Category: Geekery

The Social Singularity

Why I will never have a Facebook account.

Hmmm, this is obviously the year of draws. A draw in the federal election, and now a draw in the AFL grand final. They’re going to replay it next Saturday, which is frankly hilarious. Call it schadenfreude, but the idea of all those fanatical footy fans moving heaven and earth to get tickets to the grand final and booking flights to Melbourne and so forth, only to have to do it all over again in a week’s time – well it has me cackling like a loon.

I’m a bad, bad man ;D

Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about Facebook.

Barely a week goes by these days without someone asking me if I’m on Facebook. Now in my experience when someone asks you if you’re on Facebook, they don’t actually mean “are you on Facebook?” they mean “can you add me to your friends and if not why do you hate me?” – because when I tell them that no, I’m not on Facebook they get a very confused look on their faces, as if they’ve asked what my blood type is and I’ve told them that I don’t actually have any blood.

My reasons for avoiding Facebook are threefold, and I figured I’d explain them here in the hopes that people might stop regarding me as some kind of weird, alien, untrustworthy, internet communist.

Privacy: Facebook has an absolutely appalling record when it comes to respecting user privacy. Historically they’ve tended to regard any information you put up on your Facebook account as their own property, to do with as they like. Public scrutiny has forced them to clean up their act a bit but I still wouldn’t trust them with a Subway order, let alone intimate details of my personal life.

Call me paranoid if you like, but I work in the internet industry and thus perhaps have a better viewpoint of just how bad privacy abuse can get. My details are mine, and I’m not releasing them to anyone without a really good reason. Handing them over to a bunch of privacy-happy clowns like Facebook just so I can post messages on a “wall” is simply not going to happen.

The Social Singularity: I’m the first to admit that I’m not the most social of creatures. I have a pretty small group of people I count as friends, and a somewhat larger group of people I consider acquaintances. If I sat down and did the maths the total of both groups would probably come in under 30. This is a figure I’m perfectly happy with – after all, my friendship is so awesome that it needs to be carefully rationed out ;D

Facebook is not built like this. Facebook divides the world into two groups – Friends, and people who you haven’t friended yet. Anyone who’s a Friend gets  to see everything you do, with no way to filter information based on how much of a friend you actually consider them.

(OK, from reading Lamebook I believe there’s some kind of private message system, but I really can’t be bothered looking up the details)

Add to this the fact that rejecting a friend request on Facebook has become the new social faux-pas. Your Boss, your Aunt, that homeless guy down at the supermarket, any of them can look you up and send a friend request. You can reject it – and have to go through a painful litany of excuses the next time you see them – or accept it, and have them reading every detail of your social life. It’s a lose-lose proposition.

Facebook collapses your entire social circle into a singularity. Everyone you know suddenly has the highest level of access to your personal life. That is not something I’m ever going to get on board with.

Contrarism: I admit it, I’m a contrarist. If everyone is carrying on about how great something is, I’ll be the curmudgeon in the corner refusing to join in just on general principles. This is just the way I am, deal ;D

So yes. I don’t have a Facebook account, and do not plan to obtain one at any point. So stop sending me those damn invites.

Meme Me

Office Shenanigans

A conversation in the office today..

Coworker: (in relation to some ugly concrete panels at Esplanade railway station) What are they for?

Me: What’s it for? What’s it mean?

Coworker: Magnets! How do they work?

Me: Double rainbow!

Coworker 2: I’m on a horse.

It’s a wonder we get anything done at all.

Open Source Quarto

Something more-or-less useful for once.

Over the weekend I wanted to print out a document in quarto format. That is in such a way that 8 pages are printed on the same piece of paper (both sides), it’s folded into quarters, some staples are put in the middle, the top is trimmed, and presto! You have a classy looking 8 page booklet.

Now you’d think that with the open source community’s love of all kinds of independent, home crafted, maker type stuff this would be an easy ask. But apparently not! Nowhere online could I find any program or set of instructions that could carry out the simple task of taking a word processing document and sending the contents to a printer in such a way that it could be folded into a quarto. Madness!

So, I had to figure out how to do it myself. And I thought I’d explain how for every other mad bastard out there trying to make their own booklets.

Now, these instructions are probably not the most efficient way of doing things, but the get the job done, which is the main thing. Oh, and I’m not going to explain in what order you need to arrange your pages as this will change based on how many pages you’re printing (you should be smart enough to figure this out for yourself anyway). These instructions tell you how to get four pages printed out – with the top ones upside down – on one piece of paper.

Step one – Write up your document in Open Office. I suppose you can write it in some other word processor and paste it in, but seriously, why would you be using anything else? 😉 Keep in mind that you’ll be printing out your pages at a quarter normal size, so scale your content accordingly (I found 22pt was good for body text).

Step two – Export each page of your document as a separate pdf file. Yes, this is a pain, but as I said it’s the only way I could figure out to get things to work.

Step three – Open up a new A4 Inkscape document. Drop in some guides to divide the page into quarters.

Step four – Import the first pdf file. The text and graphics will drop into the page as a single object. You’ll need to scale it down – oddly Inkscape seemed to import my pages at half size, so I only had to scale them down by a further 50%. Drag the object into the appropriate quarter of the page – if you have snap to guides enabled it should snap neatly into place.

Step five – Repeat step four until all four pages have been imported and placed. You’ll need to rotate the top two pages 180 degrees so they’ll be the right side up when folded.

There you go! Repeat the steps until all your pages are placed, and then print them out (make sure to print the rights ones back to back and the right way up). Fold them up, staple, cut, and you have your own semi-professional looking booklet.

So that’s it. An entirely open source (if you ignore the intermediate pdf step) way of printing in quarto. Get to it my little home publishing cobras of desire!

Beware of Coyotes

Off to the Gunner’s Crag

After an exhausting week at work I’ve been taking it easy this weekend. Annotating photos on Flickr, playing Fallout 3, avoiding any contact with the outside world, that kind of thing. I’m almost at the point where the idea of going in to the office tomorrow doesn’t fill me with a deep sense of dread, which is pretty good all things considered ;D

One thing I’ve been particularly enjoying for the last few weeks is Tom Siddell’s webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court. I stumbled into it via TV Tropes (Warning – Do not visit that site unless you have five or six hours to spare. It’s worse than Wikipedia…) and have been reading my way through. It’s pretty intriguing, essentially a prolonged mystery story about a very strange school full of robots, ghosts, gods, psychics and alchemical symbolism, but it’s very hard to pin down to any simple genre. And the art has gone from a bit shaky at the beginning to excellent quality in the present.

One of the things I find so fascinating about it is it takes some themes that I thought of many years back, and tried unsuccessfully to work up into a story, and runs with them in a way far, far better than I could ever have done. The Court thus fitted right into a hole in my brain that I’d been trying to fill for years (that may sound like I’m accusing Tom Siddell of stealing my thoughts. Firstly, no, and secondly, if he is then I’ll let him off in this instance since the result is so good).

So, Gunnerkrigg Court. Go check it out.

(Personally I suspect Jones is the Seed Bismuth, but what do I know?)

Asteroid Magnets

It all makes sense!

Dinosaurs are asteroid magnets. We once had dinosaurs all over the planet – what happened? Boom! Asteroid. Go to any museum today – where we keep the dinosaur skeletons – and what do you see? Meteorites. It all makes sense!

On another subject my work colleague Bruce solved all my commitment issues this morning. Unfortunately the issues in question were merely in TortoiseSVN.

The Not So Amazing Race

My strange obsessions come to the fore

Just put a Flickr Set up about the scavenger hunt, treasure hunt, follow the clues madness thing I ran through the city a few months back. There are two photos missing at the moment (I tried to get one of them today but someone was sitting on the clue, inconsiderate so and so!), hopefully I’ll be able to get them soon.

I’m organising a new race shortly – one of the reasons I was in the CBD today was scouting out locations…

Dawn of a New Era

We are go for launch!

I’ve been hinting a bit lately that change is coming to the Wyrmlog. Well today it’s arrived!

If you’re reading this on the old, iNews powered Wyrmlog (the one that’s all green) it’s the last post you’ll ever see here. Maintaining a custom blogging application may have given me almost 10 years of smug independence, but it’s become increasingly annoying as time has worn on. Added to that is the fact that I’ve never had the time to set up a robust commenting system, which in this Web 2.0, wired, user generated content world made the Wyrmlog even more irrelevant that it would otherwise undoubtedly be. So a few weeks back I decided to damn it all to hell and set up a spiffy, new, open source WordPress blog – the Wyrmlog 2.0!

(Actually it’s probably about 6.8 with all the revisions the old one went through, but hey, who’s counting?)

The old Wyrmlog will be maintained in it’s current location, although no updates after this one will be made.

So where can you taste the literary rainbow that is the new Wyrmlog? Here!

wyrmlog.wyrmworld.com

Now, the new Wyrmlog is still being set up. All the content (9 years worth! I’ve been spewing out this crap for 9 years?!) has been ported across but some of it (particularly the old stuff) is looking a bit dodgy. I’ve also got to get it all sorted properly into categories. The skin also needs a complete revision (what’s with that tree?) so don’t worry about the messed up menus up the top. But hey, it makes blogging a lot easier for me, and it has comments! Yes! Comments! Wow!

So yeah, it’s the start of a new era. Or something. Enjoy my children!!

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