I may be against the majority of the world with this decision, but I really hate myspace. I deleted my account about a 6 months ago. My internet experience didn't seem to suffer too much from deleting it. I do, on occassion, miss the fact that I no longer recieve instant messages from random creepy people, but that will fade with time.

I have many qualms with myspace. The first thing that annoyed me when I found myspace was the abundance of ads and popups. No one else seemed to mind, until just recently ads on myspace were found to be exploiting windows security vulnerabilities and downloading viruses and spyware onto the computers of unsuspecting users. I laughed when I first heard about this. The second annoyance I found was the music that everyone posts on there personal pages. If I want to listen to music I will play a CD or listen to my mp3 playlist. I don't want my music listening to be interrupted by the emo-crap songs that everyone posts on their pages. Another thing that just grinds my gears is the horrible layouts on myspace. The default layout is OK to be nice. If everyone just used the default layout, browsing myspace might be tollerable, but no one does. Instead users sport ugly poorly done layouts that make it impossible for people to read any of the content in the page. Honestly people, black text scrolling over gothic black background images aren't going to be readable. It makes me wonder if people actually read there own pages after posting to them. Possibly the biggest headache of myspace is how people use it. Its main purpose seems to be allowing fourteen year old girls to compete and see who has the most "friends". I say "friends" because the myspace definition of friends isn't exactly the definition that we use in the real world. In the myspace world a friend is just anyone else with a myspace page who is willing to link toour page. The secondary function is to perpetuate the idea of chain e-mails. Such e-mails are posted on myspace "blogs", message boards, and personal pages. These things got old in 5th grade people, grow up.

Myspace is known as a "social networking" tool. Am I the only person who thinks social networking should require social interaction as a main ingredient? I currently fear that facebook is going in the same direction as myspace. This deeply saddens me, because I always thought facebook would be a great way to keep in touch with old friends and organize events. Now it is becoming just another tool for people to brag about how many "friends" they have. And what's worse is that businesses seem to be using it as a tool to weed out employee candidates. Maybe social networking should be left to the real world, not the cyber world.

Today at about 9:00am I was awakened by a police officer knocking on my door. As this doesn't happen very often, I was rather surprised (and annoyed). The officer informed me that my car, which was parked on the side of the road in front of my house, had been ticketed, and that I would need to move it to my driveway. I asked him why it had been ticketed, and he said that I'm not allowed to park it on that side of the street. This was news to me. I've lived in this house for at least 8 years, and we have quite frequently parked vehicles there without incident. One year we had a car that was the subject of a hit and run (some one hit it and then drove away), and we had the police come when we filed a report, and we weren't informed of our illegal parking then either. So, I told him that I had no knowledge of this, as there are no signs indicating that it is illegal to park on this side of the road. He told me that it is in the town ordinance, and promptly left.

Now, I usually don't have any problems with police. I don't bother them, and they don't bother me, but I feel as though I was unjustly ticketed here. I know that it's just $10.00, but it's the principal of it. Police shouldn't be able to harass people like this. (maybe harass is to strong of a word, but it is how I feel). After a quick shower and breakfast I decided to try and find out about my town ordinances online. I didn't expect to have much luck, because my town is quite small and technologically inept, just like my state. I was surprised when a quick google search yeilded my town ordinances as the first results. Here is what I found:

Sec. 11-1 Parking prohibited at all times on certain streets.

SCHEDULE I

When signs are erected giving notice thereof no person shall at any time park a vehicle upon any of the following described streets or parts of streets:

[...]

No parking on the easterly side of Pine Street.

[...]

At first I was rather shocked. It was true, I'm really not allowed to park on my side of the street. Then I reread it a little bit closer and noticed that it said When signs are erected this is true. Since no signs are erected on my street, I should be able to park there until said signs are erected. Furthermore, according to this town ordinance, I was not illegally parked, and should not be subject to this ticket. I think that the officer was low on his quota and just decided to go around and ticket a bunch of cars to make up for it. I don't plan on paying the ticket, and I plan on going to the town office to see what I can do about it. Two other cars on my street got ticketed at the same time, and I'm pretty sure that the people will just pay their tickets. I don't think this type of thing should be tolerated. The police in this town have too much power, and something needs to be done about it.