Mostly, I like the fact that it’s not MySpace.

Now, just like Microsoft Windows is king of OSes, MySpace is king of social networking, and the common denominator is that they really, really suck. (Oh, and it’s interesting that they’re both owned by similarly evil corporations: Microsoft versus News Corps. Oh, man, what I’d give to see a showdown between Gates and Murdoch. That would rock.)

The user interface is seriously obnoxious, it’s brain-dead easy for the femme-bots to infiltrate your Inbox, and people have profile pages that look like the Internet circa 1996. I bet you MySpace makes Eric Meyers cry.

And yet, because my cousin J is addicted, I find myself drawn into the maelstrom.

Truth be told, I entered the social networking arena because of, you guessed it, a girl. Actually, the reason why I ended up on MySpace is kind of funny. R signed on with a fake name “Hazel” and accidentally asked me to join. Now this was the time before femme-bots were part and parcel of the scene, and MySpace was literally a two-man deal. Sure, it looked amateurish, but you gotta give Tom and his erstwhile partner kudos for the moxy. But Hazel just happens to be the name of my cousin, and thinking that’s who it was, I accepted the invite.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

So right now I’m intent on hacking my profile. I’ve figured out where I can stick CSS. It’s not elegant, but it works. I at least have gotten rid of most of the instances of Arial on my profile page. (God Almighty, would you look at the ugliness of the Class and ID tags that they use?) I also figured out how to tack down the background pic. (I have a feeling it probably looks vomitously ugly on IE6, but fuck them anyway.) So the next task is to embed an Adobe (neé Macromedia) Flash MP3 player.

There are, thankfully, GPL’ed players out there, so I don’t have to troll around through the spyware ridden Myspace Mod Sites. (Vomit, vomit, vomit!!!) And I’ve got a shared hosting account with Dreamhost, meaning I don’t have to worry about where to stick my files so much (although I’m a little apprehensive about bandwidth, but we’ll see.) Now it’s just a matter of getting the files on the server and sticking a little HTML tag in my profile.

But unfortunately, my technologic choices have bit me in the ass. I stopped encoding things in MP3 a long time ago, partly because I want to give Frauehofer and their ilk the finger, and partly because AAC (also known as MP4, that is, MPEG-4) is a more efficient and open specification. That said, unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a flash player out there that can play AAC files.

So it’s back to MP3. Which is all well and good, except that Flash doesn’t handle VBR (variable bit-rate) so well, and I’ve been encoding MP3s with VBR since at least 1999.

This means that I have a lot of transcoding to do, which is generally never good for audio fidelity. (Not that I’m an uber-audiophile, considering that I never encode above 128 kbps, and while I do have a receiver which can handle seven-speaker surround sound plus subwoofer, my equipment is pretty cobbled together and not exactly high-end.)

And it’s slow as all hell, too.

OK. I give up. It’s time to go to sleep.