Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article which portrayed moms heading off to conferences as deserting their families to party with other moms.  To listen to Katherine Rosman, moms run off to these "so-called-conferences" to party with other moms, get drunk, eat lots of bad-for-you food, and tweet what companies ask them to tweet.  The article even included an oh-so-helpful graphic showing how moms attend these events to sleep in, party, and raid the mini-bar while laying on the floor.

Now I’m not sure what blogging conferences this author is talking about, but the ones I’ve gone to haven’t been like this.  Granted, I haven’t been to a lot.  Mainly just BlogHer 2010 and the Disney Social Media Moms events.  Still, I’ve heard from plenty of other people who have gone to a lot of other events and they all tell similar tales.

Is there partying?  Sure, but that comes at the end of a long day of learning and networking.  Are there company reps there and sponsorships?  At many events, yes, but nobody is obligated to meet with them or to tweet/blog about their products.  In many ways, this is no different than just about any other conference involving travel.

Years back, the company I was working for sent me to a computer expo.  I was there to learn about new technologies that were coming out.  There was plenty of company information to collect, but there was also a lot of swag.  (People crowded the Iomega booth to get their great buttons… buttons which I still have.)  In addition, there were parties at night designed to wine and dine various attendees.  I didn’t attend it, but I was invited to one party where I was assured that there’d be a hot tub and that I’d "have a good time."

Just like the expo I attended way back when, you could go to a blogging event like BlogHer and just party and collect free swag, but you’d be missing the entire point of the event.  Or you could attend just the seminars, avoid the company reps and parties, and come away having learned a lot.  Most people take a middle of the road approach and do a little of each.

Of course, many bloggers have already written many responses.  The main woman who was interviewed, Katherine Stone, aka Something Fierce, even posted an apology for how her words were twisted and misused.  (For the record, she doesn’t have anything to apologize for.)

The Wall Street Journal didn’t just insult moms with their article though.  As a dad, I found it highly insulting as well.  First of all, they insinuate that moms go to these conferences to lie around in a hotel room and let someone else clean up for once.  As if dad never cleans up at home and mom is the only one who ever tidies the house up.  The helpful graphic also insinuates that dad hogs the remote and doesn’t help get the kids ready for school either.  The old stereotype of "dad the idiot who does nothing in the house while mom wears herself out doing everything" was quite clear.

Congratulations, Wall Street Journal and Katherine Rosman for insulting both moms and dads in one article.

Oh, and that graphic showing the mom eating from the mini-bar while laying on the floor?  Have you SEEN some of those hotel room floors?  I don’t walk on them barefoot much less lay down and eat off of them!

NOTE: The photo at the top of this post was taken at BlogHer 2010.  Pictured are Christina (aka WELLInThisHouse), Jenn (aka KissMyKitty), B, and myself.

I had three things I wanted to post about, but none of them seemed long enough for a post on their own.  So here they are together in a mish mash of superheroes, science, space, and social media!

Beware of Geek Kid

First comes a bit of Geek Fail on my part.  Recently, Cartoon Network released a large amount of their library on Netflix.  As I drooled over the shows that I could share with my boys, I saw "The Powerpuff Girls."  I laughed at it and, on a lark, decided to show them the show so we could laugh at it together.  Never underestimate a geek’s love of superheroes, though.  While I couldn’t take the show seriously enough to enjoy it, my kids loved it!  Now NHL is determined to watch every episode.  Geek Fail?  Or perhaps Geek Win in that NHL loves superheroes so much that he even likes PowerPuff Girls.

Goodness Gracious, Great Balls of Incandescent Plasma

Next up comes a little video that NASA put together.  You see, NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory three years ago.  Since then, it’s been regularly taking photos of the Sun.  One photo every twelve seconds.  For three years.  It’s given scientists tons of data to prove and disprove theories about our favorite star.  NASA has taken those photos and strung them together into an amazing four minute video showing some amazing details.

Thanks to NASA images and videos being public domain for the most part (about the only ones that aren’t are items with the NASA logo or with people in the shot), you can download high resolution movies or still shots from this movie.

Why? Because, Saturn!

A couple of days ago, Phil Plait (aka BadAstronomer) and Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess) started conversing on Twitter.  Phil was tweeting a drive to press Congress not to cut planetary science at NASA.  This is a very good cause on its own.

Then, Jenny pointed out how "Because, Saturn!" was a good answer to anything.

"Why do I have to eat my broccoli?"   "Because, Saturn!"

"Why can’t I watch TV?"   "Because, Saturn!"

"Why can’t I stay up late?"   "Because… Saturn!"

Jenny mentioned putting this on a shirt.  While I haven’t done that, I did come up with this nice looking graphic.

That image comes from NASA via the Cassini space probe.  They stitched together 126 individual photos to come up with this 40 megapixel beauty.  Of course, you can and should go to NASA’s website to look up some of their other wonderful photos.

NASA makes getting great science and amazing images from millions of miles away look easy.  So please click the link above to press Congress to give NASA funding for planetary science efforts.  Why? Because, Saturn!

Back in November of 2011, after many months of development, I launched FollowerHQ.  This was my first major Twitter application.  For those who haven’t used FollowerHQ, it’s goal is to help you manage your Twitter followers.  Other tools will let you automatically follow everyone who follows you, but I didn’t want to do that.  If I did, companies that I’m not interested in might follow me only for the automatic follow back.  They could then pollute my Twitter stream with tweets that I don’t care about.

FollowerHQ shows you who is following you that you aren’t following back.  It lists detailed information such as how many followers they have and when their last tweet was.  You can use this information to determine whether or not you want to follow them back.  Perhaps you might ignore some followers because they haven’t tweeted in a long time.  Maybe you might pass over some others because they don’t have any followers or seem like spammers.  Or, perhaps, you will choose to follow some users who tweet about subjects that you find intriguing.

In addition, FollowerHQ will show you who isn’t following you back.  As with people you aren’t following back, you can decide to ignore this situation, or you can decide to unfollow the accounts.  Finally, FollowerHQ will track your followers and will show you who you have unfollowed.  This is useful for the seemingly all-too-frequent times when Twitter decides to automatically make you unfollow someone when you didn’t want to.

Major Upgrade

The previous version of FollowerHQ was good, but it had one major flaw.  It needed to work while the user was waiting.  The user would open the page and FollowerHQ would start pulling information from Twitter’s API.  Since Twitter limits how much data you can pull at once, this meant that the application could be slow at times.  If the person running FollowerHQ only had a thousand followers, it might not be too bad.  If they had a hundred thousand, however, it was unusable.  Even worse, if the browser crashed, you would lose all of your progress and would need to start from scratch.  Needless to say, this limited FollowerHQ’s usefulness.

For the new version of FollowerHQ, I ditched the "real time load" and went with a report request.  Once you request a FollowerHQ report, it will queue up in the system.  FollowerHQ will then process these report requests behind the scenes, completely separate from the users’ browsers.  You can close your browser and even shut down your computer because FollowerHQ is running on my server.

When FollowerHQ is done, it will e-mail the user to notify them.  They can then log in to view the report.  Since the report information is pulled from my database and not from Twitter, the report comes up nearly instantly.  (I also used Google’s PageSpeed analysis to speed up the site.)

Now Available as an Android App

I’m also testing out ways of packaging FollowerHQ as a mobile application.  The first of these attempts utilized AppsGeyser.  I’m very happy with this approach so far.  AppsGeyser: 1) packages a special web browser that has no controls of its own and points to my site by default, 2) bundles said browser into an Android app, and 3) gives it all of the usual app characteristics such as being able to put an icon on the device’s home screen.  As a bonus, there are no ads (unless I want to include some which would give me some revenue) and I can submit my app to the Google Play store.

I’ve wanted to get into app development for awhile so this is highly intriguing.  I might make a "mobile.FollowerHQ.com" version of my Twitter application for the app to launch, however.  I also want to find similar tools to utilize to create an iOS app.

With all of the changes I’ve made to FollowerHQ, I’ve love to hear what you think.  Head on over to http://www.FollowerHQ.com/ and give it a try.  Post what you think about it here.

Yesterday, while relaxing at home, B decided to check her Facebook account on her iPad.  She immediately told me that she thought she might have been hacked.  To make sure, she went on her laptop.  Sure enough, I came and saw that she had been locked out.  Not just locked out, though, but locked out due to a virus.

Wait… a virus?  Mind you, this was without Facebook having any ability to scan our computer.  Also, this was after being locked out on the iPad.

Nice lesson in malware prevention.  Of course, we’re both well versed in the "don’t run programs from sources you don’t trust" rule.  We also have anti-virus software running all the time on our computer just in case anything slips by our "common sense filter".  (Security is all about layers.)  Still, we can just click Continue to re-enable the account and scan using our anti-virus of choice, right?  After all, the next screen does say "you can also remove them yourself."

I’d click the "We’ll remove them ourselves, please unlock the account" button, but all I see is a "Download and Run McAfee" button.

At this point, I began to wonder just how valid this notice was.  I didn’t doubt it was from Facebook, but I began to question whether this was just an isolated incident.  So I did what anyone would do: I searched Twitter and Google.  On Twitter, I found numerous people who were locked out due to "virus infections."

Two stood out to me in particular.  First was @grilledcheez.  She responded to one of my tweets with the following:

If this was an actual virus infection, why weren’t both of the accounts locked out?

And then there was @jason_michael who was locked out of his Facebook page due to a "virus infection"… on a Mac:

This was looking very fishy.  Especially when a Google search turned up a deal between Facebook and McAfee.  Facebook will helpfully "detect" viruses on your computer and offer to clean it for you using McAfee’s software.

Of course, if you don’t want to install McAfee on your system, that’s fine.  You can use your own anti-virus software, as this Facebook post illustrates.  However, there’s a catch.  You first need to agree to the McAfee Scan and Repair Terms of Service.  (That’s why I don’t have a screenshot.  I didn’t want to agree to their TOS.)

I do have one more screenshot, though, from @jason_michael.  Apparently, he got back in without running McAfee.  You see, his third screen didn’t display a "Run McAfee now" message, but this instead:

Yes, he was able to simply click to certify that he ran anti-virus software and then was able to get back into his account.  No forced downloads and no required TOS agreements.  So why did he get the optional treatment and we didn’t?  My only guess would be that Mac-Windows difference.  After all, you can’t require a Mac user to install Windows software.  (It’s trivial to detect what operating system you are running.  In fact, I use Google Analytics which does – among other things – just that.  Hello to the 22.25% of TechyDad visitors who used Macs or iOS devices in the past month!)

In the end, after writing almost this entire post, I got back into B’s Facebook account again by using Internet Explorer instead of Chrome.  However, I’m not sure if it was a matter of IE being allowed in where Chrome wasn’t or if the lockout was only for a certain amount of time.  Still, the big red warning bar and only presented choice of running McAfee seems very scammy to me.

It looks like I’ve got yet another reason not to use Facebook.  And, if Facebook insists on pushing McAfee on its users due to "virus infections" that it "finds", they will give many users a good reason to move away from them and to a different social media platform.

Last Sunday, the boys and I spent a day in the New York State Museum.  During the beginning of the trip, we excitedly looked at the moon rock on display.

I told the boys all I knew about the rock and its trip from the Moon to Earth.  Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what facts and information that Phil Plait, aka BadAstronomer, could provide.

Later on, we saw one of the museum’s long standing exhibits: A series of taxidermied wild animals representing local animals.

Again, I found myself wondering what someone on Twitter might say.  Only this time, it was TheBloggess.  If you follow her (and you should), you know that she has an interesting collection of taxidermied animals.  She also tends to have hilarious conversations with her husband, Victor.

Seeing this moose, I could only imagine The Bloggess telling Victor how they *needed* to get a moose like that and Victor’s exasperated sighs as he completely missed the point of how a house moose would dramatically improve their lives.

Despite Phil and The Bloggess (and Victor) not being there, the boys and I had a wonderful time at the museum.  It did get me wondering, though, what it would be like to spend a day with some of the people I follow on Twitter.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: If you could spend one day with someone you follow on Social Media, who would it be and what would you do?

P.S. If you haven’t already, try out my Twitter applications: FollowerHQ and Rout.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #171