Archive for December 2007

I’ve been semi-addicted to Scrabulous lately - basically, it’s a Facebook application that allows you to play Scrabble with your Facebook friends. While I’m trying to limit the games I play, it’s a great chance to play games with people I don’t see every day. I’m not into MMOs, and Scrabble can be a casual game - check when you want, play a word, come back in a couple days.

I had been playing a game with Vince (Japan), Eric (Lincoln, NE) and Jason (Omaha, NE). Vince and I were neck and neck for most of the game, and at the end it looked like he was going to win. In fact, the word-by-word score showed Vince winning, yet somehow the win went to me:

Vince, determined to have an untarnished Scrabble record, encouraged me to investigate the discrepancy. I’m nice, so I did. I opened the “Contact Us” page on Scrabulous, and found there was an FAQ about scoring already:

Scoring is not correct.
The words are scored perfectly and there are no bugs. To double-check, please right click on the board and choose NUMBERED BOARD. For more details, please see the Rules of Scrabulous.

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Adobe, Adobe, Adobe…

A couple years ago, I wrote about Windows XP’s habit of updating overnight and restarting the computer without user input. This caused its share of problems, but today Adobe topped it.

Back story: Apparently it was a big update day for Adobe, because I had almost 200 MB of updates to download and install. This process was taking a couple hours, so I went into a meeting with my coworkers. The meeting ends and I return to my computer. After a couple minutes, an unnerving dialog appears:

Your computer will restart in one minute.

And here I am with Visual Studio open, an unsaved mock-up in Illustrator, two functional specs, and a half-written email. Freaking out, I desperately try to decide what to save first (meanwhile my boss is asking me what’s wrong since I’m making such a spectacle).

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Complaints abound over the… enthusiastic nature with which some Facebook applications try to get you to sign up. I guess it’s all about the numbers. But as I watched my notifications over the course of a week, I was intrigued by what I saw. At the start of the week, I was being notified about these items:

The items under “Other Applications” aren’t applications that I added to my profile. In fact, I don’t know where they came from at all, or why Live Blog is checked but others aren’t.

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Digg’s buzzing today about a prototype for disappearing car doors; basically, doors that slide into the car instead of opening up like normal car doors.

Neat idea. And it may even be adopted by a car company or two. But it’s wasted money for an unusable idea.

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When MoveOn.org created a Facebook petition group to protest Facebook’s Beacon, I joined because I agreed with the principle. Like I said the last time Facebook rolled out a feature that disregarded users’ privacy, what user’s want and what they’ll react negatively to isn’t intuitive. Last time, users rallied together of their own accord to get privacy enhancements ushered in. This time, MoveOn.org led the charge. I’m just glad that Facebook left out the “Awesome!” button this time. -shudder-

Fast forward 3 weeks. Facebook Beacon has been completely overhauled with privacy features, and for most people, Beacon isn’t broadcasting any information for them. In fact, the owners of the petition group declared victory over a week ago:

Yet MoveOn.org’s Facebook Privacy group is at 77,000+ members and climbing, by over 1,000 people each day!

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It may have taken a couple months, but I can finally say I’ve settled in on the east coast. I’m down to two boxes (OK, I’ve been down to two boxes for a month now… which makes me wonder if I actually need whatever is in those two boxes), and I’ve got my apartment arranged more or less the way I want it.

Settling in has come with it’s share of interesting moments. My apartment is half of a 2-story duplex that used to be occupied by the landlords for the complex. The benefit is that they completely repainted and remodeled everything before I moved in! The downside is that nobody got the memo that the landlords moved out.

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