I’ve lost a fair amount of weight in the last few months. It’s an incredible achievement, and while I’m proud of myself, I’ve found it a bit odd that my family and friends have been asking me how I did it — I only followed what seemed common sense. Still, at the risk of making this a humblebrag, I’m going to offer my advice.
I don’t do New Year resolutions. Honest. I mean, it’s just one more day and a public holiday to allow us to nurse our hangovers in peace, right? Still, I know plenty of people do them, but if you think you’re going to make yourself over, you’re in for a rude shock. Instead, I’m picking a few minor changes to make with realistic goals that I think will improve me overall.
There’s no doubt that social networking is both useful and fun. But it’s become a bit of a hodgepodge of interconnected services that overlap, never find wide-enough traction to be useful, or are just plain dangerous. I’m not going into another rant about what I do and don’t like — this is about personal preference. I am, however, going to clean up my act and start walking the walk.
FacebookThe big one. I’m going to spend January on a self-imposed exile from Facebook. Somehow in the last 12 months, it’s gone from photos of parties, weddings and babies to reshares from irrelevant celebrities (whose posts I suspect are largely ghost-written), and pages like “I fucking love fridays, like if you agree” (see to the right; I suspect are largely spam farms). All of a sudden, I discovered that I wanted to know what my friends had for lunch today. Wasn’t that the point? To stay in touch and keep up to date?
I also had a couple recent run-ins with the way FB handles privacy. While I’ll admit an amount of user error, the service actually makes it easy to screw things up. Rather than risk further stuff ups, I think that it’s definitely time for me to put up or shut up on this. However, before I jump ship there are things that I need to do.
Mister Fry is a master of the Word. Personally, I am much like him in that I cringe at improper uses of words, grammar and syntax. I think that our society is not getting the linguistic education it should. But if people want to make “mistakes” then they should be allowed to, as long as they know why it’s “wrong”, and that their choice is conscious and informed.
If you don’t believe me, start by looking at these photos:
I took them a few minutes ago. The first suspicion I had was the smell of burning rubber in my room, but I couldn’t see the source, even looking out my window. It wasn’t until I opened the door to call one of my cats in that I saw embers in the air.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a house fire up close and personal before, but I am proud to say that I kept my head and called 000 before grabbing the camera. Which leads me to my dilemma: is it okay to be posting these photos? I mean, I can see how people might think me heartless and perhaps even indulging in schadenfreude with this act. I’m no journalist, I’m not getting paid for this, so is this benefiting from other people’s tragedy?
Edit: The fire got a brief mention in the news this morning
Apologies to everybody who had to endure a whole bunch of articles being made just now. WordPress had been throwing some nasty errors whenever I published an article and I wanted to fix it while I had a little free time.
I’m not sure, but I think I narrowed it down to the combination of WordPress Mobile Pack and wp-cache. I opted to deactivate the former for now. Hopefully we won’t need to go through that again