smarty pants

7-11 has a sneaky marketing campaign in effect, capitalizing on the upcoming elections. They're offering customers the opportunity to show their allegiance by opting for one of these babies at the coffee station:

The catch? This cup is only offered in the largest size, the 20 oz. cup. I'd be very curious to see how much of a profit 7-11 has made on this, since I'm sure many people will opt for the larger coffee, despite the fact that they usually buy a smaller one. Nice move.

don't make me cut you!

Let's face it. The way we socialize today is much different than we did just 10 years ago. In the past decade, social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace surfaced and were dominated by people under 30. In fact, Facebook was created as a way for college alumni to network. Today, people of all ages are using these sites... looking for friends, schoolmates, relationships, and more.

I know that friendships and relationships can be forged online. I've made some great friends, I've had a couple relationships, and some of my close friends have had similar experiences. One comment that I've definitely heard (and used) more than once, is something like, "We've just broken up and he/she already changed their status to "single!"

It's amazing to me that we define our relationships not by the quality of our interaction, the strength of our conviction to each other, or even the cold hard truth... but by whether or not to take the BIG step and change your status from "single" or "in a relationship."

One of the things that make social networking so successful is both the desire for humans to be exhibitionists and to be voyeurs. When we split with a loved one, we can obsess over them and spy on them by viewing their day to day conversations online with friends. This is when we check out their relationship status, and for sure, when it says, "single" that bears a huger impact than the actual human interaction that led to the break up.

It's totally nonsensical!

So, tonight, I checked out BBC, and found this:

"A man has been jailed for life for stabbing his wife to death over a posting she made on the social networking site Facebook.

Wayne Forrester, 34, told police he was devastated that his wife Emma, also 34, had changed her online profile to "single" days after he had moved out."

What do you think of this? Isn't this some sort of red flag?

Here's the full article: crazy facebook dude

R.I.P.

Yah. So if the image on the left looks unfamiliar, there's a reason.

I wasn't sure why the font selection offered by Blogger was so small, so after viewing a blog using a handwritten font type, I decided that I was going to try to figure out how to get that look. I really thought I was hot stuff when I customized the layout of my blog by successfully changing the font to "Loved by the King", which I downloaded for free at dafont.

This was a couple of months ago. No one ever complimented my "new look"... (hrmm) and the other day, I was chatting with a tech geek friend of mine, and sent him a link to the page.

Well, needless to say, he was confused. After he realized what was happening, he gave me my first lesson in designing for the web. He explained to me that if other people don't have the font that I used, they wouldn't see the blog (or web page) as I'd intended, which is why Blogger (and web design programs like Dreamweaver) offers a small range of fonts.. this serves as a sort of guarantee that the intended appearance will be the end result for anyone who views it.

So, now I know... none of you have been able to appreciate the fruits of my labour :(

Here's a screen shot of what this should look like. To be honest, after I post this, I'm going on my parent's laptop to take a gander at how the blog actually looks before I go ahead and conform to web standards and change it. booo.