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.

Direction when working in computing

Computing (or IT, depending on how you wish to class it) as a whole is a vast area to work in. When compared to many other areas of study there are a huge number of choices, which is both a good and bad thing. There are many languages, applications, platforms and systems etc in which you can choose to work. This unfortunately, in my case, has the ability to breed confusion and a lack of direction.

Only now am I starting to realise how the many choices are affecting my ability to focus. I use to have things planned out and a real idea of where I was hoping to end up, unfortunately things are not that simple. My initial idea prior to uni was that I wanted to be a programmer, but this is a very broad area to work in. I learnt once entering uni that a programmer can actually lead down many different paths, based on interest and the degree to which you chose to specialise.

After changing jobs last year and starting work, for the first time, at a software company this confusion has increased, even as my experience in the area has grown. I have learnt much what it means to work at a software company, including getting a better idea of where I do not want to be. Sadly it is where I am stuck at the moment, and so breeds the uncertainty around what I want to do.

But things have not been all bad, I have learnt one very important thing. Developers are specialised but not necessarily in things such as languages, it is a special way of thinking. The ability to break down a problem and see a solution is what I respect the most about a couple of the developers I work with.

Where I am right now is that I am eager to learn more to improve my chance of sometime moving into development, whether with the current company or not. But I do have a problem with motivation and attention span. I am a bit stuck finding something I am interested in in order to learn more. If I can find something I am truly into I will work myself into a stupor to achieve whatever goal because I just enjoy the challenge. Is this a common mindset within computing?

I need to make some sort of decision soon as this needless drifting is not helping me, especially as I am seeing it is a huge waste of the finite time I have.

Because we say you need a religion!

A friend wrote a piece about discussions he has had around religion and I was interested to see how he dealt with a situation I have found myself in a few times.

I have been gifted with my friends in that, although many of them do have various beliefs, none of them seem to be militant about them. I have had friends in the past, and known other people, who saw religion as black and white. You either have the same beliefs or are someone to be converted or lectured.

I experienced this first hand when I visited some people, while reading one of the Harry Potter books, and was silly enough to mention what I was reading. This left me caught between a stern lecture about the how the books were evil and corrupting children by promoting witchcraft, and being polite to my host. Luckily years of training from my mother meant that my manners won out and I bit my tongue. Which is sad because if the positions were reversed I would still be expected to do the same. Still in civilised society criticising someone’s religious views is seen as hugely rude but telling me that I am a heathen who will be condemned in another life is perfectly fine.

This is the time that you realise that it is a no win situation is many cases. Religious belief is not something that can be argued as it may not be something that is rational to begin with. The idea that being atheist is the same as being an immoral nut who will go around raping and killing is laughable. There are many examples in history where disgusting crimes are done, both in the name of, and somehow excused by, by a set of religious beliefs.

Now excuse me while me and some other atheists head off to do some unspeakable evil like working on the Sabbath and eating meat on Good Friday.

Queue the evil music… and may we all be touched by his noodly appendage. And no, not touched in that way.

It starts again

Previously this site hosted a blog where I was posting my thoughts, mostly about my concerns with time errors within the Back To The Future movies, and other things I deemed somewhat interesting. But as with a lot of things I started to get bored with the whole thing, especially continually having to cover for those slack monkeys, so the site went away.

So a year or so has passed and many things have changed, at least a few of those lazy monkeys must have died by now, and my recent use of Twitter has left me with the need to write some things that are longer than 140 characters. And it is much easier to write bigger things here rather than post 6 tweets in a row like some Twittery (wow, according to my spell checker that is actually a word) people I know.

What am I planning to write about, I hear the masses (or the two people that know about this blog) asking? Love, life and our place in the universe are all ridiculously complicated topics so I will probably restrict is to things I know about including internet and computer things as well as things that either get up my nose or interest me. However this may change as I am quite a strange one and nothing really keeps my attention for too long, which really does explain the demise of the first blog, well that and the lazy monkeys (how they try my patience with the demands for better wine and a few days a year on Earth to relax).

That is enough for now, and I have no doubt you are already scared and worried. Check back sometime and see if I have kept it up this time.