Some practical advice from Africa as reported by the BBC – when faced with slow broadband speeds and a large file to transfer… try a carrier pigeon!

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

The experiment is a bit contrived. If I want to transfer 4 TB worth of photos from one computer upstairs to a photo printing store I shouldn’t try to upload them online and should instead just take a portable hard drive to the store. The moral of the story is a good one: if you need to transfer a lot of data, instead of just firing up your FTP client, think about some alternative methods for transferring the data. We could all save ourselves some grief if we learned this lesson from Winston.

Tech that Matters – You (or your kids) could be arrested for texting in a text-free zone!!!? (snark)

Mind your manners, people – a 14-year-old girl was reportedly charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to cease texting in class and then hiding the phone down her pants.

The real question here: will they forcibly collect her DNA for this misdemeanor?

I blogged earlier about our tendency, as humans, to reveal more than we ought in on-line communication through portals like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Yet, these are but a few of the ways in which we often fail to safeguard the rights to privacy that we defend and claim to cherish. A NY Times article says that researchers refer to this as the “privacy paradox”.

normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information.

Today, Google announced a new service called Google Latitude – a new service for mobile devices and “iGoogle” that allows users to views the location of their friends and loved ones (who have opted to share the information). It’s a pretty cool idea – basically you (the user) can opt to other specified users to see your geographic location and vice-versa. Purportedly, this information can be adjusted per “friend” to show the best approximation of your location, a city-level view, hide your location entirely or even to provide intentional false information. “No honey, I’m not out boozing it up with the guys… I’m… at work… <typetypetype> … check Latitude.”

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Too much Facebook makes all teenage girls depressed.

Chris Matyszczyk wrote a CNET article, disagreeing with a study done by Stony Brook University, which claims that:

excessive co-rumination–perhaps you would refer to it as “chatting with your friends about your problems”–by text, e-mail and on social-networking sites leaves impressionable teenage girls more prone to anxiety and depression.

He claims that if it wasn’t Facebook it would be “bathroom gossip”, text messages, phone calls, slumber parties… you get the picture. Having never been a teenage girl myself, I can’t really attest to this (hopefully Chris cannot either?), but it seems to me that the persistent and “open” nature of Facebook goes beyond text messaging and slumber parties and is asking for trouble. Not just for teenage girls or even the female gender – I think it can be a problem for anyone.

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wow.

It’s awesome to say that I’ve been married for three years. It truly is one of the few things in life that I can say was nothing like I expected but everything I hoped all at the same time.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that everyone who every told me anything about the first, second, or third year was totally wrong. LOL.

- “Oooh… honeymoon phase is so great” (meh… yeah, it is … but it’s not like perma-bliss)

- “Watch out for the second year, that’s when reality sets in” (reality set in way before that… the reality of marriage is great)

- “Third year is the most dangerous time… dundunDUN!” (honeymoon phase resurgence?)

Also – the whole bit of advice to just say “That sounds like a great idea, honey”… wow. How can so many people be so wrong? Eh?

/rant

I typically enjoy somewhere between one and five Chrismas Songs (not carols, because I feel that word denotes the lame-osity of walking around and singing) a day from January to October. This is really just to hold me over until post-Halloween when I bring it out in full force.

It starts today with Tchaikovsky – The Nutcracker, Act I Scene 2 (March) … I admit – there has already been some serious rocking out.

Perhaps it’s just the memory of being young, on vacation from school, flipping through the Sears “Wish Book” catalog circling all of the things that I thought I wanted. My dad and sisters dancing around the living room, or staring out the window praying for snow to fall before the bus came the following morning. Maybe I’m just a sap who likes Christmas music.

Tomorrow will likely bring out the Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby… mix in a little Transiberian Orchestra for extreme air-guitar action – oh man… Christmas Guitar Hero anyone?!?! – , a little jazz, some no-name “Christmas Chill” music and you’ve got yourself some good “Holiday Season” listening. (Sorry Gwen)

and then there’s the egg nog… oh man

I couldn’t resist this quote:

“Praise it like an enema; it cleans you out.” -Bob Jones, live from Lakeland, FL

You: “Hey, thanks for picking me up at the airport.”

Me: “No problem. It’s the least I could do.”

Let’s assume that you’re “You” and I’m “Me” (a stretch… I know) – don’t you just want to slug “Me” at this point? Heck yes, you do. Why is that an acceptable response for “Me”? Why would you ever want to tell someone that whatever favor you’re doing is really just the least that you could do for them? That in essence you had to do them the favor, because it was the absolute minimum for maintaining whatever sort of relationship you have. Like “You” are supposed to somehow feel good about that? Is it a humility thing? Is it that really the “favor” is a big inconvenience for “Me”, but “I” am unable to articulate it?

Why isn’t it socially unacceptable for the conversation to go like this:

You: “Hey, thanks for picking me up at the airport.”

Me: “You’re welcome. It was a big deal, but you’re worth it to me.”

??

Note: this rant has no implications to any persons real or imagined.