freeg131: Philip Gamble

Noticing that I had 7 pending friend requests on Facebook last week I decided I should clear out my facebook friends.

Of the 7 requests:

• 4 were spam – the first I have received on Facebook and all which appeared within seconds of each other.
• 2 were people I recognised the names of but have never met who presumably added me because we have some mutual friends regardless of the fact I know nothing about them
• 1 was a Game Maker person that I did not know at all well

Along the way I found out some rather interesting things such as the fact that you can very easily bulk harvest your friends e-mail addresses in text form and that my friends are overwhelmingly male (well I do Computer Science).

I conducted a very-mini purge removing 13 ‘friends’.  Without exception these people were people that I have not spoken to since I left school 2 years ago either in person or online and had never been particularly friendly with.  At the time it seemed like a good idea to accept all friend requests coming my way though now everyone is on Facebook I can be more selective!  From now on I intend to operate on a one-in-one-out policy so I don’t feel so bad about ‘unfriending’ so many people at once!

Also got an unusual message asking me to “tag a friend” which turned out to be me.  Can only presume this is the start of auto tagging friends in photos.  Hurrah.

I have an extension installed in Chrome which provides a link to Google Maps when text from a webpage is selected if the plugin judges it to be an address.  You can get the extension here.

Fair enough if you highlight a real address but Google Maps also thinks it can find “Up to 1000” and “6” E Ink” (taken from a website about an eBook reader).  An interesting way to discover random locations around the world, in this case  what is presumably a posh American estate built around a forested golf course on windy roads and an octagonal prison on “S T O Road” in India.

Incidentally I am of the opinion that eBook readers are almost as pointless as digital photo frames.

A comment I am often given when working on my laptop in public (or sharing a screenshot) is “oh, you’ve got a lot of tabs open there”.  So I opened a new one to write this.

It’s true I do use a lot of tabs.  Most of the time I am online I will have between 10 and 2o tabs open at any one time, and when I am also working perhaps as many as 30.  This reduces my viewing of each webpage to a favicon only – one of the reasons why I was happy to recently implement such an identifier at Game Maker Blog.

Whilst having as many as 30 tabs open at time starts to become impractical (there are only so many that can be identified in a single line at a time), I don’t see anything strange it having around 15 active tabs.

For example here is Google Chrome’s Task Manager showing the tabs I currently have open having just returned from eating dinner after doing some research.

A nice mix of tabs covering connection with the outside world (my email), news stories of interest followed from the BBC news homepage and Twitter, an Earth Hour de-motivational poster (following on from a Guardian article about tourism in North Korea which I read at breakfast), identifying a song from some of its lyrics, Game Maker websites and pages about the security of JSP files and Social Networking (work!).

Working like this enables me to quickly switch from checking my emails, updating a blog, working, reading sites of interest and playing the occasional online game (a current favourite is dicewars based on the 2008 US election).  Provides a distraction from work – possibly.  But I like it.