respublica

Why Facebook?

What made the powers that be at Facebook decide to change how things work?  A very annoying weekend trying to figure out what was going on.  It appeared as though almost no one was posting, an impossibility.

Here's a simple solution one of my Facebook friends found to get the entire feed instead of a strange outdated, abbreviated version: 

Go to the menu list on the top left of the screen and click on MORE.  Then click and drag status updates to the top of that list, put it above 'news feed'.  Click it so it turns blue and that becomes the default and things work as before. 

My Note:  However, this process has no place for you to post an update on what you're doing, so, it's back to the drawing board and going with the newsfeed/live feed.

Another of my friends, one of our seminarians, found this explanation on the help page for what Facebook was doing:

"News Feed aggregates the most interesting content that your friends are posting, while Live Feed shows you all the actions your friends are making in real-time. Facebook determines what's 'interesting' based on an algorithm which considers: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update)."

Test

Blogging sample from the itouch.

Silencing dissent

There's an app for that.

Via Scott Ott

The 18 million dollar website

18 million dollars of stimulus money has been allocated for the redesign of the Recovery.gov website.

This is incomprehensible and incompetent.  No wonder the first stimulus isn't working.

A new reading toy

For my birthday which isn't for a couple of months yet, my sister and my mom sent me a Kindle reader.

Just when I thought I'd grown blase about there being anymore surprises in technology, along comes something which just blew me away. 

I love this Kindle.  Reading is easy, it's thin and light and does a whole lot more than just enable you to read a book.  And, speaking of books, it takes about a second for any book ordered to end up in the Kindle and the price is much less than buying a hardback copy. 

We decided to also subscribe to the Washington Post-9.99 a month compared to the really high price we pay to have the New York Times delivered each morning.  We wake up in the morning and the daily Post is already in the Kindle.

The home page

And the book I've started reading.  The Kindle automatically returns to where you've left off when you come back to it.  You can make notes and copy a quote or a paragraph which then goes in a note file on the home page. 

Very amazing.

CNNFail

One of the most widespread conversations on the web over the weekend came from Twitter as millions of people flocked to CNNFail to protest and express their frustration over CNN's lack of coverage of the election protests going on in Iran.

One Saturday as people in Iran marched in the streets over what they believe was a fraudulent presidential election result, CNN news was largely absent.   News from Iran was coming in large part from Twitter, ironically.  Ironically because the CNN news people constantly push their Twitter pages for up to date news.  On its American Morning program today, CNN called Twitter "annoying."  After all the Twittering CNN pushes, this is just laughable. 

The Daily show did a great riff on the cable news channels last Monday.  Stewart hit CNN on their Twitter obsession at about 7:35 on the time bar below the screen.  Just move it to the right to watch the CNN Tweet/Twitter thing, if you have time watch the whole bit which hits Fox and MSNBC as well. 

For those who love to hate Fox News, they did cover the protests on Saturday while MSNBC continued their practice of taking the weekend off in favor of an endless loop of true crime stories.

Oh No, Ono

Why would anyone be following Yoko Ono on Twitter?

So they can read stuff like this?

"When you say 'I love you', you are not just saying it to that person.  You are saying 'I love you' to yourself, the planet & the universe."

Uploading election returns

One thing is certain after yesterday's local elections.  Madison County is far ahead of other area counties when it comes to timely publication of election returns. 

Madison's website uploaded returns as each precinct reported and everything was complete by 9:30 or earlier.  Not so with St. Clair and St. Louis County.  St. Clair's website was incomprehensibly stupifying and had nothing in the way of actual vote tallies.  The only thing to be found was a link to which precincts had been counted.  No numbers, just the information that a precinct had been reported.  And, to make things worse, that rather useless information was in pdf form.  No links no nothing.

St. Louis County is very slow and their results page is endlessly long forcing you to scroll and scroll until you come to the city you're interested in.  To make matters worse, the county chose a faint, grayish type on white background which is hard to read.

With Madison County, you have a couple of steps to find what you're looking for but after that everything is right there in very readable print.  For example.  Type in Collinsville and it brings you to all of that city's races.  Click on any candidate's name on that page and you find the totals for everyone in that race.

Madison County did this in 'real time'.  It's too bad these other counties don't have a sit down meeting with Mark Von Nida and try to emulate his election return practice in their own offices.

Get those updates

Tomorrow is April 1st, the day Conficker, a malicious internet worm is thought to be ready to strike Microsoft computers worldwide.  Apple seems to be immune to these threats.

If you're running Microsoft, go to the Windows Update link in your program file and get things updated.  The same with your virus protection.  Make sure your virus protection is running, Conficker may try and disable it.

It could be the worm wipes out files and monitor keyboard strokes to get private financial information and passwords. 

Or, as some believe, it could just try to get you to buy fake software and other products.

No one can say for sure what will happen, but better safe than sorry.