Is it just me, or does Facebook feel like a 21st century technical version of a chain letter?

I don’t know about you, but every time I get a request to poke, prod, gift, pot, super-wall, rank my friends, throw Chuck Norris, chuck a sheep, or toss my cookies at someone, I start by clicking the link, and then it reminds me that in order to reciprocate, I have to check five different boxes. And Facebook conveniently checks all the boxes for me, so all I have to do is click an innocent little button.

It’s then that I pause, and I think: hmm? Do I really want to add a new toy? What does that toy do? What information will Facebook send about me? What does Facebook already know about me? What are the Application Terms of Use, and does anyone really read those things?

Then, I think about my Wall. I like my wall, but 2/3rds of my friends have the super wall. What’s so bad about my wall? Why do I need a super-wall? Should I get the poke or skip it and jump straight to the Super-Poke? Or should I wait to see if someone develops an Uber-Poke? Which simply begs the question: Where does it end?

And then, I wonder, what if I don’t click the button? What will my friend think? Have I just insulted my friend? Is that person really a friend? . . .

You know, [I'm thinking to myself, which explains the italics], he really isn’t my friend . . . is he? I mean, I’ve never met him. But then again, a real friend of mine said I should be his friend, and shouldn’t I trust my friend’s choice in recommended friends? After all, Joe Schmo has 96 friends, and I only have 35 friends.

So now, I’m feeling a shadow of guilt creep over my shoulder. It’s the same feeling I used to get when email was all the rage, and an acquaintance told me to fill out a survey about myself and forward it to 10 people, so I could have good luck. And that reminded of me the time, I got the Amway sell from my friends’ brother-in-law’s neighbor’s cousin. Or the time I was threatened to have a ghost hang out under my bed, or the letter I got warning me of dire consequences if I didn’t forward it. Hmmm . . . I guess it’s nothing new.

What I really want to know is who thinks up of these things and who falls for these things? So, the next time you invite me to poke or prod back in retaliation for throwing a Simon at me (that’s my son’s name, and I’m offended), please, don’t hate me for not responding. And the next time you suggest a friend, and I leave that request sitting in my request box because I have not met the person and still have this old-fashioned idea of making friends by actually meeting them in real person (the phrase itself is becoming arcane in this day and age). Or the next time you want me to adopt a virtual snake (my real life has enough responsibilities for me to take care of some digital daydream), please don’t get offended. And if you do, just throw a pillow at me.

Calling all Code Red-swilling teen computer geeks! The US Air Force wants you. In light of all the cybercrime threats and warnings, the US Air Force is seeking new recruits to train to fight on the front optical-fiber lines.

It’s about time, in light of all the buzz about China’s PLA cadre of cyberwarriors.

The Air Force is also seeking full-timers for AFCYBER. Future cyberwarriors may be more couch geek than fit flyboy – not “the same kind of folks that perhaps you want to march to breakfast in the morning,” Air Force Col. Jeff Kendall told the Council on Foreign Relations in March.

Does that mean they’re going to recruit ex-hackers who have made plea-bargains to avoid conviction?

The colonel also suggested the Air Force may have to make exceptions to its entry standards and recruit ex-hackers, who may have committed computer-related crimes or have a felony conviction for unlawfully cracking a network.

As a high school teacher of technology, I could refer the Air Force to some future “cyber-warriors.” I think I would rather some of them turn their energy away from trying to break the school district’s firewalls and put it to use defending our power-grids and government agencies.

Some US intelligence agents think the Chinese were able to influence the blackouts in the Northeast back in 2003.

There has never been an official U.S. government assertion of Chinese involvement in the outage, but intelligence and other government officials contacted for this story did not explicitly rule out a Chinese role. One security analyst in the private sector with close ties to the intelligence community said that some senior intelligence officials believe that China played a role in the 2003 blackout that is still not fully understood.

According to the article, the Chinese have been working on mapping our power-grid structure, and possibly was in the process of mapping Florida’s power-grid when a hacker inadvertantly triggered a power outtage in February.

Apparently, the attacks on our corporate and government agencies are “relentless.” So, if you are a corporate big wig about to meet with the Chinese, you may want to check your computer when you get back. I recommend bring hard copies only.

Stay tuned…

Just a little over a week ago, I coded quite a challenging layout. It was a contract job, so I won’t name the website by name; we’ll just call it Joe. Anyway, the client wanted a graphic banner that was positioned about a quarter of the way down the screen. They wanted this banner to stretch, like a wing, across the entire width of the screen and basically cut a swath straight through the website; it divided the header from the content and took up about 140 pixels in height.

As I agreed to try this design, I thought there might be two or three ways to accomplish the task, but the more I considered the requirements of the site, the more I began to wonder what I was thinking. My first thought was to make a background graphic that had the banner and then simply create a div tag for the header, a div tag for the content, and apply just the right amount of margin to reveal the banner.

This might have worked, except that there was another graphic that needed to be tiled on the background, and so I would have to make sure the wing would not repeat further on down the page. I also had to create the site in such a way that we could sandwich in some kind of slide show or flash graphic in the heart of the wing (I suppose that would make it the thorax).

My solution was to create a div (<div id=”wings”>) and place a background graphic that was quite wide and repeated on the x-axis. I placed this before my centering container so that it could stretch across the entire width of the screen. The div doesn’t really do anything other than hold the background graphic. I then created the centering container and set the width to 970px, and after that, I created a banner division that contained the logo (using an image-replacement technique) and the navigation bar.

Once I had the header set, I micro-adjusted the wings background image position until it lined up directly below the banner div. The next division was the content div. I simply added a top-margin to push the content down until it lined up directly below the wings.

The real work was not the wings but in testing for Firefox and IE versions 6 and 7 and working the nav bar and logo. As I began testing, it became apparent that if I designed for Firefox, it looked fine on Opera (latest version) and Safari. Unfortunately, IE 7 did not display the same as Firefox, and neither did IE 6, and to make things worse, IE6 and IE7 occasionally differ in their rendering. If you ask me, the best way to deal with IE’s continued stubborn refusal to display correctly is to use the conditional comments (e.g. <!–[if IE 7]>). The most time-consuming part of it all was the continual testing and refinement (i.e. making one change on one div and having the layout on another div shift in response).

I technically haven’t solved the slideshow div (the one that goes right in the heart of the wing), but when it’s time, I’ll simply sandwich a new div in between the banner and content and add the right amount of top and bottom margin and make sure I do not add a background color. It should be a simple operation, but if not, it will make for an interesting post.