I deactivated my Facebook page, much to my daughter’s great relief, I’m sure. I created an account to learn what it was, and I have to say I never really caught its wave. In the end, I guess it is a PHP-enabled blog server for people without the time or inclination to get into blog design, with some social networking tools enabled to help create, maintain, and encourage site traffic.

Facebook facilitates the sort of ‘virtual clubhouse’ that Howard Rheingold lucidly analyzed in ‘Smart Mobs‘ … a technology that provides a sense of privacy with one’s friends. And I understand the particular usefulness of that, particularly for teenagers still under the watchful eyes of parents and teachers and lacking the mobility or means to carve out much real-world personal space. (I’d say I grok it, if only to underscore that my Baby Boomer psyche left this particular experiment a long while ago, although I can still see why it is a tool so relevant for Generation Next).

The FaceBook application platform feels convoluted. It probably has to be to maintain their very-locked-down business model (services like Google AdSense won’t work within application pages, so ‘monetized’ applications seem either hamstrung or impossible).

Much to the chagrin of my teen-age daughter, I’ve been looking at FaceBook and trying to learn a little bit of how their applications platform works. For that I created a FaceBook Jumble application from the page found on this site.

In doing that I had the first chance in a long time to clean up the code, so I also modified the Renaissance version in two ways. First, I improved the output display, and second, I put it back in its own page. The experiment of putting it in a WordPress blog page made no difference in the page rankings and was a little brittle anyway. I had to use runPHP to make it work inside of WordPress, and that would get shut down anytime someone entered a comment for reasons I could never fathom.

I always loved this joke from the Ernie Kovacs ‘Mr. Question Man’ bit:

Q: Mr. Question Man. I am studying Science in high school. It is well known that the Earth is round like a ball, therefore many people must be walking on it upside-down. Why is it that these people do not fall off?

A: You are suffering under a common misconception. People are falling off all the time.

Last Tuesday I was home from work with the flu. A sort of ambulatory flu that left me physically miserable but also bored. Somehow I stumbled upon Yahoo! Answers.

The idea with this service is to provide a community where you can ask questions and gather answers. You use up points when you ask questions, but you can answer others to earn points. I’m not exactly sure what these points are for. Maybe if you get enough you turn into Aristotle or something like that.

From hours looking at this thing I have learned:

- 90% of the audience are optimistic high school kids hoping to con someone into doing their homework. Among the homework they also aren’t doing is keyboarding, so some of the typed questions leave you looking for the Rosetta Stone for translation.

- The other 10% of the audience are weirdly obsessed by the fact that a fictional headmaster of an (also fictional) wizarding school is gay. Why these people aren’t worried instead that the Justice League of America isn’t doing more to get us out of Iraq is beyond me.

- The answers will turn your hair gray. To the question ‘Should I read the Iliad or not?’ (correct answer, “Who the f**k cares what you read? Go read ‘My Pet Goat’ again and stop annoying people.”) I read the answer “Homer is looking at the ideal of a Greek hero and the model has been the warrior, so he looks at Achilles. The Iliad showcases the fatal flaw of the warrior hero - blood lust - which consumes Achilles and leads to his downfall.” (No he isn’t. No it wasn’t. He does examine Achilles’ anger … but it’s his anger with Agamemnon for stealing his girlfriend. And the dead hero at the end or the story that we care about is Hector. Achilles has lost his best friend but is otherwise doing great.)

So now I can’t stop with the smart-ass answers. Here’s today’s:

Q: Curious George and the Puppies.what is the story about?

A: It’s about Curious George, who finds these puppies. There’s something he’s not supposed to do but, well, George is just so curious and he does it and everything gets weird. Anyway, the Man in the Yellow Hat comes along and sorts it out and then it’s all cool.

Sort of Like Gilligan’s Island. But with a Monkey. And puppies.

I am discontinuing use of my Moleskine notebook. It is a fine notebook but won’t lay flat on the desk when open. And I have a habit of reviewing and consolidating notes every couple of days, since otherwise I only remember facts and obligations for about eight minutes. When I do that, I like to discard obsoleted index cards and notebook pages, and I can’t rip pages out of the Moleskine. I mean, I can, but I feel like I am defacing a book. Back to my spiral-bound Tops 9.5×6″.

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In getting rid of the notebook, though, I wanted to capture the following before it is filed away. Found perched on an otherwise useless budget meeting summary:

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And this Trivia of the Unexplained. From Google Maps, an ‘aerial schematic’ of the Boston State House indicates it is … Lobster-Shaped! Coincidence? I think not. Call Mulder and Sculley.

Certain phenomena have a gradual, long-term toxic effect. Like George Bush’s voice or mercury poisoning. Add to my personal list Microsoft operating systems. I’ve had long exposure to these through their entire evolution, but instead of an evolving technological marvel, they always remind me more of a bloated and stagnant bureaucracy.

The prospect of Vista filled me with all the enthusiasm of a visit to the DMV. I’d catch myself on the Apple web site, choosing a MacBook Pro in the online store, selecting all the options, getting a little sick looking at the $4,200 price tag, but still thinking “Wouldn’t that be great?”

Then, deliverance, and from two quarters: First, in an attempt to either exorcise or kill my flawed and temperamental Dell laptop, I wiped the hard disk and installed the free Ubuntu Linux distribution, and it was like drinking a mugful of Felix Felicis. Suddenly my laptop Just Works and is Fast and doesn’t take 10 minutes and jumper cables to boot up.

But the big change was an iMac 24″, a gift from my Mom. As with any Apple product these days, the design just makes you smile. It is fast and works the way you think it should.