Facebook

So I realize I am really late in the game here, but I finally joined Facebook. I have had a number of invitations to join over the last few years, and the lure of getting work from joining finally made me do it. (Someone looking for photogs on Facebook to bid a job. I got the job... and a good paying one at that.)

Facebook is like some entire other life that obviously I have not been living. As comfortable as I am on computers, using IM, Skype, etc., I guess it is sort of weird that I would be so slow in just jumping in... but I think I've proven that some of my concerns have some validity.

One of the reasons I held off on most of these social networking sites is that I have quite a bit of face to face and telephonic social networking that I do already. In terms of communicating with the computer, there is email, and of course this blog (and anyone (all four of you) who have been looking at my entries here and/or the dates I made them knows how hard of a time I have keeping this up on any sort of a regular basis) not to mention AIM and Skype... plenty of ways to communicate.

Facebook has allowed me to reconnect with a few people who I have lost touch with and I truly am happy to have made contact with them again, but then there are those folks who I am happy to have as "friends" but who keep flinging groundhogs and things at me for no apparent reason, other than to be cute.

I certainly don't mind cute, or off the wall, but I don't like feeling forced to act. Now you chucked a mongoose at me... why do I have to pitch one to five other people? The fact that Facebook says so? No.

Plus, if I single out five other friends that I want to annoy with a hurled small mammal, and any of those five ask me why I did it... I'm not sure what my answer would be. It reminds me a bit of elementary school where you like someone and because you are seven or eight, you lack the social skills to go up and make interesting conversation, so you do something annoying like throw a kickball at them. I guess the thinking then was any attention (including negative) is better than no attention.

So I'm not sure how the lobbing of a small imaginary furry animal is intended to benefit me... nor do I see how it is going to enhance the life of those around me who agreed to be my Facebook "friends."

Now there are some cute Facebook apps as well. There is the one for the photojournalist who gets an unpleasant assignment that made me laugh, but there is the insider catch there that you and I are both photographers, so we both are going to think that is funny having shared that experience of a bad assignment or two over the years.

For one thing, time is a precious commodity. I find that my time is stretched pretty thin. Work, family, church, teaching, and the friends I do hang out with already make my days pretty busy as it is. So how I add another commitment and make it fit. This is the challenge I am facing.

So look me up on Facebook... but please don't fling any small furry creatures at me.

Switching Menu Bar Items

I just found something cool on my MacBook Pro by accident. You can switch the order of the menu bar items on the right (clock, battery power, airport, etc) by turning them off and then turning them back on in the order you want in the System Preferences. The first thing you turn on is at the far right, the second is just to the left, the third is to the left of that, and so on.

This becomes even more helpful if you have your menu bar littered with stuff they way that I do.

I love iStat Menus which tells me all sorts of stuff about my computer while I am using it like the internal temperature, how much memory is being used, and what processes my computer is working on and how much data is being uploaded and downloaded.

By turning them all off and then turning them on in the order you want, you can customize your menu bar... and I figured this out by accident.