Dolphin's Dock

• Home
• Intro
• Cast
• Commenting Policy

Main Posts

What Were They Thinking?

Without clicking for more, can you guess what well-known product this is the new logo for?

Go ahead, guess. No? Ok, well at least take a stab at what possible industry or function this product serves.

Is There a FaceBook Anonymous?

I had never signed up at FaceBook because the first (and previously only) time I had looked at it, it was still aimed sole at the college crowd and required you sign up as either a student or staff member of a school. At that time I was actually BOTH, and couldn’t really decide which I’d rather sign up as and figured I was on MySpace, so what was the difference. A week or so ago, I noticed that Kat from Just Another Pretty Farce, had placed her FaceBook information on the side bar of her blog. Well, I’m fairly certain that Kat is currently neither a college student, nor a staff member, so I figured the “admissions policy” had changed and thought I’d check it out, so I signed up.

Before I dig into my FaceBook experience let me preface with this: I have never understood the social networking phenomenon. Maybe that means I’m old and out of touch already (I hope not). I have a MySpace account simply because several friends wanted me to get one. I thought it might be neat to get in touch with some long lost friends but found MySpace’s search feature to be seriously lacking in functionality (either 0 results or 4 million). Combine that with MySpace being ugly (and not very customizable despite being able to edit the stylesheet, because nothing is labeled in the html so you can only style incredibly broad elements), and inefficient (hello? I shouldn’t have to click through 3 screens to do one simple task) and if you’re not (and I’m not) one of those who enjoys collecting 3 trillion “friends” whose pictures and names appear on your profile page but the vast majority of whom you have never met or even spoken to, then there’s just not much left to it. I get on MySpace about once a week to see if anybody has left me a message or invited me to some event (since this seems to be the only way my friends invite people to anything, picking up the phone is sooo 20th century).

That said, FaceBook is completely different. They need to put a big warning label on the front page: “This website may be addictive.” It’s not visually customizable, but it’s an attractive site in its own right and at least you know more or less what you’re going to get when you visit a friend’s page so you’re not searching all over. What makes the biggest difference is the search tools actually work. I’m finding people from as far back as ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, and because you can search via graduating year/city/etc. I’m finding people who I’d never even remembered their names if I hadn’t run across them browsing. Here’s where it gets dangerous though. In the time it took me to send out 50 friend invites to all these people from my past, 3 responded. So for the last couple of days I’ve been sitting around not getting work done because every five minutes or so I’m compelled by some invisible force to check to see if anybody has answered in the last five minutes.

A few observations I’ve made as I browse through the friends from my childhood:

• The majority of the friends I grew up with have their political views marked as “Conservative.” What the heck happened there? I’m used to having conservative friends now, but I’ve chalked that up to living in the Bible Belt where even the liberals are conservative. However my hometown leaned a little leftward (not sharply, but slightly). I wouldn’t have expected so many of it’s children to have joined the darkside taken on a conservative world view.
• For the first time in seven years, I’m finding myself concerned about people finding out that I’m gay. Why? I’m not really completely sure. I think it has to do with the fact that when I meet someone today, they are meeting me knowing that I’m a gay man. If they don’t mind that, great. If they do and they can’t be my friend over it, fuck ‘em. I don’t really know them enough to care at that point anyhow. In this case, I do know these people (at least as well as you can know someone you haven’t talked to in 7 years or longer) and they know me, but they know a me who is “straight.” It’s like having to come out all over again, and seven years of everyone knowing (surprisingly) doesn’t make it much easier.
• When learning about what your friends have achieved since last you spoke, how do you avoid mentally making notes and keeping score? When I tracked down my absolute best friend from middle school and it turns out he’ll be graduating from medical school this academic year, that old competitive spirit that used to exist between us with regards to grades in middle school just started burning. It’s especially silly because, for whatever it’s worth, our grades in middle school were always equivalent so it’s not as if this shows he’s “smarter” than me (he may or may not be but the difference is probably minimal either way), he just chose a different path. I love my job and would almost certainly hate being a doctor. Why the bit of jealously?
• The flip side of that is the people that aren’t quite living their dream. Like a high school buddy who everyone thought was destined for Broadway. He IS performing but cruise ship entertainment is a far stretch from the lights of Broadway.

Alright, well it’s time to go check FaceBook get some work done.

Can iMac Too?

Interesting that the day after I start seriously considering an iMac, Apple goes and releases a new (and in my opinion much prettier, and I care about that sorta thing :-)) iMac. It must mean one of two things. Either it’s just not meant to be for me to have an iMac because as soon as I start looking, the old models are replaced with new and more costly models, OR, I’m absolutely meant to have an iMac because as soon as I start looking the new top of the line model is released that will allow me to use it sans upgrade (which is a major part of what has kept me away from Mac in the past) for the longest period of time.

My PC is working again (though it will be awhile before I get it back where I had it), so I’m in no rush, but for better or worse my inner-geek and get my inner-accountant’s ass any day of the week, so I’m opting for the latter interpretation of the meaning behind Apple’s release of the new iMac.  That said, my inner-accountant put up a good fight and so I’m holding off until I actually have a good portion of the money to buy it with.  I had all but stopped freelancing while I got settled into my new job, but a week or so ago, I was contacted and met with a local design firm (not in competition with my current company, which is not a design firm) about doing some freelancing for them (another clue that I’m meant to have the iMac), and agreed to have them contact me as work came up.  In the meantime, anybody out there in the blogosphere want to hire me to do a new custom template??  Or, outside of your blogging world, do you need any flyers, business cards, etc.?  Let me know!

Damn Bill Gates!

Awhile back, my DVD-RW drive suddenly stopped recognizing blank DVDs. It would play DVDs and CDs just fine, but put a blank DVD in and it would immediately decide to identify itself as an (empty) CD-ROM drive. I kinda suspected a software issue, but reinstalling drivers and updating firmware had no effect. I don’t really burn many DVDs, so I had not worried about it for awhile until I happened across a deal on a black-front (I have a charcoal case) DVD±R, ±RW, -RAM, Dual Layer drive with Light Scribe for $30 (which had its own bit of drama). Once that arrived, I installed it only to find that the problem still existed (I knew it was software related). It was time for my best google-fu.

Google graciously gave me a several answers though none that I really wanted to hear. The solution that kept popping up involved editing the registry. I can be a bit of a geek, but I’m not geeky enough to feel comfortable editing Window’s registry. That said, I’d just spent money (regardless of what kind of deal I had gotten) on a new DVD-R drive and I was going to be able to burn DVDs, dammit. The solution had been posted numerous times and there were lots of “thanks, this worked for me, you’re great” kinds of responses to it, so clearly this was fairly tried and true, right? I backed up the registry entries to my desktop, made the suggested changes, and rebooted.

Ahh, the lovely Windows Welcome screen, time to see if my registry surgery paid off. Wait a minute, why isn’t my mouse cursor moving?? I can’t use my keyboard either!!

How one restores a backed-up registry entry without a mouse or a keyboard is beyond me. I wrestled with it for a bit (no mouse or keyboard in safe-mode either), but no to no avail. Now, in the past, I probably would have just wiped the drive, reinstalled windows and not really worried about it, however, now I have my whole portfolio on there (which of course is only partially backed-up) and I’m not about to erase my entire professional life unless I’m give no other option. Fortunately The Boyfriend™ came up with a good plan.

I’d simply buy a new hard drive (hey it was tax-free weekend), set it up as the master, install Windows on it, copy over that which I needed and wipe the old drive to use as storage. $59.99 later, I installed my new hard drive and started the Windows installation.  Once Windows was installed, I checked to see if my data was still on the old drive.  There it was safe and sound, yet I scarcely had time to see that it was there before my fresh new cleanly installed copy of Windows locked up.  Reboot.  Again, about 15-20 seconds of proper functioning then, freeze.  Again.  It’s not unheard of for an installation to get corrupted, so let’s just reinstall.  Second installation, everything looks fine.  For 15-20 seconds that is.  Third installation, same thing.

I wanted to be able to burn DVDs again.  $120 later, I still can’t burn DVDs and now I don’t even have a functioning computer.  If they’d come down in price a bit more, I’d so have an iMac sitting on my desk.  Hmmmm….  You know if I got an iMac AND got my PC working again, I could have a 4 monitor, dual OS (and dual computer) system laid out across my desk (5 monitors if I bought a new monitor).  Seeing five monitors spread out across my desk (which would be big enough to hold them, barely) might just give my inner-geek a techno-orgasm.  Of course, it’d totally piss off my inner-accountant.