Facebook: The Bane of Society or Just the Next Thing?

Earlier this week, a friend of mine with a young teenage daughter sent me a link to this article... "Facebook is Spreading Like the Plague". The premise of the author's message (and I paraphrase here) is that Facebook is evil and will be the ruin of mankind. You can read the article and make your own assessment of the author's message, but I believe that my succinct summary is pretty accurate.

My friend does not currently use Facebook, and this article made him hesitant about allowing his daughter to use the service. He was also concerned about how prevalent social media services were being used at his workplace. As you might suspect, I have a different point of view.

How many times do you think this article, or some version similar to it, has been written in the past? I’m guessing that the same argument has been made by concerned parents for:

SMS / Text Messaging

MP3s and portable music players (e.g. iPods)

GameBoy

DVDs

Internet Forums

Mobile Phones

Instant Messaging (IRC/IRQ)

AOL

Email

CDs

Handheld Video Games

CompuServe

Prodigy

Video Tapes

Philip's Cassette Tapes

BBSs

Usenet / Newsgroups

Citizens Band Radio

8 Track Tapes

Color Television

45 rpm Records

Black and White Television

Amateur “Ham” Radio

33 rpm records

Telephones

Radio

78 rpm records / Victrola

Newspapers

.

.

Books

.

.

The Wheel

.

.

Fire

Okay, maybe I’m am being a bit of a smart alec, but I think that you get my point. There is always some new technology, some device or service, that is going to sap the life and intelligence out of our children and ruin our society and culture as we know it. These arguments are also often made in regards to the use of these same types of technologies in the workplace.

I believe that whether you are referencing your children or employees, it all comes back to an appropriate level of supervision and a reasonable amount of control. Facebook only consumes every waking moment of some children’s and adult’s time because it is allowed to. If a parent or supervisor is concerned about how much time their child or employee spends online, they only need to establish some house rules regarding the hours that it is permissible. It is no different for Facebook than what it may have been for any of the other items in my list above.

As a proponent of new technology and a self-proclaimed early adopter, I probably lean towards giving my kids more leeway on these matters. Our family's rules are generally based upon the children’s performance at school and with the successful completion of their household chores. If they can maintain exceptional grades, get their chores done, and still get adequate sleep and exercise, we generally don’t care about their time on Facebook (or Xbox, or texting, or…).

My wife and I originally established Facebook accounts to monitor our own children. That was the deal; the kids could sign-up for Facebook as long as they friended us. There has been only a couple of instances where we suggested that they delete a comment or photo. It has actually been a good life lesson and social experience for them. Interestingly, once we were on Facebook, my wife and I both discovered many old friends, some who were monitoring their own children. It has been fun to reconnect and we have also found that the service is a very good way to communicate with extended family; much better than our previous attempts at mass emails, family websites, or periodic newsletters.

If employees in the workplace are spending too much time using these services, then it is quite possible that they don’t have enough work to do or they simply lack the self-discipline to control their own behavior. I would classify that as a supervision problem; not a problem with the technology.

It can be difficult determining if these technologies are beneficial or detrimental in the work place, especially when they are first introduced. It’s not too hard to argue that a little music from Pandora in the background may help some people be more productive. The use of Twitter / Yammer could help people share information and improve productivity. Time maintaining a LinkedIn profile may help business development efforts.

There are no hard and fast rules. With notebook computers and mobile email devices, many believe that employees work far more hours per day than what was expected in the past, so allowing someone to watch a couple of YouTube videos while they eat their lunch, or maintain their Farmville crops before starting their long commute home may actually help the company keep the employees happy and working hard(er).

The best part of social media for me is learning how to leverage it for use in my day-to-day work. I can provide examples of projects and business development opportunities that were only possible because of my connections on Facebook and LinkedIn. I believe that anyone who is not leveraging those sites today is really falling behind. And I mean “leveraging” by joining groups, making new contacts and engaging in discussions, not simply creating a profile and then never going back to the site again.

So is Facebook the bane of society? Nah! It's just the next thing. Just wait. It won't take long for parents to identify something else that is sapping the intelligence out of their children and they will all forget about how awful Facebook is.

Natural Gas Conversion Table / Energy Equivalents

It seems as though I am often searching for this information. Maybe if I post it here I will be able to find it more easily in the future. Hope that you find this information useful as well.

Natural Gas Conversion Table*

1 cubic foot ("CF")                      = 1,000 Btu
1 CCF   = 100 CF        = 1 Therm        = 100,000 Btu 
1 MCF   = 10 CCF        = 1 Dekatherm    = 1 MMBtu
1 MMCF  = 1 million CF  = 10,000 Dth     = 10,000 MMBtu
1 BCF   = 1 billion CF  = 1 million Dth  = 1 million MMBtu
1 TCF   = 1 trillion CF = 1,000 BCF

* Based upon an approximate natural gas heating value of 1,000 Btu per cubic foot.

Natural Gas Energy Equivalents

                     1 MMBtu           Pounds of CO2
Fuel                Equivalent           per MMBtu


Natural Gas           1 MCF                 115
Coal                 83 Pounds              227
Garbage (Typical)   222 Pounds              200
Gasoline              8 Gallons             156
Oil                   7 Gallons             161
Wood                286 Pounds              195

Do It Yourself: Serpentine Belt Tensioner Tool

My daughter's Honda Element needed some routine maintenance; replacement of the serpentine belt that connects the engine's crankshaft to the power steering pump, water pump, alternator and air conditioning compressor. This is a relatively easy job for any shade tree mechanic who prides themselves on completing a Saturday afternoon do-it-yourself project.

If you are about to tackle this task on a Honda Element, you may want to review the great instructions at the Honda Element Owners Club Forum. This site includes the belt routing diagram and handy pointers on how to best get to the belt as there is not much room for you to work around the side of the engine where the serpentine belt is located.

I am a fairly competent DIY mechanic and have a reasonable collection of tools to get the typical maintenance or repair job done. What I don't own is a special tool to loosen the serpentine belt's tensioner pulley. The tensioner automatically applies pressure to the belt to keep it tight while the engine is operating. Some vehicles have a spring-loaded version, while others apply tension with a hydraulic device. All of them require a significant amount of leverage by the mechanic to loosen the tension enough to allow the old belt to be removed and the new belt to be installed.

The tensioner will typically have a standard hex-head fastener for use with the tensioner tool. This is not an actual fastener, so you will not be tightening or loosening a bolt. In the case of my Honda Element, it is a 14 mm, six-point head. There's sufficient room to apply an end-wrench to the fastener head, but the relatively short 14 mm end-wrench does not provide enough length to loosen the tensioner.

Mechanics use a tool made specifically for this purpose. You can find several different styles of tensioner tools available for purchase, like this model from MAC Tools.

Most DIY mechanics do not have a specialty tool like this, often times because they are considered relatively expensive (e.g. $30 - $50) for a job that might only be performed once or twice in a vehicle's lifetime. The cost was high enough to inspire me to seek alternatives and think creatively.

Some vehicles may have enough room so that you may simply use a socket with a short length of pipe slipped over the wrench to extend the lever enough to loosen the tensioner. In my case, the Element had limited space and required a tensioner tool that was off-set to reach around various components in the engine compartment.

It may have been possible to use two wrenches in a cheater configuration like that shown in the photo below.

Although this method may work, I hesitate to treat my tools in such a way. End wrenches are not made to be used in this configuration, and the risk of breaking them or possibly permanently ruining them is just not worth the trouble. The length of the lever is also not that much better than the single end wrench alone, making this ad-hoc tool less than ideal for loosening the tensioner. I knew that there had to be a better option.

Looking at the scrap metal under my workbench, I came upon the following idea. To create a long lever for the 14 mm end wrench that allowed it to be placed in the off-set configuration required by my Honda Element. The metal is nothing special, just some bar stock from an old garage door opener. You may have something similar lying around your shop as well.

This first photo shows the components before assembly. The hardware is standard thread 1/4 inch, by the length required. 

The short strap sandwiches the open-end of the wrench to the longer lever. Once assembled, the bolts should be snug, but there is no reason to over-tighten.

In this photo you can see how the off-set is achieved.

The final photo shows the assembled tool. It worked exactly as needed without risk of damaging the belt tensioner or my tools. The best part is that the total cost for me was $0.00.

The type of serpentine belt tensioner tool that you need for your vehicle may be slightly different, but I hope that these photos help to inspire your own creativity so that you may also avoid the expense of purchasing an expensive specialty tool that you may never need to use again. Good luck with all of your shade tree repairs!

How I've Lost Weight and Improved My Health and Well Being. My Obligatory Weight-Loss Story.

The Internet has so many web sites and forums dedicated to the subject of dieting you would think that we are all obligated to talk about our weight-loss experience at some point in our life. And from my observation, for as many web sites there are that discuss dieting, there are opinions and theories on how to achieve your weight-loss goals. Since I don't want to feel like I've been left out (Ha!), here is my story.

I did not necessarily have a serious weight problem, it was just one of those things that happened over the course of several years. Busy work days, business travel meals, rushed for time to eat right, and certainly no time to exercise. 10, 20, 30 pounds later I began to notice that my waistline was getting larger than what I would have liked. My doctor would chide me during my physical exams, and encourage me to lose a few pounds. "I will... yep, I will." was my reply. I would feel guilty for a few days and think about it for a while longer than that, and then I would eventually get busy with life and put those thoughts aside.

This past spring I had a little wake-up call. During a routine exam, my doctor detected a potential heart problem which led to an angiography to make an assessment of my cardiovascular system. Fortunately, I was able to leave the hospital without requiring surgery or any special procedures. However, the message was loud and clear; I needed to get into better physical condition.

I have never had much faith in weight-loss supplements, colon cleansing tonics, or celebrity diet strategies. My knowledge and understanding of weight-loss is based on common sense and great information from reliable sources like Johns Hopkins Medicine. I know that weight-loss is dependent upon reducing my daily caloric intake and increasing my activity through regular exercise. A few years ago my doctor suggested that I purchase a pedometer to monitor my exercise effort. She explained to me that I should strive to walk 10,000 steps each day. I thought, that would have to be pretty easy, after all, I walked a lot each day around the office and my home. So I put a pedometer on my belt and checked the results at the end of the first day. Hmmm. 2,300 steps. Well obviously the pedometer must not have been configured correctly! After reading the instructions and adjusting the device for the length of my stride I was ready for day two. Hmmm. 2,500 steps. I could see that hitting 10,000 steps each day was going to be a lot more difficult than what I originally thought.

A good pedometer can be very helpful when trying to meet walking, jogging and running distance objectives. It was desirable for me to have a device that easily maintained some kind of historical record so that I could see my progress over time. The best pedometer that I found with this feature is the Fitbit. You simply slip the small Fitbit device into your pocket or clip it on your belt, and whenever you pass within 15 feet of the Fitbit's base station that is connected to your computer it will automatically download your data. Then you can view a very detailed record of your daily steps on the Fitbit web site. I highly recommend it!

Using the Fitbit has made monitoring my progress almost fun, and it has certainly made me much more aware of my exercise effort. Bolstered with this daily record of my progress, I have worked hard to walk more and more each week. The result was a loss of about ten pounds over the course of a few months. I was making progress!

Monitoring my caloric intake was another matter altogether. I've been a pretty healthy eater for several years and I have always thought that I did a good job of watching what I was eating and how much I was eating each day. However, my wife taught me a valuable lesson. While she was dieting to get into better physical condition herself, she began a process of calculating the points value of the food she ate using a method similar to that used by Weight Watchers. 

The system uses a formula to determine how many points you are allowed to have each day. Then you watch what you eat to make certain that you are consuming foods with point values that sum to be no more than that level. It's nothing magic. No pills required. No crazy fads. Just eating healthy food in the right amounts.

This process requires that you keep a written record of each and every meal; each and every snack; absolutely everything that you consume each day. Having to maintain this written record of what I ate each day proved to be my weight-loss epiphany! I had only thought that I was watching what I ate before, but once I started having to write everything down I quickly began to see my faults and failures. Extra helpings at meals, high calorie sauces and desserts, and too many carbohydrates were quickly revealed when I reviewed my food selections at the end of each day.

The magic here for me was the physical act of recording what I ate. That process alone actually required more discipline than watching what I ate. Come to find out, eating healthy was rather easy and did not require any extra expense. I only had to choose my meals more carefully, being conscience and aware of the food that I was going to consume. No more "Are you gonna finish that?" at the dinner table! 

My wife was a big help at identifying tasty, but low-point options for my meals and snacks. Combined with the increase in my daily activity, I began to quickly see real progress in my weight loss. After just a few months, I had lost more than 20 pounds of additional weight. That was a total of over 30 pounds lost in less than six months! My wife's blog, Points In My Life, has a number of helpful ideas on using this system of counting points. Besides providing a number of great recipes and inspirational stories, her web site also includes an easy to use calculator to determine the points you are allowed each day, and another calculator to determine how many points a food item contains.

I'm confident that if you increase the amount of exercise you get each day by doing something as simple as walking a bit more, and if you eat meals that consist of healthy foods that are within your points target, you will be able to successfully lose weight. Be certain to monitor you actual daily activity, and start recording all of your food choices. That was the trick for me. If I was able to do this, you can do it too.

Creating a Time-Lapse Video of Screen Captures

I recently came across a really interesting web site that provided a graphical representation of real-time electricity prices in the wholesale market (something relevant to my day job). The image updated every five minutes, which gave you an interesting real-time perspective. However, there was no option to view past data for a historical perspective. That was disappointing to me because as cool as it was to see the data in real-time, it had a much more significant meaning when compared to recent history.

That inspired me to find a way to capture the screen image every so often and assemble a collection of the images together to view as a video. That couldn't be hard to do, could it?

Well, it really wasn't that hard! Here's how I accomplished the task.

The web site that I wanted to capture the image from uses the Adobe Scalable Vector Graphics ("SVG") viewer. This plugin requires the use of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer (Yes, I know it will run on older version of OS X, but we're talking circa 2001 folks; I've updated my operating system since then!) Requiring Adobe SVG was very disappointing since I run mostly Apple Mac OS X machines in my home office. However, I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows 7 Ultimate on the Mac Pro and I also keep an old Sony Vaio desktop around to run Windows 7 Home Professional for these purposes.

For several years, I have used a very powerful and easy-to-use Microsoft Windows screen capture application called MWSnap. Windows 7 does include a built-in screen capture utility, but it is extremely simple and lacks many of the functions that can be found in the basic MWSnap application. The most significant function is the file naming capability. MWSnap allows the use of variables for date and time allowing you to automatically time-stamp the image file. The application also allows you to automatically save the image that you capture. The very best thing about the MWSnap application? It's freeware with donations accepted. Wow! With these features, we were halfway there.

Now we needed a way to automate the screen capture process. Enter the wonderful Windows freeware utility, AutoHotkey. This handy application allows the user to create a script of keyboard and mouse commands along with a powerful set of logic controls to automate almost any process on a Microsoft Windows computer. Although the application has an extremely robust set of features, we only required a relatively simple set of keyboard commands. Through trial and error, we found the biggest trick was to include several pauses to provide Windows or the subject web site sufficient time to respond to the AutoHotkey commands; a simple, but important point for you to remember.

AutoHotkey allows you to create a command script in a text file. Then when you select that script from File Explorer, the application will begin the execution of your custom AutoHotkey commands. For our purposes, we needed to perform a few different tasks. The Adobe SVG plug-in on our subject web site was set to automatically refresh the graphic image every five minutes. However, we found that this process appeared to stop on its own after an hour or two. We decided the best thing was to force a browser screen refresh; launch MWSnap; send the keyboard commands to MWSnap to select and capture the browser screen image (automatically saving the image file with a date and time stamp); and then close MWSnap and patiently wait five minutes to begin the process over again. We included a loop to execute this set of commands for a certain number of hours.

The AutoHotkey script file that we used was very similar to this:

; Pause 5 seconds before starting.
; This will give you time to close the File Explorer window and
; place your mouse pointer in the window that you want captured.
    Sleep, 5000
; Loop ( 36 hours = 432 interations )
    Loop, 432
    {
; Refresh the browser window
    Send, {F5}
; Pause 10 seconds ( 1 second = 1,000 )
    Sleep, 10000
; Page down to view the desired image
    Send, {PGDN}
; Pause 5 seconds ( 1 second = 1,000 )
    Sleep, 5000
; Open the MWSnap application
    Send, {LWIN}
    Send, mwsnap {ENTER}
; Pause 5 seconds ( 1 second = 1,000 )
    Sleep, 5000
; Select image in browser window
    Send, {ALT}
    Send, c
    Send, w
; Pause 5 seconds ( 1 second = 1,000 )
    Sleep, 5000
; Capture image and autosave according to MWSnap settings
    Send, {ENTER}
; Pause 5 seconds ( 1 second = 1,000 )
    Sleep, 5000
; Close the MWSnap application
    Send, {ALT}
    Send, f
    Send, x
; Pause ( 5 minutes = 300,000, but subtratct the time spent pausing in the script )
    Sleep, 270000
    }

You may find the AutoHotkey script commands very intuitive. If not, a quick read of the well-written documentation in the help file will quickly get you on your way to writing your own command scripts.

After testing the script a few times, it was simply a matter of navigating to the subject web site, firing-off the AutoHotkey script and letting MWSnap capture the images as planned. In the case of my script, 36 hours later I had all of the images that I wanted.

At this point I copied the image files to my Mac Pro to be imported into iPhoto, and then into iMovie where the images were easily assembled into a MPEG-4 video with informative title slides and smooth transitions. I assume that Microsoft Windows Live MovieMaker has similar capabilities, but it is an application that I have not used for many years. If MovieMaker doesn't meet your needs, there are a number of third-party applications that allow you to create a slideshow from a collection of images. Google Picasa is one that I have used in the past. However, it is limited on capabilities for titles, transitions and slideshow speed control.

The finished product from my efforts is presented below. The process was simple enough (and rather fun) that I have a number of new ideas for other time-lapse, screen capture projects. I hope that this short tutorial provides you with some helpful information so that you can create your own time-lapse video. Good luck with your project!