tinywind and filepic; no, wait...

It's often the simple and elegant that's overlooked. I just found two file/image/video hosts, tinypic and filewind, today after some targeted googling and I'm impressed. They have very few and unobtrusive ads, very good upload speed, and a brainlessly simple interface with none of the gimmicks of other, more popular hosts, but I'd never heard of them in my travels across the blagosquare.

Let me know whether you've heard of either of these before and what you think of them.

Certified user of my own pink squishy stuff

Userbars are an interesting idea; you make a bunch of shiny 350x19px PNGs each showing off something interesting or unique about you and put them in a neat little stack in your forum sig for all to see. It's not an entirely bad idea, and their aesthetic is quite chic, but the vast majority of them are basically product endorsements—empty expressions of fanboi-ness:






So, to all you mindless userbar users of userdom,¹ It's great that you're speaking your mind and all, showing off your obssesions, but who really cares?² Maybe after you've done something useful with your f4nboi ski11z you'll deserve to slap this one up next to your other digital trophies:



(I don't deserve credit for the above graphic; I don't know its true composer.)

¹Please note how I phrased that. I'm not speaking against all users of userbars, just the mindless ones.

²Say, I could make a userbar for my pento project...