To Facebook or Not to Facebook

So it seems like more and more people are on Facebook these days. (And migrating away from MySpace, thank goodness.) In the past, I'd never really felt the need or desire to have a Facebook account. I mean, I already have this blog, in which I talk about what's going on in my life (when I remember to write in it), and I in turn, follow the blogs of my friends and family.

Except... a lot of them seem to be migrating to Facebook as well. My wife is on Facebook, and some of her friends there are people she met through me. Recently, she showed me some of the people that they're connected to, and I found several family members and a lot of old friends from high school.

And on top of that, my mother is now on Facebook. When I learned that, my brain needed a few seconds to overcome the cognitive dissonance. Mom's on Facebook, and I'm not. I work in the computer industry, and my mother is more wired, more down with the social media thang, than me. You turn your back for one minute, and the world goes upside-down on you.

So that's the question before me: should I break down and get a Facebook account? I don't know. Maybe those of you who have one can give me your opinion. Here are the pros and cons, as I see it:

PRO: Facebook would let me restrict what I write to just family and friends.

Everything I write here is out in the open. I'd prefer the discussion with family and friends be a bit more closed. Facebook would keep my updates within my circle of friends and family, and easily brings their updates to me.

PRO: Facebook would help me reconnect with old friends.

I'd love to find out what those pals of mine are up to these days. It's apparent from one glance at my wife's profile that Facebook would definitely help with that. And unlike a blog, I could initiate what would become a two-way connection, instead of me just blasting updates out into the ether and wondering whether it would ever cross the eyes of some of those old friends.

CON: Facebook seems oriented towards “stream-of-conciousness” posting.

From what I understand, there isn't a blog feature. Instead, there's the wall, which seems to be a stream-of-consciousness affair, kind of like Twitter, except that your friends posts and reactions are interwoven into the flow. The thing is, I don't think that I'm fascinating enough for anyone to be interested in my consciousness stream. I feel like I need to put some thought into it before I could expect anyone to bother reading it. That usually translates into less frequent posting, but when I do post, it tends to be at least a couple of paragraphs and about something other than what I ate for lunch. But do people want a multiple-paragraph entry on their wall, amongst all the one-liners?

CON: What about the other topics?

Facebook's ability to restrict the audience works against me when I want to talk about something more that just updates. This blog is pulling double-duty: not only to I give family updates here, but I also write about other things. And unlike the updates, I want people I don't know to come and read those posts. Sometimes I will write something and someone just shows up out of the ether and posts a reply, which is gratifying. I want some of my writing to be public, and some to be restricted to my friends. Facebook doesn't seem to make this very easy. And is Facebook really the kind of place for that more public writing, anyway? Would it be worth the trouble to keep a blog separate from Facebook just for that kind of thing?

PRO and CON: Applications

The applications seem like a powerful way to extend Facebook, and things like photo-sharing are nice. However, it seems like most of them are pretty frivolous, and worse, they insist on spamming your friends about your activity in them. I'm not particularly interested in keeping up with how much time anyone is wasting feeding nonexistent pets or throwing nonexistent snowballs. I know that you can block an application, but I'd personally prefer that all applications be blocked by default, and then have the opportunity to unblock ones that I actually find useful.

CON: Loss of control

It seems that you don't have total control over what appears on your page: your contacts show up and scribble all over it, with their profile photo next to it. This is fine when you're reasonably certain that all your contacts will behave in a gentlemanly or ladylike fashion. But sometimes there's someone out there with whom you'd like to keep in touch, but they don't exactly show much discretion in what they post. I know at least one person where this would be the case. It's bad enough to deal with that yourself, much less exposing my family and friends to it whenever they view my wall. I don't know, maybe I'd just have resort to holding my Facebook friendship with them hostage until they clean up their act. That brings me to the final point...

CON: The perceived offense of not “friending”

So say I decide, for whatever reason, that I don't want to accept a “friend” request from someone. If the request is from a stranger, no big deal; I couldn't care less what they think. But if it's from someone that I know, turning down the request can have undesirable consequences. They may want an explanation. The reasons could range from “You seem nice, but I don't know you well enough to say that you're a friend,” to “Sure, you're a relative/friend, but you don't exercise proper discretion with your online behavior and I don't want to expose my friends to that,” all the way to “I'm actually trying to reduce contact with you, thanks.” I could deal with this, certainly, but it's not been something that I had to be concerned with up until now.

So what do you think? Should I make the leap?

Must Be Santa

The kids just can't get enough of this festive little number:

And here are some other holiday videos that I'd like to share. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Money

We hosted Thanksgiving this year for my parents and my sister-in-law. Gorgeous Wife did a great job on the meal, and I suppose I did a reasonably okay job watching kids while she made it. The turkey, in particular, won high praise from all.

After the meal, my son went to bed, and the rest of us went downstairs to chat. At one point, Gorgeous Wife pointed to my mom and asked my daughter, “Who's that?” “'Amma,” she responded, which is about as close as she gets to the word “grandma” right now. Then Gorgeous Wife pointed at my dad and asked, “Who's that?” We expected something like “'Ampa,” but instead, without any hesitation, she said, “Money.” Several more trials indicated that she clearly believes that her grandfather is “Money.”

Watch out, Dad.

Pet Bugs

Just about anybody who uses a computer regularly will have accumulated one or more “pet bugs”: little annoyances in the software they use, forcing them to find some way around the problem. The more they use the software, the more the bugs bother. Sometimes a bug survives several significant updates to the software, and the user begins to wonder, “Why on earth hasn't this been fixed already?” Well, I'm here to tell you why.

I can empathize with the sentiment. I have my own collection of pet bugs. But as a software developer, I also live on the other side of the issue. Many times, the developer simply doesn't know the bug exists, and if they did, they'd rapidly fix it. Other times, they are aware of the bug, but—as unfathomable as it might be for some users (and software process gurus)—they have decided, at least for now, not to fix it. Usually the reason is rooted in a problem faced by nearly any software project with a significant user base: the astonishing pile of feature requests (most of them considered “high priority”) versus finite developer resources. Somewhere, amid all that, they've got to fix bugs, too. Because of this, they tend to rationalize why some bugs can be left unfixed, with varying degrees of legitimacy. Over the course of my career, I've heard a number of different rationales; here are a few:

“Almost nobody will be affected.” It's sort of an inverse of “The Starfish Story.” It's no problem for almost all users, but the ones who do experience it are significantly cheesed off. The rationale would be better expressed as, “It is a valid problem, but there are other things we could work on which would result in a greater total benefit for our customers.”

“Yeah, but when's that ever gonna happen?” The very act of uttering these words seems to guarantee that the exact scenario in question will happen. The Y2K bug fell into this category: those who developed the software never dreamed that it would remain in use for so long without eventually being replaced by something more modern. Incidentally, another such event looms on the horizon: lots of applications (and some operating systems) store time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, but the storage space is only sufficient for 2,147,483,647 seconds, meaning that a Y2K-like problem is slated for January 19, 2038.

“If that ever happens, we'll have bigger problems to worry about.” Fairly justifiable, if it's really true: “Yes, emails will fail to go out if our server farm is hit by tactical missile strike, but if that ever happens...” It reminds me of a co-worker's story about someone he knew who was required to design a simple, mechanical button... which could still work after a missile hits the building. I'm not kidding. (I have a feeling that whatever it is intended to do, the button itself is probably large and red and surrounded by black and yellow diagonal stripes.) It's a reasonable requirement for military applications, I'm sure, although you might end up with a situation where the button is perfectly functional but nobody has survived to push it. As for the rationale for fixing the bug, one could always argue that if you do have bigger problems, wouldn't you like to have one less?

“If that ever happens, we'll be discussing this on a beach in the Carribean.” An only half-serious rationale: the problem would only arise in a situation where the product was so wildly successful that those involved would all be fabulously wealthy. The speaker asserts that not only can the fix be put off, but that when it reaches the point where it must be fixed, they could probably delegate it to someone else so that they could continue sipping their tropical beverages. Often termed “a good problem to have,” but responsible developers are forward-thinking and will head the these issues off beforehand, when possible. The last thing you want is to be killed by your own success.

I still am tempted to revile my pet bugs. Being a developer, I ought to know better. I ought to remember that somewhere there's a developer who would love to kill that bug if there were just more hours in the day. Except that if there were more hours, he'd probably use them for other neglected things, like taking out his will, or changing his oil, or getting a physical.

As improbable as it seems, it turns out that software developers are people, too.

The Five Stages of X-Raying a Child

For the benefit of any who may not have experienced it before, getting a child X-rayed (especially when you have no way to explain to her that it won't hurt and all she needs to do is hold still) goes something like this:

Phase 1: Crying

From the moment you enter the building, she knows it's something she isn't going to like, and the tears start falling.

Phase 2: Screaming Bloody Murder

Usually starts when you enter the examination room. She somehow knows that this is the place where it's all going to go down and that it's time to put on her game face.

Phase 3: The Full Limp Noodle

Upon picking up the child to place her on the examination table, all of her muscles will relax and she will endeavor to turn into a puddle of toddler on the floor.

Phase 4: The Rabid Wolverine

The noodle having proven ineffective, the child will then “hulk up” and proceed to fight the X-ray process with tooth and nail. Actually, a single rabid wolverine doesn't really describe it; it's more like two rival hyena packs fighting over a dead gazelle. Expect to need at least two people to hold her down, perhaps more. Expect elbows to faces and scratches on arms. Expect multiple attempts at getting a clear image.

Phase 5: The Blubbering Mess

Once the torture is over, the child will now willingly sit on the examination table that you fought so hard to keep her on, but will snivel incoherently and look at you like you just killed her puppy.