Category Archives: Social Networking

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Considering migrating domains

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I’ve been thinking about this for some time and I’m considering migrating off of gingerninja.net.  WHY!?!? I hear you all cry.  Well, Twitter started it, not me!

For some time now, I’ve been getting @gingerninja messages on Twitter for a Danish band called…wait for it….Ginger Ninja.  Oooo, look.  They have a SPACE.  I don’t.  By that I mean a space between Ginger and Ninja.  Not a MySpace space.  I have one of those.  It’s over at http://www.myspace.com/gingerninjanet and that’s part of the problem:  GingerNinja is too popular a nickname.

When I first started this blog and grabbed the domain name, I found that GingerNinja was already in fairly common usage.  So where I couldn’t grab “GingerNinja” for something, I would grab “GingerNinjaNet” instead.  Problem is that that has led to much confusion and a lot of muckaroundiness in some places.  Then Game Centre happened.

I jailbroke my iPhone 3G in order to add some functionality I wanted – LockInfo calendar notifications on the home screen and biteSMS allowing me to reply or send texts within apps without quitting – which meant that I delayed upgrading to 4.1 or 4.3 until a JB version was available.  This was a delay of a month or so and by the time I got on there, “GingerNinja” was gone.  On a whim, I chose “GeekDad3″ (which I have as an alternative gmail account and a test blogger blog).  It snowballed from there with the culmination of the purchase of geekdad3.com yesterday.

Maybe it’s a maturity thing as I’m not the same gamer guy I was when I registered the domain back in the ’90s.  Maybe it’s a convergence thing as I have geekdad3 accounts on Apple Game Centre, gmail, blogger, twitter, wordpress.com and now tumblr (which handles mini-blogs status updates which are automagically sent to Facebook and Twitter).  Could be the new me?  Well, just in case, I now own geekdad3.com and I’ve even come up with a logo that I like:

PsychopathicCoho

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So, I’m sitting here looking at jobs on the net when I get an AIM message from someone called PsychopathicCoho which says Let’s kill Lady Gaga together!.   I immediately think spam or virus and Google the AIM name before closing window or responding and I find lots of information.

Turns out it’s a social networking fish bot (not to be confused with a phish bot) which randomly connects two AIM ID’s together and gives a spurious message to both to get the conversation flowing as well as much hilarity as one accuses the other of initiating the conversation.

After much confusion and then amusement, I had a lovely chat with my random person – a 26 year old film major from San Francisco who loves The Smiths and Joy Division – about everything from the current economic climate to the fact that we both love music from the decade we were born rather than stuff that is around now and how Americans get rather confused about how Britain, the UK, England, Scotland and Wales all fit together.

It was random and totally anonymous but ultimately harmless and rather fun. It also highlighted for me that the world isn’t as big as you sometimes may think and the internet can be brilliant and surprising.

More links:
The AIM FishBot Phenomenon
Got a random IM message?
AIM Fish (not Phish) bots
Project Upsteam Screen Names
The Missing Hat

Facebook – Yes or OH, NO!

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*sigh* Nice. I’ve been stitched up by my Mrs who sent me a link to the Facebook app Yes or No (link). Now, I thought it was like Am I Hot or Not and started merrily clicking away. You know how it works…..
She looks nice
*click*
Yeesh!
*click*
Grrrr….
*click*
You are not 31.
*click*
etc.

It was only after I had been clicking for a while that it dawned on me.

This is a dating application.

All these people are going to know who I am and expect…..something!

Oh, pants!

Then it also dawned on me that they will also see

  1. what I look like and
  2. that I am married.

Saved!

Master Johno

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I’ve had a couple of messages over the past week from old friends from my Haven & Pontin’s days where I’ve been referred to as Johno. The following keeps popping up in my head…….

Me: Johno? Johno… Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time… A long time.
Junior: I think my uncle knows him. He said he was dead.
Me: Oh, he’s not dead… Not yet anyway.
Junior: You know him?
Me: Of course I know him….He’s me!
*pauses*
Me: I haven’t gone by the name of Johno since before you were born.
*looks away reflecting on the past…at Camber and Littlesea*
Me: I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn’t allow it. He feared you might follow old Johno on some damn fool idealistic summer season show like your father did. It’s your father’s jacket. This is the weapon of a BlueCoat. Not as clumsy or as random as a Red Coat, but an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For over a thousand generations, the BlueCoats were the guardians of fun and laughter in the Old Holiday Camps. Before the dark times. Before Ibiza.

But I am an old man and my powers are weak….

Ikel – the family formerly known as Ykema

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As only some family and friends are aware, my great-great-grandfather changed his name from Sepke Ykema to Charlie Ikel when he emigrated from Friesland in the north of the Netherlands (Holland) as he thought it would be easier for the English to pronounce. How wrong he was! Incidentally, he chose Charlie as that was his nick-name on the docks. None of his East London co-workers could say Sepke correctly, so they called him Charlie instead and it stuck.

Anyway, did a quick search on Facebook for Ykema to see how common it is. There are LOADS of them in the US and Canada, but I am guessing that they are probably not related. Having said that, I don’t know about much about Charlie’s brothers or sisters so it may be possible.