Goodbye MySpace

I've given up on MySpace. Why did I even bother starting? Well, my son was using it and he told me it would be a good way to keep track of his exploits. At first I was hesitant, because it's so clearly aimed at 20 year olds, but Adam told me, quite generously, "The Internet is for everyone". It quickly got annoying. No sooner did I sign up , but I started getting phoney "friend invitations" that were really advertisements for porn sites. But I can ignore spam. Harder to ignore are the advertisements, especially those with motion. How does anyone tolerate it? Maybe the kids tape little squares of opaque paper over the areas where the ads are. Maybe even that i could have lived with. But it's just too slow. (I'm told that MySpace is now the most heavily used site on the net.) What are all those people doing?

I have an awful suspicion. MySpace must be using a huge web farm. Maybe they've adjusted the routing so that undesirable people like me (that is to say, those over 30) get handled by slow servers, so we'll jusy give up and go away. Could it be true?

Superpowers

On Sunday the 20th, I went to an indie rock show for kids and their families, organized by the Bunch Family. The band was The Bicycles, a Toronto band. They were fun, but the opening act was like nothing I had ever seen. It wasn't music, it was something called "trials" bike riding, which I guess I would describe as acrobatic bicycle stunts, like hopping straight up with the bike, or balancing on the top of a triangle, or jumping from one box to another. The rider was Carsinn Wilson, who I knew from my local bicycle store as a mechanic. I had no idea that he could do stuff like that. I had no idea that anyone could do stuff like that, at least not with a bicycle.