26 September 2010

Still Getting AlertSF Texts

It's been a few years since I last worked in the city of San Francisco and even longer since I lived there. I still get the emails and text messages from the city government's safety alert system.

Some of the alerts are still interesting, such as the tsunami warnings. Others are more mundane, such as street closures and other traffic related ones.

When I was both living and working in the city, I tried to be prepared for emergencies, so the city alert system subscription made a lot of sense. Post 9/11 and around Katrina we all were subjected to disaster awareness. And 2010 has shaped up to be a year full of global disasters.

Now, I am thinking about unsubscribing, at least from the text alerts that go to my cell phone. I think I can still handle the email alerts.

I should look into whether there are similar alert systems for my current cities of residence and workplace.

23 September 2010

Facebook Outage Feels Weird

Gotta admit the current Facebook outage feels weird. I'm surprisingly stunned. Of course, no system is fool-proof, but for the website that serves literally hundreds of millions of people, by some measures more than Google, it's unexpected.

I don't have any critical business or even personal processes reliant on Facebook, so a brief outage is no biggie. I can still read and post status updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and my blog here.

Oh, I should mention I only connect with people on Facebook that I already know and want to connect to.

I've been spending quite a bit more time on Twitter the past few months anyways. Seems like Twitter is more appropriate to post status updates, where people only read who are truly inclined to read such updates, whereas on Facebook, people are somewhat forced to see updates only because they know someone, but perhaps don't care about so much.

21 September 2010

Simplified Blog Layout

I've decided the 3 column layout for my blog, with widgets scrolling my tweets and diggs alongside my blog posts, was just a jumbled eyesore.

Besides, the trend in blogs is to be visually minimalist. I'm not ready to strip away everything to leave the blog text bare, but I have finally dumped the many widgets that cluttered my site.

The AdSense vertical banners are gone. Even my blog tags list is gone.

Probably putting out more frequent blog posts is the next step to livening things up here.

Definitely not ready to hyper-specialize into yet another food blog or a mind numbing HR blog.