Big Friendly

I’ve had my finger of the red button for a while now. I’ve been close to the edge a few times now, knuckles white and sweat dripping off my brow but time and again I blinked. I’ve read how Facebook changes it’s privacy policy over and over to suits it’s partners and own interests. It’s reached the point we are lining up at the Rohypnol vending machine so that Mark Zuckerberg can have his way with us. We don’t resist. We don’t object. We just till the fields while our homesteads are plundered. No more. Deleting my Facebook account makes no difference to the numbers, but every drip ads to the corrosion.

So, from today I will be visiting this site every time I feel the urge to visit Facebook.

For the handful of visitors to this blog, do yourself a favour and read “Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative”. Enough said.

Breaking up is hard to do. The relationship is stale and has become one sided. I seem to be the one doing all the work and investing all the time, and all it does is try and find new ways to fuck me over. I’m reading daily how it is finding new ways of exposing my most intimate details to a bunch of couch farmers. I’m tired of the friend requests from people who I don’t really know or even care about. The sum total of people of value in my life is about 20, not the 122 I currently seem to have. If people want to know me they do. If all the effort they are prepared to put into finding out how the hell I’m doing is opening a web browser then bollocks to them I say. Pish on them and their friendships.

Not that I’m exactly living my life on Facebook mind you, I do the occasional Like (why the fuck can’t I Don’t Like or Hate or Disagree or Love or Agree or Sneer?), make the occasional “clever” comment. I do post the occasional link though, like this one that has given rise to this rant. And I try and warn people off the scams that I’m aware of, the current one is “Disney’s Most Shocking Hidden Message! All of You Have Never Seen Before!”, don’t click on it people and don’t Like it, or Fan it. It puts Brooklax in your coffee, hides all your toilet paper, roller towels and tissues and sits in the corner sniggering at you.

I’m tired of all the apps, games and causes that you are asked to join. If you want to save the Whale or Lesser Known Rainbow Snoek or Kill Malema and/or Obama or protest the fact that Riaan Cruywagen has changed his hairstyle for the first time in 45 years of presenting the news, then get active. Do something! Joining a Facebook page isn’t going to change one little thing.

So, I’ll be harvesting the email addresses of the people who I really want to be in contact with this weekend and then it’s time to start removing my stuff off Facebook. I’ve read that the best thing to do is slowly removing your info before you deactivate your profile.

Update: Habibti has posted a “different” perspective on the whole Facebook thing. I still think Riaan should be allowed to do with his hair as he pleases.

Well, here we go. Uncapped ADSL!! MWeb announced it on Thursday and I phoned the minute I heard about it and applied to upgrade. They said it would take about 16 to 24 days to become active. Bummer, but what the hey. We’ve managed on our 7.5 GB cap till now with the occasional top-up just fine. That evening I received a SMS to say that we’ve been upgraded. Oh the dilemma!!! What am I going to do with this new found freedom? I’m not big on downloading movies and TV series, so what is a man to do when he wakes up in a harem? He goes into full geek mode. I’ve downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 Beta (twice), I’ve downloaded Kalyway 10.5.2 and VMWare. I’ve partitioned my laptop and installed Ubuntu 10.04 and installed VMWare and tried out OS X (only 10.5.2 though) and am having a blast. Playing with OS X, while I write this post via Windows 7 and Rolling Stones play via iTunes on Windows 7.

On Thursday we’d used 6.5 GB of our monthly cap, as of 21 March, 2010, 00:17:25 we’d used 16.78 GB. So 10 Gb in just 3 days. Not bad for somebody who woke up in a land of Poontang just three days ago.

You know you’re a geek when you can identify with this:

I take great pleasure in checking my server’s uptime. Not same amount of pleasure Tiger Woods gets out of his “uptime” I bet.

As of today (25/02/2010) it’s sitting at 202 days.

I’m sick in bed with flu, seems to have been a winter for it this year. This is the first time that I’m actually in bed though. I feel as guilty as all hell as I have a ton of work to do, but fuckit it feels good. Even though I’m laying here reading I’m still not resting, I have laptop, cell and landline around me. Skype is open, as is both mail clients and two instances of Google Wave. There is a SSH session to the new FormFunction hosting server as I’ve just deployed a site and I’m keeping tabs on the match between India and Australia which may be a non-event due to a cyclone forming over the Arabian Sea near Mumbai.

Habibti is buying is a new coffee machine as our old has just lost too many pieces along the way. Can’t wait to see what she gets.

The one thing that is making me feel like I’m really sick is the fact that both the cats are snuggling up to me which is pretty cool, except for the fact that Annie moans every time I as much as try and sneak a piece of fudge never mind move or even try get comfortable.

In the photo below I have Charlie (Chasie) on my right and Annie between my feet.