1. Don’t ride down hills with your mouth open
2. Buy antihistamines
3. Don’t ride up hills with your mouth open
4. You know nothing about horses
5. Never look at threadless after you’ve been drinking, unless you’re willing to wake up and realise you now own a shirt with a woman shooting pink stars from her eyes and another with a girl dressed up like Batman hugging a giant tapir.
6. Participate more, create more, spectate less.

lets get suspect
lets get wrecked
every little defect gets respect
just protect
what you expect
quicker on the reflex
hit the deck

i know i’d rather complain…

- Nisker

Incredible that a song about casual sex can be pigeonholed into the SDLC so easily. Until you think about dongles. Dongles explain everything. Life is better with a dongle, UAT is better with Peaches. Q.E.D.

Having had to duck into the office, it’s later than usual when I load the iPod, wind down the windows, and head to the markets. I’m going to buy all the necessities for that recipe I’ve been meaning to try for ages, to see if I can find some Alpha Pale Ale, and to find something for the headache. I’m yet to make a decision as to who makes the best coffee down here, and have settled on a vaguely scientific method of research which involves working my way, coffee by coffee, clockwise around the entire market, until I hit on a winner.

Today, this lands me in front of the delicatessen, where a cute girl yells numbers from a window dispensing a bewildering variety of Saturday morning beverages, “ristretto, short mac, and a skinny flat-white. Number 45 please.” The girls sitting behind me are discussing the relative merits of tramp stamps and gluten-free chocolate brownies, two topics I had not previously made the connection between. I guess it’s obvious, when you think about it. I sip my coffee and wade through the testament of Gideon Mack until the sun begins to erode my patch of shade.

On my way back to the car, I notice a cart selling churros. In truth, the smell turns my head before I spot it: the sweet, punchy aroma of pastry in the deep fryer, the softer notes of cinnamon, the burnt tang of fresh caramel. As I wander up, the owner, a large French man wearing a threadbare Wallabies cap, is arguing with a Brazilian student as to the relative merits of churros in South, Central and North America. When the Brazilian suggests that perhaps South American ones are the best, because they contain fillings, and are larger, he becomes visible upset, pacing up and down behind his cart as he gesticulates in refute, stopping only to adjust the sticks of pastry as they float to the surface of the bubbling oil.

A three word summary of his argument would be as follows. One, tradition. Two, texture. Three, simplicity. He delivers his parting shot to the Brazilian as he hands me my bounty, a crisp, golden-brown pastry coated in cinnamon and smeared with thick dollops of dulce de leche. I stop and bliss out for a while, until a car beeps at me and I realise I’m standing in the middle of the road with caramel syrup dripping off my face. I decide I need to get home before I finish the remainder, or I’ll find myself walking back with the intent of buying out his whole stock. I manage to make it to the car without a relapse, and head home.

My housemate comes into the kitchen as I’m stacking cans and announces she’s bought new clothes pegs. That they’re in the cupboard near the laundry. That I can use as many as I want.

I’m telling you, if you can get excited by the little things, the big things are easy.

A quick search for Kobe, Japan on my social search uncovered this photo:

Charming, isn’t it. Particularly when taken out of context. According to flickr, almost 400,000 people have seen that photo.

The thing is, you have no control over what other people link to, title, and share. With the increasing ease of uncovering these links it’s so important to make sure your side of the house is in order.

So, a reminder:

1. Kill any links to things you don’t want discovered. From your side, but also from the source if you’re able to. If your friend has a photo or story of you don’t want public, ask them to make it private, or to remove your name.
2. Use privacy filters to control what people can and can’t see. Here’s an awesome one for facebook.
3. Map connections to things you do want public in something google indexes quickly (like their profiles) to push those results above others.
4. Understand how services like social search work so you can be mindful of what’s going to happen when you’re creating content or linking to stuff.

This isn’t about being paranoid, or changing what you share with friends, or the services you use. It’s about understanding how the web hangs together, and that everything you put on it will be there for pretty much forever. With the increasing ease of mapping connections between content you or your friends create, it’s important to make sure that this won’t come back and haunt you.