{"id":14828,"date":"2014-06-09T12:30:37","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T19:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=14828"},"modified":"2014-06-09T12:42:05","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T19:42:05","slug":"monday-bag-o-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=14828","title":{"rendered":"Monday Bag o&#8217; Social Media"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/farm4.staticflickr.com\/3907\/14383146462_be0b82984e_n.jpg\" alt=\"facebook_friend_request_bag-p1495725604028038292w92h_4001\" width=\"320\" height=\"320\" \/>Facebook is grinding me down. My default\u00a0reason for staying is keeping up with friends and family, but as reasons go it&#8217;s\u00a0wearing thin. With few exceptions, my friends and I are just posting to be posting, and there&#8217;s so much junk\u00a0clogging up my newsfeed it&#8217;s barely worth the effort to separate\u00a0worthwhile posts from worthless ones. Empty calories, and addictive at that.<\/p>\n<p>A friend called me out this morning on changing profile pictures. I do it too often, she says, to the point of being vainglorious. I thought I was doing it to amuse my friends, but maybe she has a point.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m considering whittling down my friends list and using\u00a0Facebook in moderation, but it probably won&#8217;t work for me. I&#8217;m beginning to recognize in my relationship with Facebook what I recognized in my relationship with alcohol before I quit drinking.<\/p>\n<p>As time goes on I&#8217;ve come to value\u00a0the Twitter experience more than the Facebook experience. I follow family and friends on Facebook, but truth be told we don&#8217;t have that much to say to each other. On Twitter, though, I follow people I don&#8217;t know &#8230; writers, commentators, reporters, military planners, a poet or two. I rarely try to engage them in conversation; mostly I read their tweets for news value, and in fact I&#8217;ve found Twitter to be a great source for both breaking news and stories being ignored\u00a0by major media. I learn things from Twitter &#8230; I rarely\u00a0say that about Facebook.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll stay on Twitter. Whether I stay on Facebook depends on how my experiment in moderation goes. If it goes the way drinking in moderation went, I&#8217;ll probably have to give it up.<\/p>\n<p>In other news:<\/p>\n<p>Donna&#8217;s been at a sewing retreat in Big Bear, California. She\u00a0looked\u00a0forward to it for months. She texted me yesterday to tell me she threw her back out a couple of days ago and has been miserable the entire time.\u00a0She drove there with a friend, and they&#8217;re driving home today.\u00a0I&#8217;m hoping her friend&#8217;s car seats have\u00a0adjustable lumbar supports. The one or two times I&#8217;ve hurt my back, the driver&#8217;s seat in my car was about the only place I could be comfortable.\u00a0She&#8217;ll be home later today. I&#8217;ll make dinner and offer what comfort I can.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of Twitter:<\/p>\n<p>Saturday I took the Goldwing to a neighborhood coin-op car wash to clean it for a ride up Mount Lemmon on Sunday morning. Riding home I noticed the outside air temperature display was wrong, and figured the water from the car wash must have affected it. I mentioned it in a tweet and got roundly schooled by a perfect stranger:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/farm3.staticflickr.com\/2929\/14383321592_47211183b7.jpg\" alt=\"Motorcycle tweet\" width=\"500\" height=\"412\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I learned with my first motorcycle, a Honda 50 Super Sport,\u00a0that pressure washers are a no-no, at least if you want your engine to start afterward. Water gets inside spark plug leads and coils and can\u00a0even short out ignition switches. But this is mainly a problem with &#8220;naked&#8221; bikes where the engine and electronics are exposed.\u00a0For the past several years I&#8217;ve been riding a Honda Goldwing, a bike with a shell that covers all the naughty bits. Water doesn&#8217;t get in the works, and I&#8217;ve used\u00a0pressure washers on it since I bought it new in 2001. In fact, here it is at the ski lodge on Mount Lemmon, all clean and sparkly:<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 500px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a title=\"IMG_2915 copy by Paul Woodford, on Flickr\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/halfmind\/14405057103\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"click to view full sized image on Flickr\" src=\"https:\/\/farm4.staticflickr.com\/3862\/14405057103_6764d1b5ce.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_2915 copy\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Clean machine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Also, perfect stranger? I&#8217;ve been riding motorcycles since 1965 and have a pretty good idea what bikes look like after they&#8217;ve been ridden in the rain at 50mph.\u00a0Perhaps we can agree to disagree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m beginning to recognize in my relationship with Facebook what I recognized in my relationship with alcohol before I quit drinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,555,5,2,827,6],"tags":[145,181],"class_list":["post-14828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumerism","category-local-color","category-motorcycling","category-personal","category-social-media","category-a-series-of-tubes","tag-facebook","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14828"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14836,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14828\/revisions\/14836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}