woke up this morning, I mistakenly selected a HUGE chunk of the sidebar design and it got deleted and I did not pay attention to it (because I had just opened my eyes), and then I clicked ‘Update’ and BAM! — that chunk was gone. You can’t undo after clicking on ‘Update.’

To fix the mess, I installed WordPress locally. Of course, I had done that on Windows but had no idea how to do it on Ubuntu. So I found this useful page Install Wordpress locally with NanoWeb Server – Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10, and it took me approximately two hours to figure out how exactly to change file permissions or edit files as root. The author basically assumed I knew how to implement commands as root and his layout of the commands was plenty confusing. This page helped me get over my illiteracy, especially the gksudo command at the bottom of it. That command enables you to open and modify files and folders which are exclusive to root while at the same time not jeopardizing your security. I am putting these resources here for the general good of mankind, no actually, I am gambling for some positive karma. Or something.

So, Tololy’s Box is back now. I am sure there are some minor glitches here and there but hopefully I can fix those too.

P.S: Did you notice the new TinyMCE comment editor? I killed that RTF editor which was ultra buggy. Now I have to go back to ALL the comments that have been posted since January and clip out any formatting commands used in them, because if I don’t do that, they will all look very very bad and nobody will want to read them anymore. How fun is that?

Update: How does everyone like the new editor? Is it less of a pain in the arse than the old one?