Garrett Kelley

Why are navel rings so popular with women these days? I swear, every time I see a woman with a bare midriff in magazines or on television she has a navel ring. I just do not understand the appeal. They make the woman look cheap, slutty, low class, and it is certainly not sexy. When I think of navel rings I think trailer trash. It is even worse when a woman with a navel ring wears a tight fitting shirt and you can see the jewelry poking out from under shirt. So gross!

I would like to find whomever “invented” personalized ringback tones and personally punch them in the face. This person deserves it. Personalized ringback tones are the most annoying “feature” of mobile phones today. Music ringtones take a close second place.

Most people listen to crappy music. Why these people feel the need to subject me to it while I am calling them is beyond me. I already hate talking on the phone, and having to listen to the crappy song of the week while calling someone only makes the experience worse. All I need to verify that my call is being successfully received by the other person is the standard 440 Hz + 480 Hz tone.

I am now instituting a new policy. If you feel the need to subject me to a personalized ringback tone when I call you, I no longer feel the need to call you.

I have quit Facebook. Why, might you ask? There isn’t one answer or one reason. Truthfully, it is a collection of reasons and a decision I came to over the last several months. The one conclusion I came to which actually allowed me to delete my account is the realization that I do not need it.

MySpace is a cesspool of degenerates, shoddy html, poor design, and oh yes…music. I believe this is the direction Facebook is heading. Facebook users are now facing an onslaught of friend requests from people whom they causally know (at best),  shady applications, pointless quizzes, and let us not forget status updates which you MUST repost if you support the cause of the hour. Not to mention that you have to read every couples love fest back and forth to each other. This is one problem I really do not understand. There are several options for communicating PRIVATELY to your partner how you feel. Email, text message, instant message, or even a private Facebook message are all excellent choices. If you and your partner feel the need to constantly inundate your Facebook friends with lovey-dovey public messages to each other, perhaps you should re-evaluate your relationship. Are you trying to convince each other you are in love or the public at large? Ether answer is cause for concern. The friend requests. Oh, the friend requests. These come from people you casually meet in the journey of life, friend’s parents, or people whom you have not talked to in a decade. The problem here is that EVERYONE is on Facebook these days. That being said, Facebook does not make it easy enough to share what I want to with only the people I want to.  I wistfully remember the days when Facebook membership was limited to college students.

Another problem is that Facebook is becoming too large for itself. Facebook is attempting to do everything. The problem with doing everything is that it does nothing well and everything mediocre. Take Twitter and Foursquare for example. These two companies offer a core service which they excel at. So far they only offer their respective core services and I hope they stick to them. Facebook is stepping on everyone else’s toes by trying to integrate other companies’ offerings into their product portfolio. Facebook is on a path to follow Microsoft in their footsteps. Becoming a company so large and unmanageable that it cannot offer a quality product customers can believe in and rely upon. The current similarity between these two companies is that their product is so widely used that people use them simply because everyone else does. Note: While I am a user of Microsoft products, they do have their issues.

Perhaps I just have a different idea of what Facebook should be used for. I would like to use it to communicate with my friends without all of the fluffy nonsense. I would like a simple and straightforward service to share my random thoughts, useful things I find while browsing the net, or  other things I believe my friends would be interested in. I do not need or want requests to join stupid causes, take some pointless quiz, or become “friends” with someone I have not talked to in over a decade. Especially those people that send me a friend request, but after becoming “friends” never actually communicate with me. I do not want to read your pointless status update about how you support some random cause or how much you love your partner. I simply do not care. I will stick with Twitter.

All of you have several other ways of contacting me: by phone, SMS, email, Google Talk, Twitter (http://twitter.com/neuor), or this site.

I do not consider leaving Facebook a loss, but rather liberation from a self-serving company.

I’m thinking about quitting Facebook and you should consider leaving too. My reason is simple: I do not trust Facebook with my information. More importantly I do not trust Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have repeatedly demonstrated their disrespect for their users and their privacy. Facebook touts the granular control of their privacy controls. Sure, they are there, but for the average person are almost impossible to use or understand. Furthermore, Facebook on multiple occasions has experienced privacy leaks. For example, earlier this year a glitch caused private messages to go to the wrong users (link). Zuckerberg himself has demonstrated disrespect for Facebook users’ privacy and his own lack of moral standards. For example: when Zuckerberg was building The Facebook, he was also allegedly working on a competing project, HarvardConnection, with other students. Instead of building HarvardConnection Zuckerberg stole their ideas and built his own social network (link). Another example is his instant messaging conversation (link) where he labels Facebook users as “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their private data. More recently a New York Times blogger shared that Zuckerberg does not believe in privacy (link). Clearly Zuckerberg’s interests, company, and money come first. The safety and privacy of Facebook users are of little concern to him.

Facebook needs to restore trust in their company. To do this Facebook needs to make a couple of changes. First, change the default privacy settings for user data from public to private. ALL of my information on Facebook should be private until I expressly change it to become public. Not the other way around. When I delete my Facebook account ALL of my information and data should be COMPLETELY and PERMANENTLY deleted. Rather, Facebook holds onto your data for 14 days in case you change your mind. I can see this as useful for people who are unsure they want to separate from Facebook, but there should also be an option to delete my data instantly. Making the situation even worse is the fact that if you delete your account not all of your data is removed. Facebook Help states “Copies of some material (photos, notes, etc.) may remain in our servers for technical reasons…” (link). What is SO hard about deleting my data? Please, just remove it from your servers!

The one thing we all need to remember is that Facebook’s goal is to make money. To make money Facebook sells advertising space. Facebook uses your information to show you advertisements you might be interested in. While Facebook states that no information which can identify you is used for this purpose, there is nothing stopping them from using identifiable information. Combine that with Facebook’s demonstrated disregard for user privacy and I believe it is only a matter of time.

Do I trust my information with other companies, to some degree I do. Can I actually trust any of them? Maybe, maybe not. The emphasis here is that Facebook and Zuckerberg have repeatedly demonstrated a blatant disrespect and disregard for their users’ privacy. This we cannot ignore.

In some circles it is the holy grail of the BlackBerry. Countless hours have been wasted in bathrooms, airports, buses, subways, etc. by people all over the world playing the game of BrickBreaker. I myself, have fallen victim to all that is BlackBerry BrickBreaker. That being said, I am here to tell you that BrickBreaker is not all that it is cracked up to be.

I find the game more frustrating than anything. My largest compliant is that if a data transfer occurs while playing, it seems to bog the game down. Now that in it of itself is bad enough. To further compound the problem, when this happens the ball jumps randomly around the screen! I’ve even seen the ball go directly through bricks without breaking them. WTF? Also, there appears to be a magic space where the corners of two bricks meet. I can’t tell you how many times the ball has “slipped” through this little hole. Fuck you ball!

Lastly, the paddle. Oh, how I hate you paddle. I depend on the WHOLE paddle to play the game. Apparently the programmers did not intend for this. You see, sometimes the ball goes right thorough those curved corners. To make matters worse, sometimes the ball goes through the whole damn paddle. The paddle can go to hell! Now should the paddle be still when the ball hits it, the ball may just decide to speed up after bouncing off the paddle for no apparent reason. Who the fuck programmed this piece of shit?

Couple all of this with the fact that sometimes when I try to feather the paddle, it goes the complete opposite direction of the trackball! Now, I do attribute this more to sketchiness in the trackball than I do to the programming of BrickBreaker. Nonetheless, it is infuriating!

BrickBreaker is useful for one thing: instilling within me the strong desire to throw my beloved BlackBerry at the wall. You won’t win BrickBreaker! I’ll thwort you yet!