Make your own Facebook policy

February 17th, 2009 | Posted in Networking, Web | 2 Comments »

Whether or not your employee or workplace has laid down the law about acceptable Facebook behavior - I’d like to encourage you to make your own decisions and stick by them. I’ve spent a while thinking about my own personal boundaries and rules so far as what I do and when I do things on the internet.

I’m intently interested in internet marketing but really I’m only a junior at the game. I make websites for a living so a part of my job is keeping on the cutting edge of geekdom. Urrg, sadly as work has demanded more of that I’ve felt less inclined to use twitter and Facebook in the recent months.

I love keeping up what my family scattered around the world are doing and Facebook is able to help me do that… but its also able to drain 30 minutes to an hour of my life every evening… if I let it. I’ve begun to enforce that not let it because I can get to the end of an evening and wonder what I’ve done, despite having starred at a screen for a large portion of it.

There’s always one extra blog to check, someones ’status’ to chuckle over - but the gain is what? What’s the bottom line?

I don’t propose to answer this just yet, as I have not worked it out for myself, but I’m more and more of the opinion that one should make a set of rules for this kind of internet interaction and that way you’ll make of it what you want, not what you think its meant for.

I was inspired by Ed Dale’s recent blog post that discussed his reevaluation of Facebook as a tool.

His sentiment was something that had been brewing in my pool of crazy thoughts for a long time. How do you decide who you want to associate with on Facebook. Should Facebook be any different to any other internet social media? Should you put limits on who you talk to online?

After all so much value comes from not just knowing someone’s name and ’status’, someone’s mood or a quip, it comes from a real interest in their wellbeing - I think.

Facebook is a platform that will let you continue your real-world associations and relationships into the new media but it was never concocted as a place for you to market or network to score business points or financial gain, I don’t think.

Ed Dale’s post amounts to his realisation of this: that if you try to spread yourself too thin, in any case, not just online, you may miss the important things - your family and you close friends. Well, that’s what I read into it and that’s the line his explanation got thinking along.

I now know that for all the networking I do online, I want my Facebook to be for me and my friends, my real friends… not work or discussion or worrying about everything I say as if I need to appeal to nerds, or keep a business professionalism keep friends of friends of friends from stalking me.

My Facebook policy is firstly to have a personal policy about exactly how I want to use my favourite social network.

Make your own Facebook policy, I think you might just find your Facebook time a little more productive and enjoyable.

Excellent advice is hard to find!

January 15th, 2009 | Posted in Apple, Code, General Goodness, Servers | No Comments »

I’ve just spend almost all of the day trying to install and compile ImageMagick, all of its dependancies and the Rmagick gem onto my swanky new Mac server.

Ok - so it’s a Mac Mini I’ve set up in my office, but that’s not the point.

At two this afternoon I set about finding a solution to my troubles. Many blogs offered a variety of tips about how to get around the troubles of ImageMagick and its ridiculously confusing install sequence. None of which really helped me. It’s now 11 in the evening and rMagick is installed. WHAT a mission!

I tried the OSX binary version of ImageMagick which failed to compile properly. I tried the MacPorts install which, while saved me an hour making and sudo make installing the different dependancies, broke when I tried to install the rmagick gem. The only solution was to simply DIY!

NB - I dug deep enough to find that the reason why I wasted an hour on MacPorts (simply trying to get the command line tool to execute) was that it wrote a ~/.profile file, when I was using ~/.bash_login for a few shortcuts an aliases, which I now know takes precedence. Ick!

My sanity came in the form of a blog post by Dan Benjamin. It was the most simple and coherent instruction I’d read all day. Many blogs credited Dan for their similar solution to this awful problem but none of the other blogs worked.

Well to cut a long story short - I was going to write a comment of praise on Mr. B’s blog entry, but comments were closed… I simply thought something should be said since his old but reliable blog entry has made my day.

Thank you very much!

What’s next for Mac OS X - the third dimension?

December 12th, 2008 | Posted in Apple, Art, Web | No Comments »

I really do find Apple’s OSX environment a pleasure to use. Cynics shun Macs as being useful only to “artys” people but of all the people I know go truly give OS X a chance, all have been converted Apple-fans. I know of several people who, since the birth of Bootcamp, have brought Apple hardware to primarily run Windows on their georgious Apple laptops - ahem. Not being a hardware guy, I fail to see the point in this but it illustrates the point that the love of Macs is definitely growing.

OS X has been my trusted companion for as many years as I have been in the IT industry (not long by many dedicated Apple-fan standards, granted, but I’ve never tried or had any ambition to do serious work on a PC)… If gaming is you call - something I know very little of - then be my gust, stick with the crowd. ;)

I was really prompted to post this, because, for a while I have been wondering what is next… Today I read an article that hazarded a guess at the next big thing from Apple and its operating system. We know Snow Leopard (despite its silly name) is due to make an appearance and is traveling a tried and true path for Apple, optimisation over application - making the tools you need as useful as possible! (As, reluctantly, I have to integrate with clients and employees who use Windows Server to host data, I am actually looking forward to features such as the full Enterprise support…)

But as a TUAW writer mentions, we haven’t seen any leaps in technology in Apple’s operating system since 10.0. We Apple users have gotten used to the tried and true method - but in the backs of our optimisitic minds, we’re hoping for Apple to break big news and launch something breathtaking. If you ask me, they did it with the iPod, they did it with the iPhone (no, I’m not an owner yet), but standard computer users are still waiting patiently for their turn.

The future might have come about - but in an unusual and unepected format. A three-dimensional OS X diagram has brought itself to attention. Its an odd direction to be focusing on, a new spacial reference - a three dimentional desktop that, ironcially, looks like a window into my lounge!

The image run by TUAW and Engadget only show a sketchy idea - like a drafter’s drawing - but it is not the direction I would imagine the operating system going. I had expected a “Less is more” approach, if truth be told. I expected the search to take a more upfront role: as users are familiar with “Googling” now, intelligent search might have been a step in the future… Never mind. In these sketches - the extra dimension could conceivably give you three times as much desktop to keep tidy! Not only would a user have a desktop, they would have walls and floors to stick notes, files and folders to. Isn’t that just a wee bit complicated; for my brain at least?