Is this always a good thing?

A friend in middle school became disturbed in high school (for storytelling sake, let’s call him Ahab). Technically I’m pretty sure Ahab’s a paranoid schizophrenic and from anecdotal accounts of close friends of mine, he became violent, paranoid and pretty crazy. I think his family eventually had Ahab institutionalized. I really hadn’t thought about him in years.

Fast forward 15 or 16 years and in today’s age of instant access to old friends. He requested to be facebook friends with a friend of mine (let’s call him Joe). Once the friendship request was accepted, Ahab sent Joe a scathing email where he blamed Joe for all of the problems in his life, tried to extort money out of him and said he knows where Joe’s family lives and will do them harm if he doesn’t pay.

So Joe did the responsible thing and called the police, they advised him to keep all the threatening messages, but delete his facebook account and after tracking down Ahab’s family, Joe found out Ahab at least lives out of state (and has been off medication for over a year). So Joe and his family are concerned, but much less so knowing that Ahab lives far away.

Scary story and absolutely true except for the names.

Hearing this got me thinking about what I divulge online. On twitter I’ll happily share the names and pictures of my kids, where I am (via foursquare) and other personal details about my life (where I work, where I’m going on vacation, etc). On facebook I post photo albums to share with friends and family. One personal detail I’ve always left out is my home address, but I have friends who have added their homes to Foursquare and checkin when they get there.

I think social media is one of the last nails in the coffin of privacy and for the most part I’ve accepted that and would rather engage and share what I want to share without fear of deranged people.

A lot of internet privacy stories are ridiculously sensationalized by the media. (Tangent thought: pleaserobme.com is a joke, ok, as a friend tweeted to me about this story: “Know what else tells robbers where you are besides Foursquare?? Being a reporter on a scheduled nightly newscast!!”)

But after hearing horror stories like the one above, I at least need to pause and think about what I share.

Do you? Does this give you pause for concern? Let me know in the comments below.

2) Add some “drama” (contest for money, competition as best of their diva-like profession, alcohol, house being foreclosed)

3) Profit??

As I’ve chronicled here before, I watch The West Wing reruns from my couch while working and because I’m usually just half listening while looking down at the laptop, I don’t fast forward through the commercials. While doing this I’m subjected to all the BravoTV commercials.

Now I miss Billy Mays yelling at me – because other than weird NuvaRing ads – the rest are messed up reality TV shows that I would never watch in a million years.

Here are some of the reality TV shows on Bravo whose ads I’ve suffered through lately:

That said, I’m probably getting close the have a cap to the amount of people I can follow. Why? Well, I don’t use tools that separate people into groups. Twitter apps like Tweetdeck, Seesmic (and others I’ve never tried) allow you to follow your friends and group the people you follow into logical columns so you can track certain accounts together.

I used to use this approach… I had a column in Tweetdeck for people I follow who tweet about Sports, Business, Design, Web Development, “Good Friends”, etc and a few saved searches – mostly related to Spoke or our clients. But I gave up Tweetdeck and the column approach altogether. Why? Two reasons — One was a problem I had with links in AIR apps and the second I didn’t realize until was a problem until I started using Tweetie for Mac: I wasn’t interacting with a lot of people.

See using these columns I was virtually ignoring the All Friends column.  I was interacting with the same people over and over again and unless I added the account to one of those columns when I started following it, I would most likely not see any of their tweets.  I didn’t even realize that I was doing this until I switched to Tweetie.

Tweetie is a one-column application (a la – All Friends column in Tweetdeck) and after I started using it, I noticed that I read (or at least skimmed) through the tweets in the stream (when I’m on twitter, I don’t worry about trying to catch up when I’m not). After a while I noticed I was interacting with more and more people. Making new friends, unfollowing people who spammed my tweet stream. Life is good.

I found one draw back to this approach — I’ll run into a maximum number of people I can follow. I’m right around 1,000 now, and I’ve decided to start removing people from the list if they are tweeting the same thing alot or if they are business bots that just tweet blog posts, etc.

My Advice: Find Your Approach

I’ve talked with people each with different points of view about how many people to follow. Some only want to follow 100 people so they can keep up, other’s don’t care and just pick and choose what they pay attention and some people care about their follower numbers, so they follow everyone.

I made a comment on Mark Murnahan’s blog post about the following / unfollowing trend about my approach and his reply was that the communication matters less than the approach. He’s right, he also follows 18,000 people, something that I’ve come to realize I probably never want to do. It’s just not me… I want to interact with a large majority of the people I follow. I want to follow people who’s tweets I care about reading, and I want to actually read them.  That’s the twitter approach that works for me. Make sure to find the way it works best for you.

I guessed based on what was going on that it was a problem with the hard drive and decided to schedule an appointment with the “Geniuses” at the Apple Store [Mistake 1].

I was running late due to an accident on the highway, so I politely called to say I’d be a few minutes late [Mistake 2], the nice woman I talked to said:

No problem, I booked you a backup appointment in case you can’t get here on time.

So I showed up about 5 or 10 minutes late for my appointment and I wasn’t listed as still having an appointment at that time, but instead for 2 or 3 hours later. I explained the situation and the “concierge” said they could still get me in at my original appointment time because the woman with an appointment before me wasn’t finished yet… Nor did her appointment finish for a while. So I sat there waiting patiently… fast forward a 1/2 hour and the “Genius” tells me that since I missed my appointment he would try to fit me in between his next appointment… Which of course, is wrong, because he was running 30 or 40 minutes late for my appointment. I explain the situation, he looks at my Mac and says:

I think it’s the hard drive

Umm, really, Genius, me too. Got anything to help confirm that suspicion?

Well I could try a boot DVD or drive?

That would be great since I’m here and all, and by this point I’ve been here about an hour. For the next hour or two he tries this to no avail, asks me if I brought the original Leopard install disk with me [mistake 3] and of course, I didn’t. He explains he can’t confirm it’s the hard drive without taking out the hard drive (?) and if I want the repair it’ll cost upwards of $300, at which point I said I’d be happy to do it myself.  My only real reason for bringing it in was to confirm it wasn’t a logic board or something worse, nevertheless, I left went to Best Buy and bought a new hard drive (after googling it myself since the Best Buy staff had no clue what size hard drive fits in a MacBook Pro).

I followed these great instructions on iFix for replacing my hard drive, and in the process fixed my loose bluetooth antenna and put it all back together.  

So I take the laptop to the office, install that boot DVD the goofball from the Apple Store told me about and tried to restore from my Time Machine backup that I had from about an hour before my Mac crashed, waited three and a half hours and… nothing.

Why? Well since I’m running Snow Leopard, I can’t restore from a Leopard install disk. Thanks again guy at Apple Store.

So after another 3 hours of booting from Snow Leopard install DVD, success, MacBook Pro is working, good as new (faster / bigger hard drive, better Wireless antenna).

What did I learn in this process? Well a few things:

• The Apple Store does not really employ geniuses
• It’s not that hard to fix items on a Mac yourself (if you are a techie)
• Time Machine alone makes a Mac worth the cost (my Vista laptop’s backup process – ugly and horribly slow)
• I’m still a Mac and now I’m faster.

One huge UI improvement that would make my life easier is the ability to swap out one image for another but keep everything else the same. Size, layout, placement, etc.

If I need to export a new image in Illustrator or Photoshop because the client decides they want the color to be different (or if it doesn’t look right printed, or whatever), I end up having to reset all of these settings, by hand. Every time.

Instead of just choosing a new version of the image in Word, I’m forced to do a screen scrape and paste them in Photoshop just to be able to try a new version of the image. This is stupid and should be fixed.

Here is the screen grab of my settings in Photoshop with my feelings on the matter:

Word Failure

Now more than ever, this movement is gaining steam:

• There is now an article at Mashable about killing IE6
• News that Youtube will kill it’s support for IE6
• And Digg wanted to, but realized that the reason people use it is because they have no choice (locked down XP computers without being able to upgrade).

But by far the funniest of all I’ve seen yet is this – IE6ify any website. This tool will make the site look likes it being shown in IE6 (to a developer). Basically it breaks your page.  Enjoy the fun that I and so many have experienced trying to use CSS on IE6 in this replicator. (H/T to Logan)

The rebranding car wreck doesn’t end there though. Not happy with just creating a shockingly bad logo for bing the designers of this launch micro-site (which I assume is being used to herald the new dawn of Bing to the world) have blatantly ripped an idea from this site: dragoninteractive.com. Of course, it goes without saying that the Dragon Interactive site is far superior in many ways – but why have Microsoft so obviously not invested time in the design of these sites let alone the bing logo?

Also Microsoft apparently ripped off Kayak.com for their travel search features. You would think a company with the resources of Microsoft would be able to create unique and better designs. Also, they have this creative company that does some ads for them just in case they need some help, they are pretty well known. Maybe you’ve heard of them? (Hint: their name rhymes with Crispin Porter + Bogusky)

The bing search engine itself actually isn’t that bad, but that matters little when their competition is google. Microsoft would likely win more converts if they didn’t piss everyone off by using bad or stolen creative.

Tangent thought…but every time I think of “Microsoft design” I can’t help but think of the great: “If Microsoft designed the ipod packaging” video which is embedded below. Enjoy

I don’t understand why Billy Mays must yell at me every time he is on TV. Also, why is this an acceptable and popular form of television advertising?

I’m sure he’s a nice guy and all. But please stop yelling at me.

I didn’t mean forever.

R.I.P Billy Mays

(Original Post – Billy Mays Stop Yelling at Me!!)