10 things from my really boring life

The topic of Livejournal has popped up a couple times on the social network du jour. More specifically the topic of “Does anyone still use Livejournal?” has popped up. Of course I was never much into the service to begin with. Aside from the occasional annoying meme or “anyone free?” post, my account was merely to view all the juicy details of my friends’ sordid lives. Not surprisingly it’s pretty useless these days…

Recently it came to my attention that the private feeds I used to keep track of you all had stopped working – largely because I accidentally deleted them. Not only did it take me months to realize, but once I logged back in there was almost nothing to read. No offense to those of you still writing there, but maybe 2 or 3 people had written anything in the last 6 months with most accounts blank for the year.

So it’s time for me to cut ties with that sinking ship. The only posts that really mattered were imported years ago, but I did notice one labelled “10 things from my really boring life” that seemed to fit the typically boring content over here:

  1. Helped an old lady cross a street in NYC.
  2. Stabbed a good friend…
  3. Gotten so drunk my dad had to drive from train station to train station before he found me wandering around a deserted parking lot at the end of the line.
  4. Built a large window-sized structure completely out of Snapple bottles.
  5. Skied through clouds.
  6. Had my car totaled by a police officer.
  7. Been hit by a lawyer when I almost did something stupid in court.
  8. Built a dorm room that became a regular stop on campus tours.
  9. Got a guitar string from a famous musician (Roger Miller) and helped someone get one from another (Chris Cornell).
  10. Sued Apple… oh wait, that was a different Thomas Slattery… How about almost been killed at a concert?

Fascinating life I led, eh? Not that there’s much to add over 5 years later…

Slight rant…

No matter where I go on vacation… no matter whether I have a blast or just an OK time… no matter how much I miss my home… Once I get back in my car it takes about 2-3 minutes max to begin hating New Jersey again. This state sucks the life out of me that much.

Oh, and what’s with all of my chattering friends? I leave for a week and come back to 130+ posts to read – and that doesn’t even include the rest of my blogroll…

All your livejournals are belong… nevermind

Along with my limited online presence of late has come an almost indifference to posts by my friends on Livejournal. No, it’s not that I don’t care what you have to say or don’t care about you at all… wait… no, that’s definitely not it. It’s that the Livejournal friends page is absolutely horrendous. If a few people write a bunch of entries one day, I end wasting a bunch of time just trying to figure out where I last left off. And as time goes by, that gets worse and worse.

So my goal had been to read my friends’ Livejournals just like any other decent feed – via Google Reader. The problem is that Google Reader doesn’t support digest authentication, which means that I miss out on any protected posts. And for some people, that would mean pretty much all posts. But along comes Scatman Dan and his wonderful and imaginatively named LiveJournal For Google Reader (now with v1.3 flavoring). This magnificent tool translates the protected LJ feeds into some horribly complicated URL that totally fools Google into displaying all of your personal secrets protected entries. And now I know everything going on in your lives again. W00t indeed!

I even get to rename all of the feeds with your real names so I don’t mix people up – very confusing for some of you married couples! It’s so refreshing to see everything like my other feeds – now if you people would just start writing more. Not that I can complain…