A few thoughts for a Wednesday evening, in no particular order of importance.
- Attention Mac & iPhone Users: Download, learn, buy, and use 1Password. Religously. 1Password is designed to make your web browsing safer, by generating a long random password to every site you use. It may seem counter-intuitive to have a long password randomly generated for everything, but 1Password stashes all the random impossible-to-remember passwords behind a single password. 1Password also remembers typical auto-fill info–with multiple identities–as well as credit card details in the same encrypted space as your passwords. If you use the “fill with identity” feature, you can basically two-click through the register process of most websites you’ll run across. After using it for several months, I am to the point now where I only know perhaps three passwords. It works with Safari, Firefox (including Ff3), and iPhone(!). Perhaps other browers too, but I haven’t tested them. $34.95. Wow, I wish I got paid to say that, but maybe it means something that I wasn’t compensated. It is excellent software.
- There should be probably is a term for when a Google search term returns no results. A word besides “nonexistent,” anyhow.
- I never thought Facebook would be useful, particularly in the light of classmates and myspace and the like. But in the last few weeks especially, I’ve found Facebook interesting on so many levels. What I’m enjoying is the indisputable fact that Facebook is the de facto social networking site. I’m pleased, particularly because MySpace is the giant <blink> tag of social media (and the schadenfreude of Murdoch paying $530 million for it.) The ads on Facebook are even useful. I discovered an album I’d never heard of (and is totally incredible.) Most importantly, I’ve been able to reconnect with so many old friends on Facebook. People I haven’t seen or heard from in 18 years. That is remarkable. Despite the fact that I’ve been running a blog (or at least some form of web presence) since at least 2000, very few of these people turning up on Facebook have crossed my digital path in all this time. Which leads me to my next point.
- I see you Google, Yahoo, MSN, miscellaneous and sundry robots and crawlers of my website. Since you make up more than 90% of traffic to chrisash.com, this post is not directed at you. Instead I wish to address the other, ahem, 3 readers of this site. There are perhaps more of you than that. By and large, I maintain this site for myself. I have long-standing rambling issues, and the things I write about here are at least filtered by the exclusion of material from my journal. Nevertheless, I try to write nominally-interesting things. Hopefully humorous. Maybe informational. Possibly insightful. Whether I achieve whatever goals I’ve set for myself is one thing, but it is defeating when the majority of my non-robot traffic is arriving via a set of search terms that are totally unrelated to a post I made almost 5 YEARS ago. Furthermore, the one-hand-clapping nature of the dialogue around here is a bit disconcerting.
So, I’m at a bit of an impasse. I’m not at all convinced that I’m writing anything that anyone is interested in reading, nor can I imagine what people would like to read. I’m not a half-naked, tattooed bisexual girl with a webcam. I’m not… anything really. I have a lot of opinions. I could rant a lot (but I’ve always felt that made me sound angrier than I truly am.) I could write sans filter, which I’ve threatened to do in the past. Or I could just make shit up. That might be the best solution, actually. It might have the interesting side effect of scaring off my stalkers. Or encouraging them.
I’m interested in your opinion. Not that you’ll leave it, lurker that you are. Seriously, what are you afraid of? Is the comment system broken or something? There is only one person who I don’t care to hear from, and as far as I can tell, it ain’t you.
