I wasn’t watching the Hey Hey reunion last night, but the regular appearance of the #heyhey tag in my feed alerted me to the fact that quite a few people I follow were. I felt compelled to comment

I was happy to see my tweet re-tweeted, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as seeing the following reply.

There’s nothing as wonderful as constructive criticism.

With every new technology that the web throws at us we end up with more and more disparate identities, accounts and places where our stuff is kept by other people. I can’t remember how many different websites and services I’ve signed up to over the years, let alone what passwords I would have used, and I know I’m not alone in that. I’ve started documenting these things of late, but they’re still a mess.

In the late 90s there were a few different attempts by vendors to become the single sign-on service for the entire internet, ten years later we’re still not much closer to achieving that, despite the good work of the OpenID proponents. The idea of single sign-on also brings with it a series of trust and privacy issues, who do you want having control of your information?

All of this doesn’t even begin to touch on the ideas of anonymity or authentication, which are also central to online identities. I’ve never gone to great lengths to hide my identity, although I have felt some responsibility to perhaps censor information about my family, the kids in particular. Since I started writing for Pure Poison everything there has been under my own name, as has my twitter account, so now I wonder what to do here?

Dave from Albury is mostly me, but with a few doses of hyperbole or fiction thrown in as poetic license has demanded, so would it matter if I started posting under my own name? I’m still undecided, but as an interim step I’ve started to align any online stuff under a common name, dfg77, so this blog, twitter, my as yet almost unused tumblr and even my email share the same handle.

Getting my online identities organised is not straight forward, there are at least nine different usernames that I know I’ve used since signing up for my very first rocketmail.com account in 1995, but it’s something that seems worth doing.

So let me just get this straight. There’s about to be rioting in the USA because Obama is so unpopular, and the people who so violently hate Obama, namely  right wing fringe dwellers who not long ago were calling for the “Axis of Evil” Iran to be nuked off the face of the planet, are now great big fans of the Iranian people? Excuse me while my head explodes.

The conversation on Friday went a little like this,

“Do you like Weezer?”
“Sure.”
“Then you need to take a look at this chick on YouTube, she does a cover of Keep Fishin’ on a ukulele.”

I was intrigued enough to take a look at it and was immediately smitten.

Julia Nunes has a beautiful voice, and injects her bubbly personality into all of her clips on YouTube. In the Keep Fishin’ cover, as with a lot of the other ones she’s done, Julia lays down her own backing vocals and has put together a video clip that turns a messy room and a webcam into something much greater than the sum of its parts.

I’ve spent a heap of time today looking through her other covers and then moved onto some of her original songs, which led me to her home page and the “Buy Now” button on iTunes. She has two albums, not just ukulele, full of delicious songs that I can’t stop listening to.

When YouTube first entered public consciousness Julia Nunes was exactly the kind of person that it promised to uncover, a talented individual from outside the traditional media channels, who is then broadcast to the world. The signal to noise ratio is still pretty low on YouTube, but it seems that the wisdom of crowds can pick a winner every now and then.

So here is my latest musical obsession, but if Weezer isn’t your thing take a look at her Beatles, Queen, Beach Boys, or Counting Crows covers. And of course, check out Julia’s original stuff too.

Too late for Christmas, but an excellent resource to bookmark for later.

My favourite distraction today is the McCain sign generator at johnmccainisyournewlogo.com.

Leave your suggestions in the comments and I’ll shamelessly steal your ideas and add them to the post.

From the Comments

Ray Dixon from Alpine Opinion chimes in with these three informative slogans…

Lee joins in..

Earlier today Ray Dixon “Outed” me as one Brian Limond.

The revelation raises several questions about blogging ethics. Leaving those aside, however, the most important question it raises is this: who is Brian Limond? Because it sure as hell ain’t me.

Several weeks ago I decided to test Ray Dixon’s oft-repeated claim that he’s not a malicious net-stalker by setting him up. I sent him an email from my Dave from Albury Gmail account, but changed my name to another fictitious one: Brian Limond.

The premise of my plan was that any decent, ethical person would ignore the name at the top of the screen and content himself with responding to the body of the email. If Dixon did this, it would go some way to demonstrating that he is indeed the unassuming “respected conservative commentator” he has claimed; if, however, he chose to focus primarily on my “identity” and threaten to reveal it, it would provide conclusive proof of what most people already suspected: he is full of shit.

I include the correspondence below, from which you can draw your own conclusions.

So, what have the events of the past couple of days taught us?

First, Ray Dixon is a malicious, unethical net-stalker who, in the absence of an ability to debate intelligently or in good faith, goes after the personal lives of his political opponents, and will swallow the most tenuous bit of bait — which any sane person would recognise immediately for a hoax — if he fancies it’ll give him some leverage.

In short, we’ve learned nothing we didn’t already know.

Game off.

Have a look right here for more background on this.

Update Psst… This is all satire. Sorry to those of you who didn’t know the back story and freaked out about it. Take a look at the background link just above and it all makes a lot more sense.

Let’s just take a look at this line by line shall we?

Our girls have outgrown some of their MFC stuff

I have no doubt that they have, but I’m betting that they’ve emotionally, rather than physically outgrown the stuff and the pack of losers that it represents.

Size 3 Jumper – has been through dryer so is on the small size
Size 0 summer jump suit

Previous attempts to destroy the clothes were unsuccessful.

There will probably be more

We got a fine after lighting the incinerator, but we need to get this shit out of our home.

Would like to go to real Melbourne supporter

As though there’s any such thing.

I realise that former Melbourne supporters are trying to purge the club from their lives, but I cannot condone using a community resource like Freecycle in the underhanded manner that Naomi has tried to today.