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I am so over it – and it hasn't even happened yet. Not that I care.

I'm going to predict some things.

• Obama will become president – he talks better and doesn’t want to kill everybody - (or so he says)
• He will not withdraw the troops from Iraq. Simple point in fact - he cannot.
• There will not be a decisive military victory ever in Iraq (unless they kill everybody in Iraq (McCain’s plan)
• The us economy is totally screwed – has been for 20 years – been hanging on by the eyeballs to an ever expanding inflationary money supply. I did predict this before the most recent “correction”.
• US gas prices will get to over $5 a gallon – live with it – that is still about half what we are paying.
• Racism is alive and well in the USA as is stupidity. A new president will not fix the totally screwed legal system, health system, financial system, public education system, and a whole lot of other systems that are biased against the poor, the black, the disadvantaged etc.
• Most US citizens still wont realise that there is anything outside the 48 continental states or if they are vaguely aware of that fact still won’t be able to locate anything on a map. (I learnt to draw a rough map of the world freehand when i was a teenager and fill in most of the major countries.)

My apologies to the intelligent readers of SpyJournal – but then if you had the brains to come here most of the things above don’t apply to you.

Hurry up and vote in the screwed political system that does not equal one man one vote and let life get back to normal please.

And as happens once a year I look back and forward. Back to the first year of being 40 and realising that it wasn’t the beginning of the end at all. Playing AFL again was great, the cycling and running is still happening, though not quite as hard as before and I can still show the youngsters a thing or two there, and coaching basketball and volleyball has been fantastic.

I think part of the reason I am hanging out with the young guys and girls so much at the moment is because there is virtually no one my age keen to have a go. Most of the Dads and people I know round my age are sedentary. Sad really. I am organising cycling trips, rock climbing and hiking events, playing basketball and volleyball and these guys just sit there and say things like”Where do you get your energy from?” and “I wish I could keep up with you”. Well the answer is – You can! join me – if you dare. I have a couple of mates who comes when they can and go as hard as I can push them. Dave is one of those. He hates me and loves me at the same time. Here is a video of him finishing a very punishing ride we did on Monday.

I’ve been wanting to write an article for some time now about how the social (web 2.0) web works, and why there are so many different sites out there. specifically I wanted to explain the use of sites like FriendFeed, Profilactic and Ping.fm

I have built a small diagram that hopefully illustrates a small portion of this. It is not comprehensive, though it is accurate in the detail it does show.

The missing stuff includes a dotted line back from any of the sites in the 2nd or 3rd columns back to the first column.

Let me explain the circle of internet life and how Ping.fm, Profilactic and Friend Feed play a part.

So what is it? Why do you need to keep reading this? Well you probably don’t, unless you work in an organisation with internet access and more than one person there. Well that’s most if us!

Did that get your attention?

How about this?

Has Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Google videos been banned in your workplace? What about instant messaging or Skype?

I want to talk a little about why this has happened, and for the wrong reasons, and also how it will change in the very near future.

Organisations have been very jealous of their employees time (and they have a legitimate right to require their workers to be focussed on work not their social lives while in their employ. IT managers and CIO’s have seen applications like Facebook and messenger to be purely time wasting social applications with no business use. That is starting to change.