Don’t Get Fired by Facebook!

Popular social networking site Facebook is about to become searchable. Previously only people in your Network or your friends were able to view what went on in your profile – now soon the world will be able to see it. This could mean trouble to some and people have already gotten fired because of the content of their Facebook profiles. Don’t let that happen to you! Lifehack offers a few common sense tips on how to prevent problems:

If you like your job and don’t want to get trumped out of it, be careful how you use Facebook or one or the many tools like it. Use these above suggestions and your profile will become positively enhanced. Many employers, including the CIA, are turning to these tools as part of their recruiting arsenal. If you use them well, you might be hearing “You’re Hired.”

Or you can do what some of my friends do and avoid Facebook entirely. It’s your call!

Power Fantasies of Michael Oren

Writer Michael Oren releases a new book today on America’s history with the Middle East.

It was a precarious time for the United States. Americans overseas were being kidnapped by marauding Muslims while the government pursued a confused policy of both verbal admonishment and appeasement. What period am I talking about? Isn’t this what is going on now? Well, in a way yes, but this was also the situation faced by the newly minted United States of America between 1783 and 1815 where America fought its first foreign war in the Middle East and the first American soldiers to die in battle overseas were killed by Arabic-speaking hijackers.

DVDs for Jesus.

Perhaps concerned about their image as one of the harbingers of the downfall of enlightened society and morality, Fox has announced that they’re starting a new subcompany, FoxFaith, which will market and release Christian fare on DVD. The network that cancelled Arrested Development and Firefly must be worrying that God might be planning (quite rightly) to strike them down. Learn more at the Washington Post:

Twentieth Century Fox launched a Christian home-video label on Tuesday, becoming the first major studio with a unit devoted to the church-going audience that turned “The Passion of the Christ” into a blockbuster.

The new FoxFaith banner will acquire Christian-themed films produced outside the studio and release them on DVD, with the help of a marketing network tied into 90,000 churches and 14 million households nationwide, said Steve Feldstein, a spokesman for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

FoxFaith also plans to help market theatrical releases for six to 12 such movies a year, most of them small-budget productions in the $5 million range, through a deal with specialty distributor the Bigger Picture, he said.

Many of the films are direct-to-video adaptations of Christian books that have sold tens of millions of copies.

Me? I just think it’s faintly amusing that a dude named Feldstein was given the job of plugging the Jesus DVD network for Fox. But then again, I suppose the Big J himself was one of the tribe, so it’s only fitting.

Millionaires…IN SPAAAACE…

Every time the rest of the world finally catches up with luxuries once reserved only for the wealthy, they find something else to spend extravagant amounts of money on. This time, it’s space travel. Yes, once reserved only for ballsy former test pilots and the brightest scientists (and the odd schoolteacher), now the final frontier is in the hands of the super, super, super wealthy, thanks to the Russians who will pretty much do anything for a few bucks. Which is why, for the cool price of $20 million, American millionaire Anousheh Ansari is now orbiting our fair planet in one of those increasingly old-school Soyuz capsules.

A Russian-built rocket carrying the world’s first paying female space tourist and a new US-Russian crew streaked into the cloudless sky over the desolate steppes of Kazakhstan on Monday, en route to the international space station.

The Soyuz TMA-9 capsule blasted into space less than a day after the US space shuttle Atlantis pulled away from the orbiting station and began its journey back to Earth. The Soyuz entered orbit about 10 minutes after liftoff, according to Russian space officials monitoring the launch at Mission Control in Korolyov, outside Moscow.

“The launch was successful. Everything went as expected,” said Russian Mission Control chief Vladimir Solovyov.

Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and US astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria were to join German astronaut Thomas Reiter on the station just over 48 hours after blasting off from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Joining them was Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-born American telecommunications entrepreneur who has paid a reported US $20 million (Rs 92.27 crore) to become the fourth paying visitor to take a trip on a Russian spacecraft and visit the station.

“I’m just so happy to be here,” Ansari said ebulliently as she entered the Soyuz rocket, shrouded in vapours from the super-cooled fuel tanks and painted a soft orange hue by the just risen sun.

Well, if this blogging thing pays off, and I’m SURE it will, I’m going to space! Of course, by the time I have the money, it will probably have become commonplace, with people complaining about that damn crying baby in the next pod, flight announcements that include “For those of you seated in escape pod rows, please refer to the onboard instructions…” and flight attendants floating by offering you a choice of the freeze-dried chicken or freeze-dried beef. I can’t fucking wait.