Reason to Facebook

This is something that I put into my Facebook page thought it would go better on my Blog:

I dislike just about every social media (chat rooms, FB, blogs, My Space, esp Twitter... ect) out there and will dislike every social media that will come out, almost as much as reality TV... almost. I started a facebook page just to learn how the more advanced parts of Facebook works for a side project I've been working on. So after using it for a few days I have come to a new and less pre-judgmental option of it: I hate it even more than I thought I would. So here is my TOP10 reasons why I hate Facebook:

10: the name: Facebook what is that? It's nether a Face nor a Book.

9: My spell checker keeps telling me that I am spelling Facebook incorrectly. "Did you mean face book?"

8: It's filled to the brim with advertisements and I hate those even more than social media stuff.

7: The odds of rolling a 7 with 2 standard 6 sided dice is much higher than rolling any other number, but the odds of getting a 7 when randomly selecting a number between 2 and 12 is exactly the same?

6: I hate all social Media in general.(just to give you all a little background into this let me tell you of my first incounters of social media: When I was around 13-15 years old I don't quite remember I was "Chatting" in a chat room some time late at night/early morning for several hours to some one in Austrelia about breakfast ceareals. after concluding the conversation I came to a realization that it was a complete waste of time. I didn't accoplish anything and infact wasn't entertaning at all. so from then on I never used a chat program or anything like it from then on.)

5: I get an account of everyone's activity on facebook even though it has nothing to do with me, and is nearly impossible to keep track of especially when I don't check it 20 times a day.

4: Keep getting exactly 1 "Bajillion" invites from people who I'm not sure if I know them or not? well they have the last name Ray so maybe they are a relative? I don't want to decline there invite but I don't want to accept it either so they just sit in limbo.

3: It keeps changing. I find some instructions on how to do something in facebook and it's telling me to go places and click on things that aren't there.

2: Doesn't work, not facebook it's self but everything else I have tried to do to get it to do what I want to do doesn't work. All the apps that say "it can do this" doesn't. I suppose that it might but oh boy already spent several hours trying to get it to do something simple like adding a little bit of html to it.

1: It is a complete mess, I spend 13hrs+ a day at work on a computer and a few more at home. I see and interact with may websites and Facebook is in the top 20 of the most unorganized mess of a website I have ever seen.

Now just to conclude this I know the benefits and such of Facebook to keep in touch with people and become reacquainted with people that you might have known in the past but at least to me beyond that I find a waste of time. I don't have anything against people who do use facebook and that's fine if that's how you want to spend your time and you enjoy it then great. Also I just want to point out again that if you want to contact me the best way is to Call, Email, or IM me. If you see me on IM it means I am near my computer esp at night because that's when I am at work but am usually not very busy so you can feel free to IM me any time you see me on. Just remember that I do work at night and sleep in the day time usually until some time after 5pm MST. If you want pictures updates and other stuff about what is happening with our family Shawna keeps an nearly always up to date blog here: http://clarkandshawna.blogspot.com/ you will need an invite to view it so if you don't have one you can ask me or Shawna for one.

Mind the Gap

If it so happens that some one actually reads this blog, and out of those imaginary readers perhaps there is one or even half of one that noticed that it has been a long time sense I had made a post. My first claims were that, when creating this blog, I wouldn't make many posts, but later I found that it was some what enjoyable. After that time it seemed that I was posting just about every day or night as it is to me.

To understand completely my circumstances that surround my posting schedule you must understand how my time is spent. First is family, all my time other than when I am at work is spent with and/or around my beautiful wife Shawna and adorable son Nickolas. So that leaves the time that I am at work. I work the night shift for a company that does IT support for many medium to large business. As one could probably guess there isn't much to fix while everyone's sleeping. Mainly I watch a screen that is lit up with little Blue, Yellow, and Red boxes that indicate the status of servers and network equipment. in this way I can determine if a problem happens during the night and hopefully fix it before anyone knows it even happened. This way everyone can sleep soundly knowing that I am watching over their computers. This and what ever random task they feel I can complete during the night is what comprises my schedule while working.

With this schedule you would think that I would have plenty of time to make posts while also maintaining the integrity of the networks that I monitor, and you would be correct mostly. When I first started this blog I and a most helpful coworker who would assist with completing all the tasks that needed to be done during the night while also helping to maintain the sanity of us both by providing another person to talk to. At some point some one with the authority to make changes came to the determination that the position I held was completely achievable by one person. While this is true and I have no problems completing everything I need to do with time to spare there is a connivance for both me and the company to having more than one person on a shift. You know like if I'm sick or in capable of coming to work there is some one else here to cover or you know when I would like to take the day off.

So at any rate rather than paying two people to do the job of one they moved the person who was working with me to the day shift. I don't envy him for moving to days rather than me in fact I prefer it this way for a few reasons mainly I get paid more for working at night and the fact that they thought that the day shift can be handled by four people instead of the ten that were doing it before.

It seems I have a tendency to go off on tangents... My main point is that I have less spare time while working so this means less posts.

YouTube and this Guy

So tonight just want to throw out two things one I like and one I hate. First is YouTube, it's probably classed under Social Media but hey I love this thing. There's nothing better than watching the most random videos the web has to offer. This is probably the second biggest change to the internet aside from maybe MMO games. Being able to stream video over the internet would be nigh impossible on those old 28.8 or even 56k modems. best you could have done was waited several hours while your video downloaded before watching. Also 1080/720p is now available on some videos on YouTube. Just gonna throw a random YouTube video here: (actually he's one of my coworkers).

As for what I hate is this guy:

Not the guy but rather what he is doing. I'm sure it's not his fault, but some one is sure to blame. Those strange people in marketing thinks it's a good idea to put some guy out on the street and pay him minimum wage (I suppose that he gets paid more but that's just silly) just to hold a sign that a less than $5 stick could do (just as well I might add). Does the sign get more noticed due to the fact that it's getting held by a person rather than a stick, pole, or even a wall? No not really, at least nothing good just me going off on a rant about it. But hey that's just my opinion. Maybe I would start a poll but I don't think I have many readers and I can't be bothered with one. at least for now.

TinyURL

Ya it does seem like I've been posting a lot but don't worry it will die down real fast. This one is a little off topic but I don't care. One of my responsibilities at work is to help add and modify our KB (Knowledge Base). this contains lots of information on our clients and how to quickly resolve issues that are specific to them. Our KB is done in a Wiki just like www.wikipedia.org/ but you can only access it on our network.

If you have edited a Wiki before you'll know that it doesn't use regular HTML like most websites do. I had to create a link in the Wiki that points to a file shared on a server like this: "\\servername\foldername\file.name" so little quick modification I changed it to look like this so it's recognized by a web browser: "file://servername/foldername/file.name" I could plop that into IE and it works perfectly but the Wiki still didn't know what to do with it. A few hours of Google searching later I was reading a forum on this problem and found my answer. Some one in one of the posts said the word "tiny" not referring to TinyURL but it made me think: "Hey that just might work!" You can take a look at www.tinyurl.com to see exactly how it works but basically it takes a long URL like this: "http://www.example.com/this/isnt/a/real/url/example.html" and turns it into something like this: "http://www.tinyurl.com/example"

what I did was put "file://servername/foldername/file.name" and it gave me "http://tinyurl.com/filename" and the Wiki like that just fine. so I've been super happy with TinyURL lately.

Bloggers Alright

So far I have started on Facebook, Blogger, and have created a Twitter but have done anything with it. Blogger is probably my favorite. This is because 1: it's easy to use and not nearly as cluttered as Facebook. In less time than it took to set up my Facebook page I was able to put up very customized and personalized Blog with little effort. 2: You have much more control over what is displayed. 3: Don't have to invite/be invited by everyone, no spam updates on what everyone is doing at all times, and hardly any advertisements. Does this mean I will be spending lots of time making posts on this blog??? No, but maybe more than anything else.

~Bored~

It's only 1:30 AM and I have already finished all my work created a Blog and tried to understand the nonsense of Facebook and I have nothing to do... So wanted to add some more junk to this Blog couldn't think of anything so I decided to show off my desktop on my laptop. I used some stuff from www.wincustomize.com/ mainly Object Dock and WindowBlinds.

I don't like having icons on my desktop because it covers my background pictures so they are all on the docks that I have expanded on the first picture but usually they are hidden like in the second picture. the one on the top has multiple tabs so I can have as many shortcut I want on it. Also have a few widgets down the right side including Pandora, I would highly recommend that you use the Pandora widget rather than the website if you have Windows 7 or Vista because it doesn't play any of the ads while listening. lastly I used Windowblinds to change the texture of the taskbar at the bottom, right now I'm just using the trial of Windowblinds because I'm not sure if it's worth the $20 to buy it just for that. but the Object Dock is well worth the money. There is a free version that you can get that lets you add 1 dock like the one on the left side of my screen. Also love the window preview they added to 7.

(after posting this I noticed that the pictures are super small so I'll fix it another time.)

I Hate Social Media

As suggested by the title I hate social media, yes this does include blogs. So why in the world do I have one you may ask? Well I love computers and just about everything to do with them and I love to learn to do things with computers and like most everything I know about computers I have learnt by doing so here I am, doing.