Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I’ve been walking a lot this spring, trying to get into shape. It’s a real battle, but I am making progress. I don’t have an accurate scale, but I’m estimating I’ve lost 15 pounds already.

I’ve been walking a route along the canal as often as I can and expanding it as I feel up to it. At first, I experienced so much pain in my legs, that I was limited as to how far I could go. It was literally a trip from park bench to park bench. But I’ve persevered and gradually, the pain has lessened to the point I am now walking a route in excess of 2.5 miles without stopping or feeling pain. I’ve also gotten to the point where I want to do it daily. In fact, I feel weird if I don’t. That’s a good thing and something I used to experience when I was cycling regularly. Continue Reading…

Today I got three emails from Facebook. One told me that my password was changed and that, if I had not done it myself, I might have been a victim of a phishing attack.

The second one told me my account had been deactivated and that if I changed my mind and wanted to reconsider, all I needed to do was log back in. Too bad I changed that password…

The third one, was titled Facebook Service sent you a message on Facebook… and came from “Facebook Team.” Wow! Were they going to beg me to come back. Were they asking what they could do to make me stay? No.

This is what it said:

To read this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=156102208989&mid=6f888e491cd35db616b1089c9fe2d4da&n_m=facebook notify

Okay, so it wasn’t a personal message. Maybe it was something they wanted everyone who was quitting to see. Maybe about the changes they are making to correct the issues people have been complaining about. I had my hopes up.

Nope. It was a Viagra Ad. Canadian Pharmacy spam. Just one last shot to tell me I had made the right decision…

Incidentally, all the while I was a member in good standing with FB, I don’t ever remember getting a message like this that portrayed itself to be an important message from the “Facebook Team.” Guess I know what the “Team” thinks of me now…

Well, I did it. I committed “Facebook Suicide.” That’s the term for deleting your profile in the social network as if you no longer exist.

Of course, as soon as I was done, they announced sweeping revisions of their privacy policy and a simplification of the user controls that had become so complex that most people gave up and just didn’t deal with them.

I wasn’t terribly worried about my privacy. I assumed that pretty much everything I put in my profile or said online was visible to everyone. I mean, it may be only your “friends” who are supposed to see what you write, but if someone is determined, anything is available.

You can still (always) find me online. I have Twitter, MySpace, Google Buzz, AIM and other accounts. And of course, this blog. For all of my stuff, just Google me, my profile is there.

Continue Reading…

I’ve been playing around with Linux for probably close to 15 years and am still far from comfortable using it. I keep hold tightly to my security blanket of Windows.

The first time I tried to put Linux on a computer, I bought a set of disks, CD’s in fact and tried to put it on a spare computer I had. It was a version of Slackware Linux and featured the latest installer to automate the job. That meant feeding it disc after disc and watching as screen after screen of text scrolled by, periodically stopping to prompt you for some arcane information that I usually had no idea how to answer. I gave my best guesses and it worked, sort of. I got it to run and create a root account. I even had a graphical interface (X-windows) running on it and it recognized the mouse. But I could never get the GUI to match the screen size, no matter what I did. Continue Reading…