jeffjudge.com

Erin and I went to Sepia (123 N Jefferson St) last night for dinner to celebrate her birthday with her brother Eli, and his girlfriend Lizzy. I remembered earlier in the day that Erin had added our dogs Dylan and Roscoe to Facebook via an application called Dogbook. I started laughing about that, and told Eli and Lizzy that they should join Facebook. They both kind of laughed and asked us why they should join Facebook. Funny thing is - Erin and I didn’t have a solid answer for them. Our best answer was: “so we’ll be connected”. Wow, that’s a pretty soft sell to two people that we should be connected to on a social network. The more we talked about Facebook, the more we came to a conclusion that Facebook albeit interesting at times, is pretty much a waste of time.

Here’s a daily sample of our interaction with Facebook:

-Receive a request to join Pirates vs Ninjas (huh?)
-Receive a request to join Vampires vs Wherewolves (again, wtf?)
-Receive an animated plant grow over time (i do like flowers though)
-Watch an animated egg hatch over time (wait, let me finish watching baby einstein first before i watch this miracle of life)
-Receive an inbox message (you get notified via email when you get these messages, except the email doesn’t actually tell you what the message is)
-Play a game of hot potato (similar to those old emails where you’re asked to forward the email to everyone you know, but less spammy)
-Join a group (with a name that is funny enough to be on a t-shirt, but group activity that is interesting enough to capture your attention for about 30 seconds)

Don’t get me wrong - the people behind and involved in the Facebook ecosystem are brilliant people - and there are some interesting things being done that can only be done with a community as large as Facebook - like contextual advertising and forcing developers to massively scale their applications. And there are a lot of good, simple things about Facebook too - it’s interface, the birthday updates, the ability to post articles to friends, etc. It’s just that in the whole scheme of things, Facebook falls somewhere between getting my oil changed every 3000 miles and cleaning out the garage.

Jeff is currently planning on wasting less time :)

today is erin’s birthday - happy birthday, baby!

I have been planning on moving a couple of sites to a content management system and had some free time tonight, so I started playing around with RadiantCMS. I grabbed the gem, followed the install and setup instructions and got everything up in running in a few minutes. Then I went to checkout the documentation to learn more about RadiantCMS’s syntax structure - and their documentation wiki is down! This is actually something that I find the Rails community does a particularly bad job at. Even the official Ruyby on Rails is down or defaced half the time. Hmm…are wiki’s really that hard to maintain?

On a wiki related note - I setup a wiki for my Erin and I a few years ago and we use it to keep track of tons of stuff. That combined with Google Calendar has made sharing and keeping tracking of things pretty easy. I still laugh when she says the word wiki though, it’s cute.

Sweet - I just installed MacTheRipper and Handbrake and have discovered a whole new world of “backing things up”. MacTheRipper first rips the DVD, than Handbrake comes in for compression. Hot damn, this is exciting. It seems that our Mac Mini will soon become a nifty little first floor media center in our house. I don’t know why I haven’t paid much attention to this until now, but I’m excited. Hot damn!

I am continually impressed with Google…they are cranking out new, useful things every week. Just this week they released the Google Chart API, which is hands down the easiest API for quickly creating good looking charts. Taking a step back and thinking about how much Google stuff I use on a daily (or every other day) basis is astonishing: Apps, Gmail, Talk, Reader, Docs, Calendar, SMS, Maps, YouTube, News, Groups, Analytics, Adwords. I often use Checkout and Finance, and I have used plenty of tools on a periodic basis. They are adding GData (or rather formalizing it into a product), which is something that I’ll definitely be using as well. I hope that they nail that product, as it will be really useful to see someone do it right.