Cameron's Thoughts

There seems to be a new tech trend.... quitting Facebook. I don't care to explore the history and reasons why, but it basically comes down to general panic over the Facebook privacy system. I will admit that they have made some stupid mistakes when it comes to the way they have changed some default settings. But, what seems to be overlooked is that, every time Facebook does this, they place some huge message on the newsfeed explaining what they changed. I can only assume most people just close the message and not read it, because I've always been extremely informed about these changes directly from the Facebook website.

On top of this, the Facebook control panel isn't overly complicated. There are a fair number of options, but they also allow you to highly configure the privacy controls to a high level of detail. You can fine tune things so that individual people can't see certain items on your wall. I can't think of any other site that gives such control. They do offer some details on how the privacy works on their site. When you go into the privacy settings which can be found on the Account menu, you are given a page with six categories. On the top three, you are given a selection of various area's of your profile and what limits you want to share your privacy. Basically, everyone, friends of friends, friends or you can customize and make it so only certain groups of people can see the info. That seems pretty straight forward. If you are unsure that privacy settings are how you want, you can click "Preview my profile" and it will show you what your profile page looks like to the general random person viewing it. At the top, you can also type in a persons name and see exactly how that person would see it. If you ever have any reservations as to if your profile is locked down well enough, this is the place to go.

The next option on the privacy page seems to cause the biggest conflict. That is the applications and website settings. On that page, you can control things like how your information is shared with apps, and what your friends can share. You can also disable the "Instant Personalization" feature. Oddly, there is no link here to directly edit the sites and apps settings. That can be also found under the Account menu under "Application settings". Finally, the last two options on the privacy settings, search and block list, are pretty self-explanatory and basic.

While the privacy panel isn't basic, if you are really concerned about privacy issues, sending 5-10 minutes to explore the options really isn't a huge cost. I don't mind this personally periodically explore the options as I sometimes decide to change things around.

As for why I'm not leaving Facebook; basically those privacy issues don't bother me, so it's business as usual. Facebook actually makes things much nicer on a day to day basis for me. My phone integrates with it really well. Anyone I ever talk to on the phone is on Facebook, so when they call, I have their most recent profile picture display on the screen. I think that is very handy. Whenever I take a picture or a video, I can easily upload the picture or video straight to my Facebook account with just a couple of clicks. This allows me to share events with my family nearly instantly as they take place. On top of that, if anyone has their phone number on their Facebook profile, its already in my contacts. Facebook has become an overwhelmingly useful extension to my phone.

Of course, there are the typical social network reasons for staying on board with Facebook. No other place on the Internet has so many people I know together. That makes it much more convenient to stay connected with people and know what's going on. When I plan events anymore, I just set them up on Facebook and invite the appropriate people. Since usually 90% of the people I intend to invite are already on Facebook, this works out really well.

I also really enjoy the Instant Personalization feature. I am sick of having to sign up for accounts over and over again. Facebook already had the Facebook Connect feature which allows using your Facebook account to login to other sites, but this makes it happen a bit more automatically. On top of this, in many ways it is actually better to use this method to sign on to sites than to create new accounts everywhere. You have no idea the security and privacy settings on every site. It's true that Facebook could leak information, but if it is just in one location, that is much better than having logins on hundreds of sites. If at any time in the future, you want to disconnect your login from a site that you used Facebook Connect, or the Instant Personalization with, you can go into the Application Settings on Facebook and remove that site. If you didn't use Facebook, you'd have to figure out each site individually and determine their method of removing your account info. That seems to me to be much more secure than not using Facebook.

Anyhow, that's my random thoughts on Facebook. Feel free to comment.

Items for sale on eBay currently through Sunday:

These auctions are over!

iPod Shuffle 1GB

Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee for PSP

If you are interested in these, please bid on them!

Unless your planning on buying the FM remote thing for your 5th gen iPod, don't get the latest firmware update. Bottom line, it sucks. The version 1.1 software is supposed to fix some bugs and add support for the remote. I didn't notice any bugs before, but now, after updating, when I hit the center button while playing music to rate songs and things, the wrong screens show up. Sometimes it will show the rating screen three times in a row. But, even though the rating is showing on the screen, you might adjust the volume or the tracking on the song. I guess this is the only thing I have a problem with right now, but, when I got a new computer, I don't have any of the rating info, so I have been re-rating all the songs, and this is making it annoying.

Joel mentioned to me that you can get 2GB of free storage on Hotmail with an @msn.com address. There are instructions there how to sign up for that. While it's a very nice offer, though strange that only MSN Explorer users can access that. Maybe there are just testing the service out with those users, and will maybe expand the offer to all users in time. Once GMail is out of beta, the other free e-mail services will need to come up with something.
But I don't plan to sign up for this. It is very nice that it works in all browsers, such as Opera, but rumor seems to be that Opera is working with Google so that version 7.6 will be compatible with GMail.
Not only that, while Hotmail does have some nice improvements recently, the features and ease of use in GMail would make it very hard to switch away from it. Plus, I have already imported all of my e-mail and contacts into GMail, so I don't want to have to do that all over again.

Not an extremely comprehensive site, but I have found it to be informative. If your like me, and still have trouble thinking of webpage design as XHTML and CSS as opposed to old school HTML, then this is the page for you.

On Wednesday I had phone wiring and phone jacks installed in my house. I have now entered 19th century technology.
I have been living in my current place for about two and a half years, and bought it new. Never had any phone jacks, and when moving I decided that I would try the wireless only phone option. So for the last two and a half years, a cell phone has been my only telephone.
There were a few things behind that decision. I already had a cell phone that I never really used at the time. I bought it because I was driving a hour one way to school three days a week. I wanted a way to call in case of something happening. Of course I never did need it. But, I was paying about $30 a month for that, then another $50 for my landline. I then realized that I could by a plan with two cell phone for $70. Cheaper and then Nickcole and I could still stay in touch. To top that, at the time, MCI was my phone carrier. But, they didn't have the ability to move my service. I would have to switch my service to SBC (was known as Ameritech at that time). After they moved my service, I could then switch back to MCI. Plus, all the costs of installing the jacks, wiring and hooking up the service, it wasn't worth it.
Fast forward to today. I have a child. Nickcole always forgets to charge her phone. I worry something will happen and there will be no way to get in touch with 911 or anybody for that matter. I also am planning on getting DirecTV once they get local channels in my area. Should be ready within the next few months. DirecTV requires a phone line to operate. I now work for a phone company. I get a really nice deal on the phone service, so there is really no reason not to have one anymore.
So in an era of computers, satellite TV and worldwide Internet, I now have a landline phone.

Tonight I ended up buying a new TV and setting that up. Was going to hang out with my friend Patrick and a bunch of other people, but I forgot to line up a babysitter until the last minute, and then it was too late. So, instead I went and purchased a new TV that Nickcole and I have been planning on buying out of our tax refund. It's a 27", so not a whole lot bigger than our previous 25". But the last TV we bought was really cheap, and we bought it before we got married back in 2000. So, it's nothing great. This new one is really nice. It has a flat tube, and 700 lines of resolution with a digital comb filter. I guess that makes signal take advantage of all the additional scan lines since the highest resolution input is 480. But the TV also includes some nice inputs such as component video, in addition to the S-Video, composite video and RF input found on most sets. Our old TV had only a single RF input making it very complicated to get a VCR, DVD player, Dreamcast, Gamecube, digital camera, and previously digital cable all connected.

Got a nice deal on a SB Live 5.1 card off of EBay. Only $10 with shipping. It was advertised as a Sound Blaster 128 card. I just wanted to get a card that had support for rear speakers since I got a Creative 4.1 surround sound speaker set for Christmas from my mom. I'm not a big audio fanatic, so I had just been using the stereo sound that came built into the motherboard on my PC. So I was very surprised to see the card was even better than the one advertised.
I have had a little trouble with it though. I think there is some sort of resource conflict. Most likely with my NIC. What happens is, every time I start my computer up, I am not on the Internet. What I have to do is go into the network connection properties in XP and disable the connection, then re-enable it. Then it works fine. But, I have to do this every time I restart. I tried moving the NIC to another PCI slot, but that didn't help.
My solution to that for the time being is to use the onboard NIC. The story for that is a strange one too. My PC came with an onboard NIC like many PC's do now. Remember that big power outage that hit the northeast in '03? Well, I was on the edge of the outage (my town didn't lose any power, but many of the nearby cities did.) Instead, we had just lost power for a few minutes, then go hit with a nice surge. I have surge protectors on all my equipment, but maybe they are getting old or something. Because my speakers on my PC made a deafening screeching sound. Then I noticed my NIC was no longer working. I quickly replaced it with a PCI NIC to get back on the Internet. But, I then realized from time to time my onboard NIC was recognized by Windows. What happens is, if I restart the PC, the NIC is gone. If I completely shut down, then it will return on next start up. Annoying, since I usually just restart because I don't want to wait for a shutdown to occur to restart. It takes about three minutes for this piece of shit to shutdown.
So, anyways, I at least have a backup network solution for the time being. But, the sound is still having some trouble. It keeps having this trouble where every 20 seconds or so, it will freeze up for a second and make a terrible jittering sound. This makes listening to music impossible. I have already uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers and even updated my motherboard drivers. I think the next step is a Windows reinstall. Not just because of this, the whole computer is just running like crap lately. Too many programs installed and a number that have been removed, but probably not all the way. Somehow almost 35GB of this drive has been taken up, and that is in less than a year. I have other drives filled with data from the past. What is taking up all that space?? I have no idea.