Sunday, May 16th, 2010 @ 8:03pm
Ever since Facebook’s introduction back in 2004, I have always been wary of freely giving my personal information to a 3rd party website. Thankfully, Facebook proved to be a useful tool for communication and was limited to college students with a e-mail address of a registered school.
Six years later, things have changed. Information that I could originally fine tune is now made public by default with no options to make it private other than to remove the information. The tool I found useful for communication has become more cumbersome and frustrating as my personal data is made open and shared freely with other 3rd parties.
I already rarely use Facebook, so I’ve long thought of deleting my Facebook account. However, I dislike the thought of having a disconnect with too many people if I need to be reached. It may soon come to a point where “enough is enough” as I get tired of removing information that I feel should remain under my control.
For those of you who do read this through Facebook, my blog is my main outing to the internet and should I find the need to eventually delete my Facebook account it will be my main point of contact outside of email and phone. Future activity will also be available on Twitter and Flickr as I deem necessary. Let this serve as a warning should you no longer find me on Facebook in future.
Thursday, December 10th, 2009 @ 8:40pm
It’s been a while since I’ve had a reflective post, and I’ve had a lot on my mind recently. So here goes…
A while back I heard an interview with Michael Caine where he was asked, “…do you have any regrets in life?” in which his reply was, “I only regret not having done something.” He goes on further to say, “…if you did not do it and it was something great, that regret would stay with you for the rest of your life. Regrets about things you did do never stay with you.”
Regrets about things you did do may not have the expected outcome you are looking for, but at least you can’t say you didn’t try. I’ve been trying to apply this philosophy more recently since I want to be able to say I have very few regrets for things not done. For the things you did try, you may regret doing it if the outcome did not result in your expectations but at least you can continuing in knowing that you tried.
I feel sad to say that even at 25, I feel like I have regrets for not having done things. I look back and see missed opportunities and think, “What if…?” What would have been the outcome had I followed that path? Would I have been happier? Could something great have happened? It’s painful not knowing if I’ll ever find out the answers to those questions, or if there’s any chance at rekindling those opportunities.
That’s not to say I’m not trying to learn from those regrets and move forward. It’s difficult to try and adjust your life to a new philosophy especially when it pushes the limits of your comfort zone. But even in the midst of my failures and regrets I have to move forward realizing the potential of having no regrets. If I make it to be old and gray, I want to be able to look back on my life and say, “I have accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish and left no stones unturned.” I want to do the best I possibly can with the opportunities that are presented to me and be satisfied with the outcome, no matter how horrible it may be.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and life changing philosophies take time as well. I’m taking it one day at a time and trying to learn from my mistakes. I think that’s the best I can do.
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 @ 10:50am
It’s amazing how much stuff you can accumulate in so little time, yet you only really find out how much junk you’ve accumulated when you move from one place to another. Things have been a little slow here since I’ve been trying to get stuff moved in the past couple of weeks, but I’m glad to say that everything (except for bills) is finally complete out of the other place. I’m still in boxes at the new house, so I’m trying to find where in the world I placed some of the most random items, but it is a process.
I’m not exactly sure what is going to happen in the upcoming months, and exactly how long I’m going to be here. Thanks to the generosity of Guy Walker (one of the roommates in the prior town home), I’m staying in his new house until I figure out what I am going to do. I would like to buy my own home, depending on how my finances turn out in the next couple of months, while the market is still down. It may be in Birmingham, or if I really want to take a leap, somewhere else where the job market is slightly better and geared towards what I want to do. The latter portion of that statement is difficult and will take some time to think over, since I would be giving up much of what I’ve established here and jumping into a vast plain of unknown. But unfortunately, it may be the leap I have to take if I want to get out of this rut that I feel like I’m in.
Friday, May 8th, 2009 @ 4:27pm
To think today that the internet is where it is today is just amazing and the amount of changes that have happened in the past 20, or even 10 years ago. 10 years ago, can you imagine when companies like Google and Amazon were in their infancy, and sites like Wikipedia, Youtube didn’t exist.
Even more interesting is how I got my start doing web development, and as I stumbled upon some of my older site designs I thought it would be interesting to showcase them, and how I got my start on the internet. It’s kind of scary for me to look back and think that I created that, but it’s here for your entertainment.
I don’t remember exactly how I first got started. I recall my dad popping in an old AOL disk cd when we had a 2400 baud modem, and attempting to access the Cartoon Network channel of AOL. It wasn’t until some time later when we eventually obtained a computer with a 28.8kbps that I got my real start sometime in 1996-1997.
My first website was a result of my infatuation with SimCity, so I wanted to share that interest with others. Through Earthlink, we had a member space available at home.earthlink.net/~charawilson/ (no longer exists) that was the jumpstart for that first site, Simcity 3000 News Central. From that spawned a sister project called SCN (SimCity Network), which was a portal for SimCity sites at the time.
Eventually I outgrew the member space that Earthlink provided, and through the generous offer of a friend moved to simcity.boulderd.com (internet archive). With the move I discovered NewsPro (which eventually became Coranto), a perl script that would allow me to update the site from anywhere and not have to edit html code any time I wanted the site to be updated. This is really where my interest starting growing, as I discovered how one could make a site dynamic, and do cool things with DHTML as well.
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 @ 1:44am
Today marks me having spent a quarter of a century on this planet earth. I guess 25 isn’t usually a very big birthday, but it feels like a very big milestone to me. My insurance is (supposedly) reduced, and I can now rent a car. Yay?
25 is a big milestone for me at least, since I had a lot of goals that I expected to accomplish before I was 25, but sadly some of my largest goals that I had hoped to achieve have fallen short, although no fault of my own.
“Life is short”, they say, but I think life is really what you make of it. Sure I haven’t accomplished two key goals I had in place, but I have very few regrets of these past 25 years. I heard a very good philosophy the other day that applies very well here, and it goes something like this: Live life without regrets. A regret is something that you wish you had done, but didn’t. To live life without regrets is to take the opportunity even if nothing comes of it. Don’t live life such that have a regrets of inaction.
While I didn’t realize that concept until recently, I have noticed that over the past few years I have been living by this philosophy. The regret of not doing something is much greater than being disappointed by the results of said action. The event may not have the expected outcome, but you will never have to experience the emptiness of not at least having tried. I don’t want to live through life wondering, “What if…?”
It’s difficult to say what I expect or want to accomplish in these next 25 years, God willing. Maybe I had unrealistic goals for these last 25, or maybe the time just isn’t right yet, but I don’t plan on giving up. There is something worth fighting for, and I am going to fight for it with all my heart. The battle isn’t over yet, and today just isn’t another day. It’s a milestone of my accomplishments and stubbornness to keep on going, even when the going gets tough.
Happy Birthday to me indeed.
Monday, April 20th, 2009 @ 11:20am
I’ve been sporting the 7000 x64 build of Windows 7 for several months now, and wanted to post some of my impressions on Microsoft’s latest push on their newest OS. Vista has been a marketing disaster for Microsoft. Even with service packs improving Vista’s stability and functionality, the stigma associated with Vista is still bad enough to have people stick with XP. I myself have been using XP for the past 8 years, with brief forays into Ubuntu for my primary OS. But Windows 7 is all about change, and Microsoft has something to prove. Will they succeed?
One of the most interesting changes from Vista and prior versions of Windows is the task bar. Instead of having the normal, “each window takes up space” portion, applications are reduced to large icons in a similar manner to Apple’s OSX dock in 7’s default setup. The task bar is surprisingly very interactive, showing indicators of the number of windows, or status information for items such as downloads or file transfers. It’s also easy to switch between windows, or close excess windows with the preview Window feature. Of course, if all of this seems daunting, the old task bar functionality can be restored.
The start menu is not surprisingly very similar to Vista’s, but with some additional functionality. “Jump Lists” are a new feature which allow you to quickly access commonly viewed sites or files from frequently accessed programs. This feature can be accessed through the new start menu, or by right clicking on the icon in the task bar.
Of course the previously mentioned items are all about eye candy. What about actual performance? With my desktop’s configuration, Windows 7 is very responsive and I’ve experienced little to no slowdown. Compared to when I beta tested Longhorn/Vista, Windows 7 is a very big improvement in being a much smaller consumer of memory resources. Additionally I’ve been able to run Steam games very smoothly with no major issues. Like Windows Vista, Windows 7 includes a scoring system from 1.0 to 7.9 that rates your systems performance. Given my machine’s specs, here is my score:
- Processor: 6.1
- Memory (RAM): 5.9
- Graphics: 7.9
- Gaming Graphics: 5.9
- Primary Hard Drive: 5.9
Overall score: 5.9
I could probably improve my performance with faster RAM, or setting up a RAID array, but overall the general performance of everything is very speedy and quick.
Overall, I’m very happy with Windows 7 and feel that it is a much needed improvement over Vista. There is a lot standing on Windows 7 at the moment, and Microsoft really needs to make a big push to show that people really need to upgrade from Windows XP. Given that I’m running a beta version and it has thus far proved to be very stable and reliable, good things should come once the final version is ready for release.
Monday, March 23rd, 2009 @ 11:18am
Ever since the dawn of social networks, I have always been hesitant to join the fray. When Facebook first came about, I resisted for as long as possible to join in. Eventually I saw some value in Facebook, and finally created an account. A similar situation occurred with Twitter, but I was able to some value in using Twitter and hesitantly tagged along.
Social networking does have some value and purpose, but one of the things that concerns me greatly is how easily information is released, and the questionable privacy loss that occurs when information is placed in the social network’s hand. It begs the question, “How safe is my information?” One of the key reasons why I host my own blog is because I feel it is very important that I hold the key to my information and decide how and when information is released. When I allow my information to be handled by someone else, I lose that privilege and stand a great risk to my privacy. Even still while I control the information on this blog, I am still very cautious in what personal information I post since the information is available freely to anyone.
This is why I try to limit the amount of information that is available on social networking, and I highly recommend others to do the same. I feel some sense of humanity is lost since so much information is available so freely and released with no regards of the consequences. I must admit, I do not have anything to hide but rather feel that certain freedoms of an individual are being violated or forgotten in this age of freely available information.
I don’t have anything against social networks outside of that, and I find both Facebook and Twitter to be great tools for communication and keeping in contact with people. My word of caution is just be careful in the information is released, because they’re no guarantee that the information will remain safe.
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 @ 10:54am
I have a confession to make. I’ve fallen in love with the mid-west. There’s something about the vast open country that is so appealing to me. Sure, the southeast has its perks but is nothing compared to places like Colorado, Wyoming, and Washington.
But this brings me to something else that I’ve considered for the past month or so. Considering how dead the market here in Birmingham is for what I want to do, I have even more incentive to considering moving to another part of the country to help improve my opportunities. Aside from my church and family, there really isn’t much incentive for me to stay in Birmingham any longer and maybe a change in environment is really what I need to help push things along in my life.
For many years, I’ve had a set of goals that I wanted to reach by the time I was 25. That time is quickly approaching and I’m hardly any closer to those goals than I was 5 years ago. I’m clearly at a stalemate where I am at right now, and unless something new happens here in the next couple of months I am going to seriously start considering a new location. I still have plenty of time to come to a final decision, as my lease does not end until mid-August.
There’s still a lot of time for things to happen here, but I’m tired of sitting around twiddling my thumbs waiting for some magical event to happen.
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 @ 10:08am
Ever since the iPhone was initially released, I have had my eye on the newest Apple toy. I initially thought that a plan would be too expensive, but found out that since I was already on my parent’s family plan, it would be just as simple as buying the phone and adding the data. Now one week in with my new phone, I wanted to post my thoughts.
One of the nicest things about the iPhone is of course its OS/software. The standard apps included with the phone are of course great, but the App Store is where this phone really shines. There are literally thousands of free and paid apps in the store covering nearly anything that you can imagine. Of course, having internet on the go is quite incredible as well, since I can now check my email or look up the latest movie times. It’s going to be hard to imagine not having this convenience as it was with my old phone. In addition to replacing my phone, I had been planing on replacing my iPod at some point anyway, considering that its battery life was waning.
Needless to say, there are a couple of things there are slightly annoying about the phone. Without some sort of film or protective case over the screen, this thing picks up fingerprints and dirt like you wouldn’t believe it. I also noticed that if you have two events on the same day at the same time, you only receive notifications for the first event.
With that all said, I must admit that I am very happy with my purchase and considering the small amount that I’m paying for it, the plan is well worth it.
Thursday, February 5th, 2009 @ 12:14am
My 2 year contract with AT&T finally ran out last month, and I’ve been looking to upgrade my old Sony Ericsson phone as seen on the left. It’s been a decent phone, but has unfortunately had the screen go out several times during the two year period that I’ve owned it.
But I must admit, I really want an iPhone. I’d love to have an iPhone. But the plans alone are at minimum $70/month. I’m not sure if I can use my existing plan and just add data plus the phone, but it is something I need to look into. In addition to having internet on the go, gps capabilities, and the app store, I’ve needed to replace my iPod for quite some time. I could easily kill two birds with one stone; provided that I could get an affordable plan integrated into my existing setup without having to split the line off from my family.
On another note, cell phone plans in general frustrate me for the value that is received in the end, especially with text messaging. AT&T at minimum offers 450 minutes for roughly $40. If I was not already with my parent’s family plan, I would’ve considered using a GoPhone plan, especially considering that I likely use less than 100 minutes a month; if that much. Text messaging infuriates me even more. If you are without a plan, AT&T charges 30 cents per text message received or sent! If you consider that AT&T limits characters to 160 per message, allow 96~ bytes for a header, you’re paying roughly $1,200 per megabyte, just for a simple text message! Even if you have their minimum text messaging plan ($5 for 200 messages), you’ll still be paying roughly $100 per megabyte of data. It certainly can’t cost them that much to send a simple 160 character text message!
I’m not saying that wireless companies shouldn’t be in it to make a profit, it just seems that as I look around at plans that they are more or less taking advantage of the situation and overpricing their services well beyond their value. I just wish something could be done about it, but at the rate plans keep increasing, I’m not sure it will…
