journal [archive]

November 11, 2003
.3:59 PM
My friend called me up sunday night to tell me about this paid focus group that I should seriously consider participating in. The focus group was looking for visible minorities that were born in Canada to do a study on the barriers to entry in the employment world. I talked briefly with the lady organizing the focus group. Everything was cool until the end. She told me that I would be paid and that dinner would be provided but it won't be anything like dim sum. Those were her exact words. I'm like FWAH?? I don't eat dim sum everyday (let alone for dinner). What sort of remark was that? Man, what's with these stereotypes. I would have thought she'd be the last person to make a comment like that.

I'm not bitter really. I just found it sort of funny.





November 9, 2003
.10:03 PM
Of mice and msn

As if the world wasn't paranoid enough, there's a new tool available online that lets you check to see if someone's blocked you on msn messenger. It does some sort of network trickery by pinging your system to see if you're online and signed into msn messenger. If the test returns true, and your "buddy" Miguel is conveniently off-line, then you just might be ARE a victim of being blocked.

My theory is that blocking someone from msn is actually worse than ignoring someone in real life. I say this because I, like many others, have a fair number of people on my list. But in actuality, I only chat with 10-20 people on my list. I'm simply not that popular. Those that know me from school will attest to that. So what about the other people on my list? Just because I don't really talk to them, doesn't mean that I'm going to ignore them or give them the cold shoulder. Ignoring someone is very much a passive activity. Everytime you make a choice to hang out with one group of friends, you're neglecting or ignoring the other group. Blocking on the other hand is very proactive. You don't really have to do it, but a lot of people do because of some sort of unresolved tension.

Ignoring someone on msn is like saying "Listen I still wanna be msn chat buddies but your chatting is really getting annoying" or "You're a great person, but I don't really want you to see me online at the moment" or "I hate your fucking guts I can't believe we were buds at one time but now that you've added me to your list I have no choice but to block you from now until the end of time!!!"

So do I have anyone ignored? Why don't you find out for yourself? In true CS/geek style (if you can call it that), I was thinking of writing some script that queries everyone on my list to see if anyone has blocked me. If the script actually detects people blocking me, it'll send out an e-mail query of the following form:

to: ex-msn messenger buddy
from: tlo
subject: i thought we were msn buddies.
message:
hey ,
i thought were msn messenger chatting budz. where did it all go wrong?
write me back k thx.
tlo
Truthfully I can't be bothered to write a script that does this. If I do find out that you've blocked me, you'll probably find me sitting alone in the corner of my room sobbing quietly while eating some beans from a can. Or maybe I'll be more proactive and block you too. And so he cycle begins....


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