Facebook-Free, day three, four & five

I'm combining day's three, four and five because

A) I forgot to post something on sunday

and

B) This thing is a whole lot less dramatic than i thought it was going to be. So far we're about 96 hours into this adventure and I really have nothing to report.

Has my life gotten better? Worse? Is it the same. I really couldn't tell you, which is perhaps the most surprising result of this whole thing.

At this point, it appears that Facebook — the place where I interacted with the majority of my friends, and spent probably an hour of each day — really had no impact on my life what so ever.

Luckily — for the sake of moving this story on — multiple sources are reporting that facebook has launched an iPad app. PCMag.com is reporting that it has moved the facebook game on, and added a new dimension to the social media site. I have to admit that the most temptation I have had came from my desire to try out this app.

Maybe Google+ will get off their butts and add a tablet app to their phone-based one.

Facebook-Free, day two

The missing of facebook I had anticipated hasn't come yet. more than 48 hours in and I'm not really feeling any desire to check on things.

Without discounting the possibility that the desire might come at some point, I have to wonder how much facebook actually mattered in my life.

Right now it's looking like the answer is "not a whole heck of a lot."

Facebook-free, day one

What is there on the Internet aside from Facebook?

After deleting my FB bookmarks I found myself staring at my computer, knowing that I wanted to do something, but no idea what. Normally at times like this I would see if my brother was on FB chat, or check some status updates. No longer.

I decided to take the dog to the park and run some errands instead. Much more productive.

Do I miss it yet? Not really. I feel kinda outta the loop in terms of what my friends kids are up to, but I'm not really too concerned, I'm sure I'll find out soon enough.

Bye Facebook

Of all the things I could have done in response to Steve Jobs' death, I never would have assumed leaving Facebook would be one of them.

It became very clear to me however, looking at my feed that Facebook had just become another source of argument in my life, so I've decided to leave it for 30 days and concentrate on twitter (@leiflarsen), Google+ and Blogger.

Gonna try daily entries about my Facebook-free life for the next 30 days, as my wife says: Morgan Spurlock style.

It never rains . . .

The title of this post is a double entendre. It hasn't rained here for about a month, so things are dry, dusty and generally lacking moisture of any kind. It is supposed to rain this weekend, but they have predicted that lots-o-times before, and it has come to nothing but a few couds. Despite this though, somehow the local flora have found enough H₂O to bud and bloom. This is my favorite time of the year in Winnipeg.

Part of me doesn't want it to rain this weekend though because of the title's second meaning . . . the end of April and beginning of may is literally pouring with things for me to do. We move into our first house on the 30th, I officially become the Editor-in-Chief of the Manitobanon the 1st, and as if that weren't enough, I went out and got a dog on Saturday (pictured above).

We called him Stig, and he is probably a Labrador Retriever. I say "probably" because we got him from the Winnipeg Humane Society, so you can never be too sure exactly what you're getting. He's pretty mild mannered for a puppy, although he does have bursts of energy, at the end of which the cats are on the highest piece of furniture, hissing, the kid is crying and Stig is sitting in the middle of the floor with a satisfied smirk on his face.

These incidents though are pretty few and far between, for the most part he is an awesome dog. Already pretty much house broken (one accident in the house on Saturday, one on sunday, and none on Monday), sleeps in his kennel, and knows to give Maeve (our Bengal cat) a wide birth when she starts hissing.

Audrey (or chubby Calico cat) on the other hand has approached having a new pet in the family as an opportunity for even more attention and affection, and flops herself down in front of stig and rolls on her back, her way of asking for a belly rub.

So, moving, new job and new Dog, all within a week of each other . . . insanity, but fun insanity.

feet bikinis

It's March, and that means it's sandal season! I love sandals, but some people talk trash about them.

Feet are not meant to be in socks and shoes, they need to be let out, free.

Think of sandals as bikinis for your feet, and who doesn't like bikinis?

Love, hate and Apple inc.

I both love and dislike Apple at the same time. It's getting to be a problem.

I love their computers. My Macbook Pro is delightful, fast and easy to use. Mac OSX 10.6 is pretty brilliant too. Were it to break, get stolen or otherwise disappear, I would probably end up biting the bullet and spend the $1800 Canadian Apple wants for a 15 inch unibody Macbook Pro. Also, if they ever make iPhones illegal, you can tear mine from my cold dead fingers, nothing comes close, and I have tried all of the competitors in Canada. But there would be something nagging at me.

Steve Jobs, in my opinion is a bloody genius, and indeed Apple's stock prices seem to rise and fall in step with his involvement, and rightly so, Apple prospers when Jobs is at the helm and in control. But that control can also be a double edged sword. Jobs is very cautious about who he lets develop consumer products for Apple products. Just google "iPhone app censorship" to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

From one perspective (that of Apple) a policy of strictly policing software is a very good thing, since, ideally, it would mean that only top quality apps are released for apple products, helping to maintain their high quality image. However, with 25,000 apps as of March 2009 (some reports put the current number at more than 50,000), and as many as two billion downloaded, it's hard, if not impossible for Apple to thoughtfully consider each one before allowing it to be distributed in the App store. From the perspective of the consumer, or app developer, on the other hand, the hand of Apple can be a drawback.

Consider Apple's recent "purge" of any app that could be used for displaying pornography. On the outset this could be seen as a good thing. Apps that display naked women don't exactly convey the image that Jobs would like his company to have. Yet at the same time Apple has been criticized for this move on two accounts.

First, some claim that the purge was too general, and removed apps from the store whose intention was to never display pornography, but were used for that purpose by a scant nefarious few.

And second, that it was a hypocritical move, considering the iPhone's Safari based browser can connect a user to as many pictures of naked women as Google Image Search will facilitate (which is undoubtedly somewhere in the bagillions).

So, to summarize a long post, love Apple, don't really care for the short lead Jobs likes to keep on developers. Right now it isn't really an issue for me, however I do foresee a day when Mac OS is closer to that of the iPhone and upcoming iPad, which would mean that the programs available to a user would be greatly compromised. For example, Apple does not allow apps which mirror the iPhone's core apps . . . meaning that, for the here and now, if you own an iPhone, safari is the only browser you can use. I shudder to think about a similarly constrained Macbook.

As for recent sensationalized reports of apple using child labour in factories, not to trivialize child labour in any way, but anyone who took the time to read the articles, instead of just posting the headlines to facebook, would have read that it was 11 cases of Apple suppliers employing people who were 15, in countries where the labour laws say that no one under the age of 16 may be employed. Furthermore, this was not uncovered by Dateline's "To catch a Predator" as some would have you believe, but through an internal audit by Apple, who choose to make the information public, and in each case, the audits revealed that the problems had been corrected independently by each supplier.

Frankly, aside form the irrational desire some have to make Apple look bad, I don't see how this is news.