Remove 5 Facebook Friends Challenge

September 30, 2010January 13, 2011Digital Citizen 8 Comments

Nov 6 2010 update:
This article just became much more relevant after Facebook introduced the Facebook Friendship Page feature on Oct 29, 2010.

Many, if not most, Facebook users have more friends on their Facebook Friends list than are good for them. Having more Facebook Friends means more people are watching you. There more people to waste your time, even if just having to sift through their updates to find ones from people you care about. There are also more people who could use something on your profile against you in some way, even if it’s just gossip, possibly from misunderstandings or unintentionally. We’re not even talking about potential creeps and malicious people here, who you don’t know well but had casually added as Facebook friends over time.

On a different topic, there are all kinds of Facebook memes, or trends, going on all the time. Facebook tagging is big. Facebook notes get passed along. There was that 25 Things You Didn’t Know About Me thing that only helped making your ID easier to steal. Then there were the baby photos or retro photos trend that also helped in the case.

So how’s about putting the two together for something useful?

A challenge to remove 5 Facebook Friends and pass it on!

These would be “friends” in the loosest sense of the word, of course, not any real friends. I don’t think most people need any help to do this challenge if they want to take it up. That’s how frivolous I think the Facebook Friends thing has become for most Facebook users. However, if you need help or want to do a more serious purging, check out some of my criteria for identifying Facebook Friends you can remove without a lot of consequences.

I took up my own challenge, of course, and went way over 5.

Can you?

If you don’t take the challenge, maybe just ask yourself, can I remove 5 Facebook Friends from my list? It’ll give you an idea of the state of your Facebook Friends list to where it maybe should be.

If you can remove 5 Facebook Friends from that thought experiment, maybe you ought to reconsider, especially now that you know you can. It’s just some clicking and scrolling now. 🙂

Or try it Facebook tagging style! (obviously you can’t tag these friends’ profiles, but you can tag and type in their names)

Facebook friends dumped tagging meme

Earth Day Pledge Update #2 – My Farmers’ Market Experience

August 29, 2010April 21, 2011Digital Citizen Leave a comment

For Earth Day 2010, I made a pledge to eat better.

I then defined “better” with four specific goals.

This is an update on goal #1, which was to spend more money on groceries at the farmers’ markets than in the grocery and other stores. That’s without having to go to extremes of not eating what I want or paying unreasonable prices for similar products in the grocery stores.

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Can’t We Find a Better Term Than Facebook Whales?

August 17, 2010August 17, 2010Digital Citizen Leave a comment

The people at Facebook call Facebook users with over 1,000 friends Facebook “whales”.

For a hip company in a hip business like social media, that’s about as “un-urban” a term as I thought they could come up with for the urban dictionary of new slang.

“Sub-urban” would be the more appropriate term, as that’s like Latin for “below” or “less than” urban. But Latin’s too old and logical to be hip.

So can’t we come up with a better term?

Flake?

Fake?

Fimp or Frimp? (Friend and Pimp)

Falker? (Friend and Stalker)

Follector or Frollector? (Friend and Collector)

Fliend? (Flake and Friend)

Actually, I’d save fliend for people you add but you don’t really want to. You just add them to avoid awkwardness. An example might be a boss you don’t like but who may have a thing or suspicion for you. Or a partner of someone you know who wants to keep an eye on activity between his/her partner and anyone else who might be a “threat”… or who is just jealous of everyone else in their partner’s life. You get the idea.

Fliend. Yeah. I kind of like it! Someone you don’t particularly like sends you a Friend Request. You have to reluctantly accept it so you say Sure, I’ll be your FLIEND! 🙂

But I digress. Back to the original topic.

Maybe none of those are great, you know, and probably a little too judgmental for Facebook to put out there, but for the people outside of Facebook, can’t we come up with any better idea than Facebook whale?

Maybe there’s a term out there already? After all, the Urban Dictionary has terms like Facebookemon for all sorts of Facebook related activities, habits and people.

Can someone inform me or suggest a term?

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 6.4

Hey (fat) Girl Friend, Wanna Be My Bridesmaid (so I can look thin)?

July 14, 2010July 16, 2010Digital Citizen Leave a comment

Here’s definitely something to think about the next time you are at a wedding, or see someone’s wedding pictures!

On July 6, the Daily Telegraph in the UK ran a story about how one-third of engaged British women in a survey by Slim Fast admitted they would choose an overweight friend for a bridesmaid to make them look better (i.e. thinner) on their wedding day (and the photos from that day that would be cherished as long as the marriage lasts).

OH MY!!!

That was my first reaction. Insecurity and vanity have gone to new heights! While I’m sure this is nothing new after thinking about it, just the thought shocked me… though I’m not a woman so that would go far to explain why. I did know about women having bigger purses to make them look thinner, tight stuff to hold it in, curved lines to fool the eyes on actual size and shapes of their bodies, having an uglier friend be their “wingman” out on the town so they’d look more attractive (guys do the same thing though not me), etc. But this was way above and beyond that for me because this threw out true friendships for obesity!

OUCH!!!

That was my second reaction. If this ever really got out, every woman who will ever get asked, or not asked, to be a bridesmaid, is probably going to think about this reason as a possibility first. If she didn’t get asked, the reaction might be just a slight snark. If she did get asked, especially when she didn’t think she was among the bride’s top 3-5 friends, she might be outright insulted. Now, I know brides also take bridesmaids from her family or the groom’s family, too, to include them in the wedding party a little more. But hey, now there is a great excuse to eliminate some thin friends without telling them the truth about how insecure you were!

Just the thought you could have been included or excluded among the bridesmaids for your weight is just NASTY!!!

Now, this “one third” group is just those who admitted it! I wonder how many didn’t admit it???

And how many who would undoubtedly be in self-denial about it?

Come on. People are in denial about all sorts of ludicrous things. That’s why admitting you have a problem is truly the first step towards solving it… whether it’d be addiction or something light and simple.

Worse, what do you think those rates would be in America these days, where obesity is literally an epidemic?

Literally means statistically cause they’ve got far more than enough numbers to prove it!

Good Lord!

There were a few other eye opening details from this survey, like how brides diet before their wedding and such. However, they weren’t surprising to me. People, men and women, do all kinds of crap to their bodies that are far worse, and friendships were not at stake here.

There was also a result about how the women surveyed said buying a new outfit boosted their confidence. Hey, you think marketers don’t know this when they advertise to women? And don’t give me the “that’s BRITISH women” or “that doesn’t apply to me” stuff. If it didn’t, the woman is uncommon, if not rarer than that. Too bad the odds are she’s probably not nearly as uncommon as she thinks she is there. That uniqueness affliction is true for all humans as many psychology studies have shown. Also refer to note above on “denial”.

But I especially loved the 40% who said new shoes made them feel better about their appearance. Maybe so, but if that feeling better has anything to do with men looking at them, and a lot of it is, let me share the news the men aren’t likely looking at their feet if the men were checking them over! The eyes stop far above the feet!

That’s enough of all that for now, though. It’s plenty to chew on. But maybe you’d like to answer a couple of these questions knowing results from that SlimFast survey. This is not meant to be scientific or anything. Just throwing some thoughts out there in hopes the people who respond would be honest, and seeing what comes back.

If the Sim Fast survey were correct and you’ve had a chance to be in more than 3 bridesmaid parties in the past 5 years or so, statistics say you should probably answer “yes”.

If the Slim Fast survey were accurate, and you have 3 or more married female friends whose wedding you have attended, statistics say you would probably answer “yes”. Let’s see if the men’s opinion differ from the women’s below. Don’t tell your friends if you answered “yes”, though, cause you know they’ll ask you which friend/s prompted the answer. For women who like to gossip, and there are many who do, this could be “fun” (aka nasty) gossip!

If the Slim Fast survey were accurate, and you have 3 or more married female friends whose wedding you have attended, statistics say you would probably answer “yes”. Compare to the men’s results above. Don’t tell your friends if you answered “yes”, though, cause you know they’ll ask you which friend/s prompted the answer. For women who like to gossip, and there are many who do, this could be “fun” (aka nasty) gossip!

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 6.5

Star Trek 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpapers (TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Movies)

May 18, 2010July 25, 2011Digital Citizen 3 Comments

While making 1920×1080 Star Trek wallpapers for my new monitor, I also created 1920×1200 pixel wallpapers since they was close in size. Mind you, the different in proportions were a real pain to deal with in some cases to adapt the smaller wallpapers for the larger size, where the graphics I found started out 1920×1080 pixels in size.

There are over 100 wallpapers here so if you have trouble deciding which one to use, I hope you’ll come back to pick a different one every now and then.

These wallpapers are also good for some other monitor sizes, and the operating system on your computer should know how to scale them properly. There will be no distortion or warping of the images as the other sizes listed just below here are of the same proportion: