My 11 year old loves Arrested Development. He loves Lego. I guess it was inevitable the two would collide. He’s been busy constructing scenes from Arrested Development out of Lego. Here, Gob is about to make the yacht Lucille disappear:

Here, Gob is hanging out with one of the many girls of low self-esteem during Spring Break:

Here, Gob regrets letting Buster in on his magic (OK, illusion!) act:

After I posted these, he got a request on Twitter for the banana stand and Gob on his Segway. So he dived in:

Curious if others had the inspiration to combine Legos and Arrested Development, I did some searching. I’m asking to get permission to show photos for some of these. In the meantime, you can click to view those that aren’t embedded.

Here’s a nice one of George Michael in flying suit gear taking on the Tobias the Mole over the miniature village that Gob had Buster build:

The photo was taken by Jordan Chesbrough and is used with permission. The scene was created by Jon Furman.

Here’s the banana stand from Camera Wences, and used with permission:

I like Buster with a hooked hand!

From Nannan Z on Flickr (and shown with permission), here’s a huge Gob on the Segway at the construction site:

From unfulphilled on Flickr (and shown with permission), here’s one of the entire Bluth family:

Here’s another of the banana stand with a better Buster, Gob also on a Segway and with flames! The same person also has a great one of the stair car.

Just a quick update from the work-side of my life. Our SMX West search engine marketing conference happens this March 2-4 in California. Working with my co-chair Chris Sherman, we’ve assembled over 50 sessions of search marketing goodness. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is also keynoting — his first time ever speaking at a search marketing conference!

If you know someone who needs basic education, we even have a special SMX Boot Camp track with introductory pricing.

Speaking of pricing, the early bird rate expires this Saturday. So get registered!

To learn more about the show, see the Agenda-At-A-Glance or check out my virtual tour at Search Engine Land, Why You Should Attend SMX West 2010: A Personal Preview, From Danny Sullivan

Today, I logged into Facebook and got a huge, honking message saying they needed my birthday as a “security measure.” Then I got a second overlay message popping up right on top of that to make clear I really needed to enter it.

Color me confused. I thought Facebook already had my birthday. In fact, I know they had it, because I’d given it before to be shown on my profile. But then after they did all those scary privacy changes last December, I took my birthday off my profile.

So WTF? Did pulling it off my public profile mean that Facebook lost its internal record of the date? And why over a month later did Facebook suddenly decide it needed my birthdate. Shouldn’t it have known it was gone back in December, if that’s when it disappeared? And why do they need my birthday as a security measure at all?

Doing a quick search, I discovered these types of prompts have been happening at least since 2007. Peter Keung has a blog post from back then showing the same nag screen I got. He also asked Facebook why they needed his birthday and was told:

For the security of yourself and our other users, we need to verify that you are old enough to use the site. Additionally, there are certain age requirements for particular networks so that the right users are associating with the right network. No information that you provide to Facebook will be distributed or used in any way. Let me know if you have any other questions.

You know what? Want to verify I’m “old enough,” like over 13? Then ask me to pick my current age. You don’t need my exact birthdate to verify age (especially given it’s not really going to be verified anyway). Or ask for my birth month and year. You don’t need the exact date.

Unfortunately, there was no way to use Facebook unless I gave it my birthday. So I did. Or I did off by a few days. The first time, it came back saying I wasn’t old enough — despite having picked my correct birth year. Tried again, again no luck. Third time was a charm — except I then got logged out.

Now when I try to log in, I get this message:

Account Unavailable

Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I didn’t believe this message was correct. Why would only my account suddenly be unavailable due to “site maintenance” that seems to be affecting few other people. I mean, no one else is twittering about this problem. In reality, I suspected a screw-up based on the entire birthday thing.

So, I hit the help area. There’s an entire topic devoted to the “Site Maintanence” issue, telling me:

“Site Maintenance” usually means that we’re making an improvement to the database that your account is stored on. While we’re doing this, you will not be able to access your account. In most instances, this maintenance will last only a few hours. Please note:

• After the maintenance is over, you will still be able to login with the same password.
• Your profile and account will not be affected by the maintenance.
• We don’t do site maintenance on all accounts at the same time, so it is possible that some of your friends will be able to access the site while your account is unavailable.
• It is not necessary to contact us about Site Maintenance.
• If your maintenance lasts longer than 24 hours, please follow these instructions to clear your browser’s cache and cookies.

If you’re still having trouble after trying the above steps, please click here.

OK, so just big time coincidence? Just sit back and it’ll be OK in a few hours. Maybe? But being worried, I went ahead and used the form to request help. I got back this auto-response:

Thanks for your report. Some users have been experiencing difficulty logging into and using the site for several days. Specific symptoms of this issue include:

Inability to log in due to a “Site Maintenance” error message

Missing friends from the Friends page

Errors when trying to access Inbox

Unfortunately, we do not have a specific date for when this issue will be resolved, but we are working to fix it as soon as possible. Please note that this is a temporary display issue and no content has been removed from your account.  Although we are unable respond to every bug report individually, we are reading them. We appreciate your patience.

Woah. The login screen gives me a message saying all will be good in a few hours. Facebook’s help pages give me a message saying all should be good in a few hours. But now Facebook’s autoresponder has no “specific date” for when things will be fixed.

All this started by a process that was designed to supposedly protect my security. I’m not feeling so secure.

Move over, Goodyear Blimp. The Zeppelin Eureka’s moving in on aerial event coverage!

I just got an email from the Airship Ventures, which operates the Eureka, saying that the zeppelin will be covering the Golden Globes. It’s the first time their airship has been used for a national broadcast in the US. From the email:

NBC is using the airship to broadcast live aerial footage of the red carpet and official after party at “The 67th Annual Golden Globe Awards” this Sunday. Join us aboard Eureka for our first-ever live national TV broadcast and be a part of the glamour and excitement of Hollywood award season.

That’s right. In addition to covering the stars on the ground from the stars above, the company’s also offering seats to the general public who want a bird’s eye view:

An extremely limited number of seats are available on two flights. The 3-hour Red Carpet Sunset Cruise will soar above L.A. landmarks and hover above the red carpet, broadcasting live across the country, before offering panoramic views of the sun setting over the Pacific. The 2.5-hour After Party Night Flight will cruise above the City of Angels’ twinkling lights and broadcast bird’s eye views of bustling Hollywood hotspots, including the official Golden Globes after party on the rooftop of the Beverly Hilton. Red Carpet Sunset Cruise seats are $1250/person, plus taxes. After Party Night Flights are $950/person, plus taxes.

There’s no page on the Airship Ventures site that I can point you at with more about either the TV coverage or how to book. But the email said those who want to buy seats should call the main number and ask. You’ll find that here.

Southern California’s been very good to the Eureka since she first started making trips to the area last year. I got a real kick of seeing her overhead while rollerblading along Newport Beach last Saturday:

For more about the Zeppelin Eureka from me, see these past posts:

• My Zeppelin Flight With Burt Rutan At The Helm
• Zeppelin Eureka Heads To Los Angeles & Orange County
• Zeppelin Rides Come To Southern California!

I don’t know anyone who likes the Department Of Motor Vehicles in any state. The DMV seems to represent all we hate in bureaucracy. Surely there’s got to be a better way? Here’s a short tale of the absurdity of replacing my driver’s license.

I’ve misplaced my wallet. Maybe I’ve actually lost it, but having looked everywhere, I’ve concluded it’s not turning up soon. That means canceling credit cards and getting a replacement driver’s license. That especially sucks since I was just issued a brand new one allowing me to ride motorcycles in addition to cars.

I headed over to the California DMV site to look up what’s required for a replacement card. The instructions are all here, and they start out:

To apply for a duplicate license or ID card, you will need to:
* Make an Appointment(s) to visit a DMV office

Those instructions are a big fail from the very beginning. Why? To drive, you have to have a license on you. It’s legally required. So make an appointment? Sure, I did that. On February 20th — over a month from now — I can go into my local office to be processed.

I can’t wait that long. Who on earth does the DMV think can wait that long for a replacement drivers licenses? I’m going to have to go into the office as soon as possible and wait in line without an appointment.

That’s fine. I’m not complaining about having to wait. I lost my wallet. The state’s under no obligation to shoot me to the front of the line for my own ineptness. But let’s provide instructions that make sense. Say something like, “If you need to drive immediately, you’ll need to visit an office as soon as possible.” There’s nothing like this.

Next, the instructions say:

Complete a Driver License or Identification Card Application form DL 44 or DL 44C.

Pay the application fee

Give a thumb print

Have your picture taken

OK, the first item, no problem. On the second, in cash-strapped California, here’s an opportunity. Charge me an express processing fee! Really soak me to get my license processed faster and use that extra money to speed the process up for everyone. Missed opportunity.

The next two have me scratching my head. The DMV just sent me a license literally two weeks ago. Fresh picture. Same thumbprint as they already had on file. Why are they doing this again?

Further down, the instructions say:

To ensure your identity is secure, the DMV will validate your photograph, social security number, and your personal information.

Say what? What do they have to validate? I’m asking for a duplicate license to be sent to the current address they have on file for me. I look like the picture that will be on the replacement license. I have the same thumbprint. In the past, when I’ve renewed my license online, they’ve sent me a new one. How on earth is this protecting my identity?

It feel like it’s a handy way for the DMV simply to keep itself busy. Well, there’s plenty enough that it has to do. Couldn’t this be made easier?

Even further down, there’s this:

You will be issued an interim license valid for 60 days and/or a receipt for your ID card until you receive your new photo license and/or photo ID card in the mail. Check your address before you leave DMV and tell the DMV representative if your address is incorrect.

If you’ve never seen one of these, it’s just a piece of paper that says you can drive, no picture, no thumbprint, etc. So here’s another thought. Since appointments take over a month now, why not let people order interim licenses online? You can’t use them for identification. But they do serve to allow you to drive legally until you wait for an appointment to go in.

Anyway, off to the DMV next week

Tried Android and feel it doesn’t measure up to the iPhone? TechCrunch would have you think it’s just because you didn’t try it long enough. It’s not the phone, you see. It’s you. And that’s bull.

Fair enough, it’s easy to go from something you know very well and be irritated that something else doesn’t work in the same way, in the way you think it “should” work. One thing I especially appreciated about Om Malik’s Nexus One review was that he lived with the thing as his primary phone. He spent time really getting to know it.

I might do the same with Android myself. And I’m somewhat hesitant to write against the TechCrunch “it’s you” argument as I’m still living with the Nexus One and trying to get to know it better. Then again, I already know enough to blow holes in that argument.

Look here:

Those are my most three most recent smartphones. My primary phone is that iPhone on the left, a 3G version from when they came out in July 2008. On the left, the Nexus One from Google that I was given when I covered the Nexus One launch this week.

That one in the middle? That’s my Windows Mobile 6.1 device from 2007. Previously, I’d used Windows Mobile devices going back to 2004 (see Swapping My Treo 700W For The UTStarcom XV6700). Smartphones aren’t new to me. In fact, when the iPhone came out, I thought it was a joke. I had a phone that was faster than what the iPhone first offered, had a flash and a pull-out keyboard, which I thought was super important. I mocked the iPhone (see No 3G, No Keyboard, No iPhone — Thank You Very Much).

When the 3G version of the iPhone finally came out, I bought one for my wife, fully expecting I’d continue using Windows Mobile and mocking iPhone users. After all, my Windows Mobile phone could still do all the iPhone could plus doubled as a modem.

But after literally an hour or less of playing with my wife’s iPhone, I knew my Windows Mobile days were over. Any time I might save with a physical keyboard was totally wasted on the number of menus I had to go through to do anything on the Windows Mobile phone compared to the iPhone. On the iPhone, everything was easy, intuitive, time saving. And I soon learned that I didn’t need an physical keyboard. In fact, the last time I tried one was when I tested the Android T-Mobile G1. I hated not being able to do on-screen typing.

So now let’s shift to what Jason Kincaid in TechCrunch says today:

Imagine if you took a longtime Windows user and sat them in front of a Mac for a couple days. They’d probably complain about superficial things like the change in mouse acceleration and the “unintuitive” button placement (the Close button is on the opposite side of the window). It’s not until a week or two after you start using a Mac as your primary computer that you overcome these issues and begin to fully grasp some of the benefits it offers. No, it may not be for you, but there’s really no way you can tell for sure without taking the plunge and using one as your primary computer. It’s the same way with Android.

Look, I was a long-time Windows (Mobile) user. I was sat in front of Mac (iPhone) for a couple of days. Actually, an hour. I complained about nothing. I knew what to do very fast. So why shouldn’t that be the case for me going from the iPhone to Android?

Jason also wrote:

A week or so later, it clicked. When I want an option that isn’t already visible, I hit the dedicated ‘Menu’ button just beneath the screen. Need to jump to a previous screen in an app or the web browser? Hit the dedicated ‘Back’ button. In some ways, these are actually better than the soft buttons located in iPhone apps, because they’re always in the same place. It also saves some screen real estate.

Again, I didn’t need a week for the iPhone to “click” with me. It clicked almost immediately. And I think that’s the key driver to its popularity. Michael Arrington, when I was on the Gillmor Gang with him earlier this week (video will be posted here later), asked what was the killer app for the iPhone and for Android. I didn’t think there was one for many people, not one “I gotta have this phone because it runs….” type of thing. I thought the killer app of the iPhone was the user interface.

Look, the iPhone did not invent the smartphone. The iPhone, when it emerged, was well behind many smartphones in terms of its capabilities. The App Store? Please. Windows Mobile had plenty of “apps for that.” The problem with Windows Mobile apps was that you had to hunt them down. They weren’t organized in a nice, vetted location. They were scattered all over the web.

But the iPhone blew people away — and to me, it did so because it made a pocket computer that’s also a phone intuitive to use, just as Palm did for PDAs.

Android’s not as intuitive. I’m sorry. I wish it were, if only because I tend to dislike Apple so much because of its closed, controlling nature that I’d like a different phone to use. But right now, I wouldn’t abandon my iPhone for Android. For me, Android remains like some type of weird evolution of Windows Mobile, where you have to constantly go to menu options to get stuff done whereas the iPhone presents what you need when you need it.

Using Tweetie on the iPhone and want to write a tweet? With the iPhone, the compose button is right there at the top of the screen:

But for Android, you have to go down to the bottom and push the menu button.

After you’ve pushed the Android’s menu button, then you have to further pick the Compose button:

While you’re still trying to get the compose window, over on the iPhone, you’re already writing. (NOTE: Per comments below, this is the case with Seemic on Android, not with Twitdroid, where the UI is much nicer. But also see the comments about how my reactions to Androids aren’t based on just this one application).

Finally, after two clicks, you finally get the compose window and can do your tweet, as shown below. But also below, I’ll address something else that Jason raises, how handy it is that Android has a “Back” button always in the same place:

On Android, in the Seemic Twitter app, you can go back by either using the applications Cancel button or using Android’s dedicated “Back” button that I’m pointing to at the bottom. On the iPhone, you’ve got to guess — the Cancel button in the top left will let you do it.

But you know, you guess once or twice, and then you know. I rarely struggle trying to understand how to use my iPhone apps even though they might not have some dedicated buttons in all the “same” places. I think that’s in part because I’m usually only shown buttons I actually need. Also, how many apps do you really use, where you have that much trouble learning how to do things? And don’t forget — on Android apps, the menu options you get after pushing the menu button aren’t all the same nor in the same place.

How about email. I email a lot on my phone. Let’s do some email:

On the iPhone, I push one button down in the lower right, and boom, I’m writing email. On Android, I have to push the menu button at the very bottom. After I do that, then I have to push a second button to start writing.

I don’t know about you, but for me, having to push twice to do something doesn’t make the phone twice as good. It makes it twice as annoying — and I don’t need a lot of “livability” time to understand this. Moreover, with the Nexus One, you can’t even have the type of time Jason’s talking about to understand it. You can’t touch it at all. It sold online only. You can, of course, return it if not happy within 14 days. That’s a nice policy and provides plenty of time for living with it.

As for browsing, which is one of the most important things I do on my iPhone, there’s no contest. Without multi-touch, without the ability to pinch and zoom in or flick and zoom out, the Android just feels clunky. Worse, I keep hitting that damn magnifying glass at the bottom of the phone (it’s the fourth one over on the right, at the bottom) thinking it’s a zoom button. You know, because a magnifying glass is an icon often used to represent zooming. But it’s not. It’s a search button. I know, search is often represented by a magnifying glass, too. And I know, I just need to get used to the Android. And get used to needing to tap some place on the page I’m viewing that doesn’t have a link to get the real zoom in and zoom out buttons to appear. Then keep pressing on them to do things that are far easier on the iPhone.

There’s a lot I do like about Android. The built-in voice recognition gets better and better. I’ve done about 20 searches this evening by only speaking into the phone, and the accuracy has been amazing. FYI, as I joke, I cursed into my Nexus One. I discovered it will recognize curse words and replace them with ####!

The screen is beautiful. I love that there’s a removable battery plus removable storage (and even better when you can actually install apps on that storage). The trackball, which I found useless to worse in some instances (who knows where it puts you on the screen sometimes — it has a mind of its own) was actually awesome when using Street View on the Nexus One. Turn-by-turn navigation. Well, as long as I trust the accuracy of Google Maps, maybe I won’t need a new GPS.

Multitasking sounds great but in reality, I’ve yet to see it that useful. I had multitasking in Windows Mobile, and it was nice to toggle between different apps quickly. If there’s a fast toggle with Android, I’ve yet to stumble upon it. If I hold the home button down long, I will get a list of recently accessed apps. But that doesn’t seem to be the toggle between running apps that I was expecting. For the most part, so far, that’s not a killer for me over the iPhone.

Someone asked me if I’d recommend the Nexus One right now. My advice would be to wait until it appears for Verizon, if you really want the Nexus One because you don’t want or need a physical keyboard. I was a long-time Verizon subscriber, and the broadband network was awesome even years ago. I still use Verizon to access the web when traveling with my USB card. It consistently gets me connected in places where my iPhone often won’t.

And T-Mobile? I’ve never used them (in the US, that is — I did use them in the UK). But they seem to have a much less robust 3G network. Right now, if it seems better to AT&T users (and remember, all the world does NOT live in San Francisco, New York or attends CES), that’s because it’s not overloaded with all those data-hungry iPhones out there. But the data hungry Android users will come, and I suspect T-Mobile will encounter AT&T like problems. I’m not sure I’d want to commit two years to T-Mobile. Nor would I want to buy a Nexus One now that becomes a 2G-only brick if you shift to AT&T and which won’t work on Verizon at all.

Would I recommend the Nexus One it over the iPhone? It depends on who you are and what you need to do. For someone new to smartphones, I still think the iPhone would be the way to go. For a more power user, the Android (in particular the Nexus One) is pretty awesome. Certainly if you did get the Nexus One or any of the newer Android phones (say 1.5 and above), you’ve got an excellent phone. You shouldn’t feel a need to defend it against the iPhone.

I know Android will only get better. I hope it does. And I plan to write more about the Nexus One in particular, highlighting some of the things I do like. But this “you’ve got to learn” it stuff. If that’s the defense of Android, then it has already lost — at least this version.

When I tuned into Twitter this morning, like many other people, I saw tweets about a bomb threat of some type in Times Square. How serious was this? So I went looking for news and found an erectile dysfunction ad along the way. Classy Fox News — and shame on you CNN and the New York Times for being screwed up, as well.

I started looking for news about what was happening when John Battelle tweeted:

Bomb threat still not on nyt.com but it’s all over Twitter

I hit Google and ignored the main search results with their real time tweets that were integrated, going straight to Google News. The only article I could find was from a site I’d never heard before, DNAinfo, which I gather covers local news in Manhattan.

It was useful. I’d been hearing things about NASDAQ and a bomb threat but I quickly learned this seemed to be a suspicious van parked near Times Square. Probably nothing at all.

Still, I wanted to learn more from news sites. Maybe they had articles out that Google News hadn’t picked up. So I headed over to CNN.

There, I couldn’t find a news story, but there was a live feed being offered. It was buried way down on the page, nearly similar to where I’m pointing in the screenshot below:

I fired it up. A commercial loaded, which I found odd. Here’s a potential emergency — I could know people in the area and be extremely frightened and worried — and I have to wait for a commercial, first? Worse, after the commercial played, there was no live feed. They were showing the weather, instead.

Hey, I know news sites are looking to monetize stuff and there’s that whole debate about people expecting news for free when they should pay. But give me a frigging break. In an emergency, that’s what news sites do. You get the news out first and worry about the monetization later. That’s your job. Make up the money in other ways.

I went to the New York Times next and found nothing, just as I see now as I write this about 30 minutes after I first went there:

Figuring they probably had something, I drilled into the local area of the site and there, buried, was a news article:

Why wasn’t that on the front page? Seriously, the editors at the New York Times didn’t think when this news broke that people might think they should find it? I mean, it is after all happening in New York, from which the Times takes its name.

But really, Fox News beat them all. Similar to CNN, there was a live video feed about in the same place as the screenshot below shows:

I clicked on it, and a Viagra ad started playing.

Look, I’m not a prude, but I kind of got enough of those freaking Viagra ads during the Major League Baseball playoffs. They’re really fun to watch with your 8 and 10 year old. It’s one of those cases where I appreciated how in the UK, certain types of ads simply could not be shown before a certain hour, when kids were assumed to be bed — or in association with certain kinds of TV shows.

But imagine the scenario. You’re a family worried about other family in New York. You head to Fox News on your computer, all the kids gathered around, and here’s the Viagra ad. Nice.

OK, if it’s a real disaster, you might not have the kids sitting next to you. So set that argument aside. The “why the hell are you showing me a commercial” one still stands up. Someone’s worried, concerned, perhaps freaked out. They’ve come to your site, grateful to discover they can get some type of live information, and you first make them watch and ad about how to get their dick hard.

Really, really classy.

After nearly two years of leaving my desktop and a 3 monitor setup behind, I’m back to 3 monitors + 1, four screens in total, all running from my MacBook Pro.

My My Multimonitor Setup: Three Screens For One Computer post explains how I used to run three monitors from my Windows XP desktop. When I made the leap to a MacBook, I had only one external display port — so I could only run one external monitor.

That’s been OK for the most part. My external monitor was a big Dell 24″ widescreen running at 1920×1200 resolution. I’d usually use it for running my Windows XP installation on my MacBook “up above” with my Mac programs (usually just Firefox) running “down below.” My Mac & Windows Under VMware – Awesome! post has more about this.

Still, it has felt cramped at times. I’ve missed my three monitor setup and have even pondered leaving the Mac entirely to get back to it (see Time To Leave The Mac?). I knew there were some solutions for the MacBook, because I’d explored some options early on, as outlined in my Multiple Monitor Solutions For The MacBook Pro post. But I just never got any of them going.

Greg Boser inspired me by getting his MacBook running dual external monitors. Using a Matrox box, he got two screens running off his MacBook Pro. I talked with him a bit about it by phone, and later that day at Fry’s Electronics, there I saw the Matrox — the “triple head” version designed to run three monitors. I’d never seen these in stock before. I grabbed one to try it out.

Well, it works, sort of. You plug one end into your MacBook’s external display port. That runs into the Matrox box. Then the Matrox box has three outputs, one for each of up to three monitors.

All my monitors were recognized, but the Matrox thought they were all one big screen. That was a pain for various reasons.

For one, if you’re like me and running Windows through VMware, there’s a handy “full screen” mode. But using that mode on any one of my three external monitors caused the Windows screen to run across all of them. After all, as far as Matrox was concerned, the three monitors were all the same.

OK, just run my Mac programs on the external monitors? Sure, except you know how with the Mac, the menu bar for a program runs at the top of the screen, rather than at the top of a particular program’s own window as with Windows? This meant my menu bar ran across all three screens. So if I needed it, I had a long stretch waaaaaaay over to the left-most screen.

Really, the killer reason I returned the Matrox box was because my screen resolution dropped. I have three external screens. One is that widescreen 24″ directly in front of me. Off to either side are two square 20″ displays that can run 1600×1200 resolution.

The Matrox box couldn’t understand that one was a widescreen. As far as it was concerned, I had to have three monitors that were all the same size, and it was going to pretend they were, even if they weren’t. Worse, when running three monitors, you can’t get resolution better than 1280×1024 per monitor, in most cases (a few graphics cards will support 1680×1050 — the full rundown is here).

The drop in resolution meant I was losing a lot of screen real estate, which was the reason for wanting to increase the number of external monitors in the first place.

I went back to Fry’s far more educated about the need to know the maximum resolution that an external monitor adapter could drive. Looking around on the shelves, I found a Diamond BVU195 USB-DVI adapter. The box said it worked with Macs and could drive the resolutions I wanted. So I purchased two of them – $70 each, $140 total versus $340 for the Matrox box.

Want buy the Diamond or Matrox online? Here are links to Amazon with my affiliate code, so yep, I earn something off of these:

• Diamond BVU195: Currently $74
• Diamond BVU160: Currently $38 (this seems to be an older version and, as best I can tell, works exactly the same except the max resolution supported is 1600×1200)
• Matrox TripleHead: Currently $287
• Matrox DualHead: Currenlty $201

(I must also include this Fry’s digression, for Fry’s fans. Feel free to skip this paragraph. Fry’s also currently has a $10 rebate going on, making them $60, if you believe rebates ever work. Plus, the price is actually $65 each at Fry’s right now, so that’s $55 with rebate. But due to the unique nature of Fry’s, that $65 price didn’t ring up on the register. It came up as $70. Asking why caused the clerk to take me on a hike across the store to see the price marked on the shelf. It was $65, as I had said. Then a second person was enlisted to override the system. All along, he kept telling me I could have the $65 price only on one, as these were currently only one to a customer. That’s not true — it’s the rebate that’s limited to one per household. But then, a third customer service person was enlisted to try and fix the mess the second person was making in trying to override the system. End result: me saying you know, I’ll spend the extra $5 to $10 I was going to save just to get the heck out of the store.)

When I got home, I plugged them both into my external USB hub. Then I plugged the cable from each of my square end monitors into each box:

As for my middle monitor, I plugged that directly into my Mac’s built-in external display port. And?

And nothing. The Mac didn’t see them. And the CD-ROM enclosed didn’t have any drivers. And the sparse printed instructions didn’t mention the Mac at all.

Dammit. But there it was on the box. They were supposed to support Macs. So I went back to online product page (that I linked to above), found the support area and downloaded the drivers that clearly said Mac OS. And got nothing. No drivers. However, there was another sparse manual in what I downloaded that mentioned Mac support — saying to get the drivers from the DisplayLink site.

Well, I didn’t even know what DisplayLink was. I guess it’s a standard for multiple monitor support. So I headed over and found the Mac page. In turn, that sent me to a forum page where, if you scroll down to the very bottom, you get the latest driver. Not very reassuring.

And yet, it worked. It worked marvelously. Once the drivers were installed, and I rebooted, my Mac saw my two additional monitors. I had three external monitors running in total, plus my laptop display (1440×900 resolution on a 15″ screen) as well.

It’s awesome. It really is. Each of my four screens is seen independently by the Mac — and can be independently controlled. My laptop screen:

My widescreen external:

And what I see for each of my monitors on the sides:

I can arrange them however I’d like. My current setup is shown at the top of of this post (and shut up. I know my desk is a mess. Let’s not even get into how in doing all this, my laser printer fell on the floor and now probably has to be replaced. Don’t. Go. There).

Here’s the Arrangement screen from the Display control in System Preferences:

Want your menu bar for a program on a particular monitor? Just click on the thin line I’ve pointed to below and drag it to the monitor you want:

I wish you could put the dock on an external monitor, but I haven’t found a way to do that.

So far, the monitors run great. The two through the USB adapters feel ever so slightly sluggish — really not that noticable, and I’m pretty happy. I did find that Skitch, my screenshot application for the Mac, crashes if I try to shoot using the USB monitors. But so far, that’s the only glitch.

I briefly tried testing whether I could link either of the USB adapters to VMware, so that I could extend my Windows desktop to them. That kind of freaked out my monitors. I might play with this more later. But if use use Unity mode in VMware, then you can put a Windows application on any of your monitors, not just within the one running Windows. Of course, I find Unity mode to be sluggish — but I might play with that more, also.

Meanwhile, I still debate the PC versus Mac choice. If Mac made a laptop with an Intel i5 or i7 quad processor, problem completely solved. I’d feel I had enough horsepower to run both operating systems super well. But VMware on my existing MacBook still does the job pretty well, and this solves the other major issue that was making me think I needed to jump to a desktop — more monitors.

Another wish would be if Mac simply made an iMac in a 24″ size that had i5 or i7 processors. That’s only possible for the 27″ iMac — and that’s simply too big. For me, it wouldn’t allow room for monitors on either side, and I don’t want one monitor on just one side, as I find ergonomically, it helps to move my head all around.

Really, my MacBook setup is great. I get my email right in front of me on my laptop screen, “down below.” I’ve got room to read and write within a browser directly in front. And I’ve got monitors giving me room for additional reading or other tasks to either side. I just want more power!

For more on what I’ve written about multiple monitors, especially tips on using them in Windows, see my Multiple Monitors archives.

I’m always surprised at the stupidity of people who link spam on my blog. Let’s see. I write about search. I’m somewhat savvy to what link spam is. I regularly talk with the head of Google’s web spam fighting team, Matt Cutts. You really want to be spamming my blog? Seriously? You’re an idiot, if you do.

So last night, I added what I consider to be a “Beware Of Dog” sign. Next to the comment form, there’s now this message:

Thinking of dropping your link spam? Consider this. Seriously, STOP & READ. The guy who runs Google’s spam fighting team? I know him pretty well. In fact, it’s sort of a joke between us to see what’s the latest absurd link drop I can share. So if you want your site to be a poster child on his idiots wall — and probably to encounter a Google penalty — go ahead, drop your link. It’s nofollow anyway, plus I do have built-in spam fighting and what gets past that usually gets nabbed in a few minutes to a few hours. So you got to ask yourself. Are you feeling lucky?

Now to be clear, I have no special powers to get Matt to do anything against someone that spams here. I do indeed occasionally share with him some of the really stupid spam things I see. My Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker is one example of this. My view is straight-forward. If you’re so incredibly dumb to be spamming someone who writes about search, on his personal blog much less on his work blog, I feel I’m contributing to evolution by sending your cruddy spam attempt up the Google food chain.

Whether Matt or Google does anything about it is another thing entirely. But it makes me feel better, and I know we both get the occasional laugh about it.

Now to shed some more light on the spam situation, I get probably around 50 or more spam drops per day. Virtually all of this is nabbed by Spam Karma. The automated spam, I don’t bother reporting. I don’t even see it, unless I go looking in my logs. Instead, it’s the creative spam that attracts my attention.

In a post yesterday, I got this comment:

Thanks for the post; it has proven to be exactly what I needed.

Yes, my post about the Balboa Boardwalk I’m sure was exactly what this person named “Custom Essays” really wanted.

Other examples are people who take a comment from a post, do a slight rewrite to make it seem in context with the post, but still insert a spam drop along the way.

These isolated cases, I’m fairly sure there’s some human being who is actually using the form, spending a little time to assess the situation. So I’m hoping the Beware Of Dog sign might deter them.

Wish you had a line direct into Google to create your own Beware Of Dog sign? You do. Here. I’ll write one up for you:

WARNING! If you spam this blog, we’ll report your link drop to Google, which may result in your site being penalized or dropped from search listings. Are you really sure you want to take that risk?

That link leads to the official Google spam reporting tool. Anyone can use it. Try it yourself, if you want to feel better, perhaps empowered in some way.

Now, I’m not naive. This isn’t going to stop spam on the blog, any more than a Beware Of Dog sign might prevent a home from being robbed. But it’s another deterrent, easy to implement, so why not?

What about people who might spam your blog to try and get other sites in trouble? You know, they drop someone else’s link?

You know, that’s not that common. Any spam drop I’ve looked at, it’s pretty clear the site getting the link ain’t that hot. There’s always exceptions, and I think people can have a pretty good sense of what should be reported or not. And if they get that wrong, it’s not like Google’s going to instantly wipe someone out without looking for clues themselves.

I’ve been a Mac user for nearly two years now. I’m seriously debating going back to Windows. Part of me doesn’t want to, feeling like I should make the jump entirely away. But a variety of reasons are making Windows appealing again, including cost, multi-monitor support and removable batteries.

I used to run a Windows desktop with three external monitors (see My Multimonitor Setup: Three Screens For One Computer). I loved my setup. I could have my email front and center, important as I do so much in email. Over on a side monitor, I could bring up a browser to check on some article I was reviewing. On another monitor, I could validate some strange search situation I might be reading about in that article. And back to my central monitor, I could easily bring up an editing window to write a blog post.

In addition, I used to use a Windows laptop. My last one was a Vista machine that kept crashing. That pushed me to the Mac. And soon after that, my desktop crashed. I began relying solely on my Mac. It let me run both Windows XP and Mac brilliantly. In the office, I’d have Windows running on an external monitor and the Mac running “down below” as I call it on the laptop screen (see My Mac & Windows Under VMware – Awesome!). On the road, I use the wonderful Spaces program on the Mac to toggle between my Mac “side” and my Windows “side” effortlessly.

I loved the simplicity of having a single machine. I was no longer trying to copy over all my date for long trips away. I’d just shut the lid and go. Life rocked.

Over time, it’s been rocking less. One problem is that I still missed having my three screens. I went from two 20″ screens and a 22″ wide screen in the middle to only the 22″ and a 15″ laptop. I explored some options to add a third (see Multiple Monitor Solutions For The MacBook Pro), but I never implemented these. In particular, I just worried that adding more displays to my laptop would be more of a processing drain.

Processing drain? Well, the Mac runs slower these days, it feels. I suspect the Mac is just like Windows. That over time, junk of all sorts builds up, and a clean install freshens stuff up. In the past, I got that freshening usually either through a computer crash (inconvenient!) or purchasing a new computer every two years.

Meanwhile, the Mac is hot. I mean burning hot. I’ve got a stand now that suck wind out from underneath to the degree I feel it could double as an aircraft engine. That helps, but what a pain. And when I’m traveling, I worry I’ll set light to my seat-back table on an airplane or my hotel desk.

I also have found VMWare to be more sluggish. If I let it auto-protect, it decides to do a backup whenever it’s damn well ready to do it, bringing everything to a halt. I finally had to shut that off. I’m also feeling like I’ve gone back in time, since my dual processor machine is devoting one processor to Windows and one to the Mac. Meanwhile, my connectivity within VMWare just sucks. For some reason, pages take forever to load in Firefox (or Chrome), regardless whether I’m in bridged or NAT mode.

I’m come to the conclusion I should jump one way fully — Mac or Windows, but not both. I should just give up Windows. Finally wean myself off Outlook despite (as I’ll explain in a future post), why Outlook remains a killer product. I’ve certainly enjoyed learning about image programs like Skitch or Aviary that have made the piggish Photoshop Elements largely unnecessary. Goodness knows I’m overdue to abandon FrontPage 2002 (Shut up! If you want a nice, clean HTML authoring tool for a writer, not for a designer, this is still a killer program). Surely I know I should transition more to cloud-based programs like Google Docs.

But then there’s the cost. I keep thinking how nice a quad-core machine would be, even though I suppose I don’t need that much power, if I’m going cloud based. For the Mac, that’s like $2,500+. Oh, it comes with a beautiful 27″ monitor. But that’s another issue. I don’t know that I want one large monitor.

One thing I’ve realized is that Mac users are “maximizing” users. What I mean by that is that if you use a Mac, you’re putting windows all over the place, manually dragging them to the size you want, sometimes losing track of what’s open so that you need that F3 key that gives you an overview of everything.

On Windows, I think you tend to maximize the programs you’re using. OK, maybe it’s me. But still, rather than drag a bunch of stuff around on one huge monitor, I want to maximized and togging between stuff between multiple monitors using the Windows taskbar, which I think is better than the Mac dock.

Really, I want a Mac Mini that has a quad core and that could support three monitors. They don’t make that. I can get a dual processor that supports two monitors. If I do that, I still feel like my Windows experience will be slow.

Alternatively, I can get any number of nice Windows machines with tons of memory, quad processors and half the price. And I’ve got plenty of monitors sitting around. I’m swimming in extra monitors.

This brings up Windows 7. That old Vista laptop. Imagine that, putting Windows 7 on it makes it work just fine. And it feels better. It may be tha that the Mac got me through the Vista years.

So, I’m still debating all this. Now if Mac made a quad processor laptop that could run three displays, I’d have no debate. I’d even pay the premium — except for one issue. Non-removable batteries.

I used to do 11 hour flights. Often I’d have power, but still, having a spare battery is helpful. These days, my longest flight tends to be 6 hours. Having two batteries makes a huge difference. Oh, sure, the new Macbooks have  a 7 hour battery, supposedly. I don’t know if I believe that. I do know the many occasions I’ve found being unable to juice up, say coming off a flight and having to go right into a meeting or a conference. Having that removable, fully-charged battery is a life-saver.

As I contemplate this, all I can think is why don’t I have more choice with my Mac options. Do I really have to abandon them, because they don’t let me run three monitors as easily as I could do on Windows? Am I just not getting that I should use one or two big monitors instead.

In the end, I ultimately might just go with what I know, what works, the easy way — back to Windows, back to multiple monitors and stick with my Macbook for trips.

Postscript: See My MacBook Pro Goes Multimonitor: 4 Monitors At Once!, with thoughts on me still struggling at the end.

I live in Newport Beach, California. It is 400 miles away from the city of San Jose. Nevertheless, for some strange reason, San Jose councilmember Pete Constant has been emailing me news about his “mobile city hall” application for smartphones. The app does sound smart. Too bad his email system is so dumb.

The emails are addressed to me by name – “Dear Danny.” I got the first one on Dec. 7, telling me:

Councilmember Pete Constant is holding a press conference to announce the launch of his new blight-busting iPhone App, Mobile City Hall, built by CitySourced. Download Day participants will download the iPhone application together after a demo from the Councilmember and CitySourced founder Jason Kiesel. They will then go out in teams to perform the District’s first resident-aided blight assessment and report back about the experience at 11:00.

I particularly liked how the release went on about how download day would be on Saturday, December 12 in one paragraph then on “Saturday,” December 11 in another (today’s the 11th. It’s a Friday). Which is it? Shouldn’t the announcement of a new high-tech blight reporting tool to help city hall get the low-tech date right?

There was no link to unsubscribe from this email at the end. There were no unsubscribe instructions at all. In addition, it wasn’t sent so that I could see the exact email used to reach me. I have several email addresses that all work. Which one did they grab?

And how did they get it? I wasn’t asked to confirm my subscription for announcement from a councilman who serves a district far from the city I live in.

On the 8th, I got three more emails about the news. Pete really wanted me to know about it. And at this point, I found a contact address and emailed saying to please stop sending me this stuff. I got an email back saying I’d been removed from the email database.

Apparently not. This morning, I got another email. I emailed back that I still hadn’t moved, I still didn’t live in San Jose, and I still had no interest in this news. Then a few hours later, I got yet another announcement.

So, Pete, some suggestions if you’re being all high-tech with city hall stuff these days

• Don’t email people who haven’t confirmed they want to be added to your list
• Always show the email address you send to in the To: field or
• Ensure there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom that allows for someone to remove the specific email you’ve used

Enjoy Download Day tomorrow. Sorry I’ll miss the light lunch. Best in San Jose, from the city of Newport Beach.

I came close to killing my Facebook account this week. As I delved even deeper to the supposed privacy I have or don’t have on the service, I wondered why on earth I even have an account at all. And I kept thinking of Anil Dash’s post earlier this year, Google’s Microsoft Moment. Was this now Facebook’s turn to for people to see it as having gone evil?

After I examined Facebook’s recommended unprivacy changes (see Facebook’s Privacy Upgrade Recommends I Be Less Private), I then read the EFF’s summary, Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I was disturbed to discover things I previously had as options were no longer in my control. For instance:

Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of — as “publicly available information” or “PAI.” Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated. For example, although you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting — shown below — has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.

Seriously, I can’t make who my friends are private? Well, today I can, because Facebook backtracked on that. And so now I have to backtrack and find where that setting is and check how it’s configured.

That, in turn, is exhausting. Back to my previous post, remember when Facebook asked me and others to reconsider our privacy settings with this page:

That gives the impression that if you make you decisions on the items listed, you’ve covered all the privacy issues you might have on Facebook.

Not so. Those aren’t my “privacy settings” as billed. Those are privacy settings just for my profile data. But if I go to the main privacy screen, I discover I’ve also got privacy settings for contact info, applications, search and a block list:

Here I discover that everyone can see my web site:

That’s cool, but when did I set this? And why didn’t Facebook prompt me to review that setting?

In another screen, I discover my friends can share my birthday. That’s my birthday that I tagged elsewhere as something to be shared with no one:

In yet another screen, this one not even within the privacy area but instead as part of my account settings, I discover that ads on platform pages can be configured to show information to my friends:

I don’t even know what that means. Honestly, I have no clue what ads on platform pages are. But I turned that option off.

I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to try and figure out the myriad of ways that Facebook may or may not want to use my information. That’s why I almost shut down my entire account this week. It would be a hell of a lot easier than this mess.

See, I’m not a big Facebook user. No offense to Facebook, but most of what it offers just isn’t my thing. If I want to share pictures, I use Flickr. If I want to share videos, I use YouTube. If I want to connect with my friends, I have email or other methods. If I want to update the world with whatever’s on my mind, I use Twitter. Pretty much, I don’t need the Facebook “Office” suite of social sharing tools. I know Facebook is great for many people. I hear that first hand talking to some friends. I just don’t use it that way.

As an online marketer, I know that Facebook is a thriving, important venue. So I kind of have to keep an account. But I’m also giving up in some ways. This isn’t the place I’m planning to social network, because I just can’t expend the time to decide what I might be sharing, might not be sharing, what my friends might share, what friends of friends might share and then recheck all those settings every six months when Facebook does something different.

In fact, most of my time on Facebook has been dealing with friend requests. I’ve got over 200 stacked up. I officially gave up this week and started a fan page. That’s going to be how I share on Facebook going forward (and dammit, Facebook, make it so Notes can import information from multiple sources — I want to feed in Twitter, my personal blog and my work articles. And also make it so you only take summaries of articles. I’m kind of ticked at you deciding to reprint stuff I don’t want reprinted).

I’ll add, it’s been a pretty disturbing week on the privacy front with the internet in general. Last week, Google opted everyone into personalized results without any fanfare (Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention). It got a blog post; real time search launched a few days later got a huge glitzy press conference (see Google Launches Real Time Search). And Google’s taking some well deserved hits from CEO Eric Schmidt saying in a documentary last week:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

I don’t think the people at Google are evil. I don’t think people at Facebook are evil. I think they both have good intentions and believe they’re doing the right things. But I also know I sure lost a lot of faith in Facebook this week.

For related articles, see Techmeme.

Did you throw away your Clear card? That might have been too fast. Former Clear competitor FLO says after the New Year, it hopes to relaunch at airports under TSA guidance. From today’s press release:

The RT program was effectively suspended on June 22, 2009 after the financial failure of Verified Identity Pass, Inc.’s CLEAR program.  FLO will be re-launching RT at major airports in January under current TSA guidelines.

“RT represents a tremendous opportunity to impact millions of travelers each year,” said Glenn Argenbright, FLO Corporate Chairman.   “Our agreement with Cogent is truly a game changer for the program.  Over the last several years, roughly 200,000 members have enrolled in the program, paying annual subscription fees of between $100 and $200.  This is an impressive figure when you consider that there were fewer than 30 RT enrollment centers nationwide.  Given Cogent’s network of more than 1,000 biometric enrollment locations in the United States, coupled with an aggressive expansion strategy for new markets and airports, we expect to vastly expand the availability and convenience of the program.”

What’s happening is that FLO will partner with Cogent to take in the biometrics that the Registered Traveler program requires, under TSA rules.

Of course, it’s not like those biometrics were ever needed to get you past security. That’s not how RT worked, in the end. Instead, you just got walked to the front of the line.

So why on earth is FLO going through the hassle of reviving this stupid system? Why not just partner with a bunch of airports that are willing to have someone run “walk to the front of the security line” lanes? You don’t need biometrics for that. You just need to stand in front of a TSA agent who will look at your ordinary non-biometically enhanced regular ID.

NOTE: Fred Fisher, principal & managing partner for FLO, emailed me this after I posted about why do the biometrics stuff:

Soon to be released TSA guidelines may (will) include background checks and eventually lane benefits. Plus the airlines and airports would push hard against a “flash pass”

Meanwhile, back to Clear. Under the terms of the RT program, any RT provider is supposed to accept the cards issued by another one. So those Clear cards? Maybe they are still valid. Maybe not. Be nice if mine was. It was good through 2065!

NOTE: Fisher said about honoring Clear cards. They said:

Not required, but we are certainly considering. Stay tuned.

Past coverage on this topic from me:

• Registered Traveler Meltdown: Fraud Action Against Clear? Investigate The TSA?.
• Registered Traveler Meltdown: Class Action Suit, Preferred Traveler In Trouble & Anyone For Fraud Investigation?
• TSA Stays Silent As Its Registered Traveler Program Melts Down
• Clear Airport Security Program Closes Abruptly; Goodbye Flo, Too?

Facebook’s challenge to me (and others), as it has tried to compete with Twitter, has been that so much of the user data it wants to share with the world as content to attract visitors and eyeballs has been tied up behind the the privacy barriers set by its own users. How do you get those users to be more public? Apparently, offer “new” privacy options under the guise of “user control” but which really seem designed as a wholescale attempt to get users to open up. I’ll be a case study of this in action.

I logged into my Facebook account just now and got this big message:

You couldn’t miss it and kudos to Facebook for being really in-your-face about the change. In contrast, Google shifted to personalizing everyone’s search results last week with only a quiet Friday afternoon blog post as notification.

Still, I’ll take back some of the kudos for what happened when I followed the link to the Update Your Privacy Settings page:

Notice that Facebook is giving me two options, to maintain my “Old Settings” versus sharing information with Everyone, Friends Of Friends or just Friends, depending on the category. There are eight categories of information:

• About me
• Family & Relationships
• Word & Education
• Posts I Create
• Photos & Videos of Me
• Birthday
• Religious & Political Views
• Address

On the face of it (no pun intended), it looks like Facebook’s trying to get me to open up three categories to the world that previously appeared closed. These were all tagged as recommended from changing from my old settings to Everyone:

• Family & Relationships
• Word & Education
• Posts I Create

Well, what were my old settings for these categories (NOTE: see comment below, if you hover over the Old Settings option for each category, THEN your old settings are shown. This escaped me, and I expect others). And didn’t I have more options than just opening them to everyone? I had to open a new window to see what my old settings were:

Family & Relationships? Previously I had that locked down to sharing with only those in my networks and friends. For some reason, Facebook has determined that I should share the information with everyone.

Now, the whole networks thing always seemed dumb. I put myself in the Silicon Valley network because you could have only one at the time I did that, and despite living in England at the time, that was more related to me than other options.

As part of the today’s Facebook changes, the entire networks thing is going away. From the Facebook press release, network sharing disappears, with only these options remaining:

• Friends
• Friends of Friends
• Everyone
• Customized

Customized isn’t explained well in the release. It means that you can pick specific people or only lock it to yourself:

So my “old” settings for Family & Relationship info aren’t something that Facebook recommends that I keep. Nor can I keep those settings. If networks is going away, I can hardly share with “Friends & Networks.” But rather than recommend a conservative setting, Facebook tells me to go completely public.

I can’t even get into the Silicon Valley network to see how many people I was sharing this information with before. Maybe 25,000? I’m guessing that’s way more than were really in it. I also have about 1,600 friends. So I shared the info with about 30,000 people previously. Now Facebook thinks I should share the same with billions of people around the world.

Why? What was the logic behind deciding that my relationship data is recommended to share with the world but for some odd reason, my About Me description that says “Enough about me, how about you” was something Facebook felt should retain my existing closed privacy restrictions.

Really, Facebook should have recommended a setting of sharing with only my friends. Why weren’t all these options listed. Why did it become a choice between Everyone versus Old, which mean being having to hunt down whatever my old settings actually were.

Of course, from a privacy standpoint, I’m not that worried about the information leaking out. I mean seriously, if I share it with even my 1,600 “friends,” many of whom aren’t really close friends but simply people I’ve chosen to let into my Facebook friend network, that information is hardly locked down. For the most part, I figure if I put it on Facebook, it’ll get out to the world.

For Education & Work, I was already sharing that with the world, so no harm, no foul. Same for the Posts By Me setting, though I’ve lost track of when my Status Updates were considered “posts.” Perhaps I missed that change along the way.

Further down, Facebook wants me to chose between sharing to Friends Of Friend and my old settings for these categories:

• Photos & Videos of Me
• Birthday
• Religious & Political Views

Photos & Videos, I’d previously shared only with Friends. Now Facebook wants me to be more liberal and include Friends Of Friends. Why?

My Birthday info and Religious & Political Views were both for Friends & Network. Rather than be conservative and recommend Friends only, it again is more liberal in my view.

Finally, there’s my Address info, which Facebook recommends I keep as my Old Settings. Of course, when I look to see what my old settings are, I don’t even see an option for my address info listed. That’s probably because I never gave Facebook my address.

What I do see are things listed with old settings that aren’t called out to my attention on the privacy update page, such as:

• Photo Albums
• Allowing friends to post on my wall
• Posts by Friends
• Comments on posts

Why? No idea.

Overall, it feels like this all could have been handled better. Facebook wants me to be more liberal in half the categories of information I’d restricted, by my measure. That doesn’t feel like a privacy upgrade.

For related stories, see Techmeme.

Periodically, I shrink my Outlook PST file. For one reason, it’s easier to back it up manually from time to time when it’s smaller. For another, I guess I feel things just run better when it’s small and tidy.

Today, I shrank my file from over 1.1 GB to 80MB, a pretty drastic reduction. Being excited about such things, I tweeted it, which resulted in a bunch of people asking how. So here are my how make your Outlook PST files smaller tips!

1) Delete sent mail. But wait, you want to save that sent mail? Two options:

1A) Archive via Gmail or another hosted email system, so that you have a permanent online archive of anything you’ve emailed. See my Moving From SpamCop To Gmail & Loving POP Download With Archiving for more about this.

1B) Make additional PST files and move mail into these. For example, I have two PST files active. One is my main file called Danny, which is where my current mail resides. The other is called Archive, where I have a 2008 folder within it:

Over the course of 2009, I’ve periodically taken email that I want to have a local backup of and copied from the “Sent Items” folder in my Danny PST file over to the 2008 Mail folder within the Archive PST file.

Down the line, I’ll make another PST file called 2008. My 2008 Mail folder will get moved into into that. I’ll then detach the 2008 PST file and save in case I ever need it. I have a series of these for each year. Meanwhile, my Archive PST file remains as an active holding place for mail. It’ll gain a new 2009 Mail folder.

2) Empty Deleted Items Folder. Yes, even though you deleted that email, it’s still sitting around in your Deleted Items folder making your PST file bigger until you really delete it. Do that by right clicking on the folder, then selecting the Empty option:

I usually only keep about 1 month’s worth of deleted mail at a time, just in case I need to go back and find something locally (such as when I’m on a airplane).

3) Compress! Right click on your PST file (not the folders within it, but the main file itself as listed in the navigation pane. Then select Properties:

A new window will appear, your Outlook Today window. Select Advanced, which makes your Personal Folders window appear:

Choose Compact Now. Sit back and get something to drink. In about 10 minutes or so, depending on the size of your PST file, it will be dramatically reduced in size.

Why go through all this hassle. Why not just use Gmail directly? Short story is that Outlook’s a fantastic email management program. Long story is for a future post, where I detail why I like using both Outlook and Gmail together.

Awesome. I do all this work writing about how to be found in search engines and social media, but I could have instead just waited for Best Buy to do it for me. From my email today, a pitch on how they’ll get me found:

They don’t actually do it — a company called CloudProfile does it. It’s free, and, uh, if I were a business, this would probably be the last thing I’d want to use to get found. But gosh, I’ve got my profile now. I can’t wait for all that Google-Facebook-Twitter traffic to roll in.

Yesterday, despite being a Southwest A-List member, I received my first “B” boarding number. Curious about why this happened — A-Listers are supposed to get the best “A” numbers — I asked Southwest. Sorry, that’s “proprietary” and “confidential” information, I was told.

Wow. Who’d have thought the order that Southwest hands out boarding passes was that big of a secret? And more important, who are they keeping such a big secret from? Perhaps A-List members who don’t get as many early boarding spots thanks to the new fees that fee-less Southwest Airlines now has?

Southwest Airlines Flying Tips from me covers how boarding on Southwest works. It’s a wonderful system, where the lower the number you have (A1 beats A15, A15 beats B34), the earlier you can board and get a good seat. It’s efficient and works well.

That same flying tips article I mentioned also covers how you can get early boarding by purchasing a Business Select fare or by becoming an Southwest Airlines A-List member. After I wrote it, Southwest introduced a new $10 “Early Bird” program that lets you book early boarding for $10. Some people have derided Southwest — which prides itself for not charging fees — as effectively charging an early boarding “fee” through this program.

When the Early Bird program launched, my question was how would that impact the early seating I was supposed to get as an A-List member. Boarding is promised this way:

• Business Select: Guaranteed A1-A15 spots
• A-List Members: Promises to “most likely” give you  A-16 through A60 spots
• Early Bird: Promises to improve your “seat selection” but doesn’t guarantee A-15 through A-60 spots

Now since I joined the A-List program, I’ve typically gotten boarding numbers in the A20s-A30 range. I’ve also been higher or lower than that. It’s worked well. I’ve never had a middle seat. I’ve usually gotten the exact seat I want, even.

But yesterday, I was taken aback. I checked in and got a B1 boarding spot. While I know the A-List program doesn’t guarantee an A spot, I still wondered how this could happen.

In particular, I’d booked my ticket two weeks before I flew. Southwest is supposed to automatically hold my boarding spot when I book. That means when I booked, there were 60 other people who had spots reserved for them. I know that 15 of those spots were held for Business Select people. But the remaining 45? Were there really 45 other A-List people or early bird people who had booked before me on this flight, two weeks before it departed?

Who knows? Well, Southwest does. But as I lead with, they’re not saying. The customer service response I received:

Thank you for your e-mail regarding Rapid Rewards A-List Membership. As a longtime Customer, your concerns are extremely important to us, and we appreciate the opportunity to respond.

We’re so sorry that you did not receive a higher priority boarding pass on your recent flight as one of our valued Rapid Rewards A-List Members. Certainly, we understand that some of our A-Listers are curious to know the method used to assign boarding positions to those who qualify for reserved boarding privileges. Unfortunately, we cannot share this proprietary information as it is considered confidential (and must remain so) in order to maintain our competitive advantage. We apologize for any disappointment.

We truly appreciate your loyalty, and we hope to continue to enjoy the privilege of your patronage. We look forward to welcoming you onboard again soon.

In the end, it just feels weird. None of Southwest’s competitors offer a similar boarding system that I know of. If they do, I find it difficult to believe Southwest would lose a competitive advantage because people could now board the same way on other airlines as they do on Southwest. That hardly seems the primary reason for people to book Southwest flights.

Instead, I’m stuck feeling like the real reason I got a low boarding number is that Southwest is predicting ahead of time how many people it thinks will cough up for early bird boarding and holding those seats back from A-Listers. Maybe there are other reasons. Pity it’s so confidential and proprietary that we can’t know.

Connect the dots, see if you can spot the picture. Some news publishers call visitors they get via search from Google worthless. Meanwhile, you’ve got online media companies directly looking at search activity as a way to make money. Who’s not getting it?

My If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then? post last week covers the latest anti-Google trend, to argue that millions of visitors its sends for free to news sites are nearly worthless. I disagree, as my post explains, as do my comments at Lookie Lou isn’t really a customer from Steve Yelvington.

Today, there’s news that AOL is almost finished with a system to deliver news stories in response to searches. From the Wall Street Journal article about AOL’s plans:

The predictions, it says, are based on a wide swath of data AOL collects, from the Web searches people make on its site to the sites visited by subscribers to its Internet services….

AOL says its new system determined that the most popular topic on the Web last Tuesday was “crib recalls,” following news of a massive recall by Stork Craft Manufacturing of Canada. AOL had only one story on its sites on the recall. But, if the new system had been live, editors would have geared up to supply stories on the subject from a number of angles, the company says.

Now where have I heard this before. Oh, yes — Yahoo does this. As I wrote last year in Yahoo: How Open When You Compete With Others?:

Scott Moore — who’s in charge of Yahoo’s media operations, — started talking about Yahoo News. He described how during the Olympics, Yahoo could watch the query stream coming in real-time and craft articles that matched the most popular requests….

Um, but aren’t those publishers also your partners? I mean, as part of the open mantra of the day, we were told how Yahoo is planning to make it even easier for publishers to put their content on Yahoo News pages. That’s nice, but doesn’t it kind of also backstab those partners if you’re also vying with them for page views?

I talked with Moore after his presentation a bit. He agreed there was competition that was happening. Indeed, he kind of smiled and said it was “coopetition,” smiling I think because on the web, we’ve been kind of used to companies that compete with each other also working with each other….

Moore also got me riled when he talked about how Yahoo’s openness can be seen in terms of the sites it links to. I didn’t get the quote exactly, but it was something like: “There aren’t really many other news organization that will put in links that take you away from their own content.”Except Google, of course — where practically every link takes you away from Google News, with the key exception of some wire content. And in that case, Google does that primarily because the AP was threatening to sue it.

Again, I asked Moore about this later, and he made a good point of explaining that Google News isn’t a news organization — it’s not a news publisher. True, but I guess that brings me back to thinking that Yahoo shouldn’t be a news publisher either.

You get all that? Yahoo rarely takes the same heat as Google does over Yahoo News, despite it having three times the traffic and actually having journalists who work to compete against publishers. Meanwhile you’ve got news publishers who pretend that Google is somehow a news publisher. Moore certainly doesn’t believe that — nor does Moore believe those search visitors are worthless. Instead, they’re a gold mine he was tapping at Yahoo.

Was tapping? Oh, yes — Moore’s now at MSN, as executive producer in the US. You know, the recently redesigned portal owned by Microsoft, the company that is is currently positioned as some type of newspaper savior versus Google because of rumored talks for Microsoft’s Bing to exclusively list News Corporation content (see Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An “OPEC For News”).

Now in the past, Moore’s not suggested he plans to ramp up MSN’s original content to the degree that he was pushing at Yahoo. But still, he does want MSN to have its own material in addition to being a news aggregator (those terrible creatures as viewed by some news publishers). As he said in a Techflash interview earlier this year:

The thing that worked really well for me at Yahoo was the combination of aggregation — licensed content — and a small amount of original content that you can’t get anywhere else….

I don’t think it would be wise for Microsoft to go into a huge amount of original content creation. They already have some and probably it’s a matter of tuning that programming and seeing if there are some other things that we might want to do that are original that will set us apart and attract people to us as a result of it.

In the same interview, he talked about being interested in local news and information, something that he said again is a key area for MSN after it relaunched.

I’m not saying newspapers should immediately start writing anything to tap into search traffic. In fact, I’ve warned against that. But I do think they need to understand that visitors from search are indeed valuable. Some of Google’s competitors sure think so.

Like many, I got a laugh out of the Daily Show piece earlier this year poking fun at the New York Times for selling “aged news.” But a talk I heard by Kevin Marks this summer made me realize that newspapers don’t push aged news. They push TiVoed news, or recorded news or stored news. Call it what you want, thinking of newspapers as efficient storage devices, rather than being out-of-date, might increase their respect these days and potentially, their value.

Sadly, I can’t find a video or slides of Kevin’s talk, which he gave at Foo Camp 2009 at the end of August. But it was based off his The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing post. If I can find any multimedia resources, I’ll add them later.

In his talk, Kevin discussed how despite our current infatuation with “real time” whatever, there are cases where we prefer that things be stalled, stored — yes, even aged. In fact, that we’ll even pay for delay. That we’ll pay a lot for that “free” television show to be recorded on our DVRs, so that we can view it when convenient. We’ll pay for the storage of music on our iPods, so we can listen when we prefer.

It was a really good talk and got me thinking. Hey, newspapers store news for us as well. They’re actually a convenient digest of what’s happened, all carefully compiled for our perusal. So I tweeted back in September:

newspapers aren’t aged news. they’re TiVoed news. it’s a convenience we pay for. but they don’t position themselves that way

That got a lot of retweets, many of them positive, so I’ve been meaning to get a proper post up about it. Robert Scoble finally got me to do it, after tweeting this evening “I wonder how many of them would subscribe to week old newspaper.”

I’m not trying to get into the middle of a “real time news” / “Twitter news” is good or bad argument between mainstream sources. I think they both have their places and both have advantages and disadvanges.

Instead, I mainly wanted to say again that what Kevin pointed out is true. We value storage. We pay for it. We like that convenience. And newspapers are news storage devices.

Usually each day, I read a paper at lunch time, either the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times. It’s a break away from the computer, and a chance for me to catch up on the world away from the tech and search-dominated stuff that consumes me when I’m online.

I can read about some political development or disaster knowing full well that some of it is already outdated, and that I could run into the house and get fresher news on my computer or television. Despite this, stories that are even a day old are still useful. They get me up to speed. They bring me some recorded news that I haven’t yet encountered. They’re valuable to me.

Newspapers in print are going to find it harder and harder to be places we turn to for breaking news. Online is going to win. We know this already. But as storage devices, newspapers have got online beat.

On a mailing list I’m on where newspapers and books were discussed, there was an interesting exercise people were doing. They were walking down the aisles on airplane flights and noticing how many people were working on laptops, reading kindles, reading magazines, books and yes, newspapers. When I tried this on a short flight, newspapers were by far the “device” still in use.

Hey, that’s just one flight. It’s not a comprehensive survey. But I still see newspapers in plenty of places. And in a world where people seem to be predicting the death of papers or abandoning them, let’s add storage to the list of things that papers provide. They’re the iPods for news, never needing batteries.

If you missed it, here’s the Daily Show segment:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

A few years ago, I did a post called Watching The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade From Abroad, which talked about how hard it is to view the parade from outside the US. I thought I’d do a little update.

I think it’s still hard to watch the parade outside American, given some feedback I received from people last Thanksgiving. It’s ironic, because you’ll constantly hear from parade commentators how people are supposedly watching the event worldwide on television. It’s a mystery how that’s happening.

NBC — which broadcasts the Macy’s Parade in the US — has a page about the event here. It says nothing about watching the show online, nor does the NBC home page have info. Typically, I don’t think they’ve done live streams. However, some NBC affiliate stations in local markets might do this. Here’s a list to check. Be aware that if you’re outside the US, they might detect this and not stream video.

Macy’s itself also has a page about the parade. And sadly, it doesn’t offer a live broadcast, either.

Your best option is probably the one I outlined in my original post, EarthCam. Their webcam of the event returns for 2009. In fact, you have a choice of 11 different cameras, one in HD. You’ll find the page leading to them all here. You won’t get the commentary or the music, but it’s something.

Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you may be celebrating the American holiday. Belated Thanksgiving greetings to Canadian readers