When I first heard of and started to see friends playing Farmville, I thought. This is so stupid.

When I first saw and tried Cityville, I kind of liked it. I was a big fan of SimCity and I thought Cityville may bring some of this to the world of facebook. While it does to a degree, it is really nothing like Cityville, and after just a couple weeks of playing it off and on I have abandoned the game.

The biggest problem with the game is the excessive reliance on your friends (Neighbors). For every Community building you build you need your friends to staff it. Dont have enough friends playing the game? Well, then you will just have to fork over cold hard cash, and a lot of it! Seriously? I would rather pay a one time fee of $40 or whatever and be done with it. This ongoing charging to my credit card is NOT for me. No way Cityville, you are NOT getting my cash.

With just about every move you make in this game, Cityville wants you to SPAM your facebook friends walls with notice after notice (the same as farmville did, only worse). I have blocked all applications that do this, and in some cases even some friends!! And, if you dont spam your friends, you simply can not reach certain accomplishments. Top open certain buildings you need certain items. You have to post to your facebook wall that you need the item in the game, then someone else has to click the link for you to get the item. If nobody is playing from your friend list, then you can not proceed. (without spending real cash).

This problem is compounded by the fact that to open certain new buildings you may need 50 different items and 12 friends to “staff” it. Seriously? What a joke.

Playing this game is incredibly frustrating due to this strong dependance on others. If you have 100 facebook friends that like being SPAMMED all the time, and play the game, perhaps you can actually make some progress, but its simply not worth it otherwise.

I have to say I am shocked that so many people are falling for this game. Sure the makers of Cityville need to pay their bills, but they are seriously ripping off their players. If you want to buy say $150,000 in coins, it will cost you $100USD of REAL MONEY. The cost of building a house in the game can cost as little as 450 coins, or as much as a million!!! So to build that million coin house, you would have to spend about $650 of REAL MONEY. Seriously??? (Or you could just play the game for a LOOONG TIME with your 500 other friends who are all playing it.

Forget it. I didn’t make it very far in the game, and I blocked the app. Don’t waste your time with this one.

Many many years ago, long before I was born, the telephone was invented. Several years later, it started to appear in homes, and eventually was located in nearly every household.

Today the telephone has come full circle and many people no longer have “land lines”. Instead they have made the switch to exclusively use their cell phone.

Computers, and the Internet more specifically, are doing something similar. Not too long ago the idea of a personal computer in every home was a thing of science fiction. Today, most homes have them, and many have several. It wasn’t long ago when the internet first started to gain in popularity, and now, that too has found its way into just about every home that has a computer.

Just like the telephone, the internet is going mobile too. It is now easy to find cell phones that are fully internet compatible, laptops are impossible to find without a wireless network card, and many have cellular modems built in, and now netbooks are also online anywhere you go. The internet is everywhere, and it is leaving the home and expanding into the world.

It won’t be long before your internet access account is simply a WiFi subscription, following you everywhere you go. If you want to work from the beach, just grab your laptop and go, no worry about huge cell phone data charges as it will all be included in your plan.

Some day, globally free wireless broadband may be available as well, paid for by advertising – but I personally would prefer to pay a few bucks and remain somewhat ad-free.

I have no doubt that in my lifetime (probably within the next dozen or so years) wireless internet will be available everywhere – after all it practically is today. Perhaps it will work along the same lines as Satellite radio – the technology is all there, it just needs to be refined.

The one thing I am not certain about is the future of cloud computing (essentially using web based software for all your needs – word processing, graphics, gaming, etc). It is in use today by many, the most common being the various Google Aps, but I am skeptical that the masses will start to trust all their file storage on machines not in their control, requiring internet access to retrieve their documents.

There is a certain convenience in the whole cloud, but I personally like having all my files available on my personal machine, sitting there in front of me, where I have full control and easy access. Even if internet connections are sped up considerably, opening a photo stored on your local machine will always be faster than grabbing it from your online storage.

I suppose though, if the future goes in the direction of the cloud, I will have no choice to go there with it. I am however, all in favor for wireless internet available everywhere. (as long as they block it in resort towns – don’t want work following me on vacation)

I am always amazed by the power of the internet.

Yesterday my wife and I bought a new BBQ. We decided to sell our old one on craigslist. The old one has a few small issues, but all in all it’s okay. I would have tried selling it for $50. My wife, well, she wanted a quick sale and put it up for $20. Oh well.

So after an hour or so we got an email from someone who was interested. The next day, this morning, she called back and said she was trying to find someone with a truck to come and pick it up for them.

She called me back saying that she had a friend who would be passing through town with a truck and could pick it up. The buyer would meet the friend at our house, pay us, pick up the BBQ, and be on their way.

What makes this all interesting is that the buyer and her husband had never met the person picking up the BBQ. Turns out the buyer posted to Facebook that she was looking for someone with a truck to help them out. One of her “friends” volunteered her husband to come by. Before today, none of them had ever met, nor even knew they existed, and here was the guy with the truck picking up the purchase for them.

Within 24 hours we had listed and sold our BBQ on craigslist, and the buyer had met and managed a favor out of a guy with a truck. A couple things not really possible before the days of the internet – at least not at this speed.

Aside from playing around with this blog, I also have a very geographically specific website dedicated to my local area. On that website I also offer free classified ads for locals.

For some time now my other site has been hit hard by spammers from the affiliate program clicknearn.net based on Pakistan. I tried contacting the affiliate program, and they replied saying that they feel strongly against spam, but never did anything about it with their affiliates. I suspect that they actually couldn’t care less, and in fact, are probably the spammers themselves.

Ultimately I started banning the IP’s of the people spamming my classifieds, one at a time. But they kept coming with several posts a day. After doing some digging earlier this week I discovered www.blockacountry.com which quickly and easily generates the htaccess code required to completely block a specific country from your site. I generated and posted the code, and now, no more spam. YAY.

I hated the idea of blocking an entire country from my site, however, as my site is very specific to my local area, I doubt there are many people from Pakistan actually interested in my site anyways, so that combined with the removal of SPAM, I took the step and just blocked them all.

I later posted what I had done in Twitter noting the block a country website and got a reply from “imrananwar” who noted that he has founded an registry to help track problem ISP’s so that all of Pakistan is not hurt by these types of spammers. I provided him with the list of ISP’s that had spammed my site, the nature of the spam, etc. He is working to help reduce spam, and while I am not sure if he will succeed, I am happy to see that there are people out there that care and are trying to do something about all this bad stuff.

I hate email spammers. I mean, I really hate them. As if it’s not bad enough to have my inbox bombarded with spam every day, now they are starting to have a larger negative impact on my life.

I recently went to send an email to a friend only to have the email bounce back. It seems the ISP has flagged and banned my IP for having a “poor reputation”. Innocent me, and everyone else who has behaved on the IP, are now faced with troubles as the result of one bad egg.

I guess this is just one of those risks that comes with having a shared IP. Wind up sharing with a spammer and get your IP banned.

As a result I have requested a different shared IP from my web host, and they replied saying that my only option was to purchase a dedicated IP. It’s a minimal expense, but one I wish I could pass on to the spammer that is making it necessary for me to make the purchase. How frustrating.

I read one of the funniest things ever today over at Wired.

A woman named Susan had used her husband’s iPhone and noticed a photo of his “special purpose” attached to an email in his “sent items” folder. The email was addressed to a woman with a Yahoo account.

She confronted her husband about this and he told her that, yes, he had taken the picture, but had never sent it to anyone – he said it was an “iPhone glitch” that randomly takes photos stored in the phone, and attaches them to emails located in the “sent” folder.

Susan then posted a question in an Apple support thread asking if this glitch is real, noting her marriage depends on the answer.

I think it’s time she looks for a good divorce attorney.

FYI: “Special Purpose” is how Steve Martin referred to his penis in the 1979 movie, “The Jerk”. …Just in case you were wondering.

Please Canada, I’m too pretty for jail, don’t lock me up!

I don’t think I really have much to worry about, but over in Italy a judge has ruled that blogging is the same as publishing an unregistered newspaper – something that is punishable by fines and jail time, 250 Euros and up to two years behind bars! Since the ruling back in September, a second blogger has also been taken down by the Italian government!

It’s rather interesting. Citizens do have the right to free speech dating back to 1948, however, there is also a law in place that contradicts this staging that publishers mush officially register their new publications. How many bloggers in Italy do you think have their blogs officially registered? I am guessing none.

If you look deeper into Italian laws, apparently the vast majority of Italian websites are technically illegal! This means that there are an estimated 5 million illegal websites floating around out there – I hope Italy has a lot of vacant prison cells for all these hardened criminals.

(The Register goes into far more detail, so to learn more about this be sure to take a look)

I have to say, some people are just idiots. At least Sandor Ferenci, a motorcycle stunt driver from the UK. Ferenci had had friend video him driving at speeds of more than 130 miles per hour. His video was then posted on YouTube.

A random motorist had seen Ferenci driving recklessly and reported it to the police. They went to his home to investigate, and he asked them “Is this about the YouTube video?” Well, the police didn’t know about the video and looked into it.

The video ended up being the final nail in his coffin. He Ferenci was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail, and will also lose his driving privilages for the next two years. He will be required to take a driving test before getting his license back sometime in 2010.

All I have to say is, what an idiot. Posting his crimes online wound up screwing him in the end. While he does deserve what he gets, its amazing how people go out of their way to advertise what they are doing. This isn’t the first, nor will it be the last time when someone posts something to the web and winds up incriminating themselves. Watch out what you post online! That’s all I have to say!