Back in the OC

[nibot]

I cleared off my desk and I feel better now. Lamp, laptop, notebook, pen. Good to go.

I am back from Baja now. It was a good trip. I will write about it later. Nowadays I feel guilty about writing, because so many people complain that it is too much to read.

The best part was riding in the back of a pickup truck, speeding down a dirt road in the the middle of nowhere, looking up at the snow-covered Sierra de Juarez, the purple sunset, and the desert storms racing through the valley.

It is possible to remove all of your Livejournal friends with a single unix command. I admit, though, that I used, instead, cut-and-paste, search-and-replace, and telnet.

I am going to Hanford on Sunday.

http://43things.com/people/view/tobin
http://del.icio.us/tobin

Comments

[unnes.livejournal.com]

It's fun when you're reading a post, at an ugodly late (or early, as it may be) hour, when you're halfway through and the auto-refresh on your friends page picks up a new paragraph that the author just edited in.

[natan.livejournal.com]

I enjoy reading your posts and enjoy the frequency.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Any reason for removing your friends? Just going to read individuals now whenever you feel like it? No more friends-only posts? (I don't remember if you made many of those anyway.)

[nibot.livejournal.com]

With 247 people listed, it had gotten kind of ridiculous. I didn't know who many people were (I had forgotten where I had "met" them, who they were, etc), and it was impossible to keep up to date in reading the friends list if I, say, went on vacation for a week. Moreover, most of the posts on my friends list (largely due to communities, which are more variable in the quality of their content than individual journals) no longer interested me. So I decided to remove everyone and then only add people back slowly, when I (1) had figured out who exactly they were, and (2) found myself often reading their journal manually. We'll see how it goes. (-: Also, it was a technical challenge, since removing 247 people individually would take forever, so I had to find a clever way to do it in one fell swoop. I see now that there's the "friends editor" web interface that might have done the trick, but I didn't know about it at the time.

Just going to read individuals now whenever you feel like it?

I guess so.

No more friends-only posts?

Not for the time being.

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

dude, you think i read everyone on my friends list? i'm lucky if i read half, most the time, i only read four or five favorites.

that's what putting filters on the friends list is for — not for making filtered posts so much as choosing which shitty LJs you don't want to see anymore without actually saying so.

[ankaerith.livejournal.com]

Default View, need I say more?

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

exactly.

it's amazing how much more work i get done now that i've switched over to default view.

plus, people generally piss me off a lot less.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

in the words of someone on lj_research: "While I appreciate LJ making friends data readily accessible, my interviews indicate that an individual's friends list is not a very accurate reflection of their social network. Social and communal norms inhibit defriending practices and these LJ users use friends-locking and filtering to effectively defriend others without letting htem know it explicitly. This contributes to an overall sense of community in the group I'm studying. A lack of defriending also confounds examinations of networks evolution over time."

[ankaerith.livejournal.com]

1. We need to hang out before you leave Orange County.
2. Considering the infrequency of my LJ updates I don't think I can take offense to being unfriended.

[shamster.livejournal.com]

Tobin, you are a god. Post more often.