But is this impersonalization actually something good or bad? Well, the web allows us to do such things anytime we want. There are no early closing days, nor are we dependent on any (public) transportation to get there. And especially when purchasing specific things, you don’t want others to see you buying or when doing specific other things, you would like to keep your little secret, the web gives you the desired privacy – at least towards your direct social contacts, if you still use to have any. Sorry for the sarcasm.

However, the downside of all this luxury is the desocialization of people, especially of those, who already had problems integrating and maintaining social contacts. Nowadays you could survive for years within your own home, only taking a step out of your door to throw away the trash. But is this how the future will look? Will groups of people maybe bulkhead themselves from social life? I don’t know, but I hope, that modern technologies won’t ever be abused this way.

Personally, I see companies like PayPal or Amazon as an easement for my everyday life. They save me time by providing me such services. Valuable time. Time I can spend on other things. For example, on playing a round of cards, heh. But even those leisure sites like PartyCasino bring me possibilities I wouldn’t have without them. There is no real Casino around me within miles. Nor is there a tennis court. At that point, the Web 2.0 doesn’t lead to desocialization, but instead it allows me to do things, I wouldn’t be able to do at all without it. To me, modern technology is cool – as long, as it’s not abused in any kind.

For example, on Twitter it’s possible to personalize messages by inserting the user it’s destined for with an @ as prefix. By using applications which spread the Twitter status-messages all over the net, you begin to see posts from the very same person on platforms like Facebook, where the @user doesn’t make any sense. Also it’s a matter of syntax: While Twitter allows you to write messages the way you want to write them, Facebook forces you (by placing your Name in front of the actual status-message) to use sentences like “has gone away.”, “is finally back home”, et cetera. Since many people now seem to be using Twitter as primary input-channel, you often get to see Facebook messages that look like John Doe Going now to bed. – what’s really ugly and doesn’t make sense in any kind.

I’m asking why? Why do people need to spread one and the same message over dozens of web-platforms? Why can’t they just personalize each message to not make the other “friends” think it’s just another-useless-nonsense-mass-message?

I mean, come on. What’s the deal with multiple platforms then? I still keep each platform personalized and decide what information I would write on what platform. I mean, maybe the circle of followers of my Twitter account (where I personally have more techies than regular people) aren’t interested in reading about stuff I would write to my “normal” friends in Facebook – and the other way around. And as I just said, by making Twitter (or whatever other service) the first input-channel, people kinda stop caring about the other platforms they spread their information at – so it’s actually useless to comment on their status on other platforms than Twitter.

Of course, one could argue of this being a time problem, since he/she would not have the time to write messages into each platform separately – but I mean, why is he/she then registered on every web-community existing on the internet? If time only allows me the usage of one service, I choose the one that fits best for my needs and keep using it.

I think otherwise the whole idea of different platforms is for the birds – why not creating one huge web-community which includes every platform like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. into one service, so nobody would need to spread the information anymore onto ten different services.

Hmpf… oh well.

Is it possible, that Apple’s production quality on the newer iMacs really decreased and got pretty frowzy? As I’ve posted some time ago, he had also ordered two new 2GHz MacBooks then ago. On the first MacBook he got the Superdrive was broken and on the second one the case’s quality was pretty meh - every time you put your hands on the right hand rest you could hear a small “click” noise. It seemed like the material was so thin at that part that it curved down the to interior hardware and by that produced a “click”-sound.

Tomorrow I’m going to take a closer look at his new iMac until he has to (again) return it to his dealer and get a new one – which probably has the same problems..? Did anyone experience this sort or similar problems with his newly brought Apple hardware? Please feel free to comment and post problems, I would really like to know whether it’s bad luck or a general problem.

What else happened. Well, I solved the problem I described some days ago, regarding the Windows XP Sysprep stuff. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way I actually planned it:

The scheduled task seemed not to be ran, because (at least this is what I guess) Sysprep changes the system’s/system-user’s SIDs within the Mini-Setup. So when a scheduled task is being added to the scheduler while running the Sysprep procedure, it adds the task using the Administrator’s current SID – which won’t be the same after the reboot. Because of that, the scheduler then reports the miss of the actual user, under which this task should be ran.

However, I’ve solved it by adding the AutoLogon=Yes and the AutoLogonCount=1 parameters to the sysprep.inf. The first one generally activates the AutoLogon feature, so that the Administrator will be automatically logged on after system boot and the second option defines, how many times the Administrator should be automatically logged in after boot. By setting it to 1 the Administrator will be automatically logged on only after the machine’s first boot – on the following boots no more AutoLogon will be used.

Then, I added a RunOnce key into the system’s registry (within the mini-setup, using the “reg” command), which executes a batch-script. Within this batch script then I was able to do everything I want – unlock the firewall’s port, enable RDP and add the Domain-Group to the RDP-Users. Yay.

It’s quite an ugly hack, but at least it does the job. And it’s the only method I found out to work.

What other things occurred this week… hm… ah yeah. My car. It smells. No, not a joke. Let me go into greater detail: Last Thursday, I went to the gas station and filled up my car with gasoline. The day after, I drove to work and left it there on the parking space, since I had a company car for the weekend. When I returned on monday and sat into my CRX, intending to drive home, the whole car smelled extremely of gasoline. I thought, that it might be, because I left it fully refueled there over the weekend, so I just drove off. The smell didn’t disappear when I reached my home, so I left the sunroof open. When I entered the car again later that evening, it still smelled. The next day I brought it to the garage and had it checked. On Wednesday morning I went there to pick it up, and they told me that nothing could be found: No leaking tube, no holes, nothing. They couldn’t even tell me if this is actually dangerous.

Now I kept the car driving until today, because I wanted to see whether the strength of smell decreases proportional to the fuel-amount in my tank – and of course it does. Unfortunately it only decreases, but does not completely disappear. So now I’m thinking of brining my car in to the official Honda garage hear here and let it checked up again there. Maybe they could tell me more, since they use to have more experience with these kind of cars.

It’s not only that I don’t know how dangerous this situation actually is, but besides it’s really annoying since the smell uses to makes me pretty dizzy after a while – what’s kinda disadvantageous while driving. So I definitely need to get this fixed until my car burns out – either because of some leakage or because I drove it into a tree, due to the dizziness. Hmpf.

And now I guess I should finally go to bed. I’m still a bit sick and I didn’t sleep that much the past few days. Good night everybody.