Category Archives: Technology

User Experiences on XBox Live

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[Begin Rant]

My Brother once had an xBox live account but let it slide due to budget restraints and wanting to buy some totally awesome things that may or may not include a seven foot long sword.

Anyway, over the holidays our foreign exchange student suggested that he, my brother, my cousin, and myself play some Halo. So we try to start up a firefight match. All of us log in and after getting everything set up, we are informed that we have too many people to play firefight. So we play some multiplayer instead. But this isn’t good enough for four gamer buddies on vacation.

Now my cousin does have xBox live, and he also happens to have a promo code for two free days of xBox live Gold. So he brings his xbox and sets it up in one room while my brother signs into his account, enters the promo code and then downloads a whole years worth of updates for his system.

Some time later we are ready to begin. My cousin sets up a match, I join as a guest on his box while my brother and exchange student try on my brother’s box. The second a guest a logged in on my brothers trial account they get kicked out of the game. For some stupid reason a two day xBox Live Gold trial doesn’t provide 100% of the functionality of a Live Gold account. (Great way to test it out and see if it’s worth your money, right?)

Having no choice but to get an actual account, the foreign exchange student offers to pay and heads upstairs to get an xBox Live account for my brother. Since he was paying he decided to add it to his profile, and after putting in all his information, he realizes that he doesn’t have a postal zip code and xBox Live won’t let him sign up.

Again denied from our gaming ambition, I offer to put my credit card in. So I put in my credentials, unknowingly, into the foreign exchange students account. Upon finishing all the entry I am told by Microsoft that his account is not eligible for xBox Live. (I’m not sure why, they didn’t say. It might have been his age.) Also, Microsoft won’t let me take my credit card info out of his account via the xBox.

You’d think. You just might think that they could have told the account wasn’t eligible before they had me enter ALL MY DATA IN. You’d think.

By this time my brother has finally grabbed a USB keyboard to help with data entry and after logging into his account I am able to put all my info into Microsofts system again and purchase three months of xBox Live for $9.99.

Overall this was one of the most time consuming and painful consumer experiences I have had in quite some time. Not to mention that I now have to get two people to log in to the Microsoft xBox Live account and remove my credit card info. (Sorry, Microsoft, it’s not that I don’t trust you (though I don’t, [You can thank Sony for that]), it’s that I don’t need my younger brother and a Chinese exchange kid to have my credit card on file.)

Would it kill these companies to make this process any less painful? It’s killing me.

Facebook Books

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I’ve been meaning to get this in writing for some time now, because if I don’t I won’t be able to say “I told you so” when this actually happens.

With Facebook’s launch of the new Timeline feature, I think they are poised very nicely to start offering printed memorabilia. Think about it. They have photos, status updates, events, comments from friends, and more. They know what got the most attention. They have a good idea of what’s important to you.

Imagine this: you go to Facebook and click on a “Printed Book” button. Give them a starting date and a stoping date and Facebook instantly generates a 40 page book of photos, status updates, comments, and likes for your four years of college. You page through it, approving the photos, proofing the text, and swapping out the status updates or photos that are inappropriate for the type of book you are getting.

Rather than your college years, maybe you choose a vacation you took. With maps of where you “checked in” photos that you took at those places and comments from jealous friends who watched your progress from home.

Apple has been promoting books from iPhoto for years. Many photo printing places offer similar selections of printed photo books. There are a few independent companies that let you do something similar, but NONE of these options have the social element and all inclusive data stream like Facebook has.

The books certainly won’t be cheap, but they need to be terribly expensive. For $50 you could give your brother a book of photos and updates chronicling from when he met his girlfriend to the day they got married. (Depending of course on if your brother’s privacy settings allow friends to print books of his timeline or not.)

If Facebook doesn’t jump on this, a third party application will. (If one hasn’t already.)

In fact, I almost see parents setting up accounts for their newborn children to populate it with photos and updates in order to get a full life catalogue. (Facebook might even add this type of thing as a feature.)

That’s my prediction. What do you think?

Apathetic Zeitgeist for 2011

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It’s Apathetic Thursday and it’s time to take a look at all the terms which sometimes inexplicably lead people to my site.

I’m going to refrain from talking about the data too much and just let the number speak for themselves. Most this information is really only valuable to me and this is an easy way to archive things. So enjoy!

Here are the top 10 searches, provided by WordPress’ built in web stats (now part of JetPack.)

Search Term Number of Searches
portal test chamber sign 266
pi shirt 190
metroids 143
pi shirts 121
chamber music hero 102
mario games 91
i ate sum pi 78
portal test chamber signs 78
m&m addiction 71

WordPress provides me with the top 500 search terms, so I ran the list through http://textalyser.net/ for frequency analysis.

Word Occurrences Frequency Rank
portal 83 5.4% 1
chamber 57 3.7% 2
airtunes 57 3.7% 2
test 52 3.4% 3
mario 38 2.5% 4
out 36 2.4% 5
sign 26 1.7% 6
airport 25 1.6% 7
kart 24 1.6% 7
flickr 19 1.2% 8

Sorting though the list of 500 search terms, using only my vast intellect and Apple’s Numbers:

Term Search phrases containing term total searches containing term % of total searches
Portal 93 880 21.96%
Pi 77 862 21.51%
Chamber 66 857 21.38%
Sign 57 753 18.79%
Test 57 684 17.07%
mario 44 390 9.73%
Metroid 22 356 8.88%
Airtunes 59 328 8.18%
Kart 36 198 4.94%
M&M 13 126 3.14%
addiction 10 111 2.77%
flickr 25 88 2.20%
WordPress 20 69 1.72%
Tetris 7 47 1.17%
bug 6 45 1.12%

(*Note, some searches contained more than one term, so percent will not add up to 100)

Comments:
AirTunes. Clearly wireless technology such as AirPlay is still giving some people problems. I don’t imagine this will get any smoother as more devices start becoming wireless. The posts people are digging up are from 2007 and the same issues are still plaguing people today.

M&M Addiction. There must be some sort of conspiracy theory or television reference to M&M Addiction, because I get a lot of hits on that. I know I’m addicted to chocolate, but I didn’t know this was “a thing.”

Portal. I’m glad my Portal sign got some attention this year. I was kinda hoping it would hit some of the mainstream sites, but it never went completely viral. Maybe next year.

Bug. My “bugs in keyboard” post has generated more traffic than I expected it to. Although I had a spider run and hide in my keyboard, apparently other people have bugs coming out of their keyboards… *eeeewwww*

Chamber. While a lot of the “Chamber” searches were people looking for Portal things, a good portion game from people where looking for the Foxtrot “Chamber Music Hero” comic, which I linked to shortly after it came out.

Awards:
The “What is this I don’t even” Award goes to the 2 people who searched for:
“why do tiny ants on my cumputer”

The “Grammar King” award goes to the two people who searched for:
“if ms word file incomplete then how save complete”

The “How on earth did you find my site?” award goes to the two people who searched for:
“gooseberry drink”

Video Game Music

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I listen to a lot of video game music. My iTunes library consists of 7000+ video game songs (11 days, 9 hours, 54 minutes, and six seconds)* including OSTs, Remixes, OCRemixes, ZREO Orchestrations, and more. Most of the music is from games I have played and enjoyed, some is from games I have never even heard of (until I found their soundtrack). I enjoy the music in part because it is mostly without lyrics (a musical feature I find distracting during certain activities like writing.)

One thing I enjoy is listening to the different styles for each game. It’s almost like a fingerprint. I consider myself a meager video game music connoisseur and my bother and I sometimes play games where we need to guess which game the music is from. MegaMan has a very distinct musical style, much different than Zelda. Metroid, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Halo, Final Fantasy, the list goes on, are fairly easy to distinguish between musically.

Of course some of the games are similar in music as well. Some remixes blend and shift the musical style and make it hard to pinpoint. Other times a single song from a game will have qualities that point towards a different game all together.

Take Nayru’s Song for example: (This version is from ZREO Music.)

Often when I listen I am not looking at the song information and when I first heard this song I assumed that it was either from Metroid Prime or one of the sequels. Only recently did I notice that the song was from Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons.

Originally I thought the music was somewhere from Metroid Prime 2′s Light Temple, since I had distinct imagery in my head when I heard the piece, but upon further investigation it appeared I was wrong.

MP2 Light Temple:

Out of curiosity I hunted out other potential doppelgangers for the song.

MP Chozo Temple: 

MP2 Sky Temple Gateway: 

MP Phendrana Drifts Chozo Temple: 

None of the songs were quite as close as I had originally expected, but there are definitely some similarities. Many of the Metroid songs have high pitched flowing melodies. with deeper undertones and harmonies. The only thing that the Zelda piece is missing is a strong beat, and perhaps using voices to sing or chant the lower parts.

Part of the confusion might come from the re-orchestration provided by the ZREO team, because when I went back to listen to the original it wasn’t quite as Metroid-y.

Still it is very interesting how different games present themselves musically and have a specific audio branding.

*Notes:
1 – I only have about 9609 songs in my entire library, if that gives you an perspective on my listening habits.
2 – I use to have more video game music but I recently deleted a few soundtracks I was beginning to find annoying, such as the mario golf and mario tennis songs.

*EDIT:* Due to conflict between the MediaElement.js plugin and the Jetpack plugin the audio tracks were not showing up when I first wrote this post. Before publishing I disabled MediaElement and went with the Jetpack version, but that only uses flash and doesn’t have an HTML fallback. Today I had some time for research and discovered an alternative tag I could use with MediaElement.js and now the audio here should be playable on all devices, including iOS. Just thought you’d like to know.

Ask Better Questions

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When shopping for calculators, computers, tablets, televisions, cameras, and other electronics the number one question I hear asked is ‘which one is best’? This is the wrong question to ask… Or at least, an incomplete question.

Let’s go hammer shopping and I’ll show you what I mean.

HammerDuring high school I worked in a hardware store. If you came in looking for the best hammer, I would probably point you towards one like this. It’s just like the hammers my dad and grandpa have. It works well and it’s cheap, so it must be the best. Right?


HammerWell, a few years later when I worked construction with my uncle. He gave me a hammer like this. It’s solid steel, so there is nothing to break in the handle. It’s a but heavier, but drives nails faster. So clearly, this is the best.


070609btThat is, unless you are trying to break a concrete wall. In which case I would direct you to a sledge hammer. Its strong, heavy and can take out any wall, concrete or wood. The strongest and heaviest hammer must be the best, right?


Hammer timeUnless you don’t want to destroy what you are pounding on. Maybe you really want a rubber mallet. If you are working with wooden pegs, maybe this is the best hammer.


HammerAlthough, if you plan to give this hammer to a 5 year old child, you should maybe plan to buy a small plastic hammer, or maybe one of those squishy hammers.

So what did we learn today?

We cannot answer the question ‘which is best’ without a use case.

So ask better questions.

One problem is that most people don’t understand the the technology to know what to ask. You have to slowly walk them through their options and find out what they want to use the device for.

Which means both the user and the helper have to ask better questions.

How do we solve this?

As better questions.

EDIT: When looking for images to accompany this post I discovered that there are a lot more hammer types than I had thought. I didn’t need to go into more detail to make my point in this case, but the Art of Manliness website has a post on How to Handle a Hammer and they list 10 different hammer types, along with hammer safety and usage tips. (And this doesn’t even begin to cover war hammers, masonry hammers, judge gavels, etc.)

Through the filters: FBI SPAM?

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I received this spam message today. It somehow made it through the Yahoo Spam filter. (Yahoo’s not quite up to Gmail standards yet.) Here is my line by line commentary of the letter. (I noted a few of the gramatical errors, but didn’t feel like marking up the entire document, so most are left untouched.)

To: MrBobDobolina
From: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (admin@hzhky.com)

Yup, definitely from the FBI.

Subject: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)!!!

Little known fact, the FBI is a heavy backer of exclamation marks.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Anti-Terrorist And Monitory Crime Division.
Federal Bureau Of Investigation.
J.Edgar.Hoover Building Washington Dc
Customers Service Hours / Monday To Saturday
Office Hours Monday to Saturday:

I’m glad the FBI has such open office hours. It makes me happy to know they are working so hard, except on Sundays. I assume the baddies take Sundays off too.

Dear Beneficiary,

Because the FBI has no idea what my actual name is.

Series of meetings have been held over the past 7 months with the secretary general of the United Nations Organization. This ended 3 days ago.

Yes, I remember hearing about that in the news.

It is obvious that you have not received your fund which is to the tune of $850,000.00…

Oh it is glaringly obvious.

…due to past corrupt Governmental Officials who almost held the fund to themselves for their selfish reason and some individuals who have taken advantage of your fund all in an attempt to swindle your fund which has led to so many losses from your end and unnecessary delay in the receipt of your fund.

Can anyone say ‘run-on sentence’? Also, I’m glad the Government Officials only had one selfish reason.

The National Central Bureau of Interpol enhanced by the United Nations and Federal Bureau of Investigation have successfully passed a mandate to the current president of Nigeria his Excellency President Good luck[sic] Jonathan

Why can’t our leaders have names like Goodluck Johnathan? I would totally vote for him.

to boost the exercise of clearing all foreign debts owed to you and other individuals and organizations who have been found not to have receive their Contract Sum, Lottery/Gambling, Inheritance and the likes.

Now suddenly we are talking about Contract payments, Gambling, and Inheritance? What happened to the corrupt politicians who were forced into compliance three days ago?

Now how would you like to receive your payment? Because we have two method of payment which is by Check or by ATM card?

Gold bricks.

ATM Card: We will be issuing you a custom pin based ATM card which you will use to withdraw up to $3,000 per day from any ATM machine that has the Master Card Logo on it and the card have to be renewed in 4 years time which is 2014.

Current date: Dec. 3, 2011. Clearly this letter is a year old, I hope the offer still stands. Why couldn’t they have told me about this sooner!?!??!

Also with the ATM card you will be able to transfer your funds to your local bank account. The ATM card comes with a handbook or manual to enlighten you about how to use it. Even if you do not have a bank account.

Oh good. Because I don’t have a bank account and I have never learned how to use an ATM.

Check: To be deposited in your bank for it to be cleared within three working days. Your payment would be sent to you via any of your preferred option[sic] and would be mailed to you via UPS.

Say what?

Because we have signed a contract with UPS which should expire in next three weeks you will only need to pay $135 instead of $420 saving you $285

Wait, three weeks from now or three weeks from then?

So if you pay before the three weeks 2011 you save $285

2011 is only three weeks?!?!?! I’m confused. Also, can anyone say “punctuation”?

Take note that anyone asking you for some kind of money above the usual fee is definitely a fraudsters

Those dirty fraudsters. Asking for money above the usual fee…

and you will have to stop communication with every other person if you have been in contact with any.

I’ve been in contact with my mother, does that count?

Also remember that all you will ever have to spend is $135.00 nothing more! Nothing less! And we guarantee the receipt of your fund to be successfully delivered to you within the next 24hrs after the receipt of payment has been confirmed.

Note: Everything has been taken care of by the Federal Government of Nigeria, The United Nation[sic] and also the FBI and including taxes, custom paper and clearance duty so all you will ever need to pay is $135.

There is only one United Nation!

DO NOT SEND MONEY TO ANYONE UNTIL YOU READ THIS:

Ooops.

The actual fees for shipping your ATM card is $420

WHAT!?!? Are you a fraudster?

but because UPS have temporarily discontinued the C.O.D which gives you the chance to pay when package is delivered for international shipping We had to sign contract with them for bulk shipping which makes the fees reduce from the actual fee of $420 to $135 nothing more and no hidden fees of any sort!

Oh, whew! You had me scared for a second.

To effect the release of your fund valued at $850,000.00 you are advised to contact our correspondent in Africa the delivery officer Scott Mandy Will with the information below,

Punctuation. Capitalization. The word “help”.

Email: scott.mandy@yahoo.cn
You are advised to contact him with the informations as stated below:

1) Your full Name:
2) Home/Cell Phone:
3) Occupation:
4) Age:
5) Sex:
Preferred Payment Method (ATM / Cashier Check)

So in order for me to get my money, I first need to give a bunch of extraneous information to someone in Africa. Okay, that makes sense. I like how I don’t have to give an address. Just a name and phone number.

Upon receipt of payment the delivery officer will ensure that your package is sent within 24 working hours.

Working hours. Africa time or my time? Because I’m pretty sure I’m working at all hours. Just like the FBI

Because we are so sure of everything we are giving you a 100% money back guarantee if you do not receive payment/package within the next 24hrs after you have made the payment for shipping.

Yours sincerely,
Miss Donna Story
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20535

Note: Do disregard any email you get from any impostors or offices claiming to be in possession of your ATM CARD,

Like you? Oh, don’t worry. I will.

you are hereby advice[sic] only to be in contact with John Will

Wait, who is John Will?

of the ATM CARD CENTRE

Oh hey! We are British now!

who is the rightful person to deal with in regards to your ATM CARD PAYMENT and forward any emails you get from impostors to this office so we could act upon and commence investigation.

Which office? What address? Because I think I have an email from an impostor.

I honestly don’t know how any English speaking person could fall for this. Is the target audience foreigners?

A Technology Rant

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To all of you PC and Linux users who say that the PC is a superior platform because you can “tweak” it, and it’s for “smart people” to use.

You’re right. I feel so much better, having spent an hour troubleshooting the lack of sound in my video game. That hour I could have been playing was much better spent in frustration and tedious research. Had I been able to play for another hour I would have more quickly realized that my game would freeze for an unspecified reason at a specific point every time I tried to move to level two of my game. Without that initial crash I would not have lost my save data and remembered that I couldn’t rely on autosave, and would not have had to play through the first two hours a second time.

These machines we own, these piles of plastic and metal are nothing but toys. Cheap, pathetic toys and it’s a surprise they even run at all.

Half of you are currently scrolling to the comment section to tell me that I need to update my drivers. Others are blaming the software vendors. A few of you have already typed “get a Mac” and are about to press “submit.”

That’s not the point.

The point is that THIS IS NOT THE FUTURE.

THIS IS A DISASTER! We are living in A MESS.

I have an old and unhappy smart phone. It runs android. It’s crashed on me. But it’s crashed on me less in the last two years than my PC has crashed in 3 months. My iPad’s crashes can be counted on one hand. On both these devices apps can be deleted an reinstalled with minimal fuss in only a few minutes. You don’t even have to loose your data!

It’s often been joked that “Linux is free, if you don’t value your time.” This is almost becoming true for any PC. The time it takes to care for the stupid little critters is hardly worth the cost of owning one.

I know how much some people cringe at the though of a closed garden and closely groomed ecosystem. But IT WORKS.

Technology is suppose to make our lives easier. We spent the first 30 years of personal computing making our lives harder. We have finally started to learn how to correct this and our technology has finally reached a stage where we can make this possible.

Our solution always tends to be “we need newer technology.” The updated software and hardware has done little to ease our burdens. We just get frustrated and annoyed faster. We don’t need “better” technology, we need BETTER DESIGNED technology.

We need things with LESS FEATURES. We want LESS TO GO WRONG. We want all our things to WORK.

So stop telling me this video editing app is better than that one. They both have problems. Stop telling me OGG is better than MP3. Because nothing can play it. Stop telling me that a free system is better than my paid ones. You get what you pay for.

Let’s stop supporting the crap that doesn’t work start perfecting the stuff that does.

Apathetic Dictionary: Fanboy

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Fanboy, noun: an enthusiastic devotee who is continually irritated about inconsequential changes.

Examples:
Gamer: I see they are coming up with a new Final Fantasy game.
Fanboy: I know! It’s going to be awesome, but they changed they changed the name of my favorite character and now all the hair styles are the same, which is SUPER irritating.

Gamer: I hear they are remaking an old Final Fantasy game.
Fanboy: Oh, I just can’t wait for it to come out. The only problem is that they upgraded the graphics so it’s not going to have the retro feel, so it’s almost like ‘why even bother?’

Gamer: So they are bringing an old Final Fantasy game to a new platform, complete with all the old graphics and everything!
Fanboy: Yeah it should be pretty good. Except they are using the American version and not the Japanese version, which is pretty much the same, but some of the characters have different colored hats. And I heard they are fixing all the typos from the original, which I’m sure is totally going to ruin the experience. That and it would be cool if they upgraded the graphics to HD.

See Also: Nintendo Fanboy

Nintendo Fanboy, noun: an enthusiastic devotee of Nintendo products and owner of at least 8 copies of The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

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With all the talk of Steve Jobs today, I started to think about how much influence this single company, his company, had on my family and in my life. So I made a list of all the different Apple products that we had owned or borrowed over the years.

Apple 2e
PowerMac 5400/120
PowerBook Duo
Apple eMate
PowerBook Lombard
Bondi Blue iMac
Indigo iMac
15″ Flat Panel iMac
eMac (x2)
17″ PowerBook
20″ Intel iMac
24″ Intel iMac
27″ Intel iMac
12″ iBook
12″ MacBook
17″ MacBook Pro
G3 Tower (x3)
G4 Tower (x3)
1st Gen iPod Touch
1st Gen iPod Touch (x3)
iPad
iPad 2
1st Gen iPod Shuffle
Pink iPod mini
Airport Express (x2)
Airport Extreme

This just covers my immediate family and doesn’t include the Magic Mice, the Apple keyboards, printers, or other Apple software and accessories. Nor does it include the dead iPods, broken iBooks or other dead Apple devices that have been given into my possession.

Scrub the DriveSteve Jobs’ company has been an important part of my family’s existence. While I did not personally know him, I thank him for his dedicated work to make technology accessible to the average user. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends in these sad times.

Thank you Steve.

Facebook Theory

Quote

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There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what Facebook is for and how to use it, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

(With full respect to Douglas Adams.)

Facebook Update – September 2011

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There has been a large up cry about the new Facebook updates, and I’m a little surprised at it this time.

First off, this has happened a half dozen times in the past, and Facebook has yet to take something back that the users didn’t like.

Secondly, I didn’t think the changes were really that big.

Now, correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that the main complaints are partially due to a misunderstanding in how Facebook functions.

Facebook now gives users the chance to choose how much of a certain person they wish to see. You can use the subscribe button to see all of someone’s posts or only the “important” ones or none at all. This is entirely up to the friend, and not the owner of the account. I think this is nice, because I can go in and subscribe to friend who I care about, and possibly block some people I don’t need to follow. (Though, maybe it’s time to unfriend them…)

If you don’t want the whole of the Facebook world to see your posts, you have to limit your post to a list. (This is the way Google+ works, and to be fair Facebook has always had this functionality, but it has never been so easy until now.) If you don’t want all your friends on Facebook to see what you said to family members, you need to have your Family members in a group and when you post, choose to share it with them. No one else should be able to see the post, or the comments on that post.

Now, you don’t have control over who sees your comments on a post, (say, for example if you comment on a public posting) but Facebook has never allowed this as an option that I can remember.

I also see a lot of complaints about the new Top News section. I have never been a fan of the top news, I always want to see the recent news, and apparently Facebook tweaked the algorithm and isn’t doing a very good job right now. I don’t think it has ever done a good job. I just went through and unclicked all the “top stories” it suggested and I currently only see recent stories… not sure how long that will last, but it is a start.

I think the live feed is scary to some people, mostly because it’s live. The live feed doesn’t show anything that I couldn’t see by browsing my old news feed or glancing over someone’s profile. The fact that it is in real time and allows for quick and easy commenting only makes the site more like an instant messenger program than anything else.

Ultimately, everything that gets put on the internet should be treated as public knowledge. There is no safety or privacy out here.

That said, if you have Facebook friends who you’d rather not be sharing things with, you maybe should consider unfriending them.

Your Facebook account is FOR YOUR OWN BENEFIT. You don’t need to friend people if you don’t want to. You don’t need to share things if you don’t want to. You don’t need to use it if you don’t want to.

Facebook has been testing and tweaking their new code for months. This isn’t something they threw together overnight and they will probably continue to tweak it over the following months. I’m willing to predict that in 2 weeks most people will have gotten use to the change, or stopped complaining, or stopped using Facebook. All of these are acceptable options, but I will also predict that most of these changes will not be undone by Facebook.

The people working at Facebook have a vision of a sharing and happy utopia, something many of the users don’t share with them. As users we find a way to use our sites and we make due. When Facebook comes along and tells us we should use their site differently, we ultimately must fall in line or drop out. Facebook is a privately held company. You don’t own the site. You don’t own your profile. Facebook claims you own all your information, but you are putting it in their hands. You are putting it on their site. You have to play by their rules.

I’m not happy with all the changes they have made, but I’m doing my best to understand them so I can use the site how they would like me to do so. (That said, nearly everything I put online is considered public.) Feedback to the Facebook team is much appreciated, but telling them to “put it back how it was” is not an option they will be willing to consider. They live in a world of technology, and technology never moves backwards.

And look at the bright side. In 8 months they’ll change everything again and we can complain about that too.

iPad Blogging Software

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When I first got my iPad, I was excited to try to use it as a portable blogging tool. Anytime I came up with any idea for a topic, I could sit down and type something out and post it online. I was rather disappointed when I realized the severe lack of good blogging tools.

My first iPad was an iPad 2, so I figured by the time it came out there should be a number of nice blogging apps that have been in development since the first one came out.

Instead, I found two. One was a free WordPress app and the second was called Blogsy. WordPress was unreliable and Blogsy had a strange interface and means of operations which didn’t meld to my liking and shortly after I experimented with both, I gave up on the idea.

Instead I bought an app called PlainText which let you make notes of text and synced everything up with DropBox. I could then go to my computer, grab the text file in DropBox and put it online using the WordPress web interface.

This worked alright, and since I had to go to my computer I could easily format things as needed and upload images to my ftp server. However, this was still a two step process and it would be nice to get the whole things taken care of in one.

Then I stumbled upon BlogPress. It works very nicely with my self-hosted WordPress Blog and doesn’t try to add too many obnoxious features. I can write posts, save posts and save them online or locally. It lets you add some photos or HTML if you want. The HTML you can insert is limited and the photos are automatically added to either Picassa or you Blogs photo space, which doesn’t help me much, but more on that later. So far, I haven’t had any crashes, or duplicate posts, or accidental deletes. (As I did with the other apps I tried.)

Now, I do like to self host my images, and keep them out of the WordPress folder structure. A few months ago I was experimenting with something and ended up buying a rather expensive (in my opinion) FTP app for iPad. Files Connect is a nice little $8 app and while it didn’t help with my project, I am finding it useful now because I can take screenshots of my iPad screen and upload them directly to my site, without having to worry about syncing or emailing or dropbox-ing anything. It’s not a perfect app, when I uploaded the photos for this post they were given 644 permissions which I was unable to change until I accessed a computer.

EDIT: The more I use Files Connect the less I like it. I can going in and rotate an image, but I can’t save it to the server when I am done, I have to save it to my iPad again and then re-upload. Also, every time I close the app I have to re-login and click my way to the folder I was looking at last, there is no state of remembrance.

The only drawback I have found while writing up this post is that the HTML to display the files needs to be added by hand, since it’s not possible to link an image file from the web with the “add photo” button in BlogPress.

Long story short: I highly recommend PlainText with DropBox for note taking and BlogPress with WordPress or Blogger blogs. I’ve only tried one FTP app, and Files Connect has treated me well, although I might consider looking at other options before purchasing.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad