Facebook does not need a “dislike” button

With just about everything you get to see view in Facebook, there’s usually a button or a link displayed as “like” associated with the topic.  If you click that button, the person who posted that link gets a little note on his Facebook page that you liked what ever it was that they had put up.

When I first saw the ‘like” button, the first thing I thought of was my TiVo remote with it’s “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” buttons.  You can thumb up or down a program while you are watching it.  This information gets stored on the TiVo and it uses that information to pick shows it think you might like to watch.  A completely optional feature, but very cool none the less.

With the TiVo ‘Thumbs Down” feature in mind, I wondered why there wasn’t a “dislike” button.  If you believe in Sturgeon’s Law (ninety percent of everything is crap), then there is going to be stuff on Facebook that you won’t like.  Since they let you express your approval with the “like' button, why not be able to express your disapproval?

I’m not the only one who has wondered about that.  There’s at least one poll on Facebook that asks “Should Facebook get a dislike button?”  if you have a Facebook account, you can hit that poll from this link.  I saw it because a friend of mine had already voted “Yes”.

Voting “Yes” was my initial inclination, but I decided to think about it for minute.  The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it would be a bad idea to have a “dislike” button.  It would be a tool for expressing a negative opinion and that’s not what Facebook is about.

A large part of the early appeal of Facebook was that it was closed community.  If you want to see someone’s Facebook page, you had to be a member of Facebook and probably need to be a “friend” as Facebook defines it) of that person before being able to view that page. 

Since you have to have a Facebook account to access Facebook user pages, there are no anonymous users on Facebook.  If the Facebook administrators catch you using a fake name (like the way a certain B-List actress did last winter), they will disable the account.  What ever you do on Facebook, it will always be associated with your account.

If you could click a “dislike” button for something that a friend had posted, your friend is going to know you didn’t like what they had posted.  No one is going to want to see a little thumbs down image next to the picture of their new kitten/cat/tattoo/etc.  There will be a percentage of users who will be offended when their post is disliked.  That can lead to bad feelings between the two people and add a negative tone to the Facebook experience.

If you feel strongly against something, you can still leave a comment and express your opinion.  That can actually be helpful.  If you wanted to press the “dislike” button on something because you found it inaccurate or offensive, you can actually write why you feel that way.  Constructive criticism means a lot more than a little image of thumb pointing down.  Some people will still be offended by critical posts, but now you will have a starting point to discuss it.  So I’m not taking that poll and I’m hoping that Facebook doesn’t implement a “dislike” feature.

Checking to see Microsoft Report Viewer 2008 SP1 has been installed

We are updating the installer for one of our applications and that app now requires the Microsoft Report Viewer 2008 Service Pack 1 to be installed first.  The fun part is determining if it’s installed or not.  Usually, I check the registry keys to see if an application is installed.  If the user has installed the Report Viewer as a separate application, you’ll find it under the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2008 SP1. 

If you want to read a value from that key, look for VersionMajor.  It should be a DWORD value of 1.

Of course that’s not the only way to get Report Viewer SP1 installed.  If you have Visual Studio 2008 and you have applied SP1, then you’ll have Report Viewer SP1 as part of the Service Pack.  Under that scenario, you wont have the “Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2008 SP1” key. 

What you need to do is to check to see if VS 2008 SP1 is installed.  That key is located at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\InstalledProducts\KB945140. 

If you want to read a value for that key, look for string value for “PID”.

[Update on 6/16]

From the home office in Latham, NY, a reader sent in the suggested to also check the registry for 64 bit based machines.  On 64-bit editions of Windows, the Report Viewer Redistributable runs in 32-bit more.  It sees a virtualized version of the registry.  The actual registry location is

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2008 SP1

Note the “Wow6432Node”, that tells that it’s a 32 bit application installed on a 64 bit OS.

If this isn’t the first sign of the apocalypse, nothing is. (Jon & Kate & American Chopper)

A few months back, I posted this as a joke.  Now I’m seeing pictures like this floating across the Internet:

It looks like Kate is riding off with Paul Senior and she’s the only one that looks happy.  I think it was for some TLC promotion, not an actual episode of either one of their shows.

Tag your junk mail before it gets sent to you.

Even though we live in the world of tomorrow, we still get junk mail.  The old fashioned kind made of out paper and stuff like that.  Junk email annoys me, but physical junk mail is just a waste of physical resources.   I try to prevent junk mail from being sent at all, but sometimes it still comes in.  What seems to invariably happen is that I’ll get junk mail from some company that I have not had a prior relationship with.  They probably bought my contact information from some other company.

I came up with a little trick to make that mail easy identifiable so that it can be recycled without ever having to open up.  Whenever I register for something online and it asks for my title, I put in “Disposable”.  When that mail comes in and my title is printed on it, when I see the work “Disposable” on it, I know I don’t have to spend any time on it.  At our office, the receptionist delivers all the mail.  I’ve told her that if something comes in for me and it has “Disposable” printed below my name, she doesn’t have to bring it to me.

A followup to my post about SC Johnson not manning a customer hotline.

A few days ago, I posted about my experience trying to get a hold of customer support after my dog ate some ant bait.  SC Johnson has a contract with a health and safety clearinghouse that is manned 24/7.  I have spoken to those people and they are very professional.  Their phone number is not listed on the ant traps.  The number that is listed, goes directly to SC Johnson.  When I called that number, I got a recorded messaged that they were closed and to call back Monday through Friday, between the hours of 8am and 6pm (CST).  That’s all I remembered hearing when I called that number.  When I called SC Johnson on Tuesday, they insisted that the emergency contact number was on the message.  I don’t remember hearing that at all.

I received a call today from a physician from the Health and Safety hotline.  He had been contacted by SC Johnson after someone had read my blog posting.  They asked him to clarify with me that the SC Johnson hotline did list the emergency number.  I thought that was pretty odd as the clearing house was not responsible for the SC Johnson hotline.

I am willing to concede that an emergency number may have been at the end of the message.  If it was on the message, it did not play soon enough and I thought the call was over.  I still maintain that the number for the Health and Safety hotline should have been printed on the ant bait station and on SC Johnson’s product web page for the ant bait.  For this particular bait station, the dosage of the poison was below the level to cause any ill effects with my dog.  If I had a smaller dog (or puppy) and that dog had eaten all of the bait traps, there could have been a problem.

If you sell poison, I think your customer hotline should be manned 24/7

A couple of weeks ago, we had some unwanted visitors coming in from under the front door.  Pavement ants.  You know, Tetramorium caespitum.  They are tiny and they come from under the door frame.  It usually happens every year at about this time.  I usually spray around the outside of the house with a pesticide and the problem goes away.

This year, that didn’t work.  I did some research online and found that spraying outside was needed, but only part of the treatment.  Another part was to put down ant bait traps indoors, near where they come in.  They provide a poison that the ants take back to nest, eliminating the source of the problem.  That was a bit overkill, but the since ants were not taking the hint it was time to take it up a notch.

Last Sunday I went to the local lawn and garden shop and bought some Raid® Double Control Ant Baits.  The bait stations were very effective.  After placing the four bait stations near my door, the was a surge in ant activity (“treats for us?”) around the bait stations.  After a couple of days, the ant activity dropped down to nearly zero.

We left the bait stations at the door all week.  On Wednesday, one of the bait stations disappeared.  For some reason, that didn’t trip the alarm circuit in the back of my head.  Ant traps typically don’t move by them selves.  I figured that the housekeeper had vacuumed one of them up.  That was my mistake, I should have paid more attention to this.

Cut to Saturday.  I was mowing the lawn when Anne ran out to get my attention.  I shut off the mower and she said that the dog had just tried to eat one of the ant traps.  She had grabbed it from her before the dog could ingest the contents of the trap, but we now knew where the other trap had gone.

Now we had to figure out what to do with the dog.  She’s a 60lb Lab, so she’s a good size.  Still, poison is not a recommended part of her diet.  I grabbed one of the remaining bait stations and flipped it over.  It had a 800 number to call as the customer hotline.  So I called the number and received a recorded message that they were closed and to call back on Monday during business hours.

This is poison, you can’t have a consumer hotline that is only available during regular business hours.  What if It had been a toddler that ingested the poison bait?  I knew that I could call an emergency animal hospital over in Latham, but I decided to do some basic research on the Internet first.

The active ingredient of the bait station was something called “Avermectin B1”.  I searched “avermectin” and discovered that dogs find it tasty and this problem occurs more often than you would expect.  I found numerous pages like the following:

Thanks for the advice! I called the e-vet and they gave me poison control numbers. I called them and because the active ingredient in the spikes are 0.05% avermectin, which according to them is only poisonous if he were to consume 30 of the spikes. The biggest concern they said was the plastic. Thankfully, Wally didn't eat the plastic part.

That was from a Labrador chat board called “Labrador Retriever Dogs Chat Forum Board”.   You figure that the ant spike would be the same amount of poison, if not not more than the bait station.  Apparently Avermectin is commonly used to treat fleas and worms on dogs and small doses will not harm the dog.  In fact, that’s one of ingredients for heartworm pills.

We were a lot calmer after reading a few pages with the same stuff.  After three days since the last “tasty treat”, the dog is showing no signs of illness.   We just know now that we can’t put out bait stations anymore.

I’m not terribly thrilled with the SC Johnson company.  If you sell a chemical that is designed to kill other creatures, you should have a 24/7/365 support line.  It doesn’t have to be monitored by humans all the time.  A properly designed phone tree (“Press 1 if a pet ingested a Raid® Double Control Ant Bait”) would have helped.  At the very least, we would have know than the dog was not in serious danger and we would not have to induce vomiting. 

If you call during business hours, you do get a phone tree before you get a human.  I called this morning to find out why this product doesn’t have a hotline on the week end.  I was told that there is a 24/7 Health and Safety hot line and that number is (866) 231-5406.  It’s not run by SC Johnson, it’s a clearing house for emergency information. 

Because of the toxicity of the bait station, SC Johnson is not required by law to have that number anywhere on the packaging.  That’s just wrong.  When your pet (or a child for that matter) eats some poison, you need to find out how toxic it is immediately.   You would think that number would be on the home page for the bait stations, but it’s not.  I was able to use Google to search the SC Johnson site afterwards and I found it on their Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) home page.

At any rate, the ants are gone and the dog is still here.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do if this happens next year.  It would be really nice if they came out with ant bait that dogs would not eat.  I doubt that would happen as there are very few things that a dog wont eat.

Remembering Alivia Lovell

Last October, our company constructed 8 playhouses that were donated to some patients at the Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders at Albany Medical Center.  We do something like that every year.  It’s partly a team building exercise and partly a way a way to give back something to the community.  We put them together at the New Scotland Armory, across from the AMC.  Later on they were delivered to the homes, courtesy of Bennett Contracting.

While we were assembling the playhouses, the children were brought in to see the playhouses.  It was a pretty emotional scene for all of us.  I remember one little girl, cute as button. She was very shy and but she was excited about getting a new playhouse.  We just found out that Alivia Lowell passed away from leukemia last week at the age of 4.

(click on the picture for more information about Alivia)

My heart goes out to the Lovell family.