Taking a Break from Facebook

I've decided to take a brief break from Facebook. Not really for any one reason. It just felt like the right thing to do for now.

Last weekend, I returned from a business trip to India, where I spent a work week with my colleagues in Hyderabad. It was my first visit to the subcontinent and I'm quite pleased with how the trip went. Most of my business objectives were met, the people there were welcoming and supportive, and logistically, I was fairly comfortable with the hotel, the flights there, the food, and so on.

I chose to use Facebook as my unofficial travelogue, making comments about my observations at the India office, and the surrounding community, to a relatively private set of friends, as opposed to here on my public blog or even on my Twitter profile. Getting a small handful of comments from friends was always reassuring, that my short, personal posts had some sort of audience. Other than daily calls with my family, Facebook was my own personal conduit to staying in touch with home.

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.

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.

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.

Twitter Recruiting Video

The folks at Twitter put together a pretty compelling, hip and unique recruiting video.

Mercifully, no talking heads spewing predictable platitudes, like this utterly boring and vapid example from Symantec. Also, no half-assed wanna-be music video, like this awkward example from Ernst & Young. Twitter's is well paced and tasteful.

One of my previous employers, Guidewire Software, produced some high quality recruiting videos (a project initiated before my arrival, my involvement was limited) that are worth viewing (one, two, three, and four). They were carefully crafted for a narrowly defined target audience: bright, wary, discerning software engineers.


The best recruiting videos I'm aware of are the ones from Facebook. Great production values, well targeted messaging, with plenty of authenticity.

How to Properly Cook Scrambled Eggs

Today's SFGate Food section included a link to CHOW's The Basics: How to Make Scrambled Eggs.

While I applaud the intent of this recipe to instruct people to make good scrambled eggs, I gotta say, as a scrambled eggs enthusiast, I have some issues with this recipe.

First, who cooks 6 eggs at a time? OK, I do, on occasion, but I don't know of anyone else who does, even when cooking for two.

Second, the setting aside a small portion of raw egg in a separate bowl means unnecessarily dirtying up a bowl, and the recipe calls for fully cooking that portion anyways, so, uh, what's the point?

Third, the larger portion of egg is poured into the pan (I agree with the medium-low heat setting) and is just left there to get stiff, overcooked, and chewy. Alton Brown correctly instructs the egg mixture to be immediately stirred around as it hits the pan, to keep whatever egg that is initially cooked by the heated pan surface from being overcooked.

Personally, I like my eggs very wet and runny, and that's easily achieved without having to pour in a second bowl of raw egg mixture (cold raw egg in my scrambled eggs are not my idea of a good time). Just plate the eggs, with its hot runny goodness, out of the pan, sooner than most people would with their scrambled eggs.

Refreshed Look and Feel

I just refreshed the look and feel of my blog site using Blogger's new Template Designer tool and one of the many great new background photos available.

For now, I'm trying out a 3 column layout to see how well it works. My intention is to give relatively equal space to my Twitter tweets, my Diggs, and my blog posts.

I am a bit concerned that it seems Digg has been steadily losing its appeal, even as they make some functional updates to their service. Facebook Like, Twitter, and Google Buzz are basically drowning out Digg.

I probably will change the background photo every once in a while, perhaps to reflect my mood.

Let me know what you think of the changed layout and design.

Human Stampede in Germany Kills 15

An ugly scene, this time, in Germany, at a gigantic techno music festival.

"The festival, which drew about 1.4 million people, was not immediately cancelled because authorities feared that could spark a second panic and more chaos at the crowded venue."

At least 15 dead inside a tunnel after mass panic broke out due to overcrowding.

The New York Times carries the Reuters story, with photos and video. Terrible.

This sort of thing seems to happen once a year or so somewhere in the world. No matter how advanced our technology, this danger will persist whenever large, dense crowds of people amass.

Obviously, the music festival organizers should have been better prepared to manage the crowd size and flow of people.

Haven't Watched TV For Months

It's a bit weird for me to admit that I haven't watched TV for months. As a kid, I watched tons of TV. As an adult, I curbed my watching to just some favorite shows. But lately, I've been going cold turkey without the boob tube.

Between work and parenting, these days I don't have much personal time available. Guess it's part of finally being a responsible adult. I try to catch up on sleep sometimes.

No TV has meant not seeing what many other people do see. Lately, that's meant not seeing any World Cup soccer games, not that I ever was interested in soccer. I totally missed the Lebron James announcement special, although I was plenty aware of it before and after from radio news while driving and news on the web.

Finally, A Power Drill

I'm approaching 40 and I finally got myself my first very own power drill. My wife will easily tell you that I'm not exactly a handyman. However, over the past few years, I've been assembling a pretty decent set of hand tools, even storing them in a rugged looking tool box, which it seems to me every responsible, grown man in America should have.

In the past, I've owned a power screwdriver, but one of my ex-roommates snagged it from me while moving out, which I didn't even notice until many months after the fact.

But a power drill was previously something that I never thought I'd need or really should have any business owning.  I guess that's what I still think of in terms of any sort of power saw.