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Do you ever think about something and think you know the answer, and you do, but you can’t put your finger on it? Well I was like that for a moment. I was trying to define love. I could easily go to Google and enter define:love and get a wonderful display of web results but I wanted to see what I would come up with.
When you go out with someone, it is because you like them, right? Well how does like turn into love? Does the likeness meter hit its peak? Well it has to be it. When you like someone a lot you want to be around them, talk with them, get to know them. When you’re in love it would be a safe assumption that you would know a lot about someone thus you have done all prior activities in getting to know them and reached the maximum amount of likeness.
So all love is, is that you like someone a lot. Once again, something so complicated in real life has been made oh-so simple by yours truly.
I often wonder what those guys at Facebook go through when they think of their next design. The latest one is somewhat bothersome at times. I’ll admit that it is good at what it does which is connecting people but I think it does that too well. For example, I don’t need to know that John Jackson and Jack Johnson are now friends. In most cases I have no idea who other person is. It is however amusing when two friends of yours meet and become friends, independent of your influence and you find out via Facebook.
Now the issue I have detailed stems from the “News Feed”. Now I’m not sure what classes as news, but if Jane Smith sends a friend-wide message asking her friends to join her mob I don’t think 99% of those people who will see the message care if she needs help with her virtual mob. Facebook isn’t a game site. I think all those quizzes, games, surveys and any other abominations of the like should be terminated. I for one am proud of the fact I have never played Mafia Wars, Farmville or any other game with a similar principle. I believe Tetris Friends was the only game I played, until I was beaten by a good friend. A few rounds of Tetris never hurt anyone, in fact, Tetris probably does more for the mind than most games.
Another thing that annoys me is this new photo system Facebook decided to add. First of all, it requires a plugin, at least for Firefox. On the upside, I didn’t have to restart my browser, in this case, the slow beast known as Firefox. Of course this isn’t really a bother unless you are unfortunate enough to use public computers. Wrong move there Facebook team. After you have installed the uploader which is pretty good I guess, you have to pick out your photos. Obviously you would click “Upload photos” and go ahead and select your photos. Now you need to enter an album name. Well what if you have an album already created? Now you have to find that album, hit edit, hit add more and then do the same thing. The easier way would just be to add in an option to create a new album or select an old album to add to. Pretty simple isn’t it?
Now, here comes another load of ‘why would you think that is even a good thing’ from the Facebook team. I’m not sure if it is just me but there is a 10 pixel (approximate) buffer zone from the top edge of my browser to the button when it is highlighted. Such as small fix yet no one has decided to fix it. It seems like a trivial CSS touch up but I did some investigating with Firebug and they have made their top navigation pretty complex, most likely to deal with Internet eXploder 6. Nevertheless, looks terrible to me. However I’m not gonna write a Grease Monkey script to deal with it, I can live with such a minor annoyance.
Now I’ll conclude my Facebook rant/critique here, but don’t be alarmed, there is plenty more wrong with Facebook. At least they are a few hundred steps above MySpace (We can all agree here).
Well it’s 12.15am local time (midnight) and in 4 hours I’ll be going for the longest bike ride I have been on. From my house, about 35 kilometres to this place known as “The Spit” and back. So a 70 kilometre round trips up and down the coast. For me it isn’t hard to do but for some, they think I’m crazy. I think life is a test. It is sometimes hard to test yourself, and test yourself in a way that you can equally fail or pass. In my case this is fair since I am pretty fit and can ride a bike fairly well.
It bothers me sometimes however, that some people don’t test themselves. For example, I used to play video gameslike any normal guy. Not a lot, but enough to be pretty damn good at some games. That was only 3 years ago and since then I hardly ever pick up a controller or load up a game these days. Why the sudden change you might ask? Well it got boring. Games are just long puzzles and most games are the same puzzle. COD, BF, Crysis and most other first person shooters are the same to me and hence I saw no challenge since learning this skill will lead me to no skill which I can use. I do however think strategy games are good thinking games but then they can get repetative. When I tell people that I don’t play games they ask me, what do you do on a computer? I can’t help but think what can’t I do, games are just great time wasters to me, I’d rather learn skills I can perhaps use later in life and enjoy while I learn.
So I challenged myself. I became a video editor. I got a YouTube Partnership and 3000+ subscribers and was mentioned to Travis Pastrana (from what he said). Well that was pretty cool I guess, what next. Then I became a Web Designer. Built a few sites and now I could have a site up and going within the day if I felt like it. Now I don’t know where to go next. The bike challenges are just to keep me at bay until I find something to try and master next. A big part of me wants it to be university and myself. But I think this would be a pretty hard challenge to take on but I can always try. I think my next challenge might be to master Photoshop. I’ve always wanted to be able to take some crappy photo and make it something awesome.
How do you challenge yourself? Or, why don’t you challenge yourself for some people.