Stop the Stream to Honor Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is dead.
The news makes my life pass before me. I stare at the screen where Facebook users continue their posts about Farmville rewards and I want to yell Stop! Stop all the game posts; Stop all the Tweets! Stop everything for one second and recognize the man for the way he changed the world. Can’t you pause for a second to pay tribute to the man whose contributions lead to the creation of all these live streams of posts.
He’s been a part of my life for 26 years and yet, I only met him once. As I think about his life, I can only smile and say Thank you. Thank you for sharing your dreams and making them ours.
Please observe a moment of silence at least to honor this great man. There was no one else like him and we’re all better because of him.
Funeral Blues
W. H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
The Best Things in Facebook Are Free (for six months, anyway)
“Abandon ship!”
“Hit the brakes!”
“I’d expand my farm before I’d pay that!”
Where do Lactose-Intolerant Kids Go to School?
As I listened to Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. tell politicians who don’t put workers back to work to go to hell, I thought to myself, well good for him. Its about time someone said what all of the out-of-work Americans were thinking. But, after listening to the commentators on CNN, I realized I may not have understood his message. Which got me to thinking about words. They are so easily misunderstood and misused. Dropping off my son, I saw the school’s marquee proclaim that intolerance of any kind is grounds for expulsion. So where to lactose intolerant kids go to school?
My son told me that many deaf people think in images. I’d never heard that. I have often thought about how I thought. The sequence of thought; the way my brain works compared to say “normal” thinkers. Would I be a completely different person if I thought in images? I think that I think in words. Am I naive? Am I simplistic? Do I over-think things?
Not to harp on the topic of politics, but during the 2008 elections, a big poll amongst my Facebook friends was the Political Compass quiz.
People were commenting on how surprised they were with their own personal results being either more right or more left than they’d thought. They also noted how close McCain and Obama actually were on the compass. Don’t trust that quiz? There’s also another over at Go To Quiz so you can compare the tests.
What I wonder is: are we actually understanding the meaning of the speaker’s words?
Part of the popularity of the internet is the ability to connect with like-minded people. We love putting in our two cents. The acronym “IMO” wouldn’t be a popular, easily recognized phrase if we didn’t care about the opinions of others and how they compare to our own. But, 2 cents is all we want. Mike Godwin pointed out, in the widely understood theorem ‘The Godwin Effect’: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 100 percent.” Meaning whenever the debate gets too long, the quality of the words deteriorates to mud slinging. Isn’t the fallacy of association in forums mirroring the way we interact with each other in general?
The problem, I think, is that people debate to sway their opponent over to their side, and the other person is doing the same. There is rarely any attempt to “hear” what the other person is saying. Ultimately, both sides are frustrated and it finally ends when someone throws in the towel by invoking the name of Hitler (i.e. The Godwin Effect).
Family therapists have been teaching couples how to affectively argue with each other by advising us not to make it personal. Argue your point but don’t hit below the belt with statements like, “well you’re too stupid to realize I’m right.”
In the end, I guess its not that we misunderstand, but we fail to listen.
NOTE: This is day No. 9 toward keeping my commitment to post once a day. Have you joined yet?
I’m not cutout to be a virtual superhero
It started over a year ago. A dear friend called me in a panic and the terror in her voice was apparent. “Please help me!” she said, her tone quivering with impending danger.
“Anything! What do you need?” I said trying to calm her down. I knew she was out of town and figured she was stranded somewhere. Uneasy about the tiny size of my bank account, I crossed my fingers that she didn’t need money.
Since this was a phone call, I wasn’t worried about it being some kind of hacker, who pretends to be a friend and says they’re stuck in England and needs thousands to get home. I’ve had those kind of text messages and emails and had the fortune to recognize it for what it was: a scam. No, I knew her voice and, besides, my cell showed that her phone number was correct. No, this wasn’t a scam, my friend was in serious trouble. My husband, who’d been making dinner, came out of the kitchen, hearing the concern in my voice, and put a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
“What is it?” his eyes said.
“I don’t know,” my eyes replied.
I waited with bated breath for my friend to explain her dilemma…
“My crops are about to wither and I can’t get internet access here!” she cried. I was relieved and somewhat bewildered. I bit my lip to keep from belting out a huge guffaw. We were Farmville neighbors so I knew what she meant. She gave me her Facebook password and I resolved her problem.
Over the past year, I’ve become a VirtualHero for some dozen or so friends who’ve had similar panic attacks. I’ve even received emails from one friend or another asking if I could tend their crops, or whatever, while they were on vacation.
Armed with superhuman strength, I’ve supplied my talents to feeding virtual fish, petting SuperPets, sending back gifts, completing quests–you name it–if its a game on Facebook, I’ve helped out.
Which brings me to the inevitable question: Why hasn’t some enterprising go-getter, started a business for this? If there’s a need, there’s always a business created to fill it. Right?
There is definitely a need. There are entire websites dedicated to Farmville addicts. Dr. Phil even did a TV show about it. Wired magazine posted about executives excusing themselves from a meeting because their crops were about to wither. We’ve all heard about these game addicts, some of us are addicts ourselves. Even if you don’t play the game, you’d have to be a hermit if you’ve never heard of it.
When Harold Camping proclaimed that the Rapture would occur on May 21st, enterprising atheists set up websites offering services to take care of your pets in case you weren’t around to do it. Don’t believe me? See Eternal-Earthbound-Pets or After the Rapture Pet Care. So, why isn’t there a business setup to help these panicked gamers?
It’s not as though my idea is very original. I mean, Farm Town already allows you to hire others to harvest for you, and gives you 25 percent more profit to boot. But, still, you actually have to BE on your farm to hire them.
This morning I spent a few hours Googling for Facebook game assistance businesses, but the closest I could find was automation software for Farmville.
“The key to getting everything you want in Farmville is not to play for outrageous amounts of hours but to maximize your profits by using automation software.”
Also with extra plugins to fertilize your neighbors crops and lots more. (Cost is $27) The software, however, is for windows users only so I couldn’t try it out without logging out of my Mac and firing up Bootcamp, a chore I really hate because Windows takes so long to load.
Another one is Bot for Farmville: Bot will plant and harvest crops, plow, harvest trees, help neighbors, harvest buildings and animals. You can also add more tasks by adding the plugins. It also is a PC-only software, but it says its free.
There are also websites offering ghost posting services for businesses and celebrities on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.
The need is definitely out there. I, however, would never think of charging my friends for these services. Nor, would I want to offer the services. I play Farmville too much any way. Lately, I sign on just to send friends gifts and even that’s too much.
With a little bit of programming knowledge, such a service shouldn’t take that much time. A programmer could even adapt existing Firefox or Greasemonkey plugins to handle a lot of the work. Some extensions are: Clean my Wall, Facebook Mass Accept, Boost (automatically poke anyone who pokes you), not to mention all the grabber bars for collecting prizes for all the different games.
I do have some tips for any programmer who wants to make a few bucks and come up with such a service.
Number 1: is don’t get your client’s account banned. Facebook’s security setup is based on the location a user signs in from. If Facebook sees a person signing in in San Francisco California, and then seconds later, signing in in Atlanta, Georgia, Facebook will sometimes put a hold on the account. Sometimes the hold can last for as long as two hours during which time a person’s crops have withered. Some Work arounds might be: to re-write your IP address to your customer’s IP. The second work around, is a bit more convoluted. Facebook will sometimes question that the person signed in is the true owner of the account, by making you identify a random photo in a random gallery of the person. In this case, you should know have a local copy of the person’s galleries.
Number 2: Know the games for the services you offer as well as the your client does. I’ve had the unfortunate event of having “killed” an animal someone paid real cash for because I wasn’t familiar enough with the game to know a certain sequence of events to keep the animal alive. Since I was this person’s friend, she was kind and said, “oh well,” and dropped it. But, people who pay you for your services won’t be so kind. You might have to pay back the person for their loss or put some kind of statement that you’re not responsible in those kind of circumstances.
I’m sure there are a lot of programmers who could start providing such a service. It would really be a relief for over-used “friends” like myself.
I’m really not cut out to be a Virtual Superhero.
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