Something Everybody Should know about Facebook

Unless you’ve been living in a hole or not been following what I’ve been saying about and thinking about Facebook.  today after going through some experiments to block Facebook from installing it’s cookies onto my system I did some research and learned that the cookies didn’t matter.  This article from cnet.com talks about how facebook is tracking your activity by your IP address, the cookies just make it easier for them know know who at the particular location is doing what.   http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20006532-38.html?tag=mncol;txt#

Now I ask you and anybody else around you who and what gives this Company the right to this much data (and yes I know that my DNS server has all of this information as well)  about me or the people living in my house, not even Google has this much control over data on the Net.  This is a link to delete your Facebook account http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account .  How ever as I have said this alone will not stop facebook from being able to track your activities.  I’ve also attached a link at the bottom of this post that shows Firefox and Chrome users how to block the like button from  appearing on a webpage so that Facebook will not be able to track your activities.  I would like to encourage everyone to Call, E-mail or snail-mail their MP, the CRTC, and the Canadian Privacy Commissioner about this and make the enquiry as to how this has been allowed to happen and for our elected representatives to make it stop.  If you happen to live outside of Canada and are reading this I would also like to encourage you to contact your representatives and ask the same questions of them.

http://www.cnet.com/8301-19709_1-20006730-10.html?tag=mncol;txt This link is from Cnet’s Buzz Out Loud Podcast Episode: 1241 and the information about the script blocking is at the bottom of the page in an e-mail transcript.

^*EDIT* And if you though you were private on Facebook see what you can find out about yourself here http://youropenbook.org/ ^*EDIT*

Feeling Trapped

Lately I’ve been feeling a little trapped as of late, not in the I’m chained up in a dark damp room some place, but in a social sense online.  I’ve been giving serious consideration into leaving Facebook (http://bllgvn.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/good-by-facebook/), however, I don’t want to commit social suicide and at the same time stick to my own drive and aversions that seem to keep coming up on this service and I’m at a point where I can’t take it any more.  Another service that makes me feel trapped is Live Messenger.  I don’t understand how this service is still used by so many, I personally don’t like it and frankly the software is bloated peace of garbage and I don’t use it, but why do I still have to use the service with my friends?  Am I that far ahead of the curve that I’m moving into the new world and then stuck waiting for everybody else to catch up?  I know I went through this with Twitter, I waited a year and a half or more for it to become useful to me.  Can I move to what I think is the future of online computing and communication? or am I stuck in the mud spinning my wheels, or worse yet some place in the middle?  I want to quit Facebook, my msn dilemma is really quite trivial, but there are so many people on there that I don’t want to loose contact with, where is the big Facebook killer? LiveJournal had MySpace, MySpace had Facebook, what does Facebook have? I’m trying orkut and LinkedIn but nobody is moving with me.  I guess I just want to live on the web and not Facebook.

Good By Facebook

As many of you know I haven’t been all that happy with Facebook for a number of years and with the exception of dumping a couple of feeds into it I’ve not really used it.  Well with the latest changes to Facebook I’ve been thinking long and hard about actually deleting my account.  There are several reasons for this.  First I hate seeing all the Zynga games popping up in the news feed, if you’re spending that much time on a game then it’s time to move on and by a console or sign up for steam. Secondly I’m tired of having to check my privacy settings every six months or so just to make cretin that they are still the way I want them……But then again I’m having increasing trouble understanding them.  Now lets not forget that the current terms of use on Facebook are longer than the American Constitution, I don’t know about you but I don’t have three days to parse through everything all the time.  The next thing is that Facebook broke it’s Twitter application so what is happening now is that perhaps a third of my tweets are actually getting through (so much for Zuch’s openness and connectedness model), I post this stuff to share and if it’s not reaching people then that makes me mad.

 

This is what I’m doing about everything I just ranted about, and more, I’ve set up two profiles the first is at orkut which is owned by Google and the second is on LinkedIn.  I’m going to be using orkut much like I used to use Facebook for, talking with friends and keeping in touch with people.  LinkedIn is going to be my professional face on the web.  Now Please don’t get me wrong I don’t want to loose touch with anybody but I just can’t take Facebooks abuse of its users any longer.  I do want to give people the chance to convince me to stay on Facebook so I’ll give people until the 26th of June to convince me, if my mind is not made up than I’m gone and anybody that feels similar to the way I do than I urge you to do the same as me and delete your account.  I’ll tweet the instructions as soon as I find them.

Photos, Photos, and more Photos

Sorry in taking so long for updating but for a variety of reasons I haven’t had the will to sit at my computer and actually do the work to write a post, I hope you all can forgive me.

As of January I started my placement at the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology.  I’m finding it really interesting and quite enjoyable, but I’ve also been counting a lot of pictures, both positives and negatives.

As for more of my personal life, the wedding plans are coming along nicely, though we have cancelled our registry that was at The Bay, there will be instructions up on Val’s Blog shortly so that people will be able to know what to buy for us, and I’ll try and keep them simple.

Age it’s a Terrible Thing

Well another “year” is upon me and while I’m grateful for everything and everybody I’ve got in my life, I can’t help but remember how I used to think 30 was old and as I’m creeping closer too it I can’t help but feel old; and I’m not just griping but I’ve noticed how my body has begun to react to the mileage on it as well.

On a happier note things are going really well with school the term is nearly finished and thus class is almost done, only a week and a half left of classes and then exams. Next term is almost ready to go and is only my placement and then I’m finished.

Engagement Party

Well last Saturday my parents held an engagement party for Val and myself.  Now I would have had put this up sooner; however, I’m just so busy that I haven’t been able to get around to it, but here it is.

I, and Val, was greatly impressed and pleased with the number of people that came out, and would like to thank everybody.  One thing that I really enjoyed was seeing the Boys again as well as Lauren and Amanda it was great.  I know one thing is for cretin is that I can’t believe how fast the wedding is coming up on us, it’s both scary and exciting.

Interesting Gaming News

It sounds like Nintendo might be giving up on the Wii.  According to a story on Gamespot the Wii’s sales have been stalling over the last six months.  In part because of this Nintendo is looking at ways to boost or at least stabilize their sales numbers.  With this idea in mind there are two rumourers floating around: the first is that Nintendo is going to be releasing a “Wii HD” early next year, or that Nintendo will have a new console out in the next year to two years, in order to stay competitive with Microsoft and Sony.  The Gamespot article also talks about the Wii getting Netflix, which is no different than the Xbox360, and coming to the PS3.  Of course the Netflix announcement is part of what is sturring the rumourers of a Wii HD.

Now I’ve also seen a couple of articles, I can’t remember from where, discussing the Wii motion plus coming built into the Wii remote.  This kind of smells of a new system to me because either to form factor of these new remotes would have to be the same as the current one, or it’s not going to work with all of the peripherals out there, sanctioned or not.  Now the images I’ve seen suggest the latter, however these were also showing a black remote.  Now because of this ether Nintendo is releasing a new colour for their remote or there is a new system on the way, but you can’t say ether way from the photo.

Now what I expect to see is most likely some type of a Wii HD that will have an HDMI port in the back, and perhaps some more storage, 512mb is a bit ridiculous if you ask me when both of the other consoles will soon have 250Gb models.  Now having the HDMI would make sense if Nintendo is getting Netflix, so that the content would be better supported than it would be on the current system.  Now frankly I personally would not want to see the pixelated games that come on the Wii in HD; I think that the SD versions of their games look bad enough, they kind of remind me of my PS2 games, and even some of thoughs look better than some of the games on the Wii.  In short if you were thinking of getting a Wii this Christmas season I’d hold off until early 2010

Prince of Persia Movie

Here is some more information about the upcoming Prince of Persia movie that I mentioned a while back.

More Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Info

information from IGN

You Need to Change Your Password

I don’t know if you’ve heard this already or not but everybody should change their e-mail password.  The reason I’m telling you to do this is because of a story out of cnet-uk which discusses how there was a massive phishing attack that acquired passwords from gmail, yahoo mail, and windows live mail; because of this change your password.

New Computer

So lately I’ve been looking into getting a new desktop to replace my current one that’s now six years old, and still holding up well I think.  However with Microsoft’s announcement about dropping support some time after Windows 7 has launched, and my systems in ability to run a newer OS  properly I thought it might be time to look into getting a new system.  At the moment I’m thinking about a pre-built system from HP but I can’t decide on the specks for one that is currently available.

Currently I’m thinking about getting an Intel Core i5 or i7, leaning towards the i7, but Intel has also just announced a new series of processors that may be on the market by the time I’m looking to buy, a big hangup for me is a video card I’m not cretin what I want to get, I know Nvidea is the big gaming GPU at the moment, but I’m not a big PC gamer, I’m more concerned about having the power to run Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time without bogging the system down to the point where it is unusable, nor do I want to have to start doing major upgrades two years into the life of the system.  Other things I’m looking at are: four gigs of RAM, ether a 1Tarabite hard-disk or two 500 Gig hard-disks, I’m not cretin which rout I should go with.  System that I’m really looking closely at currently is HP’s Firebird, but again I’m not that interested in getting a gaming machine.  so many decisions, perhaps I’ll just build my own.