Friday, April 29, 2011

The Royal Wedding

The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was today.  In America it was the wee hours of the morning and still I saw several people got up to watch it on their televisions here.  To what end?  What is the allure?  We don't know these people.  We probably even know them less well than we know our own leaders or celebrities.


Are people so unhappy with their own lives that they have to live through a royal family.


There is a movement to continually give to the American Indians because of the wrongs done to them by certain people in this country many many years ago.  The entire nation is called to pay for those things.  The British Empire also did vile things to the American people many many years ago.  They sent troops over here to kill our nation in its infancy.  Yet, we hold the family of the man that did it to us up to such high respect and esteem?


I do not feel the British Empire or the royal family owes us anything, but I am using this as an illustration to give some perspective.


Now let's set that soapbox behind us and look at the people involved.  Put the pomp and circumstance aside.  This is two people trying to start their life together.  They want to celebrate their love.  This goes beyond a celebration and is well into a spectacle.  Do we not remember what this young man's mother went through with being in the spot light.


When you get married you should be able to invite YOUR friends and YOUR family and not have to invite whoever is needed to to make a statement.  Nor should your guest list make anyone think that you are making a statement by not inviting them.


Let's leave the fairy tales and carriages and big dresses in the story books.  Let's let Prince William and Kate Middleton have their own life and let us have ours.


Be happy with who you are.  Live your own life to the fullest possibly can and set the distractions and unimportant things aside.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Facebook Shared Accounts

I was involved in a discussion with some friends on Facebook.  One friend posted that they wanted to add their spouse's name to their Facebook account.  I had seen one or two doing this previously and I didn't like it.  I now see the trend of people changing their name to something like Myrtle AndOscar Jenkins.  This is slightly better than a husband opening a Facebook account with his name and then the wife taking over the account and doing most, if not all the posting.

Reasons they do it

  • My friend was expressing that their spouse wasn't on Facebook and had no desire to have anything to do with computers, so they wanted to have their friends have a way to see stuff about them.
  • My friend also said that their high school reunion was coming up and they thought it would be easier to contact them both that way.
  • Another friend expressed that if someone says something to one of them that they can say it to both.

Reasons I don't like it

  • I don't want to see all of the junk from people my wife wants to have as friends.
  • You can not search for Oscar Jenkins, because Facebook sees AndOscar, not Oscar.  So if I am searching for old friends I have to search for them and parse through all of the Oscar Jenkins and then all of the AndOscar Jenkins.  It is hard enough to determine if it is your old friend since people put profile pictures of everything except themselves, but when you have to search crazy names it is even harder.  This means that the point of making it easier for high school friends to find them for a high school reunion actually makes it harder.
  • A better use of the name field is to use maiden and married names.  So if I search for Myrtle Jenkins or Myrtle Yoder, which was her maiden name and the name I knew her by, I will still find her.
  • When I see someone online in chat I don't know if I am getting Myrtle or Oscar?
  • If I want to plan a surprise for Myrtle with Oscar, then that makes it hard since Myrtle can see everything.
  • Update 7-28-2011 - Today I had a friend pop up as having a birthday.  They have a shared account.  Whose birthday is it?  How will I know when it is the other persons birthday?

Zeppelins

I have seen several TV shows that revolve around time travel or alternate Earths or alternate realities where they show Zeppelins being widely used.  If it were not for the Hindenburg and the evils the Germans did with the Zeppelins, would they have ever been a viable form of transportation?

To me Zeppelins seem unstable, bulky, and costly.  The majority of the space in them is filled with gas and appears to be unusable for anything else.

Thoughts?