Saying Goodbye to Facebook

Posted on July 20, 2011 by bluedepth

Yesterday, July 19th, 2011 I said my final goodbyes to Facebook and announced my transition over to Google+. I went on Facebook and let everyone who could still see my wall, know that I was leaving that service for good and conducting all my sharing over on Google+. For me it was a matter of who built the better mousetrap. The services provided by Google+ far outweigh the headaches that I’d have to wade through to match on Facebook and I like the cleanliness of Google+ and the lack of baggage that comes with running a service that was at one point built for high school and college age kids to socialize on.

When I made my goodbye status updates on Facebook one of my friends who usually doesn’t say much brought up a valid point. His issue with Google+ is their privacy policy, which he took exception to. The policy is composed of jargon and legalese such as “non-exclusionary rights granted by the … for the perpetual use and non-exclusive publishing rights of the …” and so on and so forth. I am not about to make people who read these policies feel less of themselves by denigrating this legalese as so much meaningless and incomprehensible bibble-babble, but I’m not about to let something like that interfere with the path of my life and the things I want to do. Aren’t I running afoul of a policy that strips me of my rights for what I share and what I post online? Don’t I care about the things I write and the music I share and the photos I share? Doesn’t that bother me?

No. Not in one small bit does it bother me. My life is dull. What I have to share is free for the taking. Why should I license what I photograph, what I record, anything at all, when it comes down to it! What am I protecting? If I were to get all worked up I’d be protecting an endless and mindless stream of inconsequential doggerel and pablum. My social existence is important for me, and the message is important for the people in my life, but ownership of that material? It’s utter dreck. So what if someone comes along and licenses all my photography and lays claim to all that I have written. Someone comes along and asserts ownership over my blog? You are welcome to it! Much like Jazz, the crap that I create comes from an infinite source of unceasing malarkey. Grab as much of it as you want, I’ll just shovel up more. I’ve got a big shovel, boundless energy, and you’re just running garbage detail for me. Knock. Your. Socks. Off.

Really what it comes down to is none of these policies mean anything to people like me because we go ahead and live our lives. These policies exist for people who thrive on the minutiae of life. The only times these policies get dusted off and opened up is when someone tries to be a dick. Society gives us a shorthand when people are being dicks and so, in this social fabric, as long as the howler monkeys aren’t hooting and hollering too loudly the rest of us shrug and graze and go about our plain and dull lives. I haven’t heard anyone get bent about a privacy policy whatever from Google and even when I read the policy bibble-babble, I don’t really care. Non-exclusive, penultimate, pejorative, permissible, persimmons blah blah blah. It’s important to a very small subset of people and if it keeps them happy and shuts them up, why should I care? If the service disappears, so be it. It evaporates with all my writing and all my posted pictures? Uh, fine. I’ll just move on to something else. In the end I don’t care! I don’t care if I win, lose, or whatever. This sort of thing doesn’t interest me and life goes on.

And that brings me to another point, one more general than all the others. If everyone uncorked all these very dull and very blah-blah-blah policies and we all decided to dwell in the house of the righteous and mighty we’d quickly find ourselves so wrapped up in legal jargon and rules that we couldn’t do anything. Liability to perform a bowel movement? Nope. How about walking outside in the sunshine? Nope. Eating? Come on. I bet a legal eagle could find a series of policies that outlaw respiration! When you have this amount of text and only a very small segment of the population with enough interest to maintain consciousness when exposed to it, you end up with people who take others statements on-faith. We can’t process the endless stream of legal mumbo-jumbo, so we hire people who we pay and we trust to do it for us and give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Truth to be told, once we honor them enough to let them have a say, we forget all about what they said and get on with life! People tell us that we really should have lawyers look at things, and so we do. Not because we understand or actively even care about the lawyers but we understand that lawyers must be fed. Nobody told us why, and it doesn’t directly impact our lives to see to their proper feeding, so we write the right things, we post the right things and we look to the special creatures called lawyers and we look for a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. That’s as far as it goes, kids! Life goes on! Work has to be done! Those agreements and policies are great, they’re done, yes! They were seen by somebody? Yes! Those somebodies were happy? YES! Well, good… WHATEVER. We move on.

Life has to find a way to trudge forward. These policies are meat for lawyers. The only time when you need a lawyer is when people deviate from the Golden Rule. Society pressures each of us to not stray from the Golden Rule, so for a lot of this, once penned, will never see the light of day again. This brings up another point that has bothered me for a long time, and that is the fine-print monsters. There are agreements everywhere and there is fine-print everywhere, you can’t escape it. There is what is written and there is what is understood and the two aren’t necessarily bound together! When someone decides to be a dick, to play the fine-print game, then the lawyers click their mandibles together and there is a feeding frenzy — for the lawyers! For the people in the drama, there is the victim of the dick, the dick, and the fat happy lawyers moaning in ecstasy and having little orgasms when they hear “billable hours”. So afterwards, the victim of the dick and the dick part ways and the victim has learned a lesson. The victim of the dick never approaches the dick again. This used to be the end of it. The dicks never really had anything else to fear from the victim because they were just one little meaningless nobody in a sea of meaningless nobodies. That is, until social media and social networking came to town. Now the victims of the dick can hop up on a soap-box and write about their experiences to all the other potential victims of the dick and warn them. “Dick is here, he’s after you, avoid him.” and so the dick starves and dies because his prey was alerted that he was in the tall grass and fled. This creates a new series of regulatory controls between the victims of the dicks and the dicks. Now that each one of us can instantly publish and amplify our warning hoots to everyone else, the dicks are on the run, scampering left and right looking for victims and finding nothing but pounded earth from the millions of victims that have fled. This is the natural order of things now, and this is why it’s important to not be a dick. The minute you are branded a dick, you are effectively ostracized from society, you are given a Scarlet D to wear and everywhere you go tales of your dickishness proceed you!

So lets get back to where we started… leaving Facebook for Google+. Do I care about the privacy policy? No. Why am I not concerned? Because I value nothing that I create, I WANT TO SHARE IT and because I’m using these systems, isn’t it obvious that I want to GIVE IT AWAY!?! So someone comes along and takes it, well, that’s part of the point. If there is a dick in the tall grass, it might bring down a bit of the storm but it won’t stop the storm from coming and overwhelming it. Even if the dick starts to rampage, it’s now just a matter of pressing a button and walking away, effectively annihilating the dick.

In the end I don’t care. Life goes on. There are more important things to fret over, like whats for dinner tomorrow, did I see the tight little bubble-butt on that twinkie gym-bunny, what are my plans for labor day? These are the pressing things, not “Oooh, Google came in and asserted ownership of my LOLCATZ pics!” There is an order to things, and frankly, bubble-butts trump rampaging company-legalese-dicks. Life goes on.

Show Me > Tell Me

Posted on June 9, 2011 by bluedepth

I just got off the phone and an iChat session with Scott’s Mom. She reacted the same way my mother did when we had our first iChat screen-sharing support experience. They both were speechless about how easy it was to respond to a screen sharing request sent over iChat and were both shocked that I could not only hear them and talk to them over the link but also share their screen and see what they see and help them solve the problem. The only difference with Scott’s mom is that she has a Mac Mini without a microphone, so we bridge the communications gap with a phone. It’s still good however.

And then we get to the core of what I love so much about iChat screen sharing. I can really help if I can see and help control, leagues better than if I’m just relying on what the client sees and then tries to describe to me over the phone in classical telephone support. The biggest issue I have with classical telephone support is it has a catch-22 wedged right in the beginning of it. The catch-22 is that people have to have a good understanding of computer jargon and terminology so that they can describe their problem and get a solution over the phone. If they had those skills then they would most likely not need me to give them technical support in the first place! It’s almost the worlds worst practical joke on people who have made it their career to help others with technology. Because iChat is so friendly and so convenient, it makes this entire support experience just fly by in heartbeats. Everyone is happy, they get what they want and they don’t have to spend an arm and a leg on airfare, or wait for us to drive in, or pay some shyster an unholy amount of money to make a house call and then end up doing more cash-generating damage just to pad their bottom line. I can see what they see, do what needs to be done and actually *teach* how to solve the problem with an inherent simplicity and elegance that plain telephone support can never ever match.

I have often times mused about starting my own company. A Web 2.0 Internet company. It’s driven by iChat, with Google Chat performing the long-haul services (just like it was for my loved ones in this example) and social networking to link it all together. I envision a twitter account, say @MacNeedHelp and it’s staffed 24x7x365 by various people all around the world. When someone needs help, they contact that twitter name, tell them whats wrong, and in seconds they have a trained computer professional inviting them to an iChat screen sharing session ready, willing, and able to help them solve their computer problems. The clients pay a tiny monthly fee, like insurance, so that they can call whenever they like and use the service as much as they want to make their computers work best for them. What’s better, they start to actively learn how to start solving their own most common problems and stop using the service over a time. Most people I suspect would pay $5 a month just to have the peace of mind. Even if they never use it, it’s something wonderful to be able to ask for help, and get a friendly voice who can solve whatever it is that is troubling you and help you get on with your day. Perhaps someday I’ll pursue this cute little idea further. This iChat system is worth it’s weight in absolute gold!

Whither LTE?

Posted on May 26, 2011 by bluedepth

I just got a notice that Verizon is going to be expanding their LTE service in the lower peninsula of Michigan and covering Flint, Detroit, Lansing, and Grand Rapids. That Kalamazoo isn’t on that list is only sauce for the goose of course, but it’s a particular bittersweet sauce.

What’s the problem with really fast mobile broadband traffic? The problem is twofold, and it’s partially a problem with the consumer group and partially with the carrier. First, what is the consumer going to do with 5 to 12 mbps downlink and 2 to 5 mbps uplink? It comes down to applications and the speeds at which they are most well suited. Mobile data currently is composed of streaming traffic such as XM and Pandora, PIM data such as BES traffic, email, CalDAV and CardDAV traffic, and small application data such as navigation apps and other social media applications. Currently all of these applications work well on 3G networks, and moving to LTE, well, what would that get you? The applications themselves aren’t really going to benefit from the increase in network speed, but there is one network application that will benefit and that is video. Video uplink and video downlink. Much like what drove VHS development in the eighties and nineties, it is going to be pornography that will flow over these fast circuits. It’s not productivity anymore, that putters along at 3G speeds, now it’s going to be prurient content that dominates the airwaves once LTE traffic is established. This of course is a trap. The next problem is the carrier itself. LTE traffic is going to encourage people to consume more network traffic over their mobile device and porn is just the tip of the iceberg. Verizon is going to establish data caps, if they haven’t already, and this is going to be a cash cow for any carrier. If you give a busy male executive “Broadband in your pocket” then he’s going to most likely end up trying to seek out “Broads in your pocket”. They’ll be pounding down the gigabytes. After that, the only other application that is best suited for really fast networks is BitTorrent traffic. So people will be consuming porn and illegal movies on their mobile devices and generally making both a biochemical and legal mess of themselves.

Of course we can’t discount the why behind LTE. Verizon, along with all the other carriers are pressured to always enhance their services that they provide. So much like the insipid megapixel battles when digital cameras were first being developed we’ll now have a “G” battle over ever-increasing speeds. A network that is super-fast, built for porn and huge carrier bills. This has your average white male shareholders pants filling with reproductive fluids just at the thought of the profits-to-come.

So I call bullshit on LTE. It’s bullshit because it’s core application is fapping. If that’s all there is, then LTE is just that, just so much fapping. It’s bullshit because it’s a money trap for fools dumb enough to subscribe to it. Once the population gets this mobile broadband experience they are going to blithely blow right past their data caps and land smack dab in wireless-bill-bankruptcy. I can’t wait until the wife opens the bill and sees a $1600 charge for a massive use of data and ask her husband, who told her that the reason his right arm was so much bigger than his left was because of his handedness in Tennis. Of course. Sure it is. The only people who will benefit from LTE will be the carriers. They’ll be raking in the cash and laughing their way to the bank. Mark my words.

SUNY Buffalo

Posted on May 20, 2011 by bluedepth

Talk about a blast from the past! I noticed a few weeks ago @GenerationSUNY’s twitter feed talking about the SUNY report card being presented by Chancellor Zimpher and that reminded me about @ub_alumni. It’s a curious condition I’m in. I work for WMU’s Development and Alumni Relations department and here I am talking to my alma mater’s Alumni department. The things I’ve learned here at Western, things I never thought I’d actively use in pleasant conversation all of a sudden are now directly relevant.

So of course the nice people who staff the @ub_alumni account gave me a link to their Alumni connect website. This is exceptionally comic since the system I tried to get into is the same, at least thematically, that we are attempting to bring to WMU alums right here and now. So on I go. I know a few things, mostly my UB Person Number, when your grades are in a list and it’s sorted by this number, you know it. It’s a number that’s as with-me as my Social Security Number is. And I dimly remember my username that used to be on UB’s computer system, which as I remember was a Solaris Unix system. Ah, the geeky stuff you remember. And then I made contact with @ub_alumni on Twitter. They helped me remember my password to the UB Connect site and once I got in I remembered that many many months, maybe even years, yikes, I got a letter in the mail from UB offering UBMail, their email account they offered all alums through Google. This letter, as I remember, came hot on the heels of WMU’s decision to either go with Merit’s hosted Zimbra infrastructure or to go with Google’s infrastructure for email services for higher ed. There was something very deeply satisfying to know that my alma mater elected to go with Google, and that my arguments for Google and against Zimbra were at least backed up by my alma mater’s choice. I remember laughing heartily because my alma mater is nearly the same size, at least when it comes to students, as WMU is. Golly, if it works for Buffalo, maybe it’d work for Western?!? Bah, it’s all water under the bridge.

This left-field connection did get me to wander around SUNY Buffalo’s website, and I even looked at the Giving site and YES, I did think about giving. Before anyone gets all hot and bothered, I’ve given the last two times UB’s Annual Fund called me, my basic $35 donation, so keep your knickers on people. Jeesh. 🙂 But while I was looking at the site my mind started to wander and then I started to remember. At first it was funny odd little stories, things about South Campus, about the goofy city trolley that didn’t go all the way to North Campus because the rich, well-heeled slobs in Amherst couldn’t stand the idea of poor homeless people taking a trolley from the city up into their palatial bedroom community and reminding them about how hard life is, especially in Buffalo. Other memories too, from my house that I rented on Stockbridge Ave in Buffalo, with the people who I lived with, and regretted, it’s one of the few decisions that I made that was honestly really bad. And then the sillier stuff. Like being too drunk to drive, rather too drunk to walk even, and taking a cab from somewhere in the Red Jacket Quadrangle in Legoland all the way back to Clement Hall on South Campus and telling the cabbie that I didn’t have any cash. Then discovering that I had over $40 in quarters in my jeans pocket. That I couldn’t remember that little fact or the giant bulge of coinage in my pocket while the upset cabbie drove away was a memory that did stand out, and still does to this day. I also remember my classes, the halls, and as I continued to let my mind wander I realized just how much fun I had at UB. I met some of my best friends there, and at least one I still am friends with to this day. We met when I was 18, and now I’m almost 36. Oddly enough the funny memories are really quite embarrassing really. Like the rude knowledge of what the LGBT SA offices couch must have witnessed, to how many power tools were confiscated out of that office. Ahem. That sort of thing really stays with you. At least I can say that none of those drills, jigs, or saws were mine. And if you were wondering why such things were contraband, you are too pure and innocent to read any further. 🙂

After I graduated from UB I eventually ended up in Kalamazoo, Michigan and working for Western Michigan University. I couldn’t help but compare the two. One had a covered walkway system from one hall all the way across campus to the other end that kept you out of the weather. The other did not. Now that I look back, one of the smallest things that someone can remember really sticks out. Not having to trudge through a downpour or a blizzard as you walked the Spine really dwells quite prominently in my memory. But as much as WMU has foibles and shortcomings, at least both schools had some rather lame similarities. As you approach UB’s North Campus you see Cook and Hochstetter Halls, they look big and bold and grand and then… the rest of the campus. The two Universities look very much alike. Squat little brick buildings, most starting to age rather poorly. The one thing I do remember quite clearly, and why this sticks out does humor me, is that the chairs at UB were really really good. The chairs at Western are actually impossible to use, at least some of them in the very oldest of our buildings. It’s funny how the little things stick out in your memory like big sore thumbs.

So after I cleared up from my walk down memory lane I tried my hand at the UBMail thing again. That was just as impenetrable as it was the first time I tried to get into it, it’s one thing that UB really didn’t make easy, especially for alums who were out of contact for a good long while and forgot bits like usernames and passwords to student accounts the student didn’t think they’d ever need again. But all is not lost, I was able to contact the UB IT Help Desk and asked for a password reset. I have to admit to feeling quite awkward calling CIT’s Help Desk, only because contacting our own OIT is a fools errand and contacting the Help Desk here isn’t something that is done, really, ever. Oh well, what the hell, so I called the CIT Help Desk at my alma mater and talked to a nice fellow who asked me to scan and email some photo ID verifying my identity and to call back in half an hour. That was fine, and I was impressed, at least they knew what to ask for and used the phonetic alphabet when it was relevant. I wonder if the people who got my email at buffalo.edu notice the wmich.edu address. Yeah yeah yeah, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. 🙂 One thing I did notice was that the music on-hold was promotional material for UB and was designed to make you feel proud to have attended UB. Again I can’t help but compare…

All that’s old is new again. Maybe some day when I head back east to visit family in CNY I might make a stop or two on South Campus and North Campus and do a little wandering around. See what UB has done to itself in the intervening years that I’ve been away. Once I get free of my obligations, I’ll likely start giving to UB, at least more than the $35 hush-money I currently give them. *shrug* This is how it happens. Alums graduate and think nothing of where they came from until years and years later and all the good or funny things stick out in your memory while all the unpleasantness is forgotten. You get caught up in so much of those memories that you start to romanticize those memories, and before you know it, you’re writing $2000 checks to your alma mater without giving it a single thought. Huh.

Location, Location, Location!

Posted on May 11, 2011 by bluedepth

People are asking me what I think about the location-gate kerfuffle surrounding Apple. So, it seems an apropos topic to write about here. What exactly is/was Apple doing? It turns out the iPhone 4 was recording cellular tower geographic information and when iTunes backed up the device it also grabbed a file called consolidated.db, which contained latitude and longitude data. The clever and curious started to poke around this data and discovered that the iPhone had data that appeared to indicate where the phone had been and then they mapped the data to make the entire deal visual and accessible by many people who are already very skitterish about location.

Everyone had an immediate attack over this. Claims that Apple was spying on its customers, that it was an invasion of privacy. Claims ranging from the charming right down to the purest of malevolence on Apple’s behalf. Apple noticed the powder keg of negativity that the discovery of consolidated.db brought about and changed iOS to better protect users tender privacy concerns.

Yes, I suppose if you didn’t know the intent and found location data on your phone you might be concerned, but what is this mad rush to the absolute worst possibility? That Apple is spying on you, that it’s collecting location information to use against you? This is the claim of the lazy paranoid with too much time on their hands. What is the value of that data? If you were an international person of mystery and you had grave life-or-death secrets to protect then perhaps you’d have some ground to stand on, but last I checked the average iPhone-toting American leads a very tiny life, unremarkable to anyone at all, and even if it is divulging location, with all the location-based check-in services like FourSquare and Facebook, aren’t you already giving away the keys to your very dull and lame kingdom? I’ll be the first to admit that I fall right into this slot. My life is EXCEPTIONALLY DULL. I travel in circuits that are OBVIOUS and BORING. I’m like a ping-pong ball in a game played with robots that do the same thing every time. I bounce from home to work, from home to Meijers, from home to the comic book store. Boing Boing Boing. What am I protecting? Not a god-damned thing. That’s why I don’t have a problem with online advertisements, tracking cookies, my location leaking out around the edges, or any of that stuff. It’s mind-achingly dull! It runs right along with my feelings of people turning on the iSight camera on my iMac and SPYING ON ME. Knock your socks off! First, I’m not all that pleasant to look at, so that hurts you more than it hurts me, and secondly, what deep dark secrets will you uncover? Perhaps you’ll uncover my most coveted secret of all, that once I develop 5 o’clock shadow I can’t stop itching. There, I’ve saved you all the work and trouble. Dull, isn’t it? Yes. Exceedingly so.

So what is it that people are so worked up about? I think it has more to do with how people want to be seen than actually what is seen. They want to have grand lives full of drama and intrigue, not lives spent planning on how much sour cream to buy tonight to make that one dish come out better this time. It isn’t about what they are protecting, but the image that there is actually something to protect. We are all predictable, regular, non-exceptional, and above all else, magnificently dull creatures! Whatever really awesome specialness we do possess is almost always popping in and out of existence between our ears. Every once in a while we write something down and stuff it away, sometimes we even act on it, but when you take the long view of human behavior it’s more of a dull repetitive machine with little tremors of specialness in between great swaths of inexorably dull events.

So what of Apple’s Location-Gate? Get over yourselves. You aren’t that important. Your lives, frankly, aren’t that interesting. Accept it and move on to the next thing you feel the need to squawk and twitter about ineffectually.

New Blogging Tool

Posted on April 16, 2011 by bluedepth

I’ve found a new blogging tool called Blogsy. I bought it from a recommendation from The GiveMeMind Blog.

The way the app is set up is a novel approach and it is taking a little getting used to. There are two sides to a blog post, a rich side and a write side. Establishing a link is a little cumbersome, but it’s better than having to schlep to an HTML reference to remember the vagaries of assembling an “a href” construct.

I’ve defined all my blogs that I use. Thats another small issue, as I write there isn’t any clear way to say which blog I’m writing to at this point. I suppose that when I get to publishing we’ll see how is all works out.

I figured out where the settings are, but they aren’t ordered logically. the blog you post to is at the bottom of the list, but it’s settings determine all the other fields above that one, urrrr? Also, while WordPress has a correct hierarchy of categories, Blogsy just squashes them all out into a linear list. Perhaps they’ll fix that in a later update. Let’s hope so.

The cost was $2.99 and so far I’ve seen about $0.99 value with this app.

Next Innovation Frontier

Posted on April 14, 2011 by bluedepth

I have identified the next innovation frontier! Multiple device presence synchronization.

Every innovation is born out of a tangle of issues that represent a problem. For this particular point, my problem is a maddening one. I have several streams of information that I regularly check on:

Twitter
Facebook
Google Reader/RSS Aggregator
FourSquare
GetGlue
Email

I use different access devices during my day depending on the setting and activity level present in that environment. I use my iMac while I’m active at work, I use my iPhone and iPad mixed when I’m traveling as a passenger. I use my iPhone while waiting for long durations in queues and I’ll eat private meals with either my iPhone or iPad running. My problem is one of annoyance and the possibility that I’ve missed information. When I move forward in any of these information streams on one device it can be a challenge to update all the other devices with “my bookmark” in each stream. If I’m catching up on tweets on my iPhone and I get to work, I want to switch my attention away from my iPhone and towards my iMac. What I want is for my last seen tweet to be updated on each device when I start it’s attendant application. The same goes for my Google Reader RSS Aggregator. I read news items while riding the bus from home to work and when I arrive at work I want to pick up on my iMac where I left off on my iPhone.

There are several applications that I use that have ways to address my needs, but they aren’t wholly reliable. Twitter has a “favorite” system that could be used for this, but that’s expecting one bit of the system (a square peg) to be pounded into shape to work as a solution for something else (a round hole). And Google Reader has a built-in capacity to do some of what I wish, but nobody has written the code to facilitate that requirement yet.

How could something like this best work? As with many other things the answer I believe lies in abstraction. The most convenient form of abstraction would be to have every client I use understand how to interface with Dropbox. Each app can connect to Dropbox and in the root folder of my Dropbox it can use file time and date stamps to determine when the latest updates were sent to my Dropbox, and the files themselves contain the positional information that I need to share between many systems. When I read tweets, the latest tweet that I’ve seen has its date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. When I’m browsing Google Reader articles, the last-seen-article has it’s date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. So on and so forth. Everything is transparent, the files are easily accessible from Dropbox and because the network is ubiquitous, I have no problems accessing Dropbox from wherever I am. Even if I didn’t have the network all the time, the syncing and updating functions of Dropbox would eventually guarantee that my position updates are always up in the cloud.

With this solution I could start reading tweets on one device, put it to sleep and continue reading on another device. I think this will become more and more relevant as time goes on and people start using multiple devices, computers, tablets, and handhelds. The only real challenge is encouraging every app vendor and system writer to hop on board with this idea.

Back Away Slowly…

Posted on March 31, 2011 by bluedepth

People never stay the same.

I allowed myself to get a little lost in Facebook just a few moments ago and ended up looking through the “People You Might Know” list. I found a few people who I work with that I requested to add as friends on Facebook, nothing really remarkable, and then I started to just let the names and faces slide on by. I wasn’t trying to find anyone in particular.

Then I ran into a gaggle of names I dimly remember from my quite unpleasant teen years in high school. Most of those memories have been collected up and burned to ash, and in a way, I vowed that for most of it I would never again contact anyone from that period of my life. Apparently fate has other designs, but at least it has a very weak hand.

People get older, they change, they drift from the fixed memory you have of them. Whether they were monsters, assholes, annoying prats, or just names you dimly remember, there they are, like a rogues gallery in Facebook. All lined up, one after another. Youth seen through the lens of a very foggy memory and then all realized in their current form is unspeakably shocking and breathtaking. It’s a lot like watching a car crash in super slow motion. You know it’s going to be horrible and gory but you just can’t tear your attention away from the horror. Every single one of them followed a path that if I knew then as I know now, I would have spent way more of my teenage years laughing at these horrible human beings as I endured their constant abuse. Imagine a box, it’s filled with memories and it’s got tape covering the seams. The tape is printed with “Assholes and Monsters — Burn Immediately” so for a lot of these people, I just end up scrolling on by. Every once in a long while one of them will notice me and send me a friend request on Facebook. I stand a-stunned and almost always I click ignore. I have accepted a few, mostly people I dimly remember and names that seem familiar somehow, but I suspect that their photographs-in-memory are in that box. I just lack the motivation and interest to engage with them, so they continue to float on the periphery. Let sleeping dogs lie I suppose.

What does strike me, and what I wish my 35 year old self could send to my 17 year old self are these pictures, of these horrible nasty monstrous human beings. They all went bald, they all went fat, they all wear time like some sort of abrasion. Everyone goes this way, and the photographs in your memory, they remain. I’m not going to mention names lest it attract their attention, which I absolutely do not want, but it is worth remarking upon.

Another thing worth marveling at is how provincial they remain. They never got anywhere, never progressed. They’ve just waddled in tight little sad circles. They got as far as Cortland, Buffalo, and for some really unfortunates, Binghamton. They never explored, never set out and dispersed. I think above all else I am grateful that I escaped New York State. If I was still stuck in that place the regret would be unbearable.

It’s probably best for me, in a therapeutic sense to not return to the “People You Might Know” page on Facebook for quite some time. If that box full of Assholes and Monsters should pop open and I regain the memories that I buried oh so long ago, I would definitely be worse for the experience. The past really should remain in its shallow grave where it’s been whacked with a shovel and buried. I’m far happier not remembering.

Of Horses and Water

Posted on March 31, 2011 by bluedepth

The old saying “You can lead a Horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” hits me quite often at work. I thought the introduction of two new WordPress-powered P2-themed blogs at work would be better received but as it is, the only people actually engaging with them are the core people who started the boulder rolling for social media itself here in our office.

It’s just a little dismaying when you park the Horse in a field of water and oats and it just stands there looking at you. I think my expectations are just too much for a lot of my coworkers, and I can’t really blame them. There is only a scant minority of people here who have a true addiction to shiny, and I’m one of them. I think one of the reasons why the adoption rate is so low is because of how WordPress arranges user accounts. People get invited to partake in a blog and the first thing that they are faced with is a very forward WordPress presentation urging them to create their own blogs. There is a part of me that wishes I could create usernames and passwords for my coworkers to use our WordPress.com blogs FOR THEM. Alas, it’s just one more attempt to get the horse to drink the water or eat the food. I kind of think of it as “Ok, we’ve got the Horse in the water, the food is right here, lets strap a huge weight on his head and force his face into the water and food, maybe that’ll do it.” and all I get is a kind of annoyed glare from the horse.

So what’s the value of these WordPress Blogs? Why continue them and maintain them if nobody is going to use them? I thought about that as well. There is a minimum value in these blogs, in a way I’m a horse that wandered along side the other one and saw all the water and oats and is effectively pigging out. Really, seriously, these P2 blogs are excellent log-keepers, much like “Captains Log” on Star Trek. I can use these and smile wanly that my response rate was about 5% for anyone else to use these resources. At least I don’t have to worry that my horse will explode from eating and drinking, yay for metaphorical bottomless horses.