Lately I've been making an effort to explore geek stuff a bit more instead of immersing myself in work or my own isolated coding projects. I was so focused in my last job that I had essentially put on tech-blinders and had stopped paying much attention to goings-on on the Internet.

Going to Google and spending the past few months frantically trying to understand How Google Shit Works so I could do my job didn't much help either.

So I've been randomly playing with things lately. Mac stuff: Growl made Adium Much Nicer (tm) and plays well with lots of other apps as well. Cog and Macfuse will probably finally give me convenient home access to all the music I left plugged into the Internet back in Iceland.

I've also been exploring Facebook and Last.fm to see what the fuss is all about.

I think I get it... but I'm still not very excited about this social networking thing, I find it annoying that the networks are all fragmented and proprietary. Facebook is very well done, but I'm not quite "hooked". I still have the feeling that I'll probably get bored with it in a few days, just like I got bored with Friendster and Orkut. Their 3rd party application development stuff is a very interesting twist though.

Last.fm seems much more useful to me, within minutes of signing up it was telling me about gigs I might want to go see here in Dublin and playing new music that appealed to me. But, being spoiled by Facebook, I quickly became frustrated at how hard it was to search for and add friends. Not that I'm entirely sure what I need friends for on Last.fm, but as I'm used to leeching off friends' tastes in music it seemed like the obvious thing to try.