Frank About Computers

There is a small group of people who actually give you something for free. The WordPress template or plugin author who expects nothing — no link back to their site nor even their name in the footer — is truly an altruist. If I have to give you my email address, it’s not free. Free means nothing in return. When I honor a request to keep a link or other stuff, it’s out of gratitude. If one is forced to show gratitude, then it’s not gratitude.

A couple of years ago, I was being phone interviewed by a company. During one of the five calls, I was asked what I thought of MySpace. It’s ugly. It’s only good — maybe — if you’re looking for a date or you’re a teenager promoting your band and you want a date. How hard was it to be right that it wouldn’t last long. People would tire of it.

Look back on the webcam. The novelty of watching someone else quickly wore-off. There was only one site that succeeded at retaining an audience, Jennycam — which disappeared when she graduated college. And for as much as I like Skype, how big is it? I first used it to interview with an agency. You’d imagine it would be a great way to connect with others.*

Social networks are wasting your time. How many months are you going to spend cell phoning your 140-characters to your Twitter account? Why do you think the things you do are of interest to anyone else? Seriously, I’m busy all day long but I see even my friends yawn when I tell them about it. So, I tried Twitter. Know how to cancel a Twitter account? I don’t.

* I think it’s not as popular as it might be because setting-up a webcam and dealing with Windows’ obnoxious sound configuration gets in the way. A computers isare enough work as it is.

The computer being used to write this has 3 GB of memory, and it runs at about 3 GH. So why does this thing come to a grinding halt whenever a disk is inserted into it?