Another Facebook Update

Just a quick update on the Great Facebook Experiment:

- I now have 112 friends

- The first girl I ever had a crush on has found me. Too bad she’s married…

- What am I supposed to do when somebody buys me online drinks? WHat the hell is a Lil Green Patch? And I don’t even want to know about “kidnapping” or “poking”.

Seriously folks – exchaging vacation pictures is one thing, but sending imaginary farm animals to someone crosses a whole new line…

Where No Network Has Gone Before…

All of a sudden, all sorts of electronics need to access the internet and they are nowhere near my network. I didn’t hard-wire my living room for ethernet. My media pc is wireless and I never foresaw the need. Now I need multiple net connections and I don’t want to tear the walls open again.

First – here’s why I suddenly need new network connections:

My DirecTV dvr downloads “on demand” programming  over the internet and needs a high-speed connecion using an ethernet cable. Of course, even though it has a USB port, it won’t take a USB wireless adapter. (By the way, a quick note to the folks at DirecTV – “on demand” means “give it to me when I ask for it”. It doesn’t mean “give it to me after I ask for it, put it in the queue and download it to my dvr”.)

I’m shopping for a new Blu-Ray player. I’d waited out the format wars and the first generation technical glitches, but I’m ready. Quite a few of the newer models have network jacks to enable firmware upgrades directly from the internet – a pretty good idea, so I’d like to be able to take advantage.

I’m also looking at adding a Slingbox to the mix. It’s not that I have a driving need to access my dvr while I’m on vacation. I’ve got a close friend whose job has taken him to Asia for the next 3 years, and he’s jonesing for his Florida Gators and his favorite TV shows as the new season begins. I figured a Slingbox help him stay in touch. And of course a Slingbox will require a connection to the Internet.

So I went looking for a solution that would bring the network to my living room at a minimal cost and with minimal effort. My first thought was a concept I’d been making fun of for ages – powerline networking. Quite simply, a powerline network has (at least) 2 adapters that you plug into an electrical outlet. One gets plugged in near the router and connects to the router with an ethernet cable. The second adapter gets plugged in (in my case) to an outlet in the living room, near my home theater equipment. Again, from there, ethernet cables connect the devices to the adapter. The model I bought had jacks for 4 simultaneous connections. Score! Yeah. Right…

A few problems. The manufacturer warns against using power strips, surge protectors, extension cords, etc. There isn’t an empty wal socket within 30 feet. But I juggled and daisy-chained until I could free one up. Unfortunately, the circuit that my home thearter is on has been split, fragmented and expanded so often that getting a network connection to that wall was never going to happen. But I’ll keep the adapters. When my refrigerator requires net access, this will be an elegant solution.

Next stop was to go wireless. There are a variety of wireless bridges out there and their function is exactly what I needed. The bridge grabs the wireless signal and lets you connect a through an ethernet cable. The problem was that every one I looked at had one output and I wanted to connect at least 3 devices. I considered adding a router that would connect to the bridge and then distribute, but that seemed wasteful. There had to be a better way. And then I found it – The D-Link DAP1522 4-Port GigaBit Wireless Bridge/Access Point, a handy little device that lets me connect up to 4 devices to my wireless network. So my 3 new toys will get their access and I still have room for one more, if my couch ever needsthe Internet.

What is a “Friend”?

So, as part of the grand experimment in social networking, I’ve been on Facebook for over a week. I have 32 “friends”. Some of those people have over a hundred Facebook friends. I know for a fact that hese people aren’t nearly that popular away from their PC.

In the “real” world, friend is not a term I throw around lightly. Friendship implies trust, camaraderie, shared interests and ideals. A friend is someone you want to spend time with. Someone you can count on when you need them. Somebody you could ask when you need a ride to the airport (OK - some friends believe that the airport run goes beyond the bounds of friendship). In the real world, if you asked me how many friends I have – not acquaintances, not poker buddies – actual friends – I’m pretty sure the final count would come in well under my 32 Facebook friends -and the Facebook friend requests are still pouring in. I should hit 50 by the end of the week. Because of Facebook is the word Friend losing it’s value?

Of my gang of 32, I initiated 4 – and those were nieces and nephews with whom I actually would like to stay in closer contact. Beyond that – some folks who reached out to me included my sisters, close friends and a few business acquaintances.

Then it gets interesting – I did indeed hear from first and second cousins. A high school acquaintance I have not been in touch with since the day we graduated. A friend of my nieces. My buddy’s ex-wife. A former co-worker who had moved to Costa Rica (and I’d never noticed!). I was invited, by someone I’d met twice in Nassau, to join a Facebook group for Bahamas Local Businessmen. Huh?

And the one-line status updates continue to baffle me. People are “drinking beer”, “getting excited about the weekend”, “torturing my cat” and the very post-modern, self-referential “checking my Facebook”. Stay tuned for more breaking news – someone may water their plants…

The Great Social Experiment

Ok – I know I’ve been slacking on the blog updates. Sorry about that. But I’m back.

And to start us back up, I’m venturing into the world of “social networking“. Yes, at long last, I will have a Facebook page!

You might be wondering what the big deal is. Why wouldn’t I have had a Facebook page already? I’d actually registered a year or two back – just to see what was going on, but had never even filled in my profile. There are a few reasons that I held out this long:

The “Ick” Factor- For the longest time, I still thought of Facebook as a place for high school and college kids. When they fisrt started Facebook, you couldn’t even join unless you were a student with a “.edu” email address to prove it.  That was still my perception. And and when I heard my contemporaries talking about having a Facebook page, I still thought that a middle-aged guy with a Facebook page would make me look like a creepy schoolyard stalker.

I Have Enough Friends – I kept hearing stories about rediscovering people from you past. My 50-something sister re-connected with high school friends from over 30 years ago. People found friends who had moved or relatives they’d lost touch with. Maybe it’s just me, but I already stay in touch with the people I want to keep in my life. I have no room for re-adding old friends and do I really need to exchange photos with third cousins that I haven’t seen since my bar mitzvah?

What Do I Do When I Get There? – OK – so I put up a page, post a picture of myself and tell a bit about my life. And swarms of friends, relatives and kindred souls find me. Now what? If you weren’t invited to my Labor Day BBQ, why would you want to see pictures of it? There’s the Twitter-like “What I’m Doing Now” function, but again, if you haven’t seen me in 20 years, do you care that I just got back from the liquor store? (Of course, if you’ve known me that long, you’d know that a trip to the liquor store isn’t really breaking news…)

So, despite my reservations, I put up a page, responded to the long-ignored “friend” invites and lit the fuse. The invites have already started to pour in. So we’ll go through this together. We’ll look at who found me, try and figure out how they found me, why they reached out and maybe you can help me figure out what to do now that I’m “connected” to these people…

My View of Vista (or Why I May Need a Mac)

You may recall when I took Windows to task for treating me like an idiot. Welll, I just bought a new laptop that came pre-loaded with Vista and suddenly Windows XP seems like a lean. efficient OS that treats me like I’m a PhD.

I could rant about how Vista now asks you a third time before allowing you to do any task more complex than opening an application, but it’s a minor annoyance compared to some of the lovely new quirks to discovered.

I still use Microsoft Office for XP. It continues to serve me well and they haven’t added anything significant enough to justify me spending a thousand dollars on an upgrade. (One of the few things I miss about working for a big company – they paid to upgrade your software!). Part of that Office suite is Outlook 2002. I successfully installed Office on the new Vista machine and cloned my email account info, of course telling it to save my passwords. And it all worked fine until I closed Outlook. When I started it up again, it had purged my passwords and thus failed to retrieve my email until I used the account management tool to re-enter the passwords. A Google search on the problem confirmed that it was common to Outlook 2002 and that Microsoft had no intention of fixing it. “Please send us $1000 for newer versions of software you didn’t want to replace”.

But wait! It gets worse. I had no trouble detecting and logging into my home wireless network - except that it came up “Local Only”, meaning no Internet connectivity. After frustrating attempts to figure out all the new “user friendly” nomenclature for networking I gave up and decided to use good old DOS brute force. Finding out how to open a command line window was a chore and when I finally did and tried the old faithful “ipconfig /release” command, it told me that it required “elevation”. Huh? I live at sea level in a one story home. Did I need to hit the roof? My account was set as “Administrator” but apparently that wasn’t good enough.

In a classic Catch-22, I wanted to check the web for updated drivers, but that required web access that Vista wasn’t giving me. I tried plugging in a cable direct to the router and all of a sudden all the connections worked! Sweet! Or not…

I go to a client’s office where I’ve always successfully connected to their wireless network, but I get the dreaded “Local Only”. After seeking help (and I HATE to do that) from their network admins, I was ready to give up and plug into a network jack. Presto! Once I did that, wireless kicked in. See a pattern emerging?

I was on the road last weekend. Tried to connect in the airport. Yep – Local Only. When I got to my destination, I used someone else’s computer to research the issue. It’s common. I tried to follow some of the proposed solutions. But the only one that ever worked was “plug it into a router”. That’s kind of hard in an airport.

Microsoft is mum on the issue. The net community hasn’t been able to overcome it. And my smug, welf-satisfied Mac friends are all saying “I told you so…”

Despi-cable

I need to rant about my recent adventures with my cable company. I now truly understand why cable companies need to be a monopoly in any given market: if they had any competiion, my cable company wouldn’t have a single customer left. Out of deference to the folks at Digital Landing (who do business with my cable provider) I won’t name names, but our story begins on a rainy spring day…

With the coming of the rainy season in Florida came the horrifying realization that my broadband internet connection died every time it rained. And some of my premium and HD channels began to randomly disappear. I called my cable company, went through the standard round of idiocy:

“Unplug your modem, shot down your computer, re-start the modem, restart the computer.” “I did that already before I called you.” “I’ll need you to do it again, sir.” Followed by “Hmm, I don’t see your modem online. There must be a problem. We can have technician there in 4 days” ARRRGGHHH! Fortunately I have a backup DSL line, so I waited…

By the time the technician arrived, the service had mysteriously restored, but after  checking my wiring and signal strength I was told that the problem was with the outside cable coming into the house, which of course required a different technician. Two weeks and numerous rainy outages later, the outside problem wasn’t resolved. So I called customer service and insisted on escalating. I’m pretty sure that when they put you on hold whle they get a supervisor, the rep turns to the guy next to him and says “Hey, Joe – I got another loser who needs to bitch. Wanna pretend to be a supervisor?” My chat with the supervisor accomplished nothing and I asked for the next level. This is when it gets fun…

The next level of support is called “The Office of the President”. Seriously. That’s how they answer the phone. Boy, that made me feel important! Now, let me give you a little perspective – I subscribe to every premium channel available (yes, I really need 72 HBO channels) in addition to their fastest Internet service, all of which results in a monthly bill over $200. So I’m not the kind of customer they want to lose. But since I also have DirecTV (for football, it’s a necessity) and that backup DSL, I’m also in the position where dumping my cable would be pretty easy. So I thought I as in a pretty good negotiating position.

I explained my problem to a representative of the Office of the President and she was very sympathetic. 15 minutes later, the ocal service manager called me and within an hour a technician was at my house, with orders to make me happy. Nd he tried – I gotta tell you. The guy spent 6 hours rewiring everything in my house, and then told me I had a weak signal and they need to replace the cable coming into my house, which of course required a different technician. Deja vu all over again.

Four weeks later, still no resolution, and according to the Office of the President, my issue had been marked “resolved”, a mistake I was eager to correct. The same tech came back again, astonished that nothing else was done. So he took it upon himself to run a new cable to the house (although someone else would have to come bury it). The cable ran to the main box which is in a neighbor’s yard. Suddenly I had all my channels and a markedly improved internet connection. Three hours later, of course after business hours, I lost cable service completely. I went in my yard and found that my new cable wasn’t connected to anything.

The next morning I called the Office of the President (I REALLY like saying that!) and asked if Ashton Kutscher was setting me up for an episode of Punk’d. 2 hours later, new guys come to re-connect the cable. 2 hours later after that, cable is gone again and I was on the phone with the Office of the President. I ran out for a few minutes and when I returned, the cable truck was in front of my house. As I got out of my car, he drove away, so I thought my problem had been solved, but I still had no service. Guess who I called…

The cable guy returned an hour later and told me that while I did indeed need that new cable, the last outages had new wrinkle: the neighbor (whose yard is adjacent to mine but actually lives one block over) had his own gripes with the cable company and had expressed his displeasure by rpping all the wires out of the ain junction box. When they’d been repaired, he ripped them out again. And so the cable guys had to call the police, who in turn told the neighbor that if he touched the wires again, he’d be in jail.

So no I have new cables inside my house and outside. The outside ones have been buried. I have a brand new modem. Everything seems to be going fine. But tonight’s forecast calls for rain…

Plane Crazy

It’s been a long time coming but American Airlines is getting ready to roll out high-speed Internet access on airplanes. All at once it’s a great idea and the second worst thing that could happen to air travel. (We’ll get to the WORST thing a few paragraphs down.)

Personally, I’m excited by the possibilty of being productive on flights – at least until the 3rd or 4th vodka kicks in. I’d love to spend a 3 hour flight answering emails or writing brilliantly engaging blog posts instead of zoning out watching videos on my iPod – at least until the 3rd or 4th vodka kicks in. But while this service is aimed at the business traveller looking for productivity time, we all know that even in business class, you rarely end up surrounded by business travellers. And that’s when the “fun” begins…

Imagine that the person two rows behind you is 17 and was sending text messages on her phone at lightning speed right up until the plane left the ground. 20 minutes later, you’re at cruising altitude, she fires up a laptop, pops up her IM and starts chatting – of course without turning off her sound. Enjoy the melodious tones of AOL for the next 3 hours. And of course the pinging sound of 30 Outlook clients receiving mail all around you.

It could get worse. Both Skype and Internet Phone providers like Vonage now offer USB phones so you can make calls from your laptop. Now imagine that on your red-eye flight back from L.A. to New York.

Which brings me back to the absolute worst thing that could ever happen to air travel: the long-threatened use of mobile phones on airplanes. Think about that guy who cut off 3 lanes of traffic while screaming into his Bluetooth headset. Or the 80 year old woman in front of you on line at the supermarket who can’t stop talking on the phone long enough to pay for her groceries. (And then she writes a check! Why do they still let people write checks at the supermarket! Get a freaking ATM card already!) Now imagine these people are within 5 rows of you on an airplane.

Don’t get me wrong – as I said earlier, I look forward to the benefits of technology following me wherever I go. But it would be a lot more palatable if common courtesy were actually a little more common – at least until the 3rd or 4th vodka kicks in…

Who Is Watching This Stuff?

Back in the early days of the Internet, everyone trumpeted how the web would democratize entertainment. Any ordinary person could create content that would get as much exposure as something from a major media company.

Particularly since the explosion of YouTube, this promise has been fulfilled – for better or worse. Ordinary (although often bizarre) people are posting content that is being seen by millions. A recent study showed that the average YouTube viewer watched over 50 video clips per month.

But what are they watching? I decided to take a look at the most popular clips on YouTube for the last week – and see what people are looking at. It’s not pretty.

Fred Goes Swimming - The latest in an odd series of clips by a teenage boy with the audio sped up to Chipmunk quality is about him swimming in an inflatible kiddie pool. It’s odd. A little humorous. But over 1.5 million people have watched this in 3 days. And earlier clips in the series have been seen over 4 million times. That’s more than the audience for a top-rated cable show.

Where the Hell is Matt? – Videos of a guy dancing, sometimes alone and sometimes with a crowd, in 42 countries. I applaud the huge effort this took, but how did over 2 million people find this since June 20?

The list goes on. And then there are the repeating variations on a theme – thousands of videos of combining Mentos and DIet Coke or teenage morons throwing sodas in the faces of drive-thru window attendants.

And YouTube isn’t nearly the only place for odd behavior. There’s a guy on the web named Ze Frank who has created web weirdness that rises to the level of pure genius. Besides his own weird but often hiarious video blog, he challenges his web site’s users to perform eclectic but inspired tasks and they rise to the occasion. You want examples?

During his “Color Wars 2008″, one of the challenges was a Google Street View scavenger hunt, where users were given a list of items, ranging from a dog on a leash to a prime number greater than 100 to the loneliest person on earth. The results are hysterical and inspired.

The all time classic was when he challenged users to create (and document) an “Earth Sandwich” - two pieces of bread placed directly opposite each other on the globe, effectively making a sandwich with the Earth as the filling. It required collaboration across thousands of miles. And they did it. In droves!

This is great stuff – the web at its participatory best.

But I still don’t get the chipmunk-sounding guy in the kiddie pool…

“Lost” My Mind

For me, following a show like “Lost” is an addiction. And the Internet has been a huge part of that. The Lost folks figured out pretty early on that their fan base was pretty web-savvy and they used it brilliantly to engage new fans and keep the devoted ones buzzing even in the off season.

Bogus commercials on TV for the Hanso Foundation led to websites that held clues to the mysterious Dharma Initiative. “Official” sites ranged from the website for Oceanic Air, the airline that the castaways were flying when they crashed to Find815.com - a site supposedly about one man’s search for his girlfriend who was on the doomed flight.  BTW – as an example of how well the ABC folks targeted the “geek” market, the URL for Find815.com was placed in the background of certain Marvel comic books.

The fan population is pretty active online, as well. There are hundreds of sites devoted to studying and discussing the minutae of every episode. Fans take screen captures from their HDTV DVR to analyze background details like newspaper articles that the characters are reading (and, for the record, the producers are pretty meticulous about those tiny details being accurate, so the fans aren’t as crazy as it sounds). They try to figure out the meaning behind characters that are named after dead philosophers, discuss the symbolism of Jack tripping over a Star wars toy and constantly evolve their theories about what the show is really about.

I’m sure the fan forums will spend the entire summer analyzing every detail of the season finale, which really was awesome! And while I hate “spoilers” (people who insist on publishing important plot points and ruin the suspense for everybody), I do love to check in and see what the conspiracy theorists and obsessive fans come up with next.

The Last Crackberry Holdout

The reason the nice folks at Digital Landing give me a forum for my ramblings is that I’m a self-indulgent tech freak. But there’s one technology I have steadfastly refused to let into my life – the dreaded “Crackberry” or any of its smartphone brethren.

The reasons for this have roots in my obsessive behavior, particularly in regard to communication.

I’m one of those people that can’t ever turn the cellphone completely off. If my phone rings in the middle of the night, and I don’t answer it, I’m convinced that either my friends are having fun and I’ll miss it – or that somebody will need me and not be able to reach me. The last time I turned my phone off before bed, my best friend actually did call in the middle of the night – and I didn’t answer. Nothing major, but guilt set in anyway and the phone hasn’t been turned off again in 5 years.

I work at home – my office is in the house and the computer is always on. When I’m home, I wander into the office constantly to check if anything comes in. The only time I can actually escape from it is when I go out. If I basically carried my job in my pocket 24/7, I’d never relax again. EVER!

And that ties into the other reason – I don’t want to turn into one of those guys – the ones who have to break out the Blackberry and read email while you’re in a meeting or while you’re having a conversation over lunch. I’ve always felt that If the meeting is important enough for you to attend it, pay attention. If it’s not, just don’t come. And if you can’t take an hour and leave work behind for lunch, you’re just not managing your time well. But I also know that if I had one of those things in my pocket, I’d be just as bad. So I continue to hold out.

But every time I lug a laptop through the airport just so I can check my email on the road, I start to think, “Would it really be that bad?”