Tag: technology

  • About Face

    I like routine and it is easy for me to fall into the habit of doing something because it is what I do, long beyond the point of that thing being important. If I do not do it, I will feel anxious, because a thing which I am “supposed” to do, is not being done.

    I disabled my facebook account a week ago. I don’t expect to remain off of facebook forever (at least not yet), but it wasn’t working well for me (from a personal, not a technical standpoint). I was spending far to much time on facebook, even though I wasn’t enjoying that time. I was also spending too much time trying to figure out how I was going to make it work better for me, so I decided to remove that from my thoughts for the moment and just go cold turkey.

    Now, with a little perspective, I’m coming closer to deciding how to relaunch my use, and manage it in a way that is less time and energy consuming, and hopefully provides more positive than negative.

    I joined facebook (and Myspace) because my daughter was interested in being able to hang out with her friends online, and I wanted to look at the sites so I could make an informed decision. She was not yet old enough to join according to their TOS, so it was not yet an option, but I knew she’d like to have an account on her 13th birthday, so I started doing my homework ahead of time. I hated myspace, but facebook was fun for me. I had a manageable number of friends and it was nice to have a window into their lives, and for them into mine.

    Four years later I have, less than, but far too close to, 200 “friends” which is absolutely ludicrous. There are not 200 people on this planet who give a shit whether I am alive or dead, much less how my day is going or what the past ten photos of my pets look like. Hell, most of my actual friends don’t really give much of a shit how my day is going, because, face it, most of my days are going the same as previous ones.

    The thing is, I basically added everyone who ever added me, as long as I sort of knew them. I have no idea why they added me to start with. Do they just like the friend number to look big? Did they give facebook access to their email address book? I know one added me so I could play facebook games with her. I added less than a dozen people first. But, I figured if I was going to add them, then I should pay attention to them. I made friend groups so that I could post to only specific people, but didn’t use them for reading. If they were on my friend list, I read their updates. All of them. This could take a very long time if I hadn’t looked recently. Yes. I know. You don’t need to say it, and neither do I.

    Some of them are really fucking annoying too.

    Plus, I didn’t block any apps or games, so I got all that spam too. The whole point was to be there so that I could check it out for my kid, and keep an eye on her and how she used it. If she started spamming people with app shit, I needed to know it. No way to guide her along if I had blocked them all. Now, she is older and I am totally confident in the care she exercises as far as facebook apps go (and really, she can go ages without even logging in to facebook, because she is busy being addicted to tumblr instead, where half the time I want to throw up over stuff I see, but hey, she is older now, so whatever).

    So, I was overwhelmed with all this stuff to read, and the first choice was to narrow down my “friend” list. It turned out that was easier said than done, because while many had no real connection to my life, they were at least the friend of a friend (or friend of a business associate), and I worried about offending somebody, or some such nonsense. While I mostly feel it is nonsense, I don’t actually want to hurt somebody’s feelings if I can easily avoid it.

    So, I believe over the course of my week break, I’ve come to accept that I’ll just need to create reading groups on facebook, and really only look at those people regularly. Plus, try to just see what I see when I happen to login, and not go back to check on everything they’ve posted about since I last checked.

    I still find it a shitty way to communicate at any level that actually matters to me. Not to say that there are not some people that I manage to have meaningful communication on there with, but for most people, even those I care about a great deal, it just isn’t a good place for that. It is a place of small talk, and I don’t enjoy small talk. It feels like a waste of time and energy.

    I’d always prefer to have a one on one conversation, or just sit home and read a book, to attending any kind of group event. Living your online life as a group event is what facebook is all about. It is a group event that invades my home every single day. I need to manage the door much better.

    Fifteen years ago, the internet was more than a great resource to me, it was a refuge from the way general society interacted everyday. That is no longer the case. There is no way I can stop the internet cold turkey. I’ve stored my brain in the cloud. Dependence aside, it is clearly time for me to make a lot of changes.

  • Disconnected

    I’m finding it difficult to find any enthusiasm within me for G+, despite being a borderline Google fangirl. For a long time I was very anxious for a viable facebook alternative.

    The thing is, I don’t think I even want an alternative to facebook anymore. I just feel so incredibly done with social networking as a THING.

    I don’t need a “social networking” site. I need a “hermit occasionally bump into other people and maybe share a jug of moonshine” site.

    But, let’s pretend that I am open to using something vaguely social still.

    I would need G+ to integrate with Google Reader in a smooth and significant way.

    I would need to be able to EASILY mark things as read. The current Mute is too many steps. Plus, I’d like to be able to mark as Read, but show me again if new content is added.

    I’d need some way of labeling or tagging content, both purposeful tagging by the author based on topics, and autotagging by G+ based on type (a link post versus a photo post versus a shared post) so that I could filter reading lists based on both circles and content type. Some people I am very interested in their original content, but really don’t want to see the 100s of goofy links they post per day.

    Mostly though, I am tired. I am old. I’ve been living a very rich and dear to me online life since before the web existed. Quite frankly, the more sites rise up to connect us to people, the less I feel truly connected to the people who actually matter most to me.

    My month long dumb phone experiment has stretched into a month and a half with me hardly blinking. Rather than chomping at the bit to hurry and get a new smart phone, I feel half tempted to give up my laptop instead.

  • The Experiment

    I bought a Sidekick II in early 2005. It was my first smart phone, and it changed my life. I’d had other phones with web access in the past, but it just wasn’t good enough to be anything more than a curiosity. The Sidekick II was very usable. I could get out and about while managing my business and helping my clients. I was no longer so tied to the computer.

    I’m on my 4th Sidekick now, the Sidekick LX 2009. The first one I bought at a discounted rate and signed a contract with T-Mobile, but all the subsequent ones I bought outright, so I’ve long since been out of contract.

    T-Mobile/Danger/Microsoft decided to shut down the Danger servers on May 31st 2011. Without the servers, my phone is a dumb phone, with an excellent keyboard.

    T-Mobile handled the transition in a piss poor fashion. I had to spend hours on the phone with them, I could detail it all out, but who really cares. It was hideous and offensive. No two people would tell me the same thing. At first I was told that even though I was off contract, I’d be given a discount on a new phone because of the inconvenience of my phone no longer having the features I bought it for. By the end I was told that no way would I get any discount at all, unless I would sign a contract, at which point I’d get exactly the same discount as anyone else buying a phone and signing a contract. Zero compensation for the inconvenience.

    I originally planned to leave T-Mobile and go to Virgin, where I could get a plan that suited me well (unlimted data and very limited talk (I hate to talk on the phone) for $25 per month. I’d have to buy a new phone outright, but I wouldn’t be under contract, and it was cheaper than what a new phone with similar features would cost me to stay on T-Mobile. Plus it was cheaper per month than T-Mobile. It, admittedly, has for less minutes, but I basically see the less minutes as a bonus.

    I cut back the T-Mobile plan, because we didn’t need two phones with data plans anymore. At that point I realized it only cost us $5 a month to just have a phone that shared the minutes.  $5 is less than $25.  Of course it is cheaper, it has no data, but…

    What if I just went without?

    I’ve been living with a smart phone for several years now, and I’m addicted to the damn thing.

    I think it is a useful device, but it is possible I am deluding myself over how useful it is. It might simply be a luxury item, or it could very well be a monkey on my back, ruining my ability to think properly, since I store half my brain functions in the cloud, and keeping me from really living in the moment, because I am too damn busy posting about the moment online from my phone.

    So, I didn’t replace my smart phone. I just have a dumb phone. I’m seeing what that means for my life.

    For one thing, I find I don’t reach for the damn phone immediately upon waking.

    Actually, I sometimes leave it in the car or another room for the whole day, and don’t pay any attention to it.

    It’s inconvenient to not have the internet on my phone, but my world hasn’t fallen apart, yet.

    We’ll see.

    Anyhow, that’s why I am a little less responsive than you might be used to.

  • so it’s sort of social… demented and sad, but social

    I really hate MySpace. Even before I factor in the ways in which it is used, and many of the people using it, I just hate how incredibly ugly and broken it is. It is one thing to give the masses a way to quickly customize a page and another thing to give them options which create audio and visual assault on any person who is unfortunate enough to click a link. I find it foul and hideous and I am saddened by just how popular it is. I even signed up for an account to try to check it out from the inside and see if it was possible to create something more functional with their tools, because, if I could it might be a good level of promotion for the short films I produce. From the inside I found it a total mess as well.

    Even if I ignore the ugly, I am very turned off by the way in which it is used. It doesn’t just give me a bad feeling about the site, the popularity gives me a bad feeling about society – as if I needed extra fodder.

    Because of that, I found this article about Mixi, a Japanese online networking site, and MySpace trying to break into the Japanese market to be very interesting.

    I wonder if I would like Mixi better, if I could score an invite and… you know… read Japanese. Would social networking sites hold more interest for me for actual social networking, if they reflected a different cultural tone? It would be amusing if it turned out that I wasn’t actually anti-social, so much as just living in the wrong society.

  • I’ve been informed that the Hot New Thing

    is twitter. I am skeptical that I will get much use out of it, but I mention it because I know a bunch of you despise losing your preferred userid to the unwashed hordes just because you didn’t know about something early enough. I signed up. The site has been very slow today, no surprise as reports from some conferences are that it is a big topic of conversation. At least it can be set to friends only, so it isn’t just a tool to grow your social network.

  • Turn Around Bright Eyes

    We rented Karaoke Revolution: American Idol and tried it out tonight.

    The American Idol aspect is totally R-Tarted. However the rest is very KR, and I do love KR.

    First let me just take the time to complain one more time, why the fuck does Harmonix keep making these games without any saved player or character carryover. I am so sick of everybody needing to reenter their info every time we get a new game. It is dumb. DUMB. If anybody from Harmonix ever happens by to read this, FIX THIS. Of course now that you were bought by MTV you will probably only become more suckful.

    Alright, so we are all sick, so KR is not really the game of choice, but Gamefly sent it, so there it was. The kid and I made new characters but we didn’t bother to use the EyeToy to put our own “Cameo Face” on the characters. For one thing, we already have been there, done that and they won’t let us move our fucking characters over. For another it is late and we feel like crap.

    Make characters, enter player names. Get started.

    I didn’t look up all the new song options, but I sang “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Just the Way You Are”. I sang them both on easy, because I am in a bad mood and don’t want to be rated harshly. Scored Platinum on both of them.

    The kid sang “Unwritten” and “Sugar We’re Going Down” also on easy, she does have a cold. I usually make her get rated at a harder level than me so it is more “fair” because in KR, I like to falsify a sense of fairness. She scored Diamond on both of them. Yeah, she kicked my ass, even with her snotty nose and froggy voice.

    It is mostly like KR except that if you choose the AI option the three dorks babble at you after you finish singing. Also at the end the winner sings an encore of the song they won with. I left and did not listen to the kid reprise her song. Not I was tired of listening to her, but because Indy hadn’t stopped farting the entire time we had been playing, and I couldn’t take it anymore. Nothing like playing karaoke with a dog fogging up the air.

    Anyhow, we bought it. I don’t think I will ever play the AI option again. It just made it take longer and wasn’t any fun. The rest of it was fine and it will be cool to have new songs to mess with. Now we just have to add in all our friends names again. We should be done by the time they come out with the next version.

  • bored now

    Today I am migrating to my new computer. Overall this is a good thing. My current desktop is woefully underpowered for the workload I put on it.

    In the short term it means there will be a lot of swearing and fit throwing in my near to mid future as things on the new computer are “not right” yet and I won’t realize that something isn’t installed or that some default that I hate has been left in place until I am under deadline and completely behind.

    At the moment it means I have a lot of backing up to do. Which is what I am doing right now, and I am killing burn time by typing this. The computer I am leaving is a mirrored RAID setup, as is the one I am moving too. In theory I do not need to be burning these files to CD, nor backing them to an external drive. The plan is that these two drives will be yanked out of this machine and one will be stored away with all the data that is on it currently, and the other will be stuck in an external enclosure and connected to the new computer so that I can move my files onto it.

    However there is stuff on here that it would really really suck to lose, so I feel the need to play it safer and have quadruple copies of things. Unfortunately my computer is really not much better organized than my brain is, so it is a fair amount of effort to find all the important items that I want to make sure are saved.

    “69% Writing to disc” Nice display of the English language.

    Ooh, “100% Writing to disc” I believe that is my cue to do something. No, I was wrong. “9% Verifying the compilation”

    Xander is sitting next to the monitor taking turns between cleaning himself and knocking stuff off of my desk.

  • Post 1 of The Things I Like Series

    Having been raised to give some serious respect to Thumper’s Rule, I spend a lot of time silent. People who know me a little might be shocked to hear that, because I certainly don’t seem shy about complaining. People who know me well realize I keep much more of my rampant disgust and dissatisfaction to myself.

    So, I thought I’d try some posts about things that I actually like.

    But first, I’ll start with the negative.

    I have the shittiest luck in movie theaters. I can go to a matinee show of a film that has been in theaters for 8 weeks, and I will still have a shitty experience. When I go to the movie theater, one of the following will occur:

    • people will bring their 4 children ranging from infant to 8 years old to see an R-rated movie and let them run around screaming the whole time
    • people will let their child sit behind me and kick my seat the entire movie
    • people will answer their cell phone and talk to the person during the movie “nothing… just watching this dumb movie”
    • people will make-out stretched across the seats with their head almost in my lap
    • people will have belching contests and laugh hysterically at how cool they are
    • people will have blue flame contests and laugh hysterically at how cool they are
    • people will change their baby’s shitty diaper seat next to me and then leave the diaper sitting there
    • people who get off on violent rape scenes will sit next to me and become extremely and noisily excited during them
    • people will threaten to kill me because I ask them to be quiet
    • people will vomit and just continue sitting there
    • people will leave their young, unruly, poorly behaved, unsupervised, rude, snotty (usually literally) children to watch the film I am seeing, and go watch a different movie themselves

    Often, more than one of them occurs.

    It isn’t that I hate movie theaters, just people.

    Because movie theaters don’t work well for me, we use Netflix, and I find it a reasonably painless way to rent movies. Prior to Netflix, I hadn’t rented a movie in at least five years and was instead supplying any film watching desires with an out of control DVD purchasing addiction. Netflix did a lot to help soften the addiction. What is with the rating system though? 5 stars? Who can make any meaningful rating and comparison of a movie with a measly 5 stars. I need at least 10, and I really want at least 20 points on the rating curve to measure things effectively.

    They only give me 5 though, which makes some of my ratings come out a bit odd. There is always the quality factor to consider, as well as the enjoyment factor. Plus, how difficult am I to please in a particular genre? If I tend to hate movies in a genre and then enjoy one, it deserves a different boost to its rating than a movie that has everything going for it as far as my personal taste is concerned and yet only manages to not be disappointing. Even though at the end of the day I might think the second movie is better.

    Favorite is too strong of statement and I don’t use it often. I can’t even imaging trying to narrow it down to a favorite movie. I am just going to list a random 5 (not in order, nor necessarily the top 5) by genre, that I gave 5 Netflix stars to.

    Foreign: La Femme Nikita, Cinema Paradiso, The Wedding Banquet, Battle Royale, Amelie

    Animated: Bambi, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Nightmare Before Christmas, The Iron Giant

    Comedy: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Heathers, Swingers, Dazed and Confused, Bring It On

    Drama: Dangerous Liaisons, The Shawshank Redemption, Dogfight, I Am Sam, Dead Poets Society

    Horror: Nightbreed, Scream, An American Werewolf in London, The Lost Boys, Something Wicked This Way Comes

    Action/Adventure: Thelma and Louise, Die Hard, Indiana Jones, War Games, Young Guns

    Thriller: Killing Zoe, Falling Down, The Usual Suspects, Death and the Maiden, Closet Land

    Romance: Garden State, The Man in the Moon, Before Sunset, Say Anything, Sliding Doors

    Sci-Fi/Fantasy: Serenity, Empire Strikes Back, Blade Runner, Highlander, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

    So there, some things that I liked in some fashion for a wide range of reasons I am not going to detail out.