Grown up hosting providers

I feel a sign of a mature company comes when they have to react to something going wrong. A couple days ago I received an email from my hosting company, Media Temple, about someone illegally hacking some old client records that had not been encrypted and made off with account details. Of course this is not a good thing, but they have corrected the problem and implemented additional security in order to track down accounts that have been compromised.

Oh happy joy, I receive an email walking home yesterday to say that mine was one of the hacked ones. The email notification was very good and even provided links to articles about finding and correcting the hack, as it had occurred in only specific files and changing the various passwords attached to my account. This was very well done and only took me a total of about ten minutes to do.

I am not saying it is a good thing when a hosting provider is allows something like this to happen, but it is a very good sign that they dealt with it quickly, efficiently and most importantly transparently.

Adieu Facebook, you weren’t that much better the second time

There are a lot of people who now believe that the world exists within Facebook, sadly I am not one of them. I have had my account for probably four or five years, but included in that time was a two year period where it was deactivated because I couldn’t see a reason to use it. About twelve or so months ago it was reactivated and has remained so until this morning, but really the fact that I couldn’t see much point behind it three years still remains.

I know that there are many excellent uses for it and I am totally behind social networking, but just in this case there is little in it for me. I am already contactable nearly constantly regardless of where I am in the world and don’t gain out of having yet another way to do it. Between six or seven different email accounts, mobile phone and SMS, Skype, four different Instant Messaging accounts, this under utilised web log, regular mail and various types of birds that can be trained to carry messages it shouldn’t be too hard to find me. Hell, if you know your way around Google you can probably still find my previous home address in Adelaide if you know where to look.

“But with all that why not just keep your Facebook account active, what is one more?” I hear people asking and I guess they are right. But I make nearly zero use of Facebook. I don’t want to post status messages. If I want to put up photos they will go on something like Flickr. I can’t see the point in commenting on the majority of things people post and really who out there gives a toss if I “Like” their drunken photos from last weekend or their latest witty observation.

Even with all that my biggest annoyances with Facebook is that people are Friends. I have an old fashioned and probably quite weird view (well weird at the moment) of what a friend is. When I first used Facebook I was very limiting and only added people as Friends if they really were, this time it was a little different, but I still couldn’t help but feel wrong about it every time I added someone I didn’t really know or a person from the past who found me to inflate their Friend count. A number of my best and closest friends choose not to use Facebook so really me posting stuff on there really was excluding the people I love most.

At first it occurred to me to just leave the account and not bother using it if I didn’t want too, but that seemed silly. This way people actually know I do not see or check it so there will be less chance of things getting mailed to me in Facebook and me not seeing them.

Is this the end of Ryan and the Facebooks??? Probably not, I rarely say never and so there may come a time in the future, it could be next week, where I can see the value behind it for me again.

The love is still there…

Wow, it has been a while since I posted. Don’t worry the monkeys and I have not forgotten the three of you who read this drivel. This is a quick little post to keep the faithful happy until I post in the next day. Why the long gap, I hear at least two of you ask? Really the only answer is a mix of laziness and totally lack of motivation because of everything else that has been going on.

Please come back when I post next, there is little money in this as there is and it is good to have the three of you listening.

Note: the monkeys have totally forgotten all of you, some day’s they think there are many millions of people listening to them, but that is another story. But this is mainly because I forgot to send food and all they have had for the last few months is a steady supply of booze.