Andrea & I have been accessing the Internet since the early 90’s. Over the years, we have used a wide variety of methods to connect to people. I remember doing things like connecting to a computer at a client’s site via the Internet with remote control software, firing up a text editor and using the text editor as a chat window.

Generally though, the way I’ve connected online with people over the last few years has been through writing in this blog, commenting in other blogs & posting in forums. Recently I’ve joined both facebook and twitter. For the most part, facebook provides an online connect to people that I know from somewhere else. I haven’t particularly seen it as a means to make new connections. On the other hand, I think that’s one of the main benefits of twitter.

One of the things that I don’t do is video & audio connecting. That’s because our Internet connection is via satellite and the latency is worse than dialup.

Anyway, thanks D’Arcy for giving me something to write about.

To a degree we can blame services like facebook & twitter. I use twitter quite a bit because it allows me to keep up with and interact with a large number of people with relative ease. Generally, interaction on twitter provides more immediate response which makes it more appealing. For the people who use facebook daily, I can see how having everyone’s content aggregated together makes it convenient/appealing as well. Since I’ve been using a feed reader for years it’s less of a convenience for me.

I expect there is another side of it as well. Until the advent of the web, most people had no place to talk/write that wasn’t shared by others. I think most of us had built up a large reservoir of thoughts and ideas that had had no outlet. Now that we’ve had a few years to write, most of the ideas and values we hold have had some form of airing. In a sense, we have less to talk about. Many of the things that are important to us have been read and responded to.

Today is also the start of National Blog Writing Month. A note of thanks to the blogs I read that mentioned it. I won’t promise to write every day because I know that won’t happen. I will try to write though.

Most of our business revenue comes from or through the US and US currency. In March we were averaging about 25% exchange ($100US = $125CDN). The average over the last 6 months has been somewhere in the range of 5-7%. For most of our projects we’ve been quoting 2-3 months in advance which meant that we had a 3 month period with a 15-20% shortfall in revenue.

The only recourse was to take on more work. Other things had to be put on the back burner and this blog was one of them. I do have lots of things to talk about and I’ll see if I can cover some of that in small chunks over the next month.

I shouldn’t be too harsh on Willingham. He’s not the only one avoiding this particular elephant in the room. Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody says it. It’s not polite to say it. We all tiptoe around this truth, that school is prison, because telling the truth makes us all seem so mean. How could all these nice people be sending their children to prison for a good share of the first 18 years of their lives? How could our democratic government, which is founded on principles of freedom and self-determination, make laws requiring children and adolescents to spend a good portion of their days in prison? It’s unthinkable, and so we try hard to avoid thinking it. Or, if we think it, we at least don’t say it. - Peter Gray

HT: Carlotta

For the most part it seems FB has taken functionality that exists elsewhere on the Internet and bundled that functionality together into a single site. On FB, you can share pictures like flickr or photobucket, you can post & comment like a blog and you can have friends and privacy filters like LiveJournal based sites.

As far as the privacy and filters part of it goes, if you put it on the Internet, it isn’t private. If it’s a picture it gets downloaded to every computer that shows it in a browser. So, I would not put anything on FB that I would not put either on my blog or flickr. If I wanted to say something to you privately, I’d send you an email or call you on the phone.

Now for the review:

I did sign up earlier this week so that I would have an account to test with. The signup went around in circles and kept coming back to the same screens until I clicked skip on all of them. Poking around my profile after I signed up, I found that it had collected all of the info I had provided. So, I had to delete all of the duplicate information. Strictly from a programmer’s perspective, a site reputed to have in excess of 100 million users ought to be able to get a simple signup process in place that works.

By about a day after I had signed up, I had received somewhere in the range of 30 to 50 email from FB. After the second batch of them showed up, I created a mail filter to dump the FB email into a folder so that it didn’t take over my inbox. When I had a few minutes, I went back and poked around some more to see if there was someplace where I could turn notices off. I was blown away to see that there were two screens worth of types of notices that FB sends. If you haven’t guessed already, I turned them all off.

The other annoyance I found with FB is the ads. Not that FB has ads, but the type of ads that I get. When I first noticed that I was getting dating site ads, I went through my profile to see where I could change the setting to say I was married (I did learn something about FB looking over the girls’ shoulders). Despite the fact that I’ve indicated I’m married, nearly every page view has at least one singles and/or dating site ad. Folks, it isn’t that hard to add a little logic to show people ads that reflect what they’ve told you about themselves.

The one positive note I have on the experience is that I did get to catch up with some folks that I haven’t seen in a few years.

A bit on the technology:

I haven’t used FB on dialup, but I expect that once you were actually in the site, it would work fairly well for you and be reasonably responsive. In fact, I suspect that they have put a fair amount of effort into making it so that it does work decently on dialup since a fair chunk of the world’s population doesn’t have ultra high speed connections.

One of the methods typically used to make sites more dynamic is called AJAX. The way AJAX increases the dynamic/interactive nature of a site is to send requests to the server and bring back small portions of updates to the screen that you are currently using. As long as it is done carefully, AJAX gets the most bang for the buck over dialup. The reason for that is that the main limiting factor in dialup is the volume of data. So, for small blocks of data, dialup is not that much slower than your typical high speed internet connection.

The place where AJAX kind of sucks is over satellite (which is what we have). Communicating over satellite involves a delay (called latency). The way that satellite technology compensates for that delay is by delivering data in large volume which works with most applications. If AJAX breaks updates to the page into several low volume requests, updating the page takes roughly the number of requests time longer to update than if you just requested a whole new page. Although I haven’t investigated to verify it, based on how painfully slow it is when using it, I suspect FB uses a lot of AJAX calls. So, FB isn’t going to get on my frequent use list.

The keynote address was primarily about the future of computing and the strategy that the company was taking (and going to take) to meet that future. The future of computing that he described (nearly 20 years ago) has held true. Only a few years after that keynote address the same company began selling off its patented technologies to pay its debts. Less than 8 years after the keynote, the company’s remaining assets were sold to a competitor.

There is something to be learned in that. Having a good sense of what the future holds is not a guarantee against making the wrong decisions. It happens to folks who are leading their industry not only commercially but in innovation and have huge financial resources.

I’m saying this without meaning any disrespect to the gent who wrote this post which talks about making something future proof. If someone tries to tell you that they have future proofed something, you are hearing the voice of inexperience.

One of the quotes in my post that I linked to above was “The real world is a special case.” Likewise the future is a special case. No doubt there are many things that we can do to reduce risk, etc. But a world full of beings able to make choices eliminates any guarantees on what tomorrow may hold.

It was during the dinner 20 years ago that Andrea and I first discussed how we felt about marriage. In remembering 20 years ago, I realized that my feelings on the subject of what marriage is (and is not) about have changed very little from what they were then. Having paid some attention to society at large, it’s safe to say that my feelings are not universal.

There are two things that our society places a great deal of emphasis on that I feel are largely inconsequential to marriage:

• a state registered marriage (marriage certificate) - depending on the jurisdiction, there may be value in one of these to the couple such as enabling adoption. Also, property ownership may automatically be transfered in the event of death of one half of the couple. In other words, signing a marriage certificate has value in the legal and judicial system. I don’t have any objection to state marriages. That’s not my point. My point is that once it’s signed, the only place a marriage certificate has any material value is in the legal & judicial system. It does not contribute to the day to day work of being a couple.
• a wedding ceremony - In saying that I am not knocking weddings. If a couple want to have a wedding and celebrate their marriage with their family & friends then that’s fantastic. But wedding ceremonies don’t make marriages. Marriage is something you do and are a part of every day. It isn’t a one time thing.

I’ve been to quite a few wedding over the years and have heard alot of variations in vows. What seems to be common among them are 3 words or actions: love, honor & cherish. The vows are about committing to doing those things on an ongoing basis. Doing those on an ongoing basis *is* what I believe is important in marriage. So, I’d like to talk about them in reverse order

• Cherish - IMO, most marriages start with this and the fact that the couple cherishes one another is the reason they have decided to get married. I look at cherishing as valuing them as a person, wanting their companionship, liking their character & personality, etc. The thing is, that the divorce rate in our society show that cherishing your spouse is in itself insufficient in creating a lasting marriage.
• Honor - I’m not quite sure what other people take this to mean. I think it means having respect for Andrea’s role as my wife and it is my responsibility to uphold her. The way I carry this out is by doing 2 things. First, I try to be a good husband, to appreciate the things she does for me, to value her opinion, and to be reasonable, caring, campassionate, thoughtful and considerate toward her. Second, I try to treat Andrea like she has been and will continue to be a good wife both when I’m around her and when I’m away from her. An example from the other side of marriage, if I have a bone to pick with I don’t deal with it at the local bar over a drink or at a buddy’s house. I talk to her about it and we work something out (which good spouses will do). I’ve never complained about her to anyone. Doing so would dishonor her. If she has a bone to pick with me, I want her to tell me about it and I want to work out something that is acceptable to both of us.
• Love - As an adult, I’ve always taken this to mean charity in the Biblical sense: being longsuffering (enduring, patient and forgiving) & kind, thinking of others, having temperance and not being selfish or self-serving. In more practical terms it means putting the other person first.

Whether or not everyone sees marriage as I’ve described, every marriage that I have admired over the years has a good dose of those qualities.