I opened my Facebook app on my iPod Touch for the first time in a very long time to check on something. After I was done using it, I noticed that I had a badge notification on the Facbeook app for 22 new items.

I remembered turning off all notifications for Facebook a long time ago, but just in case, I went back to my settings to check and make sure they weren’t changed for some reason.

As you can see in the image above, the notification settings weren’t changed. Yet, there are still badge notifications on my Facebook app.

A lot of you probably know how much I don’t like Facebook, and I don’t want a notification badge on my Facebook app. If anyone knows why Facebook is not adhering to the Apple iOS settings, or knows how to get rid of the notification, please let me know. Otherwise, I’m probably just going to delete the app because I just about never use Facebook and use the Facebook app even less than that.

While I was reading today, I came across this interesting diagram in a book about the psychology of influence.

Here’s what’s happening in the picture in case you can’t tell.

In the first frame, one man is staring up into the sky. In the second frame, two more people join him, wondering what’s up in the sky. In the third frame, even more people join the man, and someone is looking down from a window. In the fourth frame, even the person on the second-floor window is looking up along with even more people on the ground, and they see an angel. In the fifth and final frame, the social influence of the people on the ground is so great that even the angel looks up to see what’s in the sky.

I’ll be having a review of this book in the very near future as soon as I finish reading it.

Quote of the Day

Parkzer: brb, heading out for a little bit
Ash: how long will it take?
Parkzer: Not that long, I’m not going far
Ash: how far is not far?
Parkzer: Only a few miles
Ash: are you going to walk?
Parkzer: No, I’m driving
Ash: you should walk instead, it’s healthier
Parkzer: That sort of defeats the purpose of my trip, I’m going to fill up my dad’s car with gas…
Ash: oh -.-

I’ve been getting a handful of questions about this mysterious extra work that I’ve been doing at least once a week for long periods of time. I decided to take this picture to give you a slight clue, but also to confuse you even more.

No, that is not my house.

On a slightly related note, when I looked through my iPod Touch’s camera roll to upload the photo shown above, I also found the following picture.

This is what happens when you let Ed Lam try to take video with your iPod Touch. He’ll take a picture of your car and the tip of your knee instead.

(If you don’t know who Ed Lam is, he’s in a lot of my vlogs.)

It was brought to my attention yesterday that the light in my office back at my university randomly decided to stop working and smell burnt for a while. Even better, my coworker who shares that office space with me refuses to replace the light bulb and instead prefers to sit in the dark.

-.-

In other news, I’m extremely busy until Wednesday because I have to study for two exams and do a lot of homework and a lot of reading. Of course, this is for my community college and I’m only taking this class to get transfer credits, so I don’t really need to study. But on the other hand, I don’t want to underdo it so much that I fail.

So that’s why my blog post for today and tomorrow is and will be extremely short.

Hi humans and surge protector experts.

I address surge protector experts specifically because I need your help.

I’ve had the surge protector pictured above for almost a year now. I bought it in Madison primarily to get more outlets than to actually use it as a surge protector.

I’ve noticed lately that the light on the switch is flickering and looks really weak. I searched on Google for possible explanations and apparently a flickering, blinking, or weak light on your surge protector means that it already protected your electronics from a surge and is no longer at full power.

This question might be silly to someone who actually knows how surge protectors work, but can I still use it to get more outlets without any problems and without worrying about protecting from surges? I never even needed protection against surges anyway because I unplug electronics when I’m not using them and turn off the switch on my surge protector when I’m away from my office or room.

So I guess the main question is, is my surge protector damaged electricity-conducting-wise and I should replace it, or can I still keep using it if I’m not worried about surges and just want the extra outlets?

Response: Justin White’s “Facebook Dislike Button” (July 14, 2011)

Yesterday, a buddy of mine named Justin White wrote a blog post about the Facebook dislike button (more specifically, the lack of a dislike button). You should probably go read that now so my response is in context and you know what I’m talking about.

http://jtwhite.net/2011/07/14/facebook-dislike-button/

To begin my response, I want to state that looking at the main idea of the post, the post itself is misnamed. The main focus of the blog post is not about the dislike button, but about things that Facebook users request in general. In the conclusion, Justin explains how Facebook’s users could go about bringing about change on Facebook.com. He uses the dislike button as merely an example, not as the main focus of the article.

Ignoring the title, Justin’s proposed solution to getting a dislike button is for many people to start using advertisement blockers: “They would need to have a good percentage of Facebook’s users to protest by installing … advertisement blocking software and refusing to disable it on Facebook … until a dislike button is created. By doing this, you are … boycotting Facebook and therefore hindering the income of the company.”

We first have to take a look at the types of people who use advertisement blockers in the first place. The reason they want to get rid of advertisements is because they’re bothersome and they don’t want to deal with them. These are generally the types of people who would never click on an advertisement in the first place, or if the advertisement is interesting enough, might click on one or two once in a while, but at significantly lower rates than other people. These are also the people that advertising companies don’t even target because it’s a waste of their resources. Facebook would probably save more money by saving bandwidth not showing advertisements to these people than they would earn from the miniscule number of potential clicks they could get.

Next, how many people actually use an advertisement blocker? The most famous one is Adblock Plus, an add-on for Firefox. According to Add-ons Product Manager Justin Scott from Mozilla, on May 17, 2010, there were 131.9 million active Firefox users and 10.7 million people with Adblock Plus installed. That calculates to about 8% of Firefox users using Adblock Plus. As of today, according to Net Applications, 21.67% of Internet users use Firefox. Eight percent of 21.67% equals about 1.73% of all Internet users using Adblock Plus. Not a lot, if you ask me. At this rate, I’m pretty sure getting enough advertisement blocker users to leave a dent in Facebook and make the concerned is going to take a long time.

But what if we were to suddenly somehow get over half the population to use advertisement blockers? Justin points out that Facebook might implement a script that detects advertisement blockers and prevents you from using their website if you don’t whitelist it. But that’s way too much work. There’s an easier solution.

Advertisement blocking software works on the concept of keywords. It identifies domains and URL paths that are common to advertisements, and prevents them from showing up. For example, if the ad blocker were to block Google Adsense advertisements, they might block all URLs that follow the format of http(s)://adsense.google.com/*. But what if the advertisements didn’t fit a specific pattern?

For example, what if Facebook started randomizing the URLs of their advertisements? What if an image displayed as an advertisement had the URL of:

https://facebook.com/.jpg

(If that URL isn’t random enough for you, refresh the page to get a new randomized URL.)

Sure, the ad blocker could block everything that matches http(s)://facebook.com/*.jpg, but then it would be blocking all the images on the entire website. By doing that, Facebook can essentially force you to disable your ad blocker to use their website without actually forcing you to do anything at all.

So what’s my point? The best (and I think the only effective) way to really boycott Facebook is to literally boycott it and not visit the website. Unfortunately, seeing how addicted people are to Facebook, I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. Installing an advertisement blocker, creating groups and events, and doing other protest-like things will most likely get you nowhere to your quest to get a dislike button. And even the concept of a dislike button is dumb. Disliking a status (or anything, for that matter) is spreading negativity and will only cause arguments. Facebook wants their users to enjoy their time on Facebook.com, not spend hours arguing with other users.