Facebook Account Disabled

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Today I had my Facebook account disabled after testing various adcopies. This problem would not even have arisen if their ad review team wasn’t so stupid. Advertisers try to obtain the highest CTR possible, invariably resulting ads that test the limits. I suppose I tested one too many times, and Facebook threw a fit and disabled my account.

I really wouldn’t care about this at all if nobody else used Facebook. Choosing to use Facebook is not akin to buying a car or choosing a browser. If I don’t like Hummers because they get 1 MPG, I don’t have to drive one. I can drive a nice Aptera 2e. If I hate that IE crashes endlessly, I can use Opera. Facebook is inherently different in that it is a social networking tool, and its utility rises with user adoption. When everybody uses the damn thing, one is forced to use it or be relegated to the dark ages.

Even when I clear away the fog of irritation that clouds my thoughts, Facebook never was that great. One dandy day back in the day I was bombarded with three emails inviting me to sign up for Facebook, and I did. There wasn’t much to write home about. You create a profile and are expected to put personal details on it. Then you are expected to talk about things. Something about uploading a bunch of personal photos on a public website that I did not own never struck me as a good idea even with privacy settings. Luckily, I never uploaded anything.

So what are the options?

  1. Attempt to recover account with the support team.
  2. Create a social networking website that will be open source. It’ll be like Facebook with WordPress freedoms. Anybody can host it or have it hosted on this aforementioned concept. What about the detailed privacy settings? I imagine some sort of verification system with a password in a config file should work.

On a separate note, somebody recommended that I create a Dr. Dre Pandora station. This turned out to be a brilliant recommendation, as Li’l Wayne on Pandora yielded the worst rap has to offer.

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Switching To Google Chrome

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I just switched to Google Chrome, and it’s better than Firefox. The interface is clean, slick, free from distractions and maximizes the display area. It loads nearly instantaneously, extensions install instantly and do not require a restart. Pages are noticeably snappier than with Firefox. Memory usage is much higher, however, but things don’t slow to a crawl. It’s a missing some extensions that I would like, but Firefox just doesn’t do the job anymore.

Chrome Extensions Worth Installing Eventually

  • Chrome Reader
  • Chrome Sniffer
  • Google Translate
  • Proxy Switchy!
  • Speed Tracer (by Google)
  • Video Downloader
  • YouTube Auto Replay

Current Firefox Addons

Asterisks indicate Chrome equivalent availability.

  • Easy YouTube Video Downloader*
  • SEOQuake*
  • Colorzilla
  • Facebook Ads Manager
  • FireFTP
  • Greasemonkey
  • iMacros
  • LeechBlock
  • Screengrabber
  • Web Developer

February 11-12 Snow

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There was some amazing snowfall the last two days, and I woke up this morning to find everything completely blanketed in thick snow. I haven’t seen this much snow in years. Usually there’s about 2 inches of icy snow, but this year nature delivered 6 inches of powder to the area.

Building with snow is a mixed blessing. There’s a desire to build something amazing, but doing so completely destroys the pristine landscape which is always more amazing than whatever you build. But with 6 inches this year, I didn’t have to destroy nearly as much while building because there was sufficient accumulation on the roads.

6 inches? Am I in Canada?

Now this I'd like to see every year.

There was enough snow to build an awesome arch. I intended for it to be 6 feet tall, but the structure was unstable so I had to downsize it. The arch is roughly 89 centimeters tall and 70 centimeters to the base of the keystone. It was constructed from compressed snow blocks formed in plastic container. The weight of the arch caused the legs to fracture twice causing the arch to collapse, but eventually the whole thing balanced out and it was pretty fun.

Building the arch.

Still building the arch.

Shaping the arch with an old kitchen knife.

The completed arch.

Business, Marketing, Time And Microsoft

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Business

I am badly out of touch with potentially profitable product ideas. Several weeks ago there was a Shark Tank episode in which an inventor demonstrated seat belt safety product that alerts the driver if the seat belt is not in use. After turning down all of the sharks’ offers, a recent episode revealed that he was able to find distribution through some car dealerships and was making a healthy profit.

During the initial presentation of the product, I immediately thought it was not particularly useful for several reasons.

  • I assumed that everyone uses their seat belts. A car is a massive hulk of metal moving at high speeds. There is a risk of injury and even death in the event of an accident. A seat belt has a decent chance of decreasing the risk of harm, therefore putting on a seat belt before hitting the roads would be reflexive.
  • It is excessive and prevents the driver from having control over the vehicle. A seat belt is already a safety feature, and this product tacks on another level of safety over the first level. If this was the ignition for an ICBM a few extra precautionary measures would be great, but it just seems silly for something as mundane as a seat belt.

Marketing

There’s nothing quite as horrifying as seeing a $200 loss within a day, especially when that money was eked out at near minimum wage. Once you see that level of spending for the first time, logic flies out the window and emotions take over. I have a bit more experience now, but it’s uninspiring. After so much effort, at the end of a good day you will be left with profit, but not much else to show for your efforts aside from a good campaign. Obviously the next step would be to diversify to leave the field, but when looking at just internet marketing, it’s the kind of pursuit that can be called dull. It’s the kind of pursuit that, if I were on my deathbed, I would look back and think, “I wasted all that effort with nothing to show for it but money. No real knowledge gained. No inspiring product created. I wasted so much time pushing leads for dating websites, insurance companies, and toolbar downloads.” The optimizing aspect is interesting, but aside from that there is not much else that is interesting.

Time

The passing of time seems to be accelerating. Years ago, the minutes would pass so slowly. Now time has slapped me across the face since it’s already February 2010. So cruel and unusual.

Microsoft

Windows Mobile will likely be dead soon. I can’t imagine what Windows Mobile 7 could possibly offer to regain lost market share. Internet Explorer is also as good as dead. It’s painfully slow, has security problems and I can’t think of any redeeming features. The Zune HD is actually an impressive offering, but an app store is pretty much critical with that kind of hardware, because without one it’s just a glorified MP3 player. Bing is innovative, but in the end it still comes down to the quality of search results, a front on which Bing fails to deliver. Its only real uses are the interesting homepage photos and its cache, which is around longer than those of other search engines due to its slow crawler. Windows 7 and Office 14 are the only bright spots.

Apple iPad

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The iPad has been unveiled, but I’m not as impressed as I expected to be due to excessive hype and speculation prior to today’s event. Many of the comments regarding the iPad also hinted at disappointment, which is not typical at Apple product launches.

Prior to the unveiling, I was anticipating a revolutionary device such as the iPhone rather than the evolutionary device shown today. Despite this letdown, many of the criticisms about the device are without merit as they completely disregard what the iPad is meant to be, a casual use, portable media center rather than a full featured tablet PC. Some have cited lack of features such as keyboards, a full OS, a phone and USB ports as, but none of these features would improve the device when considering that touch screens are not especially conducive to work. If you need that level of functionality, buy a MacBook Air. The iPad leans more toward iPod rather than MacBook, and it strikes a good balance between portability and function.

Lack of Adobe Flash, multitasking and camera were also mentioned. If there’s anything the iPad isn’t missing, it’s Flash support. It runs slowly and is mostly used for advertisements and video players, the latter of which won’t be needed with HTML5. The only flaw with the iPad is its lack of multitasking. For a product with more emphasis on actual computing, it seems that multitasking would be important enough to include in the first release.

Also, why complain about missing features on an Apple product at all? The first iteration of all Apple products are invariably short on features so that they can be added in as hot new selling points in later models. It would seem that this would be obvious by now.

In other news, Microsoft is working on its Courier device, but as usual there’s no word on its status.

Cadmium In Jewelry

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Today, this article was featured on Yahoo!’s homepage. It documents how American consumers desire toys that are cheap yet made of the finest materials the earth has to offer, even though such trinkets are likely to wind up in a landfill within weeks.

It reads like a joke, and at the end the author suggests that readers could purchase cadmium testing kits if they are worried about cadmium contaminating their ten cent tchotchkes. Did you just spend money on garbage? Why not spend more money on even more garbage to fix the problem! This could be the topic of a comic strip. Buy, buy, buy!

If it were not for consumerism, would this even be a problem? Consumerism is the source of many problems in society. While I do believe that money buys happiness, the happiness is not derived from such junk, but time. Time means freedom to do what you want other than shop.

Aside from the laughable irony, the article is typical media fear mongering. But that’s to be expected from the media in general, and I shouldn’t expect any better from Yahoo!. What typically qualifies as news these days consists of murders, feel good stories (Local Woman Finds Lost Dog!) and fear mongering.

Thankfully, the original article written by the AP actually provided some useful background information regarding what cadmium is, what’s being done about the problem and relevant details, but it is the shoddy summarized version that makes it to the front page.

The original article by the AP states, “Children can be exposed by sucking or biting such jewelry. But without direct exposure, most people do not experience its worst effects: cancer, kidneys that leak vital protein and bones that spontaneously snap.” The summarized article featured by Yahoo! was devoid of context, and simply spit out these worst case side effects, with the implication that even touching cadmium could put a child at risk of snapping bones and dripping kidneys, with no details regarding the various effects caused by the degree of exposure. Wouldn’t recommendation to dispose of all jewelry deliver the message just as well without inciting unnecessary alarm?

Conscious Robots

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While Wikipedia I stumbled upon a book called Conscious Robots. My old post, A Conjecture On Consciousness, seems to be similar to this book, which I found interesting. Now that I read the original post, I realize the writing is terrible, rambling, disjointed and does not use the words I necessarily intended, nor does it accurately capture what I had in mind, which was not consciousness but free will.

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.”

- John Watson

But in reality I hope all of this is wrong and there is free will, whatever that is.

White Christmas, Snowboarding, Colorado

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I just returned from a skiing trip at Wolf Creek Ski near Pagosa Springs, Colorado, with friends and family. It was a cold, exhausting and unforgettable experience. We also stopped by Great Sand Dunes National Park on the way back. Colorado is a beautiful state with its snowcapped mountains, plains, rivers and quaint, small towns. Maybe I’ll move there someday instead of California.

After this trip I’ve felt much saner; the wilderness distracted me from civilization, which is filled with things that are damaging but superficially pleasing. The trip reminded me of more important things.