Critter's Cave

As has been all over the news the last week, Facebook updated their privacy controls. I have refrained from commenting until the new controls trickled down to my account. Now they have and I am pleased to see that my objections have been addressed. While their centerpiece is the new easier-to-understand interface for those overwhelmed by their previous interface, my main issue has been the loss of ability to control who sees your interests and activities, hometown, etc. That fine control has been added back in and the “community” focus has been dropped. While it is a little more work to find, users have same degree of control over their personal information that they did had prior to March 2010.

I have said before that I personally don’t care what information about myself is out there – I just care that I have (or have the option to) control over how/when that information is distributed. Now that these changes are in place, I will rejoining the Facebook community.

However, I will still post longer pieces and reflections here (I never have liked Facebook’s “Notes”).

My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy – O’Reilly Radar.

I actually do not have a problem with the premise of his article.  I have no problem personally giving up privacy in return for certain benefits.  I have a problem with the shifting nature of Facebook’s privacy policies.

This comment by Alex Tolley is pretty spot on about how I feel about the issue.

This Newsweek article explains in clear terms exactly what has changed on Facebook regarding your personal information and what price you must pay to use Facebook – personal information you’d like to share only with your friends (or not at all) can only be public or nonexsitent – there is no longer an option for some settings to share only with friends if desired.

The Secret Cost of Using Facebook – Newsweek.com.

I have been harping on this a lot lately, but every day my decision to divorce myself from Facebook is looking better and better:

Facebook’s Instant Personalization backfires already, thanks to Yelp security hole.

The gist is: due to both a bug in Yelp! and a bug in Facebook, a malicious website can gain access to your private Facebook information.

Still think the open web is a good thing?

I’m giving this Echo commenting system a whirl. They’ve got a 30 day free trial so there’s noting to lose and it will preserve my comments from before.

This article on Gizmodo (and the previous one that’s linked at the beginning of that post) details a lot why I’m no longer using Facebook

Why You Should Still Quit Facebook – Facebook – Gizmodo.

Today I made my last post to Facebook. I’m writing this post to expound more on my reasons why.

They are radically changing their stance on privacy

Read this article on CNN for details.

This is a big deal. Facebook is couching it in terms of “Transformative” and “revolutionary”, but all they’re really doing is gradually moving control over your personal information from you to them with the ultimate goal of “monetizing” that information – the polite way these days of saying they’ll be making money by selling that information to outside parties.

There is one HUGE part of the announcement that appears to have flown under the radar – and is in my opinion, the most worrisome issue: Facebook is dropping the requirement for Facebook App developers to delete your personal information after 24 hours! This means EVERY SINGLE APP you have authorized now can harvest your information and they are not required to delete it! If you want to know how scary that is, follow the steps in the linked Lifehacker.com article to view every app you’ve authorized to have access to your personal information. I suspect most people will be shocked about that.

Now, I am not necessarily a private person, and I don’t much have an issue with putting my info out there – but it’s been MY CHOICE. I cannot in good conscience use or support any application or service that does not let the end user have ultimate control over the use of their personal information – no matter how trivial. Until Facebook changes its privacy polices back to the way they were prior to March 26, 2010, I will not be posting, reading, getting notifications or generally interacting at all with Facebook. However, I have not completely deactivated my account simply because I have pictures and other information already up there that others have linked to and I don’t want to break those links; also if Facebook changes their policies I will be happy to return to Facebook and don’t particularly care about going through the account reactivation process.

I do apologize to my friends and family who normally use Facebook to contact me, but I would hope everyone understands my position and why I feel I need to take this stand. Granted I’m only one person, but personal privacy is one thing I have ALWAYS felt very strongly about.

Since I am self aware enough to realize I love to talk about myself, I will be posting here more regularly and you can follow me on twitter (@critter42). If you do want to chat with me, I’m always on Google Talk (tho’ if I don’t respond immediately, it may be I’m at work and am busy, don’t be upset!) – critter42 ( a.t. ) gmail (d. o. t. )com.

Well, it seems like EVERY tech site is putting up its April Fool’s Day pranks.  And it ALSO seems like every tech site is putting up their own roundup of everyone else’s pranks, so I thought I would provide a roundup of the April Fool’s Day roundups!

Engadget:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/01/april-fools-day-roundup-let-me-topeka-that-for-you-edition/

Lifehacker:
http://lifehacker.com/5507090/your-april-fools-day-prank-spoiler

TechCrunch:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/31/april-fools-shenanigans-wikipedia-google-oh-my/

If you find any more roundups let me know so I can keep updating this post!

Four years (and a little over a month) ago I quit smoking.

Two years ago I stopped drinking sugared drinks.

A year ago I tipped the scales at 320lbs

A month and a half ago I was diagnosed with diabetes.

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I had always felt somewhat bullet-proof when it came to getting things like diabetes, or heart disease and such.  This was a wake-up call.  I immediately started a sensible,  low calorie diet.  At the time of the diagnosis, I couldn’t start a real exercise regimen due to a lingering physical injury.  In the last 6 weeks I am down to about 290lbs and lost 6 inches in my waist.

Today, however,  I have started a new phase in life and begun a concentrated exercise program – I’m starting slowly and working my way up.  My short-term goal is to run the Gibson Guitar 5k on June 12, 2010 – and run the entire distance.  My long term goal?  Well, when I got out of Navy boot camp, I weighted 152lbs.  While I may make it there someday, in my mind I have 175lbs as my ultimate target weight goal.  It’s going to take a lot of hard work and it won’t be instant, but it will be worth it.

I decided to start posting my workouts as  way to hold myself accountable, as a motivational technique to keep going.

Today, my first day of real exercise in a long time, I did the following:

Stretching Exercies – 10 min
Pushups – 10 (I have GOT to work on that)
Elliptical – 30 minutes weight loss program – averaged 45rpms and a distance of 1.2 miles
Upper body (using 10lb dumbbells)
- front and side arm lifts – 20 each
- arm curls – 20
- arm press – 20
Crunches – 3 reps of 20 each

And as this is about new beginnings, I have also moved my main site to WordPress from Movable Type and updated the theme to something a little more visually exciting.

This is going to be interesting!

I’m posting this as a reference for anyone searching for how to configure FeedDemon’s ‘Send To’ feature to work with WordPress 2.9 and up.  The instructions on the Newsgator website/knowledge base are outdated.

1. In FeedDemon (current version as of this writing is 3.1.0.12), click the gear icon (“choose newspaper icons”) below the title of any post and in the popup window click “Send To”.
2. Click on the Send To icon, “Blog This Item”, then “Configure Blog Publishing Tools.”
3. Click Add
4. Put something in the Description field  - it doesn’t matter what, just so you know what it is
5. In Command Line or URL, enter the following address:
   http://www.mywebsite.com/wordpressfolder/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=post&content=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION_PLAIN$&post_title=$ITEM_TITLE$
   where “www.mywebsite.com” is the location of your WordPress blog and ‘wordpressfolder’ is the subfolder your WordPress folder is installed  - usually just ‘wordpress’ (you may or may not have this folder depending on how your site is configured)
6. You can click “Set as default” if desired, then click OK and OK again.

You are now set to post to your WordPress blog from within FeedDemon’s newspaper.