David L. Farquhar, computer security professional, train hobbyist, and landlord
Compact Fluorescent and LED light bulbs just couldn’t stay out of the news this week, and boy, is there some bad information still out there.
Let’s start with Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker, who recently discovered a form of libertarianism after years of voting a straight Democratic ticket. She said three things about CFLs in an interview with Village Voice Media: Read more
I picked up an HP s7220n dirt cheap, then I found out why. It powers on just fine, boots, runs for a few minutes, then powers itself off. At that point, the power supply is hot enough that you don’t want to touch it. Effectively, it’s a Useless Machine with an Intel CPU and Windows XP. Read more
I understand that my series on Facebook, and perhaps the length and frequency of my posts, offended at least one person. What right does that guy have to talk about that?
Since someone must know, a friend of 20 years approached me for advice on Facebook recently. After some back-and-forth, I realized that maybe someone else would want to know this stuff. I would have liked to have known it when I was starting out. Read more
This is part 3 in my series on Facebook and avoiding pitfalls. Here’s part 1.
Too many friends
Psychology professor and self-help pioneer Jess Lair used to ask people if they had five friends. If they said no, he said to go make some–with fewer than five, you wear your friends out. If they said they had a lot more than five, he said no they don’t–they have a lot of acquaintances. People don’t have enough time and energy to maintain more than about five deep friendships.
I think about that when I see people who have hundreds of Facebook friends. One Facebook meme I’ve seen is people posting a status update that just says, “Tell me how I know you?”
By hiding game/app updates, you can make it a lot easier to keep up with larger numbers of people. Hiding friends who post excessively helps as well.
But the odd thing is, even though I’ve done these things, there are still friends I’ve never seen a status update from. They appear to be active. Many of them have hundreds or thousands of friends. Whether they’re using filters and I’m just not in any group that gets their updates, or whether Facebook just isn’t designed to handle hundreds of relationships, I don’t know.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to keep in touch with large numbers of people, but don’t let the “friends” misnomer get in the way of the relationships that are most important to you.
The power of lists to filter updates and avoid conflict
Sometimes you may post something that you suspect will rile certain friends up. Hopefully it will be a small number of them. Before posting, click on the lock icon, and there’s an option there labeled hide. Start typing the names of friends you don’t want to see the post, then select them. This will keep them from seeing the post, and hopefully prevent you from inadvertently starting a world war.
A former Mizzou classmate clued me in to an even better tip: Some people go so far as to create lists and hide certain updates from those lists. Click on Friends, then click Edit Friends, then click Create List. Name the list by topic, add friends you don’t want to send updates on that topic, then click Create List. Now, when you go to post a status update, when you click on the lock, you can type the name of that list into the hide option.
You can also use lists to avoid sending irrelevant updates to all 999 of your closest friends. You can create lists of family, coworkers, former coworkers, former classmates, and any other list that’s useful to you. Then, if you want to send an update just to your family, type your update, click the lock, select customize, select specific people, and then type the name of the group. Now you can send a message to your whole family and not worry about bothering other people who won’t care or understand the message.
And then you can use those lists to see updates just from those specific groups, so if you ever wonder what your old coworkers from Initech are up to, you can find out really quickly. Just click on Friends, then click that list, and you’ll see all the recent updates from the people on that list.
The upside
Despite the pitfalls, there’s enough upside to make it worthwhile. I’ve questioned it a couple of times, but never for more than a few days.
It is an effective way to keep in touch. One blatant example: Last summer, we had a project at work that required several teams to travel. Those of us who had Facebook accounts knew how the remote teams were doing. Those who didn’t knew very little. It was a lot easier to sign in to Facebook at the end of the day than it was to use our convoluted e-mail system from the road.
I also find it easier to deal with than e-mail. I used to get more e-mail per day than I could possibly read or respond to in 24 hours. With Facebook, people’s expectations are more reasonable. I have a much better handle on what’s going on in people’s lives by spending a few minutes on Facebook than I did plowing through hundreds of e-mail messages.
I’m a whole lot more connected now than I was in 2007. I can trade family pictures and talk effortlessly with my first cousin in Philadelphia, whom I haven’t seen in person in 22 years. I can do the same with my first cousin in Germany, whom I’ve never met at all. I’ve even used it to try to chase down job leads for friends who weren’t on Facebook yet. There’s nothing at all wrong with any of that.
This is part 2 in my series of observations about avoiding potential pitfalls in Facebook.
What do your updates say about you?
It’s hard to know who’s watching you, and how your updates could potentially come back to haunt you. If your status updates or photos suggest questionable judgment, it could potentially jeopardize your professional life.
For example, it’s easy to make people wonder if you’re ever sober if every status update talks about going out drinking, and every picture posted looks like it was taken in a bar. That’s not necessarily career-killing–I had a coworker once who seemed to have a hangover every single day and he managed to outlast me at that place–but in these tough times, people lose opportunities over dumber things than that.
Boundaries
I’ve dealt with this before. Odds are, at some point, you’re going to run across old flames. I won’t revisit all of that. The most important thing is to live in the present, and set boundaries.
One of mine found me about 16 months ago. After maybe three days of back-and-forth and being part of her morning routine, I set down some ground rules. That ended the conversation, and she hasn’t contacted me since. Maybe that’s not the perfect ending, but it’s an acceptable one.
Every relationship is different, but it’s not uncommon for current spouses/significant others to be uncomfortable when old flames come into the picture. And depending on how the relationship ended, opening old wounds is a possibility. In my case, it was clear the 1997 she remembered wasn’t or isn’t the same 1997 I remember. Maybe she never knew, or just doesn’t remember anymore, that she messed me up pretty badly.
Ending communication showed she did respect those boundaries. And any reasonable person will. They don’t have to like it. The important thing to remember is that once a relationship is over, and especially once there’s a new relationship in the picture, a different set of rules applies.
And let’s talk about two of those rules. Is it wrong for my wife to not want to have to compete with a predecessor for my attention? No. Is it wrong for me to want to avoid getting hurt again? No.
If they don’t respect those boundaries, un-friend them. Or reject their friend request.
Privacy
It should go without saying, but don’t announce to the world, or even just your 999 closest friends, that the entire family is on vacation and your house is sitting empty. And I shouldn’t know that someone my wife knows received enough money in a lawsuit to buy a house. I shouldn’t know this, but I know that and then some, because she posted the whole story on Facebook.
If you want to talk about how great your vacation is, well, wait until you get back and talk about how great your vacation was. If you come into a windfall, well, those 999 people you barely know probably don’t need to know how much it was or where it came from. Maybe you trust those 999 people, but you don’t know who those 999 people are talking to.
And if a friend of a friend–or someone who just isn’t as good of a friend as you thought–finds out you just came into a lot of money and you just happen to be on vacation right now? You tell me what pops into mind. Maybe that person won’t act on it. But it’s better not to even take the chance. These are tough times, and someone may think they’re more entitled to that windfall than you.
Wasting time
I think Betty White put it best when she said, “[Facebook] sounds like a huge waste of time!” And yes, it can waste as much or as little time as you want it to.
Anymore, I check in every couple of days, usually in the evenings, to see what’s going on. A friend from high school got married last weekend. That’s a big deal, and I’m glad to know about that.
I used to try to set time limits for myself, so I wouldn’t get lost in it. Anymore, it’s usually a few skims, some page scrolls, maybe a couple of minutes to post a response to something, and I’m out.
Some people spend a whole lot more time on it than I do, but it isn’t necessary.
Part 3 of this series will follow tomorrow.
A good friend asked me for some thoughts on Facebook this week. Like many people, he’s resistant. But, as he put it, it’s the standard for personal, non-professional communication these days. As a Facebook late adopter, I understand the hesitancy. As someone with a couple of years’ experience, I’ve weathered some storms. So he asked me for my thoughts on its pitfalls and avoiding them.
Arm your system’s defenses
I went something like 16 years without catching a virus, until I caught something earlier this year. My antivirus software minimized the damage, but this was embarrassing. Whether it came from a rogue ad on their site or some rogue app, I don’t know. But if you intend to participate, protect your system from known malware domains. whether at the operating system level, or by using Adblock Plus.
Even if Facebook is completely benevolent (which I doubt), it’s a huge, attractive target for malware authors, and it has a history.
Games
Maybe the games are fun. I don’t know; I stay away from them. I get tired of hearing about casual acquaintances’ game activity, and I really don’t care to annoy all of my casual acquaintances with them. And frankly, before I learned you could hide these games by hovering over the update and clicking the ‘x’, I really wondered about certain people because it looked like they were spending their entire lives playing games.
But there’s an even better solution…
Filtering
Several filters exist: F.B. Purity, Better Facebook, and FFixer are popular ones. I use F.B. Purity and I’m pretty happy with it. It blocks the games and the stupid link-sharing apps, which eliminates at least 50% of the noise. At least now I don’t see waves of “Click here if God ever answered a prayer!” and similar posts that tend to percolate up every so often–and it seems like once one of your friends posts one of those, 30 of them follow.
I don’t know why people see the need to use Facebook apps to say things like that–I could go through my friends list and tell you who would say yes and no to that particular question, probably with greater than 90% accuracy–but it’s not my problem anymore. Every time I sign on to Facebook, all I see is that FB Purity hid 10 superfluous updates. I can see them if I click on something, but I never bother.
Politics and religion
There’s a growing disrespect for differing views in these two arenas. I suspect it’s because today’s popular opinion makers have no respect for differing opinions and encourage their fans to behave similarly, but whatever the reason is, I have less and less interest in participating in it.
My view seems to be a minority view. I have some acquaintances who seem to have plenty of time to post 15 updates every day about these things. You probably already know who you can safely talk about these things with and who’s just going to call you an idiot. (Hint: the more extreme the view, whether left or right, the worse your chances.) Unfortunately I’ve had some conversations on these topics that damaged relationships. A better approach is just to hide the status updates of people who post 15 inflammatory updates per day. Then you can still keep in touch, without being stuck reading a ton of stuff that gets under your skin every day.
And since you probably don’t want to read that kind of stuff, you shouldn’t be one of those kinds of people. While there are things I believe in, I realize it’s counter-productive to post updates about those things multiple times a day. Posting obnoxious links and status updates isn’t going to convert my atheist friends to Christianity. It’s more likely to make them dig in. Posting obnoxious links or parroting obnoxious pundits isn’t going to convert my friends’ political views either. And on the latter, I’m not certain that it’s productive.
If you feel the need to talk about such things, do it in a targeted fashion. Confine it to the people you know you can have productive discussions with. Not all 999 people you know. But I’m getting way ahead of myself–I’ll cover that in part 3, when I talk about lists.
Parts 2 and 3 will follow later in the week.
I bought tires last week. The last time I bought tires, I bought road hazard insurance without even thinking about it. This time I thought about it, and asked “How much?”
It was $130 and change.
I did some very quick math in my head, and said no, rather emphatically. Maybe too emphatically.
Here’s the math. I last bought tires four or five years ago. On my car, I’ve needed the road hazard coverage once. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t in position to use the coverage, so I paid someplace else $20 to patch the tire.
But it only happened once. And my average for the last 19 years has been roughly one flat tire every 4-5 years. That happens to be about how long a set of tires usually lasts for me. So the last time I bought tires, I spent $130 to save $20, and then I didn’t even save the $20.
So what if the tire is damaged to the point of needing to be replaced? Well, that’s actually happened on my wife’s car. But when it happens, they don’t just give you a new tire. They look at how much tread is left, then give you a pro-rated discount on a new tire. So when we had to use the road hazard coverage on my wife’s car, what we got was about a 25% discount on some no-name tire because they didn’t even have a matching tire in stock.
For some reason, my wife’s had a run of bad luck the last few years, and she’s actually had four flats, two where the tire couldn’t be repaired. But one happened far from the store, so we couldn’t use it. Had we been in position to actually use all of the coverage I paid for, we still would have only saved about $80.
So I opted not to spend $130 for questionable protection of my $330 set of tires. If road hazard coverage is included with the purchase price and the purchase price is competitive, there’s no reason not to take it. But there’s no reason to pay $30+ per tire for it.
A smarter use of that money is to pay to fix flats as they happen, and consider getting an extra rim and a fifth tire to use as a full-sized spare, and rotate it in. Then, in the event of a tire issue, you don’t necessarily have to drop everything and take care of it right then. Put on the spare, get where you need to go, then when you’re in position to shop around, weigh your options and get the flat taken care of.
And since your tires will last about 25% longer by virtue of one tire being out of the rotation 25% of the time, the full-sized spare comes close to paying for itself anyway just in a matter of dollars, not even factoring convenience in.
If a tire is damaged to the point of needing replacement, replace it. Use the money left over from not buying the coverage. Match the tire if at all possible, and if that’s not possible, replace the other tire on the same axle.
Or the other thing I could do is just deposit that $130 into the bank account I use for emergencies, because chances are, I’m not going to spend $130 on emergency tire maintenance. But I spend enough time on the road that buying a rim and another tire seems prudent.
And one more thing; Keep the tires properly inflated. It saves you some hassle and improves gas mileage. What’s not to like?
A friend bought a new computer this month. It arrived sooner than expected, and she called to ask what she should do. I said, among other things, to set it up and leave it powered on continuously for at least 24 hours.
A coworker who had never heard that advice asked why.
So Cablevision and News Corp are arguing about money, and the result is Fox is dark on cable in New York and Philly tonight, and for the foreseeable future.
Build an antenna. No, seriously, build an antenna.
Over-the-air HDTV looks better than cable, because they have to compress and recompress the signal in order to bring you those 432 channels nobody ever watches. And DTV reception isn’t like it was in the analog days. With a good antenna design, reception is much better than it was a few short years ago. Build a Gray-Hoverman antenna out of $10 worth of readily available materials, and you’ll never miss a local broadcast again. In fact, you’ll probably wonder what’s wrong with your cable provider.
And yes, Game 1 of the NLCS is a pretty good game so far. Definitely not worth paying to miss.
Rupert Murdoch delenda est.
When my accountant did my taxes this year (I almost always file Form 4868 to extend my due date, which is why I’m talking about taxes in October), he included a comparison sheet, comparing 2009 to my previous years.
One thing jumped out. I made almost 12% less in 2009 than I made in 2008. My salary for both years was supposed to be the same.
I worked for different companies, but had the same job title and comparable responsibilities. Once company was relatively generous with its benefits; the other extremely stingy.
When I worked for that company in 2009, it seemed like they were nickel and diming me on my benefits, but I never attached a number to it. He did. No wonder things seemed so tight that year.
I didn’t really negotiate the salary. The negotiation started with the hiring executive asking what I make. I told him. He asked if I could produce a couple of pay stubs. I did. And that was pretty much the end of it.
I should have asked more questions, like what the benefits were, and what they cost. Then I should have used those numbers to figure out how much I’d have to make in order to keep my take-home pay more or less constant, because I basically threw away four years’ worth of pay raises when I signed on the bottom line.
Of course, my fear at the time was that if I played hardball too much, they’d just hire someone willing to work for less. I’m not certain that fear was unfounded. And at the time, my phone wasn’t exactly ringing with job offers, even though I was looking aggressively.
So it’s hard to be too regretful. In effect, I took a pay cut. In 2009, so did a lot of people. When I was shopping for clothes for my interviews, I ran into a former classmate at Dillard’s. Working there, not shopping there. I took the job, waited for a better opportunity, and when that happened, I took it.
But when you get a job offer and the time comes to talk salary, it probably makes sense to ask more questions than I did.