So, according to a study, 88% of Americans stalk exes on Facebook:

Lukacs tells me that the survey respondents were 18-35 and the interview respondents were 21 to 39. They were all people whose hearts had been torn asunder in the previous 12 months. It is always best to research on those whose feelings are near the surface.

But did this stalking add to their pain or were they in pain and therefore stalked the ones they’d lost?

May I offer you some details of this research that might add to your pain?

Not merely did the vast majority stalk, but 70 percent admitted to using a mutual friend’s profile or even logging in as that mutual friend to do their stalking.

They creep around to see if their ex is having a sleep around.

Is that not painful enough for you? Well, 74 percent crept around the profile of their ex’s new partner or someone they feared might be their ex’s new partner.

Only 88%?

My friend Clint was having a lot of difficulty getting over his ex-girlfriend who he was sure was the love of his life (I don’t mean this as snarky as it sounds, there weren’t many girls he felt this strongly about or who matched his desires so closely). She unceremoniously dumped him and he had a hard time letting go. He was one of those people that did some funny business to get access to her MySpace stuff. I won’t recount how he did it, but it was pretty clever and she had no idea.

The end result was… sublime. He was reminded of the things that he didn’t like about her. Things that he had forgotten about in the intervening weeks. He got over her relatively quickly.

I am really, really glad that by the time that MySpace came around (and later Facebook, of course), I was out of the dating market. It’s the sort of thing that I have a really hard time resisting. I hated being completely cut off, of course, but it was always for the best. It was also easier then than it is now.

A slightly different subject…

A Facebook Friend who put up a picture of my fourth grade class recently put up our 8th grade class. It’s drawing in a lot of comments from people I knew way back in the day. I’d actually be interested in 1-day passes to find out what has happened to them without the mess of actually friending them. (This is a different subject because I never had a single girlfriend from my school system. The lady friends I had as a minor went to other schools.) Anyhow, from the pictures I’ve seen, I would have expected more of them to be fat. I think I’ve been conned by popular entertainment kharma. You know that bitchy hot girl who treated you like trash? Well, she’s 30-something now and is still hot. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

As I was graduating from college, one thing became apparent: Desktops were going the way of the dinosaur. Laptops were going to replace them. Why shouldn’t they? I mean, you can actually take a laptop places. It can do everything a desktop can do, but in a portable way, right?

Well, laptops have displaced desktops as the most common form of personal computing (at least, I believe so). Yet… desktops are still around. In large numbers. And they aren’t going away. It’s likely that they never will. Why not? Because they serve a valuable purpose as work machines. The work station I have up stairs? Laptops can’t do that. Multi-monitors, large monitors, a more workish environment that requires no set-up. Even if a laptop is more flexible, there are a number of things that are easier to do on a desktop than a laptop. And given how cheap both are, it’s easy to have both. And so while the laptop has thrived, the desktop has remained and appears as though it will remain indefinitely. Why wouldn’t they?

With this in mind, my head boggles any time anyone talks about the post-PC world. A few years ago it was smartphones that were going to replace PCs. Now, tablets. Okay, tablets with keyboards, maybe. So sort of laptops. There’ll be a merger. Something will surely happen to kill off the PC, right?

No. Not at all.

Just as was the case with the smartphone, the notion that we will settle on any single device is very short-sighted. Why should we? Different tasks beg for different tools. Sometimes you need to sit and work. Sometimes you want to sprawl on the sofa and write a blog post. Sometimes you need extra monitors, sometimes you want to be comfortable. Sometimes you want something you can take with you, sometimes you want something that fits in your pocket, and sometimes those things don’t matter and you want performance (and the desktop will always rule over laptops, tablets, and smartphones over performance). This notion that we will end up settling on a single device implies a degree of scarcity that does not actually exist. Now, more than ever, we can afford a desktop and a laptop and a smartphone and a tablet. We can cut out this one or that one, and few will have all four, but there’s not much reason to believe we will all cut out the same ones.

Ironically, the thing that is going to make this easier is actually the thing that leads some to say that the future is going to not be a PC one: cloud computing. I am actually skeptical of the extent to which we will ever move completely to cloud computing, but it does make switching between devices easier. Which not only means that we can do more on our tertiary devices, but also means that we can use these devices in complement with one another.

I was first told about “cloud computing” when I was in college. It wasn’t called that yet, but went by the less marketable name of “Dumb Terminal.” Which was the belief that in the future, computers wouldn’t actually be anything but terminals into larger and more powerful machines. It took fifteen years, and it’s still not happening quite like it was supposed. Why should it happen? Our individual computers now are just as powerful as the mainframe they would have been connected to 15 years ago. Given the constant state of advancement, there’s no reason to outsource what our computer does. At least, not completely. Enough, though, to make owning lots of devices easier. As Americans, we like to own stuff.

I was reading an article about Hewlitt-Packard and a sentence jumped out at me. The wording made me think that Lenovo had purchased Dell. My eyes shot wide open and I went googling and discovered that no, this bizarre thing had not happened. What happened was not that Lenovo had taken over Dell, but rather that they overtook Dell as the #2 computer seller in the world. I actually have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I’m all about the Thinkpad. On the other hand, Dell is an American company and I tend to root for American companies in the international marketplace (even if I don’t purchase their products).

In any event, it listed the top five makers in order: HP 17.7%, Lenovo 13.5%, Dell 11.6%, Acer 10.6%, ASUS 6.2%.

It seemed to me that Apple was missing from this. And bizarre that Lenovo was actually #2. And shouldn’t Toshiba be on there? Then I realized that this was the world market, so I looked at the US market: HP 28.9%, Dell 21.9%, Apple 12.9%, Toshiba 8.4%, Acer 7.4%.

That struck me as reasonable but for one thing: I never see HP’s anywhere!. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but I see far more Thinkpads than HP’s out there. The workplace? Everywhere I’ve worked, just about, has gone with Dell. Maybe the home desktop market is where HP does well. But it’s just weird that they are so significantly on top and they’re maybe the fifth or sixth name that comes to mind when I think of computer brands.

{Source}

The dude to the right is a character from the TV show Fringe named Lincoln Lee. That thing you see in his right ear is not an ear-ring. Rather, it’s a bluetooth-like device worn by characters in the “alternate universe.”

I long for that day in this one. Not for the day that bluetooth earpieces look like jewelry, but for the day when it is socially acceptable to wear these things at all times.

I ran across a neighbor at Safeway. He commented, “You really do always have that thing in your ear, don’t you? Do you sleep in it?”

Not generally, no.

It really has been an ongoing thing for me. Ever since I started listening to stuff at work a few jobs back, I decided that I wanted the ability to listen to things whenever I want. Therefore, the bluetooth is in my ear as often as not during my waking hours. This elicits a various responses. Some people joke about it (leave it in there long enough, your skin is going to grow over it!). I had a former boss who was frustrated by it. I always took it out whenever someone started talking to me, even though I could hear them just fine with it in. After that, I started keeping it out unless I was actively listening to something.

I keep about five of them around, so that I always have multiple ones charged. I suppose it looks goofy. Some might say that it’s rule because it gives the appearance that you’re not listening. I consider that to be a faulty norm. With the exception of discomfort (and I rarely feel that, thanks Plantronics!) there isn’t much reason to ever take it out. Even for someone that is moderately hard-of-hearing as I am.

I hope that this is one of those norms that does change. Maybe they need to do a better job of signalling whether someone is actually on a call or listening to something. However, the perception of it being douchey needs to be retired. We should accept the practicality of it. I don’t know if that day will ever come to pass. I still cling to my belt-holster for my cell phone as it becomes increasingly unacceptable (as phones increasingly fit into pockets). Sometimes, society moves the wrong direction.

I got what was the most baffling friending on Facebook to date: Jennifer “Porky” Gadsden (Greeley). The names are a story unto themselves. I’ve mentioned, but not named Porky before. She was the very conventionally beautiful (the nickname is not a reference to her weight) woman I was briefly with that warned me off conventionally beautiful women forever. Without going into too much detail (maybe I’ll make a Ghostland post out of it), in the words of Death Cab for Cutie, it was vile and it was cheap.

I’d say that things ended poorly, but save for a brief window at the start they went poorly throughout with each of us asking what the hell is wrong with the other person as time progressed. After the split (if we had anything to split from), the only contact we had was a “hello” at the university’s convenience store and once when she texted me to ask if I could help move her furniture. That was fine with me (not moving the furniture – I was helpfully out of town – but the no-contact thing).

So what the hell was she making a friend request on Facebook for? My first thought was maybe she sent out a lot of such requests – though that wouldn’t be like her – but after I accepted (I’ve never denied a request from anyone that I know to be a legitimate person) I saw that she had only a few more Friends than I do. I did see that she was still single, though with a cute little kid. She’s still thin, which I was sure she wouldn’t be.

Anyhow, those of you who read me know that I have a tendency to get hung up on the past. Yet, despite this, if there was one book I don’t mind being shut (even to the point of being so indifferent as to not care to know if things are turning out miserably) it’s her. And she was always far more indifferent to me than I was to her. I know what I got out of what we had, but hell if I can figure out why she would even remember my name.

Maybe she didn’t, or confused me with someone else. All I know is that when I woke up the next morning, I had been unfriended.

While I was ordering a couple of replacement hard drives, I went ahead and ordered a new keyboard. The existing keyboard, purchased in 2003 or so, was still doing its job. But it had, at some point, picked up an odor that even I could smell. Plus, and I will grant that this reason is more frivolous, it was beige and all of my computers have since switched to black.

You never realize how much you’ve gotten used to a keyboard until it’s gone. All of the little things you never noticed. Oddly, this is true even when you regularly switch between keyboards. I have no problem going from laptop to desktop, despite the very different computer configurations. But I guess when I am sitting at the desk, my mind has incorporated one keyboard over another.

So what are the differences? This keyboard has shorter keys. This is a shame. It’s one of the things I prefer about desktops over laptops. The tall keys. I was about to say that it makes typing easier – and it does – though I have gotten so used to the laptop I think I can switch back and forth between modes. But when I in desktop mode, I am expecting taller keys. This has resulted in an unusual number of typos. The biggest ongoing issue is for some reason my failing to correctly tap the letter “L.” The L key works fine, but for some reason I seem to suddenly be missing.

This new keyboard is also much, much quieter. I am not sure if the old keyboard simply got louder over time or if it was just a louder keyboard (this may be related to the whole height thing). I have been told, by a large number of people, that I am the loudest typist that they have ever met. My musician friend Clint actually says I am also the most rhythmic typist he has ever met. I think that’s a good thing. I seem to have gotten used to it. The only key that makes any notable noise is the spacebar, which means that the noise comes in a non-rhythmic fashion.

The biggest issue, however, is the fact that the new keyboard has a sightly different layout. They almost always do, and I consider it frustrating. This has a problem that is more severe, however. Where I am used to the Scroll Lock key being, now resides a “sleep” key. I don’t like sleep keys to begin with, but definitely not where the Scroll Lock is supposed to be. Now, some of you may not even know what the Scroll Lock is. It’s one of the least-used keys on the keyboard. Which is why KVM switches (which allow you to use a single keyboard/monitor/mouse for multiple computers) use it to switch machines. So, without thinking, I tap what I think is the Scroll Lock key in order to switch machines, and the next thing I know the computer I am on is going to sleep.

This will pass with time, no doubt. Maybe I’ll even be able to remap the key. But even if not, I’ll get used to it soon enough. I remember back in the old days how much I absolutely hated, hated, hated the double-decker Enter key. I still don’t prefer them, but it didn’t even occur to me to look for a keyboard without it.

The last thing is that my wrist hurts typing this. I am really hoping that’s temporary.

Alexis Madrigal argues that frictionless sharing could undermine our legal right to privacy:

You are no doubt familiar, now, with Facebook’s concept of “frictionless sharing.” You enable a social reader like the one from the Washington Post and the next time you read an article on the site, news of that textual encounter is broadcast to your Facebook friends. {…}

In Fourth Amendment cases, the Supreme Court has to determine what “a reasonable expectation of privacy” actually is. If you do have that expectation of privacy, then the government needs a warrant to look into your communications. So, if you go out in the public street and shout to the world that you committed a crime, the government does not need a warrant to use that communication. However, if you were to send a sealed letter to a friend containing the same information, you would have a reasonable expectation that the government would not be reading that note.

Because we’re talking about expectations, we have to think about what cultural norms are and the actions that signal what norms are in play. For example, Kaminski notes, “In the 1967 seminal Supreme Court case on wiretapping, Katz v. United States, Katz placed a phone call in a public phone booth with the door closed, and was found to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone call, so a warrant was required for wiretapping the phone.” Closing the door meant he expected the call to be private.

And the problem with frictionless sharing is that it may leave the door open for the government to collect and use information without a warrant.

“Justice Alito recently contemplated that we may be moving toward a world in which so many people share information with so many friends that social norms no longer indicate a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information,” Kaminski writes. “Without a reasonable expectation of privacy, there will be no warrant requirement for law enforcement to obtain that information. This analysis is troubling; sharing information with your friends should not mean that you expect it to be shared with law enforcement.”

I was skeptical of the headline, but reading the article it actually made sense. It actually makes me wonder, more broadly, if the perception of young people wanting to share everything won’t change privacy expectations with or without frictionless sharing.

I consider frictionless sharing to be, on the whole, a negative thing regardless of its fourth amendment implications. I mean, I keep (albeit with poor maintenance) a list of what I am reading, watching, and listening to on this site. But I choose what to put up there. I put up a thing for Fringe, or maybe a season of Fringe. Frictionless sharing can mean, basically, that every time I watch an episode of Fringe it gets posted. Or every time I listen to something on Spotify, you get to find out what it is. I don’t care if you know, but I don’t have any reason to believe you would want to know. And if I think you might, I’ll write a post on it.

The same goes for articles that I read. If I find something interesting, I’ll pass it along. But just because I am reading something doesn’t mean that I think you will be interested in reading it as well. The same applies to Facebook friends and such. The internet as a whole has a signal-to-noise problem, and this creates a whole lot more signal.

According to Thomas Freedman, we shouldn’t be worried about broadband capabilities in rural America:

Right now, though, notes Levin, America is focused too much on getting “average” bandwidth to the last 5 percent of the country in rural areas, rather than getting “ultra-high-speed” bandwidth to the top 5 percent, in university towns, who will invent the future. By the end of 2012, he adds, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. “That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard, and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States,” The Times reported last February.

Therefore, the critical questions for America today have to be how we deploy more ultra-high-speed networks and applications in university towns to invent more high-value-added services and manufactured goods and how we educate more workers to do these jobs — the only way we can maintain a middle class.

Erik Loomis disagrees, arguing:

I know the fact that people live in rural areas and small towns is inconvenient for people obsessed with national planning and technological fetishism, but that’s the reality of the United States. You can’t just marginalize these people and their futures by dooming them to second-rate access to resources. I mean, you can, but then you have to deal with endemic poverty, high rates of drug use, domestic violence, and any number of other social problems.

He is particularly concerned about rural Hispanics.

I am, of course, in the middle of this. I am a broadband using geek living in rural America. So naturally, I am sympathetic to the idea that the “last 5%” should get broadband. I am not presently in the last 5%, but I’m close enough to it that we would have to be careful about where we buy a home. I’ve already let it be known that broadband is not optional. But I am a computer geek. A lot of people out here can live with cut-rate connectivity. There’s nowhere in the country (or the lower 48, anyway) that you can’t get something, even if it’s satellite. Satellite might not be good enough for me, but I am not a typical case. The degree to which the rest of the country should bend over backwards for its most rural brethren is limited.

It leads to projects like this, where millions was spent on areas with 35k homes, of which 30k already had fixed broadband service. Over 90% of the remaining 5k had 3G availability, which isn’t ideal but is still something. I would be surprised if satellite were not an option for the remaining 500 houses. At some point, I think you have to say “good enough” and move on.

On the other hand, Friedman’s suggestion about the top 5% leaves me cold. Namely because we want a degree of universality to our service. Even if some get left behind, web site developers and content deliverers (like Netflix, Hulu, etc.) need to have some idea of the sorts of speeds that people are going to get. If you plug in Silicon Valley, and their speeds are significantly faster than everyone else (who isn’t in the top 5%, that is), they will be developing things for those speeds. This is already a problem, with inadequate buffering on the unjustified beliefs that everyman’s delivery speeds are faster than they are.

In terms of Internet, what I would very much prefer over raising speed caps is raising speed reliability. The other day I was at a coffee shop wherein all of the comments I wanted to leave at blogs had to be emailed to my cell phone, where I could then post it using my phone. The main reason is that they (I believe) have to dedicate so much of their bandwidth to downloading and so little to uploading, that the latter just became impossible. This is at a hot spot. This is where we really need improvement before we’re worried about the top 5% (or, for that matter, the left behind 5%).

Doc Searles writes:

There are dozens of wi-fi hot spots showing up on our lists, but all of them are closed. If this were eight years ago, at least half of them would be open, but the popular default in the world is now for closed hot spots, so those are also not options.

I’m sure in the long run The Market will fix this, but meanwhile “The Cloud’s” promise and reality are way out of sync. Since most of The Market outside our homes is comprised of pay services over wi-fi and cellular data systems are sure to suffer traffic jams as more of our lives require tethering to data banks and services in clouds, I’m not holding my breath for ease in the short run.

Remember “the information superhighway”? Would be nice to have that now.

I’ve written here and there about why I am skeptical of cloud computing. Namely, for cloud computing to really work, we have to be able to reliably access the Internet, and have a solid connection, wherever we go. And it needs to be free or a part of a ubiquitous subscription service. As long as we have to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it to get a solid and stable Internet connection in some place or another, cloud computing won’t work. Because the alternative is installed software. And you know what? That’s on my computer wherever I go. A file locker that can be accessed anywhere would be helpful, but even then it’s going to have to be a synchonization thing rather than a working on it from wherever thing. I open it and download it to the laptop, and as soon as I’m done with it, or the first time I am connected to the Internet again after it’s done, it uploads to the central server in North Carolina or wherever.

I am the first person that should be using cloud computing. I have an obscene number of computers and laptops. It’s a real pain to know that a file exists somewhere and then have to figure out which of the four likely places it is. But I will take that, every time, over being able to work on something only until the Internet connection slows to a crawl or stops.

This isn’t an appeal for some large government program that will assure Internet access anywhere and everywhere. Rather, it’s saying that unless we have such a program (whether supplied by the market or the government), it’s going to make more sense to work on files locally rather than remotely.

-{via Dustbury}-

I haven’t made the complete transition to Windows 7 yet. All of my secondary computers are still on XP (or, in two cases, Vista). When you do a search on XP, there’s a little dog that appears in the lower left-hand corner. You can make it to tricks. The problem with this digital dog is that it makes noise (some scratching sound). I don’t mind the dog, but the noise is irritating. But to get rid of the noise, you have to get rid of the dog. Right-click and tell it to take a hike and it trots away.

I feel the slightest bit bad about telling a digital dog to take a hike.

I feel ridiculously dumb for that sentiment.

—

Many years ago – maybe it’s till around – there was an application you could buy to raise a digital dog on your computer. My then-girlfriend Julianne had some. If you didn’t play with it often enough, it’d get droopy and sad. Sometimes it’d leave a dump on your screen. Julie bought me the program. I played with it a little bit, but it got old and only served to remind me that I didn’t have a real dog (mine had died not too long before). And I hated the notion that a digital dog required my attention or it would get pouty.

This is, of course, Zynga’s business model. Making you feel bad for letting pointless digital things languish. I guess, despite the stupid little feel-bad for telling the searchdog to leave, I am relatively immune.

My real dog would say that I am too immune to letting her languish.

—

Once upon a time, it was part of my job description to keep the office’s network up and running. It was an irritating part of my job. Not the least of which because I was having to look after the computing habits of a bunch of post-middle aged women who didn’t know the first thing about computers. One of them would say “Hey, Will. You need to see this!” so that she could show me something cute that the Office Help paperclip did. That was the second most annoying of all.

(The most annoying was conflating “I can’t find the database” (which I accidentally deleted the shortcut to) to “The database has been deleted.”)