WebTools

Whoever Ineda's husband is owes markevens the BIGGEST FAVOR EVER. Also, this is just proof that Google Chrome is out to break up people's marriages.

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Today's lesson is understanding that sometimes, those cool apps you download on your smartphone can land you in jail, especially if you use it to impersonate the police. 21 year old Alexander Welch was arrested this week on a felony charge for the "unlawful exercise of the function of peace officers." In other words, Welch used the Police Light app to force the driver in front of him to pull over so he could pass.

That driver told police a driver behind them flashed a blue and red light and when they pulled over, the car with the flashing blue and red lights pulled in behind them briefly and then drove away. That raised the suspicion of the driver, who then began to follow the other car and called police to report what happened.

Does this prove that the app actually works to imitate those pesky blue and red police lights? I guess so but don't try to actually use them on people or you could be sitting next to Welch behind bars. Remember, people, use technology wisely. I suggest using this app only at the mall when herds of slow people are blocking the escalator. I hate it when that happens.

Marvel guru Stan Lee may have just answered one of the most pressing and integral questions in the history of comic books, nay the world. Indeed, physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians all over have pondered one baffling quandary, one with which fans of Kevin Smith's magnum Jersey opus Mallrats may be familiar. As Jason Lee's character Brody asked Stan Lee in the film to no substantive response: "The Thing! Is his dork made out of orange rock like the rest of his body?" Well, hold on to your seats, true believers, because in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, creator of The Fantastic Four (among many others,) Stan "The Man" finally provides the answer to the most burning metaphysical query ever laid upon the bundle of nerves and synapses we call the human brain. Find out what he had to say just below!

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Yes, we know it's been a while since we told your fortune by using the alignment of the stars and planets, but we've been busy. However, we're back now, so, even though May is halfway over, you can still use this sage advice to guide you through.

AQUARIUS (January 20 - February 19) - French people live in France for a reason, broguette. You live in Iowa. The mime clothes have got to go. - DV


PISCES (February 20 - March 20) - Oh, man. - MD

ARIES (March 21 - April 19) - Something horrible will befall you this month, because of something I forgot to include in the horoscope last month. - EM

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Boy, some of them Webby Nominees can come or go and you would never know the difference, right?

Am I right?

Anyway, seeing as the nominees were just announced and we've got David-Michel Davies, the Executive Director for the whole shebang, on AOTS today, we figured we'd give you a little primer of the categories that you actually give a hoot about. Soon, there will be voting, but for now, here are the crucial web site noms:

NETART
Britglyph
Dreamgrove
JacksonPollock.org
Protect 77
Time Spent Alone

GAMES
Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall
Club Penguin
Kongregate
Mafia Wars
Rock Paper Scissors: Extreme Deathmatch

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A few years ago before Facebook was widely available to everyone and still confined to students, MySpace was the king of this burgeoning new world of online social networking. My friends and I were first understanding the idea of what having a version of yourself on the internet that anyone could see at any time really meant, when one of the more social among us died suddenly.

It was a traumatic and tragic way that he died but the ever-present geek in me eventually wondered about his MySpace profile. I checked it out. The comments section was jammed full of condolences and "I miss you"s, the most interesting of which were messages from family members and friends who had lost touch. I knew these commenters weren't that connected to him in real life, and it was powerful to see them reach out in a public forum and proclaim their regret and grief over losing someone not yet clear of their twenties. It must have had some therapeutic value for them, like going to a grave and leaving flowers or some other significant object as a gesture of love. Eventually, his profile disappeared.

More recently, a friend of a friend died under similarly tragic circumstances and the same thing happened. His MySpace profile was bombarded with well wishes and for a while an almost daily reminder from his sister, stating how much she loved and missed him. Being curious and slightly removed from the situation, having never met him, I checked the profile every day to see how things unfolded. Eventually I stopped checking as people posted less and less, their grief apparently dwindling and sealing up. Recently, I went to check out the profile and found nothing there. An empty internet void we're all too familiar with when there are no search results. A huge white space where a friend of a friend used to be. My search "did not match any documents."

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Are you a millionaire, and are having trouble finding like-minded millionaires to hang with on the internet? Sure, we all are. It's a problem, indeed. Well, look no further, as a new website, affluence.org, is here to help you out with your problem. If you have a verifiable worth of over $3 million, or a household income of over $300,000 a year, you are welcome to join for free, which is good, since it won't put a dent in your considerable savings account.

Not only do you get to e-hang with your close millionaire and billionaire buddies, but you also get free access to a dedicated "Affluence Concierge," though I'm not exactly sure what that means, and 'receive priority access to the world's most exclusive nightclubs, hotels, and restaurants.'  Which is good, right? Because you don't already get that stuff in your real life, so you need a website to handle it for you.

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Not every bit of webtoolery on AOTS strikes my fancy. For example, I couldn't care less about what new social network takes the best features from Twitter and Facebook and mashes them up to form a mega social network (most of the time I prefer that even my best friends leave me the hell alone, so I definitely don't need to have a Twitter page). However, today's website-building, Web Tool, Scrapplet is another story entirely.

I'm a photographer and I'm always looking for a cool place to put my photos. However, building my own site has proven difficult and time consuming and I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel this way. If you've ever tried to build a site then you're aware that unless you know html like the back of your hand or own a copy of Dreamweaver, it can be a real pain in the ass to get even minimal results after hours of work.

However, Scrapplet's simple drag and drop interface makes building amazing looking websites a breeze. Heard that before? Of course you have, but I'm telling you, I've used it and seen better results in a shorter period of time than I have using similar "build a website based on a template" services like Squarespace (a Web Tool from last September, which I also use).

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