This is Chloe Payne. Someone please give her a gig! There’s no good reason why she should have to play on the street corner.

I don’t know what my specific new year’s resolutions will be as I write this. But I do resolve to make 2012 great.

0 is the bottom. 90 and -90 are the sides. 180 is the top. Simple concept. But there’s something implied by this drawing that is incorrect. Do you see it? Let’s get some devices out and see if we can discover the error. On each device, we’ll load a test page I wrote. Then, we will hold them in portrait orientation and see what the page says. We’ll keep turning them 90° counterclockwise and checking the results until we’ve done all 4 sides.

First, an iPod touch.

Apple has decided that you’re not allowed to use your iPod upside down. Other than that, this fits with our mental image.

Next, let’s get out a Nexus S.

Google also doesn’t think you should be using your phone upside down. This device is also reporting both sides as 90, which is not very useful if you care about which side is facing down. But it still mostly fits with what we expect.

Let’s try a tablet. This is a Kindle Fire.

Good job, Amazon! This fits exactly with our expectations.

Next up is our Toshiba Thrive.

How unexpected! After looking at the results for a minute, you might notice that the numbers have shifted one position to the right. Let’s shift them to the left so they line up with results for the other devices.

So, on the Thrive, orientation 0 is landscape rather than portrait. Why is this? Is it a bug? A bad interpretation of a spec? No. It’s because this is how someone at Toshiba intends for you to hold the device when using the browser.

This may seem weird to you. It’s certainly not the norm. But it’s not wrong. The problem is that many people assume that 0 means portrait. What 0 really means is the default orientation.

Have you run into any other devices where window.orientation 0 is landscape? If you can’t rely on window.orientation to determine if a device is in landscape or portrait, what do you use?

Facebook Is Making Us Miserable got me thinking about why I continue to use Facebook. The downsides are easy to list:

• Reading with little or no benefit
• Interactions with people you don’t care about
• Less meaningful interactions with people you do care about
• Annoyances that I need to filter out of the news stream
• Trusting your privacy to a company with an ethically-challenged founder

I’m sure you can think of many others.

Then there are the things I feel that I could be doing with my time spent on Facebook:

• Learning
• Meeting new people
• Improving my career
• Getting healthier and losing weight

• I can keep up with what my wife writes online
• I can see what’s going on with the handful of other people on Facebook I care about
• Anything else? Hmm. Um. No.

So, while there are a couple reasons why I’m not ready to delete my Facebook account, I certainly don’t need to be spending more than a couple minutes per day there.

On a somewhat related note, I’m spending a lot more time logged into IRC these days. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for channels I might be interested in.

Anyway, if you haven’t read both posts, it’s probably worth your time to do so.