Monthly Archives: February 2012

Why I stopped using Twitter

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I have a problem with information overload. My brain shuts down after seeing too much data coming at me in some kind of disorganized way. Sometimes I don’t mind it, like when I’m waiting for lunch to be prepared. Flicking through Twitter feels somewhat like peoplewatching.

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It’s a mindless activity. But when I really want to read the newsfeeds and personal commentary pumped into Twitter I find it feels more like WHARRGARBL.

So I started using the Facebook Like a little bit more in recent times to follow artists, organization, and other things I’m interested in. Facebook does a much better job of controlling the spam in my stream so I get a general smattering of everything. As a result it feels more like I can see the mass of activity in some sort of organized manner instead of being overwhelmed.

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What happened to Firefox? Why are some browsers just better?

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I had just finished reading an article about Firefox and I got all nostalgic. I seem to remember when Firefox was awesome. I remember when it wasn’t some scary memory-munching lummox. It was my companion that had the latest in HTML and CSS, had the amazing Firebug plugin, and had decent multiple profile support.

These days I dread using it. Some web pages don’t load, it constantly crashes, and Webkit’s web inspectors are starting to become pretty decent. The are really only 3 reasons I still use it: 1) multiple profile management separates sets of cookies, 2) I like Firebug’s JavaScript inspector better, and 3) I have been using an awesome plugin to take a screen shot of the entire web page.

Which browser do I use the most then? Safari. Chrome is nice but since I’m a pretty heavy user of the Apple ecosystem (e.g. synced bookmarks and Reading List) Safari does exactly what I want and Chrome doesn’t add any noticeable benefit. I don’t see the point in using Opera or RockMelt. And of course I rarely fire up the Windows virtual machines to use IE 9.

What I want from my browser is: 1) smallest memory footprint (or at least perceptively small resource usage), 2) no-hassle bookmarks syncing, 3) the latest HTML, CSS, and Javascript support, 4) a decent debugger, and 5) fast, responsive UI that gets out of my way. It’s merely the window to my web world. What I don’t care or like includes: 1) themes, 2) a small URL bar (because I want to know exactly what I’m looking at), 3) fullscreen (since there’s so little difference between that and just maximizing the window), 4) hidden bookmarks, and 5) corners I can’t grab to resize the window.

I probably ought to do up some comps of my dream browser and why it would work better.

Path, you broke my trust

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I was curious about all this buzz about Path but I didn’t want to sign up for another social network. After all, Facebook pretty much has everything about me up on their site since I use it almost every day. I tried playing with Path but it really wanted me to create a profile. So what’s a girl to do? Make a test account and just try it out. Little did I know what had been going on…

I usually make test accounts with some bogus Gmail email. So I thought I was safe. I was so very wrong. I repeated the same steps and came up with this:

ZOMG. Seriously?! Wow. That is my entire address book and that was just after getting past the account creation screen. I’m going off now to write an angry letter to them.

I’m a computer engineer so I know how hard it’s going to be to delete those backups. And they’ll want the email I used as the test too probably. Uh. I don’t remember which ones. So now somewhere lost in all their servers is my entire cache of personal data and there’s probably no way to get it back. I’m sure other people have used their address books to store passwords and other very sensitive data.

This is truly the cost of living in the current world of technology. I’m sure Path isn’t the only one that has siphoned off my address book. It’s one thing when you choose to let Apple sync your Address Book via the cloud, but this is quite horrible because I did not allow Path to transmit and store this information.