Jason's Notes About Stuff

Alright folks, I'm calling it. It's quite sad, but as of 6pm Pacific on Feb 21, 2018, Facebook is officially over. Soon it will join the ranks of MySpace, Friendster, Slashdot, Digg, Orkut, and Google+ as dusty old sites that nobody really uses anymore. It had a good run. For a while, it was the perfect way to keep in touch with friends and relatives, but somewhere along the line, it lost its way. And unfortunately, I don't see a simple way back. Let's hope they can prove me wrong. But otherwise, I'm looking forward to seeing what's next. What is next? Twitter? Snapchat? Instagram? I feel like they're all mostly dead too. What's coming down the pipeline to help us all connect online? Or are we all slowly moving back to our smaller, more manageable offline groups? RIP Facebook, 2004-2018

"Should I buy Bitcoin?" This is a question I've heard a lot the past few weeks, so I'd like to quickly answer it in a public forum. My official answer is: "You should spend no more on Bitcoin than you'd be comfortable putting into a Vegas slot machine." As far as I'm concerned: Bitcoin is  not an investment . Bitcoin is a speculative, risky commodity gamble . If you do choose to put some chips down, remember that Bitcoin (BTC) can be subdivided up to 8 decimals places. Although fees make it difficult to trade very small amounts, you can easily trade down to 0.001 BTC, which at publishing time is worth about $15 US Dollars (USD). So at least you're not required to put a large amount of money at risk to play the game. Coinbase, one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges (where you can trade "real money" for Bitcoins) recently sent out an email: "Please invest responsibly." This might as well read: "Pleas...

A million dollars isn't cool , but do you know what would be cool? If you could target posts to your friends the same way you with Facebook ads. When you " boost your post " from a Facebook Page, you can target your audience by Location, Age, Gender, and Interests. The interface looks like this: I think it would be really interesting if you do something similar when you created a personal post.

For the longest time, I've been searching for a quick, easy way to take quick meeting notes. I used to use a text editor called SciTE, the same editor I use for quick code editing, but I find managing files in a file system to be a real pain. When I had an iPad for a while, I liked the default Notes application, but hated that there was no cloud storage or synchronization. (No, the crappy Gmail sync doesn't count) Then I heard about EverNote . I thought that was the answer to my prayers, but unfortunately those guys decided  to add every conceivable feature in the universe and have ended up with a bloated mess that takes an hour and a half to load. There's a bunch of others I've tried too, like UberNote , Springpad , and the Diigo mishmash of apps. But nothing was small enough, or simple enough for my taste. So I did what any good developer does. I created a "learning" project to scratch my own itch. I used technology I've discussed at the...

Compare my company's website:    http://www.syllogisticsoftware.com/ with this one:    http://mindfulltech.com/ Yikes! They stole my intellectual property ! So should I go and sue them? Issue a "cease and desist" letter? Ummm... No. Why not? Because I'm not a moron and I don't have time and money to waste . Large corporations and entertainment companies waste countless hours and millions of dollars suing people about their intellectual property . Their products and businesses suffer greatly due to this distraction. It's a digital world. People are going to copy stuff. It's easy and free . I choose to not be bothered, and instead, focus my efforts on making my business better . Maybe they should too.

In Gmail, it's really easy to see how long it's been since you emailed someone, because it displays it right in the interface: Lately I've noticed something very strange. Most people seem to respond: Within 24hrs Exactly 3 days later Exactly 7 days later Or never Has anyone else noticed a similar pattern? I wonder if it has anything to do with how people manage (or mis-manage) their Inbox. How long do you usually take to respond to emails?

Last January, I bought a Panasonic Lumix camera when living in New Zealand. I was wary of buying something expensive overseas, but was assured that it came with a 1-year "worldwide" warranty . When the camera went dead in Thailand, I phoned the Panasonic support numbers in New Zealand and Canada (which of course both routed to India). They asked where I lived, and told me I should deliver it to a Panasonic authorized repair center in Canada . Very inconvenient , but I that's what I did once I returned. However, after I sent it to the repair center, Panasonic decided they wouldn't pay for anything unless I could send them a copy of the warranty card that came in the box. So now I have to pay for the repair estimate (they determined it was unrepairable) and shipping both ways. I have the original receipt , the manual, and all accessories. The warranty is still valid through next month. Why should a photocopied piece of paper make any difference? Oh right...

I've had the displeasure of using Rogers cable Internet at two different places I've been staying recently -- one in Guelph, and one in Breslau. I remember back in the day (2003-ish, the last time I had Rogers myself) I had occasional, but persistent problems with one major thing -- any time I had a large outgoing transfer happening, all of my incoming transfers went slow and flaky. For instance, my telnet connections will stay connected for hours -- until I send a big (10-15MB) upload through via FTP. Then it drops the connection. Or if I do a big Subversion commit, all of the sudden all my DNS lookups start failing. This is something I remember from years and years ago, that they still apparently haven't fixed. For the longest time, I thought this was just a problem with cable modem technology, so I bought Bell DSL and was reasonably satisfied (until they started capping and throttling, that is). However, when I was in Texas, I had Time Warner cable Internet and I have ...