Moonflower's Reflections

Disliking Gym Says You Are Thoughtful

You are thoughtful, philosophical, and downright cerebral. For you, gym is too intense and competitive. You aren't always in the mood for playing hard. You may or may not be into exercise - but any physical movement you do is under your own terms. You don't get your happiness through thrills or adrenalin rushes. Your bliss comes from quiet reflection.

Believe it or not, there's a hedge underneath all that snow. Don't ask me what caused the sort of slot to form. It's about a hand high and an arm wide.



This is a snowcovered wall.

I've had it with winter! No more snow!

Apart from Care2 and their own ThePetitionSite (when you've signed, you can tweet it out to your friends), there are other sites where you can click daily to generate free donations. There are also other sites where you can sign petitions -  The Hunger Site (where you can also send free postcards), Change and One spring to mind as well as Petition Online and Twitition, associated with Twitter (as you might have guessed, from the name).

EcologyFund
RedJellyFish
The Environment site
Klimatbalans
A click for the forest
Por los Chicos
Clique semi-arido
The Solar Site
Hungerfighters
Tarahumara Children's hospital
Big Cat Rescue
Give Us a Home
Click to Give
BarkingMad
LandCareNiagara
Bhook
Hungry Children
One Click, One Meal
Okruszek - I think this one feeds hungry people, but I don't know the language
Die Waldseite
Free Rice - this one is really fun - you have to use your word knowledge to donate free rice to starving people
Free Kibble
Free Kibblekat

Miscellaneous

OpenID is supposed to organize your login info so you can log on to any site using just one ID. So far it hasn't worked out that way, but more and more sites recognize Open ID. I've signed up for it, but I still don't know all the ins and outs of using it.

Another cool little site is Gravatar. Sign up and upload a photo. Connect it to one of your email addresses, then if you join a site that is associated with Gravatar (like WordPress.com - it owns it), your image will show up on that site without you having to upload it again.

Listography - this might not be particularly useful, but if you like making lists this is a nice site to do it.

Internet Movie Database - In theory,  on this site you should be able to find every single movie or tv series made. There's a list of the cast and crew, trivia etc. All the various cast and crew members also have their own pages, with photos, filmography, trivia etc. 

Technology

If you're interested in computers (macs) and/or mobile phones I have a few sites for you:

LowEndMac
Applelinks
GSMarena
Softpedia

Free downloads:

CNet Download.com - they also offer reviews of gadgets
Tucows

News

I read news online in a couple of different places mainly
BBC news 
Guardian (not the snarky comments)
The Local - if you're interested in European (mainly Swedish and German) news in English.

Bookmarks

If your computer has crashed, you'll know how easy it is to lose valuable information. You might have lost your bookmarks too. Fortunately there are some sites where you can store your web browser bookmarks for free. The ones I've tried are Mybookmarks and Hampr. They have very nice features and are easy to use. You can log on to Hampr using Open ID.

Neopets is a really cute site with what you might describe as virtual pets. You can get up to four cute little figures to play with. There's a whole system of buying and selling stuff for your Neopet - clothes (kind of lame), backgrounds for their images, food, toys etc. You can also play games and gain Neopoints. Unlike in Second Life (see below) this currency can never be converted to 'real' money, and on the contrary there's also something called Neocash which you have to buy for 'real' money. Somewhat unexpectedly, perhaps, I love Neopets. It's so cute and some of the games are actually fun, though normally I don't like to play games. There are some spelling games and other word games that I like.

Chat/instant messenger

There are many different free chat programs/instant messengers. The ones I use now are Adium (for Mac users) and Skype (available for Mac and PC). If you're on a PC, I'm told you can use Pidgin. Adium (and Pidgin) are multichat programs, which means you can use them for many different chats - ICQ, AIM (and/or iChat - for Macs), Yahoo etc.

You don't necessarily have to use a chat program though. There's a site that lets you chat, using most of the major instant messenger ID:s - Meebo. A note to LiveJournal users - if you don't know how to use LJ talk and would like to, look no further. You can add it to the chat client of your choice or add it to your Meebo account. Even if you do use a chat program at home, you can access all your IM:s on the Meebo site. Very practical.

RIght now I'm only on LJ (a sort of Jabber chat) and Jabber (again). Skype uses a different software but that too is free to download and the cool thing about that is that you can use it almost as a telephone. In fact, you can buy a 'real' phone and use Skype in it. That means you can make phone calls for free (well, in this case they're called voice chats, but it's more or less the same). So for Skype you can choose between text chat (ordinary chat), voice chat and video chats. The sound quality is usually very good.

Online fiction archives

If you like to write stories, like me, you might want to upload them to an online archive. For original fiction, I've used Fiction.Press. It's a sort of spinoff from FanFiction.net. It's easy to use and posting your fics there can get you feedback from your readers. Or you can read other people's stories and comment on them.

If you write fan fiction, there are several different options. I use

FanFiction.net
FanWorks.org
and
Archive of Our Own.

They all work pretty much the same (FictionPress too). You have to use ratings and warnings. Usually, there are different categories too.

Search engines

Many people agree that Google is the best search engine. For various reasons that I'm not going to go into, I haven't used Google for years, but it seems I might change my mind about that. In the meantime I've found alternatives. Some of them are very nice.

Dogpile
Ask
Zakta
Clusty
Mamma - as everyone knows, mother knows best... ;)
Gigablast
Wikipedia - not really an ordinary search engine, it's far more than that, but it works fine as one anyway. Available in many different languages.

For anything you do online, basically, you'll need an email address. Sometimes your internet provider offers one, included in your internet connection, but that's getting less and less common these days. Having more than one email address can be useful. You might want to use them for different things, for instance to separate your work email and your personal email.

Whatever you want to use your email address for these are good, free email providers:

Webmail

It's like you'd guess - email available through a web page. Of course, you'll need to sign up through a web page for all kinds of email accounts. You'll also need an internet connection to check your email, but you must know that already.

I use the following free providers:

Icerocket webmail
Care2 webmail
MailPuppy
Caring4Animals.com

They're all good, and offer quite a lot of storage space. Of course they're nothing like Gmail, which I haven't tried myself. I've heard they keep all your emails indefinitely and they use your emails to display ads (which is reasonable, since they offer so much space, but I'm not sure I'd like it).

Then there's something in between webmail and POP mail. It's called imap . You can use that exactly as a webmail address, and just log on to the site, but if you prefer you can also set up your email program to check your email and download it onto your computer. Well, in a way. There's also a copy left on the email server. That's the main difference. You can check your email from home or from work or wherever you are.

Fastmail is a very good email provider. You get to choose between several different domain names for your email, but to tell the truth, most of them are kind of lame. I'd just go with fastmail.fm or something like that.

Then there's POP mail, which means you really download your email to your computer and usually you get to email out as well. That means you won't be able to access the same emails from somewhere other than where your email program is.

GMX offers a fantastic email service. You can collect all your other email accounts into one and you get lots of storage, again, not like Gmail, but good enough.

I also use Gmx.net (a German service) but now you'll need to have a postal address in one of the German-speaking countries and the signup process is all in German. The same goes for any potential customer support. It's all in German.

If you pay for your own web space, chances are you'll get email addresses there too.

I use Eudora as my email program. If you're a Mac user, like me, you also get Mail with your computer or you can download it. In the end, I decided to use Eudora, but Mail is very good too.

I'm very interested in learning new languages and practicising the ones I already know (to some extent). Over the years I've been a member of a couple of different ones. The one I've liked best is LiveMocha. It works like this: if you're studying a language, you can get help from native speakers. Or you can help someone studying your language. Many people ask me for help with Swedish language exercises and once someone even asked me for help with one in French. It wasn't hard, fortunately, something like what I did when I first began to study French at the age of 13.

Since I'm a major booklover, I've joined three (four if you count a Swedish one) book sites.

LibraryThing
GoodReads
Shelfari

You can post all your books (or as in my case, the titles I can remember - long story), read reviews or post reviews. There are more features but those are the ones I've used. You can post a LibraryThing author tag cloud in the sidebar of your WordPress blog or in some other places too, if you want them to show up on your blog. There are other widgets that you can post too.

Second Life is a community, but it's a bit different from many others. It's in 3D. You get an avatar (not quite like in the movie) that can move around and interact with other avatars. You can customize that avatar pretty much any way you like, add virtual pets, change hairdos and go on shopping sprees with it. If you're interested in building/creating things in a 3D environment, you can, but you'll need to pay a little to upload your 'textures'. You can 'buy' or rent 'land' and all kinds of things. And you can chat. Voicechat or text chat, whatever you like.

I'm not entirely happy about SL. You hardly ever run into so many nutcases as you do there. Some can be very annoying. Many people have 'sexual' relations in there. Cartoon sex. Pretend sex. LOL. (I didn't make this up, but it's too funny not to share it: Second Life - where men are men, and so are the women, and the children are FBI.)  It's also very much about money, though you can experience SL without paying for anything other than your computer, software and internet connection. There are an almost limilless number of 'sims' - regions - that can be beautiful and intricate and fascinating. And you can go 'shopping' in huge stores. Strangely enough, it's very relaxing. I'm not really into shopping in real life, but in SL I love to browse those stores, even though most of the clothes in there are slutty, to put it bluntly. My sister and I have had to learn to design our own, but that's another story.

There are real businesses in SL and some universities teach courses in the 3D environment, so it's not all 'fake'. I've heard companies have staff meetings in SL and I know real famous singers have concerts there. The trouble is I always get to hear about it too late. Apparently, you can also 'watch tv/movies' too, but I've never tried that. You can also display your photos or art work. It's a bit difficult to learn to move around in there, but I'm living proof you can learn how to do it. I even made a good friend in there, which was totally unexpected.

Warning: Self-pity

Lately almost all the books I've read have been disappointments, at least to some extent. I can't believe I've completely lost my judgment so I can only imagine that somehow the books (or their writers) or I have changed. It's probably the latter. The me of today has changed too much. I'm sadder and more disillusioned. Maybe if I manage to pull myself together and straighten my life out, I'll become more enthusiastic about books again. Don't get me wrong, I still love books, I just don't seem to feel as happy about them as I did, even three or four years ago.

I feel my life slipping away, slipping through my fingers, like in that awful biblical story I was told about in what the people who ran my daycare had instead of Sunday school (Saturday school?). It's been haunting me ever since. You probably know it, if you're familiar with the Bible.

A girl walks across a field. She's to pick only the best grains, but every time she sees what she believes to be the best, she catches sight of others in the distance, that seem bigger and better. In the end, she's walked across the field, her basket empty, and.she can't go back.

What worries me is that even though I'm probably somewhere on the field still, knowing I need to harvest the grains, I can't do it. There's always something preventing me and I can't stand still either, I keep moving ahead, in one sense, yet not moving at all, in another sense. It scares me.

I don't know what to do and I suppose not liking the few books I can afford, is the least of my problems. It's just that those books should be brightening my days and instead, they're not. A waste of money, that could have been put to better use elsewhere. Oh, well. Sorry about all the self-pity.

At one time or another I've been on most of the major social networks (MySpace, HI5 and Friendster). I suppose I liked MySpace the best, but in the end, I left (twice). I read somewhere that it's a bit like coming to a major central railway station hoping to meet people. It won't work. You'll need to get to know them from somewhere else or get someone you know already to introduce you. That's very true. I never made any friends, and the only contacts I really had were with people I knew from somewhere else.

Ning is a social network for - creating social networks. You get to have your own network or networks. It's really quite cool. You get most features that you get on other social networks, but this one is all yours and you can customize it, invite the members you like etc. There's a photo gallery feature, a chat room, a forum and a blog among other things. You can also add widgets - little mini programs that can do all kinds of things.

My favorite social networks are special interest sites. Some of them will undoubtedly be interests you don't share, so you'll just have to skip them.

First of all, I'm a vegan, animal lover and animal rights advocate. I'm also concerned about the environment.

One of the biggest'green' social networks I've joined, is Care2. You can get a free webmail address, a photo album with unlimited storage - limited per month, send virtual e-cards that help save the rainforest, join groups (some of them are very active), sign online petitions, click to generate free donations and much more. There are also many interesting articles about all kinds of causes - the environment, politics, human rights, animal rights (they call it *welfare* and that's one of the things I don't like so much about it) etc. You also get a profile page you can customize. Recently, they added a sort of payment system where you can earn 'credits' and then use them to pay for something or other, for instance, give a cup of clean water to a Haitian child. When you've donated or redeemed your credits or signed a petition you can tweet it to your friends or share it some other way. Care2 makes sharing easy.

I've also joined several vegan and animal rights sites. Feel free to ignore this bit.

VegSpace
VeganWorld
VeganForce
Vegppl
AnimalRights Community Online

So far I haven't made any new friends at any of these, so maybe I shouldn't even have recommended them, but for me it's important to be a part of the veg*an community. I like them, but they feel very much like MySpace except with a cause I can relate to. I've also joined several vegan dating sites. (You can specify you're just looking for friends, if that's what you want). I've actually made a few friends that way, but unfortunately, just like all other friends, online or otherwise, some have drifted away. It's been quite a long time since I made any new friends, so maybe the sites have changed or rather the people using them. In fact, though I'm still single, I'm not really looking for dates online anymore. In any case, these are the ones I've tried:

VeggieConnection
VeggieDate.org
VeganPassions (there are many other passions sites - for just about any interest you might have) and you don't have to look for a partner, just friends will do.

Since i'm an animal lover, I'm also a member of several sites for animal lovers.

Petster
Dogster
Catster
Bunspace

You get to upload photos, fill out a profile page, mainly for your baby, but also for yourself - on Petster. On Catster and Dogster there are also plenty of articles about cats or dogs and groups with forums for people who love the same type of animals you do.