Dear X,

I don’t owe you anything. No apology, no explanation, nothing. I have nothing to say to you and, more importantly, no desire to talk to you anymore. You’re no longer worth it.

You are the one that drove the wedge between us, you are the one that chose a guy over our friendship, and you are the one that made me realize I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by remaining your friend.

You called the shots. You made the decisions. And now you can deal with the consequences.

I’m out.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Dear Fellow Tweeters,

For the love of God, please stop using your personal Twitter account(s) as vehicles to spam for businesses. Yeah, free MacBook Pros and iPod Touches are really appealing and everyone wants one. And okay, (most of) the tweets for the Moonfruit (#moonfruit) competition were creative and amusing. But the Moonfruit competition was just one of the many, many ones businesses are running on Twitter, and it’s getting really tiring to read my Twitter updates page and see tens of hundreds of the same @replies and #hashtags with nothing personal or interesting in the tweet.

@sensatlandsend said it best in one of her tweets:

This trend of regular people voluntarily using their Twitter accounts to spam for businesses is wrong in so many ways. [source]

I know I can always just unfollow those who use their Twitter accounts to spam on behalf of companies. But everyone I follow on Twitter I “know” in one way or another, whether it be through various online communities or friends I’ve made through this blog. I don’t want to unfollow friends because I do care and am interested in their non-spam tweets. It just makes me sad that even though people hate spam (who doesn’t?) they’re still willing to unwittingly spam for companies. Just because it’s people and not spambots doesn’t mean it isn’t any less spammy.

And don’t even get me started on the Namecheap trivia contests and all of the pointless drama it ensues every time a contest rolls around. (My hatred of those deserves its own entry, to be honest.)

P.S. Twitter is also not an IM client – no one cares to read loads of tweets between two people about a subject no one cares about. I’d complain about this more as it irritates me as much as the whole tweeting for businesses topic does, but Melissa already covered this in “5 Ways to Fail at Twitter.”

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I live in a townhouse complex that’s in a U-shape, and in the center of the U is a lovely pond with a nice fountain that never seems to be working. It’s quite a nice pond really, and there are one or two tall trees that provide nice shade if I ever want to go and sit near the pond and relax outside. In the warmer months, there are loads of wildlife that come by this pond, like ducks, squirrels, chipmunks, and various types of birds. Sometimes, when I look out the window overlooking this pond, I feel like it’s a scene out of Bambi due to all the wildlife outside!

I’ve never really paid much attention to the wildlife that frequent the pond, I just associate it with how nature works and leave it at that. However, as the months have gotten warmer, I have noticed that there seem to be more and more animal visitors to the pond and the townhouse complex. I assumed that maybe word got out among the animals that the pond was a nice place to chill so they were all coming to hang out, so I didn’t really think much of it. But then one day I was looking out the window and into the mini-garden my family planted a few weeks ago and saw a type of animal I had never seen before near the pond: mice.

After some investigating and talking with my neighbors, it was discovered that my next-door neighbor is feeding the animals that visit the pond. I guess she thought it was cute to have all of these animal visitors, and her feeding them encouraged more and more of them to frequent the area. However, she either fails to understand or does not care that other people living in the complex view these additional visitors as nuisances, and not only has she attracted more cute Bambi-esque animals, but she has also attracted enormous amounts of mice. They get into the mini-gardens many of my neighbors have, and one even darted quickly into someone’s house when they opened the door to go outside! My brother keeps a watering can outside to use to water our mini-garden, and once he found a drowned, bloated mouse inside after a particularly heavy storm.

Many of my neighbors have complained to the management office about this particular neighbor’s habit of feeding the wildlife and attracting the mice. Some have taken it a step further and have set out poison for the mice, despite putting the other forms of wildlife at risk as well. I think the whole situation is ridiculous. Mice are rodents and are unwanted pests, and if it’s gotten to the point where poison is being set out to get rid of them, then why doesn’t this idiotic woman stop feeding the wildlife out by the pond?!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

For the last couple of days, the DC area has been experiencing a heatwave. It’s been a rough couple of days, with temperatures hovering around 90F. While 90F is not an ideal temperature in most circumstances, it is even less ideal when it’s finals week and Housing and Dining refuses to turn on the air conditioning for some unknown reason. I’ve spent the last couple of days devising ways to stop myself from feeling like I’m roasting as I force myself to study and concentrate in the hot, hot temperatures¹.

I understand that everyone on my campus is in the same boat when it comes to suffering in this heat. None of the air conditioners in the residence halls have been turned on, and everyone is stressing over end of year exams and are fleeing into air conditioned buildings such as the library or the student center in the search for cooler temperatures. However, what irritates me to no end, heat or no heat, is that whenever the sun comes out in such strength, girls decide to sunbathe on campus in the skimpiest bikini they can find and drape themselves all over every open, grassy surface.

If it is a girl’s desire to get a tan, that’s her choice. I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with, though, is that whenever I walk around campus I have to navigate around seas of bikini-clad girls who are determined to get a tan, no matter what else might be going on throughout campus². My school had its Admitted Students Day last week for the incoming freshman class of 2013, and for every huge tour group I saw of admitted students, I saw roughly six girls in bikinis, tanning on the quad. I mean, really. What irritated me even more is when there were girls lying in their bikinis in the shade. What is even the point of that? If the bikini is worn in an attempt to only cool off and not sunbathe, then take a dip in the pool. The campus has two pools for a reason!

My school is not a beach, nor is it a tanning salon. It is first and foremost a university, and I think students should treat it as such, especially on days such as Admitted Students Day or Preview Day, where potential and future students and their parents come to tour the school. There is a time and place for everything; lounging around in a bikini³ throughout campus grounds is not the time or place for sunbathing, even if it is incredibly sunny out.

1. I picked up a lot of tips about how to cool down your body temperature when I was living in Australia. I never thought I would have to use any of those tricks when living in DC! [↩]
2. There is always something going out at campus, whether it be concerts, fundraisers, guest speakers/lecturers, visiting diplomats, or functions organized by various student organizations. [↩]
3. I would address this to male students who sunbathe too, but they seem to be content in playing Frisbee on the quad during hot days, and they don’t have any scantily clad sunbathing going on. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Dear Ms. Betty Brown (R-TX),

Your recent statement about how Asian-Americans should change their names to ones that are easier to pronounce during House testimony on voter identification legislation is not only insulting towards Asian-Americans, but also to the people you represent in Texas. Your assumption that Asian-American names are the only foreign names that are hard for the average English speaker to mispronounce is ignorant, and demonstrates your lack of cultural and awareness about the diversity on which the United States prides itself. Furthermore, your belief that citizens should change their name for the convenience of poll workers and other civil servants shows that you see poll workers as lazy and/or ignorant and do not possess the intelligence required to identify one person from another.

You are quoted as saying, “Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Yes, Chinese is a difficult language to learn, one of the most difficult, in fact. However, if one’s name is in a language other than English, the English speaker is not required to learn the language that the name is in, they only need to learn the name. There are plenty of Asian-American celebrities that have had their names recognized by the American public without having to change their names so that they could be dealt with “more readily” in the States - Kelly Hu, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Ang Lee, to name a few. I doubt that all of the American people who are familiar with these aforementioned celebrities as well as other famous Asian-Americans became fluent in Chinese before learning how to pronounce their names.

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Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.