Ah…The Facebook privacy issues.

Doesn’t it seem that a portion of your friends list goes nuts every other month over some Facebook privacy flap?  This month it is Facebook Places, earlier this month was the Defcon data harvest, and earlier things like overly complicated control settings.  In another month or two it will be something else.  First and foremost we have learned with Microsoft over the years that the market leader will get blamed for every little misstep.  I love mocking Microsoft, but I’m writing this on a Windows 7 netbook (I also use Ubuntu, OSX, IOs, Maemo, etc.).  So the majority of this vocalization is from a minority that makes it sound like there is a bigger problem than really exists.

So we know that a vocal minority can get everyone worked up and excited.   People that don’t understand the issue will always latch onto something if it sounds scary enough.   The less they understand about the issue, the scarier it sounds, the more likely they are to get worked up over it.  Take the dihydrogen monoxide hoax for example; here is the information on dihydrogen monoxide:

Dihydrogen monoxide:

• is called “hydroxyl acid“, the substance is the major component of acid rain.
• contributes to the “greenhouse effect“.
• may cause severe burns.
• is fatal if inhaled.
• contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
• accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
• may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
• has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:

• as an industrial solvent and coolant.
• in nuclear power plants.
• in the production of Styrofoam.
• as a fire retardant.
• in many forms of cruel animal research.
• in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.
• as an additive in certain “junk-foods” and other food products.

The only thing that’s missing from the description that I can see is some key taglines; can responsible for millions of lost revenue, can be found in the victims of child pornography, and is taken by Facebook employees with access to your personal data (hang on I’m tweeting that one).   One student even did a paper where he surveyed users with the facts above to see if they would sign a petition banning dihydrogen monoxide.  43 out of 50 people signed the petition to ban it.   What is dihydrogen monoxide?  It is water.

Why is this relevant?    Because the same scary sounding facts about any new technology that Facebook creates get tossed about by the people that least understand the issue (as far as “warnings” on Facebook status messages are concerned).  People like suspense caused by danger, just watch the news for the tagline “what maybe in your house killing you right now”.   I really hate those.  People however will talk and get worked up over the littlest thing.

These same people that are so worried about the privacy impact in their Facebook status have a few things working against them in their “fear of privacy”.  First and foremost is that they are using a social network, if the policies scare you so much and it is a major concern to you then maybe it’s time to quit Facebook.  The next thing is that Facebook no matter how private you think it is or should be IS A PUBLIC venue.   Maybe not everyone on the planet can see your Cancun pictures, but your friends can.  If your friends can see it; so can Facebook, so can their partners, and so can random Joe Shmoe because Facebook changed their privacy policy and the information leaked out.  Finally we have the same people concerned about privacy filling out every little survey on the planet like “Which My Little Pony Are You”, “If You Were a Tiger in Midwest America, Which Zoo Would You Be In”, or “Which Writer from the French Revolution Might You Be Related to”.  Do you think these app developers are doing this out of the kindness of their heart?  They are doing it to collect slivers of information about you each time you do one of these surveys.

The question is who to be worried about with your “private” information.   Are you concerned more about the advertisers having your information?   Well then stop filling out surveys, learn to clean your cookies, install ad blockers, disable JavaScript, and disable flash.   Are you concerned about Facebook having your data, then stop using Facebook.  No matter how secure you have locked down your privacy settings, Facebook will always have access to that data.  Are you worried about the government?  Well the CIA is a minor investor in Facebook; their role has never been clear – but think about that for a moment.  Are you worried about Joe Schmoe?  Well random individual is really the least threat to your privacy of all those listed.

I do understand there are fringe cases.  Issues where there are abuse cases, restraining orders, or child custody battles.  If those are truly your concerns though, shouldn’t you be using a pseudonym anyway?  The people concerned about their safety should always put privacy first and foremost, especially when there is a real threat.  The perceived threats on the other hand, mostly are non-existent to the normal average person living in a small town.   I can get census data and get a general idea of you, I can find out how much you paid for your house and the basic layout, I can find out if you have kids.   I can stand in front of your house and take pictures of you through the windows legally.   These are more close to home violations of your privacy that are legal and easy to do that people don’t get up in arms over.  At least you won’t until I’m actually taking pictures of you from the street.

For everyone else, we are getting to the boy that cried wolf syndrome.   When a real issue comes up the general populace is going to pay less attention to it, because they hear “Facebook” and “privacy issue” on a weekly basis.   This is going to cause a problem when a real security issue that everyone is going to have to stand up and yell about comes around.  Let’s take places for an example, you can opt out and opt out of people tagging you into places.    Now the other person can tag you at a place, but it won’t show up in any user streams if you opted out (but Facebook knows you were there).    However that same person could do a status update and say you were there and all their friends (and the world if they don’t have their privacy locked down) would know that you were there.  They can also tag you in the status update and that event would show up in your stream.    So while you can opt out of places; your friends can still place you on the map in other ways.

In the end I’m not saying that Facebook doesn’t have privacy issues.  They do, and many of them.    I don’t need people with the vaguest idea of what is going to get worked up and tell me about an issue I am well aware of.  I have few technical people on my friends list – and they are never the ones to get worked up over these issues in their status messages.   We get our information from trial and error, thinking through and figuring out the issue ourselves, or at least reading about the issue from reputable sources.    The real strength of Facebook is that it has profiling on every one of their users.   If this bothers you don’t use it.  Trust a company that won’t keep a database on you, like Google. ;)

…..smile…..

:P

For those going WTF – she tweeted this yesterday:

I HATE it when people insert “…smile…” in their blog entries instead of just using an emoticon. “…smile…” makes me want to puke. :P

Before anyone thinks that this might be about anyone in particular, it is just as much about myself as it is anyone else.  I’m in my mid-thirties, and from what I remember of my parents at this age (and I was 14 when my father was this age) is that I’m alot more immature than what they were at my age.   My parents like most of my friends parents, didn’t go out and party (granted we don’t really do that by a large contingent of people we know do).   They didn’t collect toys.  They didn’t play video games.   They didn’t watch cartoons unless the kids were also watching.   They didn’t do much.   They lived.  They lived the life that my generation said they would rather die before they reached 30 because it was all downhill from there.  We have learned it’s not.

Some of the things I’ve listed people would read as normal, going out and partying.  Other things like buying toys or reading comics I will concede the geek side of things there.  However it doesn’t change the fact that I know people that I used to be close with (and others that have never been so close) are more likely to go out and hang out than having a quiet evening at home.  I will grant you that those of us with kids are less likely to go wander around a 24 hour store at 2 AM.  If we didn’t have kids though it is not inconceivable that every once and a while while we would end up on someone’s couch.    This isn’t something that ever happened in our home for people my parents age.  The sleep overs and crashes were saved for the kids.

Some things are because we don’t want to face the reality of our age and maturity.   We prefer doing the same things we have always done and damn those creaks and pains that we never got before.  We are still young and refuse to go quietly away to the maturity our parents had.  We prefer to flaunt the fact that we are young.   I feel really sorry for the retirement homes when they do finally have to deal with our generation.   Instead of the Andrew Sister’s music flooding the hallways it is going to be Guns and Roses or NWA.

In the end I can’t say if this is a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing – I guess the true outcome will be looking at the generation that comes after us.  How will they turn out?   Will they become more “mature” in what we viewed as children that traditional “grown-ups” would be?   Will they rush to be old and give up the childhood and teenage years that my generation seems to cling to?   Maybe the fact that they named us Gen X because they didn’t know what was going to happen with us is still occurring.   We still break the mold in a way that just doesn’t quite fit the same way in society.   Curious and odd, you would think after three decades we would have an idea of what we are by now.

Months have gone by since I was regularly posting on the blog, and I did get a couple spam posts here and there. I didn’t however get the glut that I received this week when I did a few posts in a row. Last night alone I received over 30 messages (which have since been cleaned out).
There are two theories to this, the first is that spammers want to hit an active blog that is receiving regular traffic. So out there somewhere is a trigger that lists that a blogs that are updated regularly. Maybe they are watching through Technorati or Google live data feeds. Maybe they just harvest and mine RSS feeds. Since my lifestream archive is updated daily (though it doesn’t hit RSS feeds) it makes it into this engines rarely. Only search engine spiders seem to find it.

The second theory behind spamming is that you can take over a dead blog or forum. If no one is there to stop you, you can post to your heart’s content and rank up some SEO for your spam site. This is beneficial for the spammers, but it ends up in some cases hurting the SEO value of that site. The dead site is then likened to a carcass that the maggots are feeding on, so Google and the rest will treat it as such. It’s value to the community is greatly lessened in the amount of weight it receives.

So there are valid justifications for spammers on both side of the fence, I’m just curious how bad the problem would be if I didn’t have spam blockers and I wasn’t using Disqus. No wonder people pay others to manage all the incidental stuff that occurs when it comes to blogging.

I keep trying out different blog themes. I’m trying to figure which one is truly the right one for me. It’s a maddening game of cat and mouse that my wife gets into with her blog. Since she can’t feel comfortable in her “home” she never writes anything. She has a desire to write, but has trouble committing the electrons to the pixels while there is something else to get done. Lately I know the same feeling.

Really I want a simple design that I think would “pop” (yes I am overly using ” ” so sue me). ad and I want something simple that’s black and white with a search bar and page navigation at the top. I also want something that makes my lifestream and other pages look good. I want something with great typography. I want something that I enjoy looking on a regular basis.

I’ve tried literally hundreds of themes on my site. Some of them have lasted for months and other have lasted for minutes. Some people that have read my blog at one time or another must have had the theme changed out from under them. I don’t have a ton of daily hits, but I get enough that it must have happened at least a couple times. This makes me feel too picky, or at least a little OCD. It doesn’t stop me from writing – life and other things handle that distraction away. It just sits there like a splinter in your hand that you forget about until you brush against something the wrong way.

What to do? What to do?

I had about 2 dozens themes loaded, but I’ve pared those down to about a dozen. I need to go out and check out some new themes. I need to find a theme that I only need to make minor changes and tweaking on. Maybe I’ll get to it this week. Maybe by next week. Who am I kidding, I’m never going to be truly satisfied

Saw this over at Boing Boing.

This would be awesome and the highlight of what ever year they did this. These are my two favorite Weezer albums and I went the Blue and Pinkerton concerts the first time around. Check the link below for more information.

Weezer Plan Blue LP/Pinkerton Tour.

Creeva Dry Chili:

1 Pound Ground Beef
1 Can Diced Tomato
1 Can Kidney Beans
1 Green Pepper
1 Red Pepper
1/2 Packed Cup Collard Greens
Black Pepper
1/2 Cup Spiral Noodles
Optional – Grated Sharp Cheddar

1. Brown the ground beef
2. Dice the peppers
3. Finely chop the collard greens
4. Boil the noodles
5. After the noodles are soft add them and everything else to the browned ground beef.
6. After simmering for five minutes remove from heat
7. Add black pepper to taste
8. Serve in a bowl with optional grated sharp cheddar on top of it

So there you go, an original recipe that works pretty well. I would have added some onion if it was available, but we were all out.

This is the dreaded post that you find everywhere over the web.  The one where I am apologetic about not getting writing done in a timely manner.  The post where I promise that tomorrow will be different, that this lapse has been only temporarily.   I will say things like I am going to turn a new leaf and that content will be flowing out of my fingertips like the biblical ambrosia and honey promised in some holy book.

I will come up with excuses such as work has been busy.  Maybe I’ll pull out time with family.  These of course are not lies or even untruths.  They can be exaggerations.  The truth is closer to the fact when I would have time to write I’m sitting on the couch vegging out instead of being a productive blogger contributing the internet society and the link economy.  I could easily be doing how-to’s on projects I am working on, writing about books I’m reading or have read, and even just daily life.

Do I have a lot of projects and good intentions in doing them in a time manner? Of course I do, but you the reader aren’t quite sure you will ever see them at all with my track that has been going the last few months.   Will I blame you for that?  Of course not.  It is completely believable and acceptable.  I can say I haven’t been playing farmville or any facebook games (ok a little bit of bejeweled blitz).

Will tomorrow be different?  As Button Bright would say “Don’t Know”.  I can say that I’ve made this far into adding content my blog, my life-stream hums along (not as flowing as before, but life happens).  I hope I haven’t ostracized anyone that wasn’t done so by my bluntness, rudeness, or general mannerism.  If I’ve lost you for those reasons – then I deserve it.  If I have lost you for the laziness that exists trying to get something to come out of my relationship with my fingers and the keyboard – I (well I’ll say I apologize, but you’ll see right through that).

Until the next post…..

Now those are some rims….

Speed, it’s a wonderful thing

Over the last few months I have been reading Lex a bed time story every night consisting of a chapter from Frank Baum’s Land of Oz books. The first thing Xie said when I told her that I wanted to work through these books with him was “There is more then one?”. It seems that there are quite a few people that think the story begins and ends with “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. Obviously this is not the case.

Baum composed a total of 20 books to the series and it was then picked up by other writers after him. I’m not sure if we will go into the books by other author’s (which canonically add another 20 for a total of 40 books), but currently we are at book seven.  Some of the books are great – others it seemed Baum was just “phoning it in”.  So when you are starting the next book, you can’t be sure of the quality you are getting into. Though I have a feeling over my life I’ll be reading these again. Lex is still at the stage where he is listening to my voice, but not really paying attention to the story yet. So when he is I’m expecting to have to go through all of these again.

I got into the Oz books when I was around 9 or 10.  I used to check them out of the Amherst public library and just devour them (hence why I was aware of the series).   I doubt I ever read them in order, I never read any not written by Baum, and I’m positive that I did not read all the books that he wrote.  I loved reading them regardless.

Working through the thought process I take that back – I didn’t read any other canonical books by other Authors.   I did have a science fiction-esque book that took place in Oz. It was titled “A Barnstormer in Oz”- my parents bought it for me when I requested to pick it up when I saw it sitting at a Big and Small Lots store.   I got it home and low and behold the story it told.   Well really I can’t tell you the story since I don’t really remember it, but there was nudity and sex in the book.  This was one of those cases where the child never tells the parents what the book really contained.

My parents bought be Wizard of Oz smut and never realized it.  You can’t blame them, it would be the same as if I bought Alexander a Harry Potter spin-off book in a few years and never read it myself.   You would go, oh Harry Potter – go ahead kid knock yourself out.   All and all I don’t think it was all that graphic – but it was graphic enough to shock a ten or eleven year old reading it.  Somewhere around the time I went to college the book disappeared from my possession.  It is just as well, it’s not one of the book’s I plan on reading to Lex anyway.

Most nights we get through a single chapter – some nights he falls asleep quickly so I don’t finish the chapter, other nights he is bouncing around and refusing to sleep so we get through two or three chapters.  This is done every weeknight after his bath and before my dinner. He get’s top priority, so every night we have the routine down to maximize my time with him.  Get home, feed him, play for a little bit, give him a bath, and then read to him until he is passed out.  All in all, it’s not a bad routine.

I’m hoping to do a blog write up on each of the books, ideally I was going to do a write up as I finished each of them.  Doing the math of not a single write up so far, and the fact I am on the seventh book – that doesn’t seem to have happened.   This isn’t something that is alone related to the Oz books – I’ve finished a few other books this year that I wanted to do write ups on but haven’t yet had a chance.   Life the universe and everything like that.   Hopefully soon these will get written, published, read, and commented on – or more then likely ignored.

Until then I hope you all have a pleasant journey with me as I travel down the yellow brick road one chapter at a time.

I thought you said you were going to wash my mouth out. I figured I would just beat you to the punch.

Is this how daddy does it?

I’ve always been one of those boring guys that kept a standard black background on his computer – especially his work computer. Sure occasionally I would branch out and for a month or so keep a new interesting background – but it was always a temporary thing.

Now that I’m a father, I’m not one of those guys that shoves pictures of his kid in your face (unless of course you are coming to my blog then it’s fair game). I do however keep an image of him on my desktop full time, just to remind me what I’m toiling away at work for anyways.

I don’t have a Lex screensaver – since I’m not around to see my screen anyways – why bother? The image above is my latest desktop image.

I had started a year in review for 2009, I was going to write up a link to all my stories of a personal nature over the last year.  Highlight becoming a father, etc., etc.  It’s now two weeks into the new year and I never got the story completed.   Instead of giving up completely, I decided that the year in review was going to be just like Shermer, Illinois.  On a side note – have you notice that no matter how many times you write out Illinois you need to spell check it?  Anyways if you don’t understand the significance of comparing a year in review to Shermer, I’ll let Jay and Silent Bob’s little scene from Dogma explain it to you.

It was a tightly held secret that before Creeva could play trumpet, french horn, baritone, (and very little saxophone) – that he flirted with being a drummer. Thankfully the danger was averted once he learned to actually read music, thereby disqualifying him from being a drummer entirely.

I’ve been thinking about a series about growing up a geek – but quite a bit of those stories would cross with a retro blog I want to get off the ground ( which if you are interested to help write for let me know). I have a few articles where I should get out my daddy issues, but those have been put to bed. I’m not sure I want to dredge up the past that my father and I have moved on from.

There is alot I could write about – just stunted at the prospect for the moment. I can say be on the look out for something genuine this year.

Great – now to decide what in the next 351 days……,

IMG_4162, originally uploaded by Creeva.

If we could all just experience the joy he is showing off in this picture, the world would be a better place.

I hope this is a typo., originally uploaded by Creeva.

Playing with mahalo answers I found this question – what are the chances terrorists are developing nuclear families? Now I’m sure (hoping) they meant facilities, but what if the question is genuine?

Are we concerned that Wars is bring up Wally and the Beaver to be home grown terrorists? When I hear nuclear family I f course think of the 50′s style meaning. Maybe there is something I am still
missing.

IMG_6721, originally uploaded by Creeva.

I finally made it one step closer to my ultimate wordpress theme. There are still a few changes I hope to get a chance to do, but one of the big things is now done – automatic thumbnail generation. WordPress 2.9x does this, but only for locally uploaded images. I mostly host my images on flickr, so generating a thumbnail from those is/ was important.

Now I get to have my home page with a nice picture montage and it gives me more of a reason to do some photoblogging. Now if only o could get it to generate thumbnails from YouTube clips……