Lost In The Web

Has social networking sites made it easier or harder to loose touch with people?

We have all read how MySpace and Bebo bring people together, its the new “watering hole” of the digital era where it allows groups of people to communicate quickly with their peers, but has it introduced a new affect, where its in fact harder to contact people?

You might be wondering “what the fuck is he talking about?” but there is a key point here, its the method of communication used. Back in the dawn of time of the internet (post-ARPA) there was E-Mail, then came Internet Relay Chat, then Forums, Instant messaging (which continues to grow today) and now Bebo. The forms of communication has changed drastically in these years to what is now common to being “bite-size” remarks, and has coined remarks like BMB (Bebo Me Back)

E-mails were always long-winded detailed accounts of actions and remarks of events. Forums made it a more public form of communications with friends and peers.
Instant Messaging and IRC made it smaller and quicker, and a faster response to almost instantaneous communications. This made people slim down their discussions to make it more reactive with the other person
Bebo has reduced the communication down to essentially shout-outs between people and groups and its effective communication, where the reaction to the message published is much like the initial where its a shout-out and remark over something.

Bebo has also created the E-Peen existence, where friends will strive to get more friends or “Luv” than their peers on the site, just to have boasting rights. In this effect you can have people with over 50 friends (and sometimes over 100) on their lists. So how can someone keep in contact with over 50 people on a single website?

This leads to the “bite-size” communications, you end up giving out “shouts” to people and not communicating effectively with people you would normally talk to at length because you have more people to talk to. This is where electronic communication lets you down. Early communications was a discussion, Bebo is like shouting to someone as you pass in the street.

The biggest benefit of Bebo? In my eyes it is the affect of bringing long-lost friends back together via the “friends” of others, There was an experiment done many years ago where they discovered that within one group of friends, there is 6 degrees of separation between one individual and anyone else. People seem to forget how inter-connected societies really are, and by using the Internet it increases the effective communications of individuals.  Recently I had two old friends and an acquaintance add me to Bebo, one of which I wasn’t aware was on-line.

I hardly use my Bebo, its my choice not to use it purely as having another “place” to look at regularly. I already have this site, my emails, forums I frequent, IRC and even MSn to keep in contact with (as well as mobile phones and SMS messaging). By adding Bebo to my communications list, I have to effectively stop communicating with other friends…

Which means its making it easier for me to loose touch with friends I have.

Of course there’s a far easier way to solve this communications issue, its called unplugging and sometimes the easiest option is also the most enjoyable, the social effect of being with friends far outweighs sitting posting comments and instant messaging.

All we need now is the good weather to return so we can all start enjoying the Barbeque’s

Okay, strange post of sorts coming up.

Every so often I have came across a computer (or in this case a server) which through no reason decides that it has to blue-screen at random, the wonderful BSOD.
We have a nice 12 server Citrix Farm, but 2 of these servers are based in our off-site disaster recovery building. These two servers are “live” and provide services to people based in our off-site DR building (which conveniently enough is one of our larger offices outside of Headquarters)

So our second server in the DR site developed a fault with its memory and kept BSOD’ing out under load, we got it sorted out but the BSOD’s didn’t stop when it was under load which worried us.
Since both servers are identical (HP Proliant ML370 G2) I had to diagnose the problems, only to discover after some digging that the Network Card driver on server 2 was an older revision. Updating the network driver solved the BSOD issue, and it hasnt kicked the bucket in over 2 months.

The whole reason I decided to check the network card drivers? one of my old computer motherboards used a Via network card, which if you updated the driver from Windows Update it would throw a wobbler and give a lovely BSOD for no reason. the pre-packaged drivers never gave a problem either.

So dodgy network card drivers = instability for Windows.

The most interesting part of this problem? both servers were built with the exact same Proliant Quickstart CD, so should of had the identical driver installed on each. Because its a Citrix Server you DO NOT install anything from Windows Update except for critical updates.

Lesson Learnt? If a computer kicks the bucket for no apparent reason and its on a network, change the network driver to a different version (sometimes the latest may not be the best!)

Side note: IESpell is very handy indeed for in-line spell checking within Internet Explorer 7

Last month I decided enough was enough, I threw the head up and asked Eclipse Internet for a MAC code. 5 Days later I gave Zen a call and transferred my service across. Why you might ask?

• Eclipse throttles p2p traffic, and I suspect nearly every other bit of traffic on their “oversubscribed” network, of course I cannot say for certain as I’m neither a techy for Eclipse, or privy to confidential information (and if I was, it wouldn’t be up here either). I found it slightly “lethargic” to say the least when surfing websites or even viewing youtube videos.
• Strange stability problems, One was due to their service hating my Netgear DG834GT router which seemed to sync fine but only manage 20k/sec downloads (sync was 2814+ most times) on MaxDSL
  The other was when using the replacement D-Link router I had bought (to solve above mentioned problems) where it would sync slightly higher but would suffer massive drop-outs throughout the evening.
• Lackluster support calls, everything goes through their ticket system for support and most people have reported similar “sudden closure” calls. They are insistent that the problem is not on their end but something to do with our ends.

So, 7 days later I was on Zen (funnily enough Eclipse had “switched off” my access a day early and Zen was kind enough to have pre-activated my connection a few days in advance) and my stability issues disappeared. The D-Link router (one el-cleapo DSL-G924T courtesy of Argos) runs fine with Zen, and after digging out my Netgear to test its been running fine for the past month with no problems, except for the one time it overheated because it was laid flat on the table..

Its great being able to download an ISO of Ubuntu 7.04 through Bittorrent in just over an hour finally and I might be able to finally try 4od (I tried it on Eclipse and got nowhere)
So, thumbs up to Zen Internet so far. Lets see if they still work great after a few months