Doug’s World

The year of Facebook

Last night we were both in Facebook for hours, and it was was suddenly after 1:00AM. This was a first.

Now, I’ve been put off by the “walled garden” aspect of Facebook for a long time. But you have much more control over those details than I thought. For example, just about anything you can or can’t find out about my Facebook profile as a non-user, user, or “friend” is that way because I decided to make it so.

Here’s a good overview of how that works. Check out the comments. Good grief. Bill Liffer’s response is pretty good.

Anyway, we’re on Facebook, and I’d recommend checking it out. It’s easier to use than you think, and I guarantee you’ll find at least one person you’ve not seen in a long time and be amused by something they’ve posted. More to the point, you’ll find lots of people you know right now who are active there. (Mom, don’t try to sign up by yourself — I’ll come over and get you going and set up a shortcut.)

Thought for the day, regarding Facebook’s growth: in the United States, Facebook now gets more uploaded photos each day than Flickr.

New laptop

My tired Toshiba M4 died over the weekend, or at least had a pretty bad stroke: no video any more except in Safe Mode with an external monitor. So I spent a few hours Sunday getting everything migrated and set up on a new Dell Latitude D820 as shown here.

So far I like it. It has a much sturdier feel than the M4, and I can’t wait for my next attempt to get some work done on a bumpy flight — that M4 tablet hinge was so shaky that the screen wobbled constantly in those situations, but the Latitude is like a rock. I also have great battery life with the extended battery, an area where the Toshiba sucked, and most of all I like the fact that the Dell was designed for Vista and so I no longer have some of the quirky problems that the Toshiba had with Vista: brain-damaged sleep/hibernate behavior, terrible performance, etc.

Now that my main work machine is stable again, my next computing maintenance task will be to set up my new UMPC (also known as an Origami). I traded the iPhone I received for not speaking at Office 2.0 for a UMPC, which is more useful to me at the moment. I have a brand-new Blackjack that I’m happy with, and I’ve been wanting a small reliable camera-bag computer: a place to download and store photos, with Photoshop and real email and everything else I might want when I’m out taking pictures for an hour or a week. I’m excited to have it, but it’s sitting on a shelf at home because I don’t have time right now to dig into it.

Ah, the tyranny of maintenance. (That’s one of my favorite phrases/concepts from Tom Robbins’s “Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates,” a book I loved for many reasons, most of which I can’t share until I decide for certain whether I’m ever going into politics.)