I’ve been meaning to get this analogy off my chest. That feeling has become more apparent when I try to explain this concept to my friends. My very first experience of the Internet was through American Online. I must have been 15 years old, living in my parents house, and not having very much money. My brother and I would spend hours on AOL surfing the web and playing mechwarrior within the safe restraints of the AOL application. “You Got Mail” would ring ever-so-often and we’d chat it up with our other cellmates in various child-predator-rooms chatrooms. It wasn’t until a coworker at Walgreens started referring to AOL as “the Play-play Internet” that I realized that I may have been in a Matrix and didn’t know it.

After some weeks of getting hackled about being on AOL, I started to ask him questions on what his internet experience was like. He told me that he connected to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP), opened Internet Explorer and went to town. I thought to myself, “That’s it!?” I tackled with the concept of using an email client, instant messengers, IRC chatrooms, and other things that didn’t come in some sort of bundled package. Well; I had enough knowledge to realize that AOL was NOT the route for me and convinced my dad to switch to Bellsouth. Till this day I’m not sure how I was able to convince him. Some little teenager whining about the restrictions of AOL verses the freedom of a real ISP.

How Does This Relate to Facebook

I’m glad you asked that question… I started out my social media adventure through Twitter, Identica, MySpace, etc. When Facebook finally opened up to the rest of the world I joined in, but didn’t really do anything with it. When Facebook picked up more interest from the world I noticed an increase in friend requests from my old high school friends. I began to chat with them and fell into the cycle of having one or two intense conversation and then the rest of the time just glancing at their latest status update and gaming spam.

Later on as my activity in Facebook diminished, I noticed that my news feed became more of a sermon from Sunday Chapel as more of my friends that found religion felt it to be their civic responsibility to encourage their followers with words of encouragement using the Word of God. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an active or lazy (agnostic) atheist, but after a while I got real burned out with skipping those posts.

Seriously! How Does This Relate to Facebook!?

The more I’d start cross-posting from the various social media platforms I’m apart of (Ping, Seesmic, etc) I noticed that the replies I got from my Facebook friends could be categorized as social media noobs. Then I started seeing people putting hash tags in their posts and other twitter-related things. I found it cute.

I then noticed that if I wanted to get a comment or response on something I posted, I’d have better luck posting it on Facebook since most of the people in my friend’s list actually know me, compared to Twitter which consists of more Internet Friends. From those experiences I drew the conclusion that Facebook is a box, a social media Matrix of sorts. It’s safe and simple enough for grandma to join the social media revolution and it gives the user the impression that they are up-to-snuff on what’s hip and trendy in the vast, ever-changing world of social media (wow! that was a run-on sentence).

In the end; I don’t think I’m a social media expert by any means. Obviously; if I was truly THAT important then I’d have no problems getting my followers on Twitter or other micro-blogging platforms to interact with me on every single post I submit. Facebook is good for what it does. This is primarily my conclusion to an observation. My interest in Facebook fluctuates every quarter; that’s because I’m a fickle man.

As I grow into my adult clothes, I some times find it a little embarrassing to introduce myself as the all mighty and feared “FergatROn” hailing from the great planet of Cybertron. Well, it really depends on what circle I’m doing it with. Since the dawn of my online adventures, I’ve always had a cool user handle. Don’t get me wrong, I love my /nick, but I’m doing more and more online business nowadays and telling a possible business partner that my Twitter or Identica account is “@FergatROn” is starting to get a little awkward.

In the Beginning

I’ll drag out this post by sharing with you my user handles from my earliest memory. I’ll have to say that America Online (AOL) was my first platform to create a sharable username. I was still in high school so you can imagine the crazy names I came up with. I do recall one – “DutiDred”. I’m Jamaican, but not a dred, DutiDred was also the name of a character I used to draw. I had countless others, but since they were all juvenile crap, I don’t remember any of them.

I believe my next major handle was in the Yahoo realm. It was my first year of college and Yahoo Games was a pretty decent platform. I believe I was working for Sears at the time thus I came up with the name “Paperboy_507″. If you can tell the name was a combination of the video game “Paperboy” and “Levi 507 Jeans”. Yup, that’s just how creative I was back-in-the-days.

The Mighty Hunter

The next evolution in my handle was related to my first major massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, Starsiege. I was a proud member of the 69th Penetration Assault Wing, aka 69 PAW. We had a web site and everything, I believe it was http://paw.cbj.net [nonworking link]. I think our fearless leader went by “Cybrid Lee [69 PAW]“.

I found that information with some intuitive Google searches. There’s no way I would have remembered that from my worn-out memory cells.

For some reason, though, I’ll never forget the person that recruited me. It’s funny because he’ll probably never remember me. I wasn’t anything special. Just another mech warrior trying to make his way around the galactic system. The person that recruited me was named “Mouse” and my glorious name was “NiMrOd”.

I think this was the first time I actually put some thought into my handle and wanted it to really mean something. I don’t know how I looked it up, but “Nimrod” was an Old Testiment hunter. Me, being the warrior that I am, thought this would be a great fit. Ironically; it wasn’t until much later that I realized that people don’t think of the “hunter”, but the other meaning of “nimrod”. Boy did I feel like a nimrod!

Linux

Handles are a major part of the open source community. Most folks (unless I’m in the dark) don’t go by their real name. Look on the IRC channels and the forums and you’ll see an array of interesting handles.

Funny; on my desktop I really don’t use a fancy handle for my login. I guess it’s because there’s no one else on my computer. Don’t worry, I’ve got a ace up my sleeve. My network id is “fergatron.deceptacons”. Yah; so even though I’m not using a cool handle to log into my computer… my computer has a handle and he’s also a kickass Deceptacon! Oh and if you’re wondering.. my wireless SSID, is “Cybertron”, with more than WEP as its encryption! I just blew your mind… didn’t I!?

Evolution

Because I think this post is going too long, I’ll wrap it up. So; over time my handles have evoled as I have as a person. My Star Wars handle is “Marfe Jokin”, I’ve created many names in World of Warcarft and other MMOs, but the name that trumps them all is “FergatROn”. It’s a mix between my last name, “Ferguson”, Transformers’ renowned Megatron/Galvatron, and an MMO I used to play alot – Ragnarok Online.

The cool thing I like about “FergatROn”, is I’ve been able to kind of trademark it through online services. Meaning, I’ve signed up for so many web sites (Twitter, Identica, MySpace, etc) using FergatROn that if you Google it, most- if not, all the results are belong to me! (No that wasn’t horrible grammer… it’s a play on “All your base are belong to us.”)

So; since I’ve opened up a part of my soul with you strangers… I’d love to see what your handles used to be or what you’re currently using. Come on- I’d be fun!

I followed Mathias Teugels around a bit (on Identica) and some how found myself at a Flash hero generator site; so I took some time out to create the official/unofficial Fedora Project super hero — The Fedora!  I was limited in some of the tech accessories I could give him, but maybe someone from the art team will run with it.

Make your own Hero at www.cpbintegrated.com/theherofactory.  Be aware that you can’t choose the hero’s name during the generation process.   Create your hero and post a link here.  I’d love to see what you come up with.

Attributes

So; with every hero creation, you must have some specs or a history for your character.  I will not satisfy that requirement today.  Just know that he’s a heavy Linux user and his distribution of choice is… *drum roll please*… Fedora.

I still don’t know the full story about this GNOME Do program, but so far it’s the best thing… besides slice bread…  you just can’t beat that!  I’ve heard about this package when Fedora 9 was released.  I installed it on my laptop, but never really learned, nor took the time, to understand how it works.  Recently, there was a blog post (LifeHacker) that highlighted the new “Docky” theme, which gives your Linux box a certain popular MAC component.  I’m not going to take a sip of the hateraide, this Docky component is awesome and it’s given my Fedora 10 a new lease on life!

Installing GNOME-Do

The popular distributions have it in their repos, such as: openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.  The only problem is some of the repos do not have the latest version yet – v0.8.0.  That version has the whole “Docky” thing.  Simply use your distro’s text installer; mine is YUM.

YUM install gnome-do

You can always install it manually, using the source files, but this is no easy task if you’re a Linux newb.  It requires other packages, such as: bzr, glib-sharp, glib-, gtk+-2.0, and much more.  I had the toughest time finding some of the dependent files.

Social Media to the Rescue

I posted a “call for help” on Identica and Matthew Schick came to my rescue.  He had it working, from source, and he even made some RPMs.  I quickly downloaded his RPMs and they installed without any issues.  So; visit his site to get the latest version.  Thanks Matt!

• http://www.excentral.org/fedora/10/
  • flickrnet – required
  • gnome-do-plugins – optional
  • gnome-do – required

What Does GNOME Do, Do!?

Beats me!  Ha-ha!  You’ll have to check out the web site for detailed informaton on that.  Besides the whole Docky thing… you call it up by using WINDOWS+Spacebar on your keyboard (it can be changed in the preferences).  Once the GNOME Do console/window is up you then type in a document you’re looking for… a program you want to run, etc.

In order to run it, for the first time you can either type in “gnome-do” in your terminal or use the one-time run window (ALT+F2).  Once it’s running you can go into preferences and have it automatically start on login.

That’s the extent of my knowledge.  If you know more, please post a reply and share your experience with GNOME Do!

Audio Review of Gnome Do

ProductiveLinux, episode #20 has a very good review of this new version of Gnome Do.