Last Wednesday, we had a particularly ominous looking sunset, with the horizon lit by the sun, yet dark stormy clouds overhead. The contrast was too much to bear, so I took a few too many photographs. I never quite got the exact shot that I wanted with the sun, already over the horizon, illuminating the underside of the clouds, but I did get some photos worth sharing. What can I say, I’m a fan of atmospheric phenomena!
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Yesterday morning I had a video conference with Bangkok, as international men of mystery like myself do on Friday mornings. It was actually with my friend Jacob, who is there for a month on business and had his workday cancelled because of the heavy flooding Thailand is currently experiencing, so he was bored in his hotel suite and sent me an iMessage. When I initiated a FaceTime call with him, I realized as soon a I pressed the button to call him that there was no way it would work.
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I’ve been a fan of The Onion for a long time, so I was quite distressed to see that they’ve put up a paywall. Now, when you view more than five articles in thirty days, it pops up a box asking you to pay $2.95/month or $29.95/year for full access. My personal philosophy is that content should be monetized by advertisements and the minority of people that choose to use technology to block those ads just have to be accepted as a loss. With a little HTML investigation, I figured out which elements need to be hidden from the page to disable their fairly weak attempt at securing their content behind a paywall. If you have the popular AdBlock plugin (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) installed, you need only add two rules to your AdBlock settings.
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There’s been a bit of an online privacy storm lately over the fact that Facebook doesn’t remove all the cookies from your browser when you log off. Every three or four months, there’s a big “OMG!! Facebook is EVIL and breaching my privacy!” wave that runs over the online community before everyone forgets it and keeps using the service.
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Facebook’s genius has been to make it “cool” to “tell all your friends” what movies and products and politics you like, which is exactly the data advertisers are dying to get their hands on.
A few months ago, I placed an ad on Facebook, mainly as an experiment to satisfy my curiosity about how their advertising system works. It was a few days before the British royal wedding, and I had done up a silly little photoshopped image of the bride and groom with their faces swapped, so I decided to see how much traffic I could drive to that page. I told Facebook I was willing to spend up to $10 on the ad over three days (I ended up pulling the plug, curiosity quenched, after spending only $8). Then I got to select who the ad was presented to…and that’s when things got creepy.
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A false dichotomy is a fallacious rhetorical device that provides an either/or choice in an attempt to force the listener to choose between the two options. The fallacy comes from the fact that the list of options are not really exhaustive, but limited in the speaker’s favor. The standard example is “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” A critical thinker will stop the speaker upon hearing a false dichotomy and say, “Wait a minute! Those aren’t the only two options!” But it works like a charm on a toddler.
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As my knowledge about social networking and online marketing has grown, I have attained a better grasp of how Facebook should be used, or at least how Facebook wants us to use it most effectively. The most important dichotomy to understand is that between Facebook accounts and Facebook pages. These have evolved over the years I’ve been using the most popular social networking site, and they will continue to evolve. Let’s look at the differences…
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This past weekend, my wife and I were in the living room watching our two year old daughter, Nora, play with her toys. Suddenly, Nora stood up and walked out of the room. She came back with my iPhone that she had fetched from my office. She handed me the phone. “Nora pictures! On TV,” she demanded with a gesture towards the television.
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Today I wanted to share two of my favorite brainteasers. It’s just by chance that they are so similar, both tricking you into thinking something is missing. Every few years, I forget the trick to the first one – because I’m smart like that – and it stumps me again. The latter puzzle is more of an optical illusion than anything else. Like all good optical illusions, understanding how it works doesn’t ruin your ability to see it.
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