2019.02.20 13.55 100928 three songs 100920 small towns 100919 best dollar stores 100918 KW day two 100917 Waterloo via Galt 100914 Facebook Humbug 100908a Portraits at Forest Hill 100908 new family member 100907 bears raccoons 100906 frightened, bikes gone 100812 tug of war 100803 monday at centrepoint mall 100802 sunday with my folks 100300 march 2010 091200 december 2009 090800 august 2009 090600 june 2009 090400 april 2009 090300 march 2009 index2006 back to 2005-2006 index2004 back to 2003-2004 archive unmodified old essays and pix

100914 Facebook Humbug 0130 After a long time avoiding it, I have decided to give Facebook a try. Everyone else I know is on it, and I have so many reservations about it. I suppose my biggest fear about doing this was how popular it is. Friendster, MySpace and even Yahoo are all trying to get people doing the same things. Facebook's primary sin is just how they are the defacto place to be. 0145 I am on step 2. I have only just given them my name, my city, and the password and email I hope to use for the service. Already it is suggesting to me all of the people I happen to know in person. I feel ill. The system has already shown it knows too much about me, and I haven't said a thing. 0200 Ok, I cannot stop the servers from learning about me through third parties, but I can try to minimize the damage. I locate the privacy settings, and turning off each one so that it doesn't work is difficult. They make it a custom setting. But I've set my wall to "me only" which makes it impossible for people to kibbitz me on my own space. I still can't prevent them from talking about me on other pages, but that seems rare. I'll be watching for that. If people manage to talk about me publicly on this thing, and still keep it so it attributes the facts to my name, then I will remove my account from it. 0300 Gawd. I'm still at it. This Facebook thing is clearly about coaxing people to discard their privacy. They make it fun, but people who use it tell their Facebook status every last thing they do and think, and it faithfully records this, and lets friends, strangers and stalkers alike comment on it. 1600 Doctor's appointment. Weight is still high. Blood pressure is high too. I thought I had early prostrate trouble, but Dr B says my prostrate gland is not enlarged, and that my bladder issues have another source. I truly hate blood work, but I will get it done. Urine analysis is fine with me. And for the next visit they want GF to attend, as my problems and hers are likely related. 1730 The internet has failed! I wanted the name of the chicken and ribs place a couple of blocks west of Bloor and Christie, but cannot get the name out of GoogleMaps. They have a rack of ribs for $12, a bbq chicken $10. They offer dinners that include drinks and salads which really inflate the final price, but I remember seeing raw ribs selling for more than $12 at Dominion, so I got a rack. Amazing good, and prepared in the Portugese style. I had only a couple of bones, and put the rest away for later. 1800 Across the street, on the south side of Bloor W, it looks like every other store is some kind of hair place. Hair 1010, Cinderella, and many more. I went into one which had only a Korean Name (maybe I'll find the receipt later, and amend this post). The lady was standing at the door, just gazing out, wishing for her day without customers to end. I waved, and it didn't actually wake her up. I smiled too brightly and waved again. She blinked and opened the door for me. I like my hair done a simple way: I want a big shield on the electric thing, and to get it all even. This way it will not only be curly, but evenly curly when it grows out, probably four months from now. I'll get two months of the hair I like, before I cut it next March 14. After she finished, I got a surprise: she washed my new hair. So I didn't have it raining down rough trim all evening long. What a good thing! 1830 I said hi to Steve at Above All, and spent some time in the Bakery and Cafe near Bathurst. Wow! They have a Yamaha piano there now! I practiced english dance tunes for a while (as my own electronic Korg Trinity is just used to hold stuff at home. I should change that). A coffee with a toasted bagel (that they baked themselves this morning) is $2.09 with tax. I went here thinking I would use their complementary internet. I was happy playing. 1945 I'm a bit late for helping my friend get his computer issues fixed, but I'm started. I thought "skype will be easy", but for some reason, skype makes his system work at 100%, and gets useless. I ran Comodo System Cleaner, and it's better, but still has trouble doing any kind of work. It browses internet fine, but something (maybe the audio) makes it slow. I hope I find the answer. Doing a web search for "my windows XP SP3 computer is slow" will get me perhaps a million posts back, all unrelated to my problem. Maybe the solution will come to me in a dream. It often does. Then when I return to the customer, I seem like some kind of brilliant computer wizard. Maybe I am, but from my perspective it feels like magic or something. Wizard, magic: they're related words. 2230 GF has picked me up. That's nice. Too bad it has changed from warm outside to cold. We wander home, and get in the door around an hour later. I wanted to spend more time outside, but I'm just so chilly now. 0030 next day I look at Facebook again, and see how it begs for attention, for me to look into the activities of the Facebook Friends, and how it wants me to share the things I've written here on to their network. I'd rather it stay here. Their servers seem smart, and would actually learn about me from the things I said, or did not say. People would be able to comment on things I shared, and the details I tried to skip over quickly or miss would be caught. I see an old friend getting cajoled for not using his Facebook enough. He has a birthday coming up too. Should I like Facebook for reminding me about this, or continue to be terrified about Big Brother like their service has become? I've heard people rag on about government lotteries the same way, how they can't get people to pay more taxes, but if they can make the lottery look interesting, they can raise plenty of extra funds for things. In the future I'll try to like Facebook. For now, though, I'll try to not hate it, and might learn to like it eventually.

tell Dave to do this more often