October 26, New York Times RSS feed. An item from the Lives column. Article is titled "Facebook in a Crowd."
The author of this piece is a Canadian writer. This Canadian writer uses Facebook, and has 700 friends. (at least they did at the time the article was written, in the summer. Just checked it's at 1014 now.)[Yes this guy has more friends on Facebook and I have posts on my website].
Facebook being what it is, I'm sure that the vast majority of the then 700 friends were not local to Toronto. I'd expect that most of them are the more normal tenuous connection or connection through a connection (friend of a friend-type). For whatever reason, the articles author decides to throw a Facebook event. So he invites his 700 Facebook friends to a bar for a get together.
One shows up, and it's not even a real friend. It's the friend of a friend. And that's it.
That's also my nightmare.
Only, I don't think that anyone at all would have shown up for the event.
For the record: I spend most weekdays sitting alone inside a medium-ish gray cube. None of the cubes around me are populated. I counted today. Between empty cubes and people working from home or other locations, I was the only person in 24 cubes (of which I sit near the middle) and 3 small and 3 large conference rooms. If I didn't get up out of my seat and found someone to talk to, I believe it is absolutely possible that I could go a whole day in the office and not even see another human being, not hold one face-to-face conversation.
Sometimes I wonder why I even go into the office. Obviously it's not because it's niceA to work around other people.
And my nightmare is, assuming that any of my 32 Facebook friends, 33 less Natalie, were actually local, and if I was the "throw a Facebook event" type, I'd expect that exactly 0 people other than the person having the event would show up.
And as I'm not really that big of a fan of drinking alone, I don't think this particular nightmare will ever come true. I don't see myself ever putting together a group activity. But if I did, I'd expect to be drinking alone. Even if all 700 of my friends (I only have 33 on Facebook) said yes.
I guess that's the price of not being interesting.
]]>
October 26, New York Times RSS feed. An item from the Lives column. Article is titled "Facebook in a Crowd."
The author of this piece is a Canadian writer. This Canadian writer uses Facebook, and has 700 friends. (at least they did at the time the article was written, in the summer. Just checked it's at 1014 now.)[Yes this guy has more friends on Facebook and I have posts on my website].
Facebook being what it is, I'm sure that the vast majority of the then 700 friends were not local to Toronto. I'd expect that most of them are the more normal tenuous connection or connection through a connection (friend of a friend-type). For whatever reason, the articles author decides to throw a Facebook event. So he invites his 700 Facebook friends to a bar for a get together.
One shows up, and it's not even a real friend. It's the friend of a friend. And that's it.
That's also my nightmare.
Only, I don't think that anyone at all would have shown up for the event.
For the record: I spend most weekdays sitting alone inside a medium-ish gray cube. None of the cubes around me are populated. I counted today. Between empty cubes and people working from home or other locations, I was the only person in 24 cubes (of which I sit near the middle) and 3 small and 3 large conference rooms. If I didn't get up out of my seat and found someone to talk to, I believe it is absolutely possible that I could go a whole day in the office and not even see another human being, not hold one face-to-face conversation.
Sometimes I wonder why I even go into the office. Obviously it's not because it's niceA to work around other people.
And my nightmare is, assuming that any of my 32 Facebook friends, 33 less Natalie, were actually local, and if I was the "throw a Facebook event" type, I'd expect that exactly 0 people other than the person having the event would show up.
And as I'm not really that big of a fan of drinking alone, I don't think this particular nightmare will ever come true. I don't see myself ever putting together a group activity. But if I did, I'd expect to be drinking alone. Even if all 700 of my friends (I only have 33 on Facebook) said yes.
I guess that's the price of not being interesting.
]]>
This is post 1000. An odometer moment has been reached for SysMango.com. A little analysis seems to be in order. There are exactly 2 people reading the site. And I think I'm one of them.
(Hi, Yvonne. Love you, and thanks for all the support).
The rest of you are looking for information on a traffic accident that happened about 2 hours north of here, or aren't actually people, but code running inside some search engine, screenscaper, some kind of blog plagiarism engine or just something that's following any of the number of links I spew due to twitter, utterli, Pownce or whatever else I'm casting links to. (Welcome to my site, please make yourself comfortable.)
And honestly, I'm not really surprised. I'm not really that interesting.
SysMango.com was first registered on 2003 March 31. It was mostly a reaction to Natalie's sister (Hey, Miriam) having registered http://churnbutterdesign.com/. I had been thinking about having a site of my own for a couple of years (who didn't when they first got on the Internet in the mid-90's). Miriam getting a site, well, that made me just do it.
So, the site has been up for 2050 days. And this is node 1000. That's an average of 0.49 nodes a day for the last 5.62 years.
That doesn't mean that I've posted 1000 meaningful things. Some of those nodes are administrative items needed to maintain the site. Some of them where created and then unpublished in my 2 year experimentation with the contributed modules for Drupal that used nodes to hold things. A few were actually written by someone else in the almost never used SysMango.com forum. Yes, I created forum about the time my brother, Brian, got rid of the forum on his site. At the time, I was starting to have a change of heart about the validity of forums and their potential use. Since then, I have realized that I really don't like them after all. I have little to no interest in maintaining them. I find the software less than useful and the whole idea of a forum to be ill advised.
That, and the fact that there really isn't a community of people here to put anything meaningful into them. There is still a forum here, but no one is using it. Least of all me.
So here I am; one thousand packages of meaningless, uninteresting information later. And honestly, I'm not sure why I keep doing it. Other than I like screaming meaningless uninteresting gibberish into the void every couple of days or weeks or even months at a time.
This site has never really gained anything of an identity of its own. I don't really want to be a single topic blog. While the idea to have multiple sites going, each about a single topic, is the way some people do things, I never really understood that. I barely have enough content generation going to justify this one site.
I guess the big problem really is that I can't stand the feeling of just reposting links to other content that has been talked about elsewhere to death. This is especially true when I don't think I have anything meaningful or interesting to add beyond the posting of "here's an interesting link." And while BoingBoing handles that really well and in an interesting way, I don't have the energy to do the concept justice. And as no one is reading this here, not really what I want to spend my time doing.
Looking at the clock, it just became SysMango.com day 2051.
I don't have anything more interesting to say other than I'm sorry it hasn't been more interesting.
There really isn't anything particularly interesting about having created 1000 nodes here on the site. But as people seem to attach special significance to these moments when a digit is added, I figured "why not?" and just posted all this.
So, please, everyone enjoy SysMango.com day 2051 (and any subsequent days till I post anything again). Comments appreciated.
]]>This is post 1000. An odometer moment has been reached for SysMango.com. A little analysis seems to be in order. There are exactly 2 people reading the site. And I think I'm one of them.
(Hi, Yvonne. Love you, and thanks for all the support).
The rest of you are looking for information on a traffic accident that happened about 2 hours north of here, or aren't actually people, but code running inside some search engine, screenscaper, some kind of blog plagiarism engine or just something that's following any of the number of links I spew due to twitter, utterli, Pownce or whatever else I'm casting links to. (Welcome to my site, please make yourself comfortable.)
And honestly, I'm not really surprised. I'm not really that interesting.
SysMango.com was first registered on 2003 March 31. It was mostly a reaction to Natalie's sister (Hey, Miriam) having registered http://churnbutterdesign.com/. I had been thinking about having a site of my own for a couple of years (who didn't when they first got on the Internet in the mid-90's). Miriam getting a site, well, that made me just do it.
So, the site has been up for 2050 days. And this is node 1000. That's an average of 0.49 nodes a day for the last 5.62 years.
That doesn't mean that I've posted 1000 meaningful things. Some of those nodes are administrative items needed to maintain the site. Some of them where created and then unpublished in my 2 year experimentation with the contributed modules for Drupal that used nodes to hold things. A few were actually written by someone else in the almost never used SysMango.com forum. Yes, I created forum about the time my brother, Brian, got rid of the forum on his site. At the time, I was starting to have a change of heart about the validity of forums and their potential use. Since then, I have realized that I really don't like them after all. I have little to no interest in maintaining them. I find the software less than useful and the whole idea of a forum to be ill advised.
That, and the fact that there really isn't a community of people here to put anything meaningful into them. There is still a forum here, but no one is using it. Least of all me.
So here I am; one thousand packages of meaningless, uninteresting information later. And honestly, I'm not sure why I keep doing it. Other than I like screaming meaningless uninteresting gibberish into the void every couple of days or weeks or even months at a time.
This site has never really gained anything of an identity of its own. I don't really want to be a single topic blog. While the idea to have multiple sites going, each about a single topic, is the way some people do things, I never really understood that. I barely have enough content generation going to justify this one site.
I guess the big problem really is that I can't stand the feeling of just reposting links to other content that has been talked about elsewhere to death. This is especially true when I don't think I have anything meaningful or interesting to add beyond the posting of "here's an interesting link." And while BoingBoing handles that really well and in an interesting way, I don't have the energy to do the concept justice. And as no one is reading this here, not really what I want to spend my time doing.
Looking at the clock, it just became SysMango.com day 2051.
I don't have anything more interesting to say other than I'm sorry it hasn't been more interesting.
There really isn't anything particularly interesting about having created 1000 nodes here on the site. But as people seem to attach special significance to these moments when a digit is added, I figured "why not?" and just posted all this.
So, please, everyone enjoy SysMango.com day 2051 (and any subsequent days till I post anything again). Comments appreciated.
]]>