Random Synapses

So, I’ve been fiddling with digital photography for a few years. I’m having a great time with it and love the few memorable shots that I produced.

It’s about time I dedicated this hobby its own section on my blog. And, to get started, every day in the next week you will find here a series of opinions to give beginners some oversight to dSLR photography.

I originally posted these tips on a discussion forum answering exactly the newbie’s question, “which dSLR should I buy?” I broken them down in a logical sequence and made some additions.

Enjoy — catch you again in a few hours!

The first e-mail I have sent was sometimes in 1994, so I’ve been very much alive and active online for a whopping 13 years. I’ve got a fleet of e-mail addresses, a long list of forum accounts, and many logins for various online services. 9 years ago I was launching my own tentative of a site, on Tripod. Remember Tripod, Hotbot, Lycos, Netscape and all those buzzwords back then? Gosh I’m old.

One would think it had to happen sooner. Having an account hacked into, I mean. Nope. I think I defy statistics. This must be some sort of a record, to be so prolific online and only have the first intrusion today. And it wasn’t even something important — it was my 10 year old eBay account, which only saw around a dozen transactions over the years. How pathetic is that? Not even my Yahoo! account.

So here I am, talking with eBay customer support about unlocking my account, and unsure whether I should worry or laugh. I have no idea how it happened, since those principles that kept me safe so far have not been crossed. I’m thinking of an exploit on eBay’s site used to spam sellers with ads through the “Ask seller a question” option. This would make more sense than breaking my random consonnants and digits password, always changed less than a month ago. I mean, you’d probably screw up the login even if I spelled out the password to you, twice.

For the peace of mind, I just took a tour on my major accounts and gave them fresh, random passwords. The eBay account lock-out has been addressed within 3 hours. Now I think I’ll celebrate this glitch in a perfect score, the reminder that even with the best protective measures in place, mistakes do happen. It’s only natural, and it had to happen. Issue contained, damage insignificant, moving on.

Have you been hacked? How did you deal with it?

Some time ago I started this blog mostly to have my own corner on the Internet where I could unrestrictedly publish whatever was on my mind for whoever may ever find it useful. Part of this was acknowledging that I’ve killed the narcissistic side many years ago and I simply loathe the idea of spilling my beans every half an hour on a public diary. I could just not go with “me me me me me me” all day long, as if I was some sort of superstar of the world searching for my spotlight. Obviously, I didn’t make a splash into the blogosphere either; I skim through some blogs of interest once every few weeks, rarely comment and almost never link back.

Not only does it make me an oddity among bloggers, but also reveals that social networking is definitely not one of my finest traits.

This stood out even more clearly when I joined LinkedIn and Facebook a couple of weeks back. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with those accounts, no interest in updating my status every 20 minutes on Facebook and definitely not going to spend my time searching for everybody I know to add them there.

I basically ditched LinkedIn a few hours after signing up. I’m still tolerating Facebook for the single reason that I can scratch the surface on a bit more personal level with some people in the Company. They interest me, and if I want to work better with them then I should start knowing better the person behind the professional.

So here I am, hating every word of a post that goes on and on about me, writing something that will probably not be read, and wondering if I will ever understand what’s so hot about being on hi5, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo! 360 and so on.

Stripping away all the personal issues above, the bare question is revealed: if social networking does not appeal to everybody, how could one still benefit from it in other ways than the obvious?

[edit] Lewis Green at Marketing Profs Daily Fix hinted a week ago what’s better than virtual relationships. Check out the comments too — looks like I’m not alone!

WordPress 2.3 is out for a few days. As any responsible site administrator, I upgraded my older version right away, making sure plugins work with the new database structure.

But now I’m at a crossroad. In addition to the traditional predefined category structure for posts, the new version introduced support for tagging. This is an unstructured, flexible organization of the posts, so one can assign any number of keywords related to a post.

I never felt that my posts clearly fall in one category or another, and cross-referencing them is weird. So I’m thinking about switching to tags, even for older posts. But should I keep the categories too?

Hmm. What’s your take?

Giveaway Of The Day (GAOTD) is an initiative I highly appreciate. It allows people to use commercial software, free of charge. There’s a new application available every day, and I’m among the first to see what they’re offering next. The catch? You must download, activate and install the application within 24 hours after it was published. You can’t install it later, even if you had it activated before.

Everybody wins. Customers get fully-featured, commercial software, completely free of charge (of course, without updates or upgrades or other services) — this is like an unlimited trial. Software publishers get a new base of curious potential customers encouraged to try the applications without time or feature constraints. Many of these trial customers do buy the license later on.

Applications vary greatly, from screensavers to DVD burners, personal information managers and system maintenance tools. It’s a free, competitive market out there, and inevitably you will spot some commercial application that does something you could easily do manually or with the help of other free tools. For example, changing the icon of a folder is a feature built into Windows XP, yet some company thought they could sell an application to do the same thing. It’s the foundation principle of modern economy: let the market decide what’s worth paying for and what isn’t.

People visiting GAOTD can leave comments and rate the applications they download. Power users, like me, do know freely available tools that do the same thing or even outperform the commercially applications distributed free of charge on GAOTD. And these people communicate their opinions on GAOTD for others’ benefit. Why limit yourself to one solution, when you have the luxury of choosing from several alternatives, also free of charge, to find what’s best for you?

And now we’re getting to what’s bothering me. There are a bunch of people on GAOTD that cannot accept any negative comment or a proposed alternative. Somehow their freedom of choice and expression dissolve in the presence of the word “free.” If GAOTD offers something for free, they feel compelled to get it and be thankful for it. Goodbye personal preferences and judgment. These people become extremely aggressive, rude and intolerant, calling others “whiners,” “rich,” “spoiled” and such.

Someone told me once that the most powerful word on the Internet is “FREE.” It’s an attention grabber, something to attract the crowd’s interest and bring some potential customers. But I never imagined that some people are blinded by this word and become unable to think for themselves and decline something they don’t like, want or need.

The extreme case is now the usual screensaver offered on weekends by GAOTD. It’s been many years since the technical reason of having a screen saver ceased to exist. Personally, when I use the computer, it doesn’t have time for the screensaver to start. Moreover, I fail to understand the people who get a computer just to stare at it waiting for an animated screensaver to run. But hey, it’s a free world and if they want to waste their lives staring at screensavers, so be it. Even more, if they want to pay for one. But so should they accept my opinion that most screensavers are utter crap. Commercial or not, free of charge or not, crap is still crap.

In conclusion, I’m now going to have my own giveaway. I’m confident it will be extremely appealing to some of GAOTD’s people who love anything free, just because it’s free. Here goes. Normally, I charge everyone $79.95 for kissing my butt. However, anyone who comments back and mentions the word “whiner” can kiss my butt for free. And don’t you dare telling me that other people’s butts can be kissed for free, you whiners!!!

Disclaimer: Not available in all regions. Limited to one kiss per household. Must be 18 or older. While supplies last. The provider of this offer reserves the right to decline any request. Further terms and conditions may apply, and these may change without prior notice. By kissing my butt, you agree to assume full responsibility over legal or sanitary consequences, and to exonerate me of any liability. This offer is not a subscription.