It was such a good plan, a solid plan… a way to keep focused and stop wasting time.

I did it, I put a block in the firewall. And for some reason, it caused me issues with other sites and various things that made no sense what so ever. So rather than having computers getting sick over having the internet partially blocked, i unblocked it. So now all that I need to do is to just exercise some restraint. It will just be a different kind of experiment. woo hoo!

Today I turned off facebook for the house. I have found that facebook is a demanding mistress.  Always taunting with “Hey take a quick look and see what’s going on…”  or  “Hey, look at this internet kitty video”.  And then 10 minutes later you are done looking at the internet crap that counts for Social Networking, and you’re opened up to the taunting. I don’t deny that it’s a great way to keep in touch with Family and long lost friends (some of those friends who swear you were the best of best friends, and you hardly remember them).    It’s also a pretty good way to announce new entries for your blog that you are writing. People do respond to those things.

But overall, it’s a time-suck, I’ve posted about this before, but I don’t believe that I actually turned access to facebook off at my home.  I was just whining about how easy it is to slip into it’s velvety cuffs and get dragged away… the worst part is that you can access this stuff anywhere, anytime…

When I was watching Hot Tub Time Machine, I came across a quote that just puts it all into perspective (and made wonder how the hell we all kept in touch back in the day):

Jacob: I’m kinda right in the middle of a thing right now, but can I text you later?
Girl at Club: Can you what?
Jacob: Are you online at all?
Girl at Club: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Jacob: How do I get a hold of you?
Girl at Club: You come find me.
Jacob: That sounds… exhausting.

And it was exhausting at times.

So we’ll see how this experiment goes…

Well, I have those ideas quite often it seems. I’m always thinking of how to improve a service or a product, and the ideas are great, but I just don’t have a way or means to make the change or improvement.

For example, I have been kicking around a feature that would improve the workings of Facebook or Google+, at least in the way I use it, maybe in the way that others use it too.

So, here’s my fabulous idea… my improvement that could make either of these services some good money and for myself, probably nothing (except that I could point out that I wrote about this on 8/8/11).

Facebook has a wall, and google+ has streams. Well, the more friends you have and the more that they post to either the wall or the stream, the more stuff gets moved down and off the stream or wall. Now wouldn’t it be most excellent if in addition to a +1 or a like button, you could have a ‘review’ or ‘net’ or ‘later’ link with each of these items on the wall, or the stream? You click the ‘later’ or whatever link and then google+ or facebook will take that item and toss it onto a stream or wall feed which would contain only those items that you find interesting enough to review or take the time to read later. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an article or a news item that I didn’t have time to really read, and I wanted to be able to flag it for review later. This could even apply to advertisements… anything that is transitory on either service. You see it, you want to review it, you click the related link to save it in your “to be read later” feed or stream… and viola! You’re in business. There are other parts of this that need to be fleshed out, like ‘How long will an item be alowed to live on your list’, and I’m sure there are some other things that would need to be looked into to make it work.

There you go Facebook and Google+! Take my idea, make it a reality, and please remember that I.P. is worth something… send me a sizable check, if you need my mailing address just send an email to chris at computersarestupid.com

The big bundle, which turned out to be a big BUNGLE last Friday (7/22/11)… because ALL of the bundle just plain flat out quit. Now, this isn’t that big of a deal to people who just have their phone and TV, those who go to work at an office somewhere else outside of their small community… nope they can still work, call their boss, and get things done.

For me, not so much. The whole bundle stopped working at around 1am Friday morning, how do I know? Well, I wasn’t able to sleep and went out into my family room and tried to watch some cable TV…. it may have stopped working prior to that, but I’ll be satisfied with the 1am outtage time.  It seems that a construction company dug up the big old feed coax fiber cable that is our (Ramona, CA) digital artery!

So, no internet, Check. No Cable TV, Check. (That one’s not so bad, I’m a movie guy and have about 200+ movies available on our Sony DVD/Blu Ray 400 changer player) So, Watched some movies. And finally no phone. That’s a big problem, because our cell phones get NO service out here in the area we settled in.  I even wrote at least one post about that which you can read here. The Cell Phone booster from the Cell Phone Company Sprint relies on the fact that we have a broadband connection.  With that out, our Cell Phone Booster is Busted!

The big BUNDLE, it’s designed to save me money every month on the services I use. I depend heavily on them and when they go out for a half hour, or hour, it’s ok… I can handle that. But when it is off for nearly 24 hours and on a Friday yet… it really sucks.

I’m hoping that this is a rare occurance, or else I will need to be ordering a back up / Hot fail over solution. You know, get DSL service or something else, and pay out the nose for duplicating the service. What do I mean? Well, if I don’t need it every day it’s a waste of money in my opinion. The only time it could be worth it is if there were another series of extended outages. But if that started happening, I would start driving in to the office (a 45.1 mile one way trip).

This whole incident also made me think about how reliable that the upcoming offerings of different ‘cloud’ services would really be, I mean if you can’t get on the net, you can’t get inside the cloud….