Sorry about earlier

Dave Farquhar This weblog

This site was down most of the day. The storms that hit the midwest today didn’t do a lot of damage in my neighborhood, but they did cause some power hiccups after I left for work, and my network didn’t completely recover on its own. I had to pick up the pieces when I got home for the day.

Such are the perils of running a site on a budget, at home.

My first Windows 7 build

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Software, Uncategorized, Windows , , , , , , , ,

I rebuilt a friend’s Windows 7 system this week.

The system includes a 30 GB SSD to boot from, and a RAID 1 mirror of 1 TB drives for storage. Aside from the two 1 TB drives, it’s basically a collection of $100 components. $100 Asus motherboard, $100 video card, $100 CPU. It seems like right now, no matter what individual system component you’re looking at, $100 buys you something really nice without going too far over the top. I’m sure certain aristocrats might disagree, but any reasonable person ought to really like using this system. Read more

Of CFLs, LEDs, and modern lighting in general

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , ,

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

Explain yourself, Mr. Farquhar

Dave Farquhar Personal

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

A late adopter’s survival guide to Facebook: Part 3 of 3

Dave Farquhar net.culture , ,

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.

A late adopter’s survival guide to Facebook: Part 2 of 3

Dave Farquhar net.culture ,

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.