If you have no idea what Twitter is good for but are curious just whatch this clip. It will only take a minute and then you know.

via @nettielamaa

Almost forgot: you can also play chess using Twitter.

In this clip the Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves uses five minutes efficiently by putting into a nutshell how the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have changed and how the whole World has changed during the last 20 years. He appeared together with his Latvian and Lithuanian counterparts in Riga in the final session of Transatlantic Agenda 2010 A Baltic Vision.

I am quoting Secretary Clinton according to the US State Department’s official blog (Boldface added by me.):

This follows on the work that we began over the last many months to transform the relationship between our two countries, to find common ground wherever we can, to further mutual respect and mutual interests, without in any way accepting the fact that there are not differences between us, because there are.

Wait a minute! I know that diplomatic language is tricky but this one takes the cake. There are three statements in the last boldfaced part of the sentence which are partly contradicting each other. Namely:

1. It is a fact that there are “not differences between us“, i.e. Russia and USA.
2. Russia and USA do not accept that fact.
3. There are differences between Russia and USA.

So would somebody please explain whether there are differences or not and if there are not, do the two countries accept it or not. Or do they accept that there are differences but pretend there are not?

If this description makes me silver I do not want to know about gold

You Are Silver

You are down to earth and unpretentious. You don’t feel like you need to show off, and you’re very secure with your place in the world. You are understated and elegant. You carry yourself with poise, and you’re more known for what you don’t do than what you do. You can fit in anywhere from a country western bar to a black tie gala. You are adaptable and adventurous. You are blind to social class and background. You see people as who they are … not as where they came from or how much money they have.

Here is my special greeting for today to everybody in Germany:

I did the German Wahl-o-Mat survey for the upcoming parliamentary election where I am not eligible to vote. I am not going to disclose my real preference but if I could vote in Germany, I would NOT vote for Die Linke, FDP, Grüne, NPD, SPD or CDU/CSU in the list below.

A moment  ago I was rated A +. Just so you know whose blog you are reading.

Say what! Rated? Here is the explanation:

Not serious at all.

Get your’s here.

What a joy indeed it is to have this test confirm that I am so very joyful.

You Are Very Joyful

You may not be happy all of the time, but you experience frequent moments of joy in your life. There are moments so perfect that time has stood still and you wish you could freeze it forever. You are so joyful because you appreciate the small things in life. You know joy is more about who you are than what you have. You are thankful to be alive, and you know that things could be a lot worse. You are content with your life.

The torrent bulletin board Pirate Bay was closed yesterday by a Swedish court injunction targeted against their ISP. And now, about 24 hours later the site is up and running again as if nothing had happened, displaying this cool t-shirt logo:

I am impressed by the speed of it. Just as I am impressed how Peter Sunde just casually broke the news in Twitter: “Oh, did i forget? TPB is up again.”

Welcome back, TPB!

This hilarious 45 second clip is intended for those who do not take competitive sports too seriously. I wonder if eating pea soup is considered as doping.

via @martkase

Is Twitter being attacked again?

This test tells me that I am independent and I put a great value on freedom. Not that I would not have known it but the description is pretty accurate. Come to think of it, I am more and more getting to like the Bolgthings tests.

You Need Freedom

You need to have full control of your life. You must make your own choices and decisions. Your confidence and self-esteem comes from being independent. It’s very important that no one tells you what to do. You don’t do well with rules, responsibilities, or commitment. You’re not flaky, but you do need flexibility. You may not always exercise your freedom, but you need to know it’s there. Just feeling constrained constrains you.

I appriciate that Twitter is concerned of my security but this is a bit too much of the good stuff. Locking me out of my account does not help me at all, neither does it prevent any unauthorised usage of my account. On the contrary, it makes things worse because as long as I have no access to my account, I am unable to make sure that nobody else has that access.

What happened was that I temporarily granted access to my account to a third party application. As soon as that app had done what it was supposed to, I cancelled the access and changed my Twitter password, just to be on the safe side. What I failed to observe was that when I changed my password in the web interface I had TweetDeck running all the time and I did not come to think that I needed to change the password there as well. Hence, TweetDeck kept trying to access my account using the old password and naturally failed.

Twitter apparently took this as an unauthorized attempt to crack my account. But rather than letting me update the password in TweetDeck they chose to lock me out in both TweetDeck and web interface. Security is fine but I wonder what the point in this action might be and how exactly is it going to increase my security.

Edit: Looks like I have my access back. I still honestly do not understand why it was necessary to keep me out for a couple of hours.

This test says that I am patient enough. At least I had the patience to take it although I do indeed not like to be tested on such matters. Come to think of it, the description of my patience level is pretty accurate.

You Are Patient Enough

In most cases, you are patient enough to keep it together. You may feel impatient on the inside, but you don’t usually let it show. However, if you’re made to wait for too long, you will usually crack. You’re only human, after all. You don’t like for your patience to be tested.

Members of the South Korean Parliament apparently had some procedural differences of opinion while debating and voting on a disputed media bill. Also a way to make the parliamentary disputes more attractive and understandable for the voters.

via @teemulehtinen

I just made this silly test which suggests that I should be living in Dublin although the whole of Ireland has so far been spared from my presence. I am not sure whether to comply or not but I guess the good people of Dublin have herewith been fairly warned.

These boys seem to have a strong opinion about the matter, though:

You Belong in Dublin

Friendly and down to earth, you want to enjoy Europe without snobbery or pretensions. You’re the perfect person to go wild on a pub crawl… or enjoy a quiet bike ride through the old part of town.

A couple of years ago I received an invitation from a friend to join Tagged. I was not very much for increasing my social network activities at the time but I thought I could give it a chance and joined. Found a couple of other friends ahead but my Tagged contacts today are but a fraction of those in Facebook and Twitter. Besides, I have contact, and I mean real contact, with everybody listed as my friend in Tagged through several other channels but all I ever get through Tagged is a load of spam.

Not a day goes by without at least one e-mail notification of a spammy message through Tagged. On worse days, like today, there could be about 10-15 of them. Most of the time it appears to be sent by somebody who says they have “seen my profile and fallen in love”. The alleged senders would be young enough to be my daughters unless they in reality were robots.

The rest of the spam mail is what is generally called Nigerian scam letters. One such today was the last drop into my bowl of patience. On top of 10-15 “Afro-Asian love letters” I received “a solid business propotition” from somebody whose picture displayed an elderly American or European gentleman. They chose to address me as “My Dear”!

This was where I decided that enough is enough and I am quitting. I found the “cancel account” button in my account settings and pushed it with joy. Just to get this:

Well, I am happy to lose a profile that spam robots keep falling in love with. I have plenty of copies of the couple of photos I have ever uploaded and as I said, I have good and clean channels to keep in touch with the handful of Tagged friends I have. I even see some of them in person from time to time so they are not likely to be “permanently lost” if I hit the “Submit” button.

Which is what I did. Only to be encountered by a password prompt! Never ever have I been prompted to enter my password when I have reported those messages as spam (for little good, though) because I have never logged out and never bothered to delete their cookies. So now they insist that I enter my password when I want to have nothing more to do with them!

Of course I did not remember the password so I needed to take the trouble to search it. Not a big deal but still a last annoyance to get rid of Tagged. Having bravely entered my password they have the nerve to throw a survey at me:

I did not bother to tell what they could do to improve themselves. I spared that detail for this post: EAT DIRT! YOU ARE FIRED!

Just had a look at my tweet stats. All sort of interesting or trivial statistics about my Twitter behaviour since last September presented in graphics. I picked a couple of interesting details to share.

This confirms what I already knew: I do not tweet on Thursdays between 9 and 10 p.m. The sauna steam would not be healthy for my laptop.

This proves that my sleeping hours spread evenly throughout the day but I am most likely to be awake on afternoons.

All days of the week are equal but those in the middle of the week are slightly more equal than others.

Statistically, the web interface is still my prime option but TweetDeck will soon catch up and pass by.

You can check your own Twitter stats (or those of anybody else, for that matter) here.

What about turning the cups upside down? According to Onion, Mexico is building a border wall to “keep the American assholes out”. Hilarious.

via @olevvaher

Commercials are not what you would be likely to see in North Korean TV and never before has the Central Television run a beer ad. The clip is a piece of crap but I would definitely like to taste the beer.

It is not the first time I receive this crazy error message when trying to enter a comment to a Facebook status update.

Now, if I am indeed offline as Facebook seems to be thinking, then what is the point in showing me this mesage? If I were offline I would obviously not see it.

JibJab usually awaits another electoral season before making anothe funny presidential video but now they have come out with their remarks on the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency. Whether you like Obama or not, got to admit that the clip is funny.

via Johan Ingerö

Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama in action against “air attack”

You may think so but I could not possibly comment.

Your Gift is Intellect

You are a big thinker, and you’re always playing with new ideas. You are curious about the world. You enjoy learning and developing new theories. You enjoy researching, analyzing, and solving problems. Thinking hard feels good! You’re the type of person who finds most mental tasks to be easy. You love to stretch your brain.

Do you think that protecting your computer against viruses and other malicious software is an overkill and not worth the trouble? Well, just watch this four and a half minute video clip and think again.

via Arvutikaitse