Stoss Blog

So I am told that 27 years ago today I was born into this world.  I say “I am told”, because who knows if I can trust my parents… They lied to me about Santa and the Easter bunny for years.

This really isn’t a milsetone, but then again milestones are arbitrary anyway. If we lived in a base 3 world I’d be 1000, or in base 9 land I would be 30, so I guess I can celebrate that. (Thus concludes the mathematics/geeky section of this blog)

Besides our obsession with celebrating decades, we conveniently decided to celebrate “odd numbers” once-in-a-white. 15 isn’t special, but we have sweet 16. Our various world governments seem to love 18,19 and 21 (or some combination) and once you hit 50 we seems to celebrate the half decades a lot more… Apparently people that are closer to the average mortality rate need more to celebrate.

The celebration of an anniversary of any arbitrary event is a time old tradition that Hallmark loves and men anguish over. But I for one salute the arbitrary partying for my impressive achievement of being born. Truth be told I can’t take all the credit, I think my mother was there too…

I love the question “Do you feel any older today?”, Of course I don’t I am simply one 24 hour period older than I was yesterday… well actually, not true, I do feel older, but that may have to do with the 27 alcoholic drinks my mates and I consumed over the past 30 hours.

Thank you to everyone for the Facebook well wishes and to the people that send cards over the ocean, your love is much appreciated! For those that are around, party in London, England September 19th, all you need to bring is your mouth and some, no doubt, lovely waiter or waitress will kindly supply the booze (for a small fee of  course). Details of locations to be sent out this week.

As recommended by a friend and source of always different and enjoyable reading/viewing material, I recently started watching “True Blood”. For those of you that haven’t seen it, I will try not to issue too many spoilers, at least none that a pre-pubescent goth freak couldn’t grasp about 12.5 minutes into the first episode.

The show overall is enjoyable. I can willing suspend my belief that in this world vampires exist and Anna Paquin can read thoughts as a relatively good plot device, between her periodically losing her fake southern drawl that is. But, I do have to admit Mel Gibson did a better job using such a talent to his benefit, I mean banging Helen Hunt & Marissa Tomei in one movie? Good for him…. I digress…

A few things I find interesting:

For a religious small town in New Orleans, these people not only have crazy amounts of sex, the sex itself is more wild and elaborate than most Private releases.  However that isn’t the disturbing part. what disturbs me is that before many of these sexcapades that would make Jenna Haze blush, they make it very clear to each other that they have had plenty of sex ,with plenty of people, and sometimes even state that it was just earlier that day. In fact, when our heroin Anna Paquin finally gives up her cherry, in what can only be described as the best display of breasts on television in 2008,  she feels it necessary to scream it out loud… to a bar full of people… where she works… which the guy she just went on a date with a couple nights before owns…The few days after she discovered two loved one’s murdered bodies… But,hell,  she had great hooters though, eh?

And  then there is Jason, the brother, who I can only picture as an homage to Ellis’ Patrick Bateman, who fucks a girl doggy style behind a bar, while covered in garbage. I am all for adventure, and exhibition… but seriously? I am pretty sure I saw his truck in the background of the shot, it was 20 yard away… trade-offs, man, trade-offs…

Now, for a country that has been fighting the war on drugs so long that the girls they initially were targeting now have more problem with their nipples touching the ground, than with excessive marijuana use,  they certainly are promoting the hell out of “V” (aka Vampire Blood). This apparently is a miracle drug! It saves a person’s life by miraculously healing her and giving her a dog’s smell and a bat’s hearing, then in one episode it acts like Viagra on Ecstasy and pumps up a guys cock in the most fake erection through the pants seen in TV history, and in the very next show it makes fireworks shoot of some guest star girl’s tits. Well, truth be told I see fireworks every time I see tits too, that has less to do with drugs… It also has this magical power of making you fuck up everything in your life. But then again, don’t all drugs? Don’t do drugs kids.

The other thing that is interesting about this town is that everyone seems to have a job (or 2) and they never need to go. I think the phrase “<blank> isn’t coming in today” is uttered once per episode. But, I mean I guess there are more important things to do, like getting arrested for every girl you sleep with dying, but then getting let go after the cliffhanger, or trot around town with a vampire who you have more of a Ross/Rachel relationship with than me and my constant love/hate affair with Tostitos.

Now, what is missing from this review? Oh yeah, the VAMPIRES! For a show that has a premise of vampires, they are really nothing but a subplot and allusion to the black/white race issues of the southern US. It isn’t even an allusion, actually. It is referenced in the damn title sequence!

The references to this are not poetic and are not subtext-ed at all. The characters bringing up segregated bars, a main character comments, after her daughter notes how white a vampire is, “No honey, we’re white”.  The continuous assertion that a “few bad apples are making all vampires look bad” and even the utterance that once you go vampire you never go back (Doesn’t really have the same ring to it, does it?)… Do they really need to spell this out anymore?

In the end, entertaining. Not my favourite show, but I find myself caring a little bit for what happens, and when sitting alone in a hotel it makes for good watching… wait, did you just say there is porn on the Internet? umm… bye…

I’ve been think a lot about death lately. Before you raise your eyebrows, it isn’t a bad thing. There have just been a few things in my life lately that brought the subject up. I’ve outlined a couple below.

Firstly, a friend and former co-worker in his late 20’s lost his battle to cancer a few weeks ago. I truly hope he is in a better place now and his suffering has ended. What particularly struck me was that his Facebook page for days was appended with kind and supporting words for him and his family, this was something I hadn’t seen before.

This made me wonder about the role technology plays in death. This blog is hosted by a 3rd party company which I pay a fee to annually. Assuming my credit card isn’t cancelled immediately and my passing happened around renewal time, it is fair to say that this page could exist up to a year after me. I am fairly positive Facebook/Twitter and similar web apps have policies around dormant accounts being deleted, but again there would be a lag between my last breath and my account’s. But once gone from the servers, all my thoughts, all my pictures, everything is gone for good.

Secondly I reference a conversation between Andrew and I on our trip to India. While Andrew is a friend and we know each other well, he certainly  wouldn’t know my parents, my home town and probably couldn’t remember the company I work for. This is no slight to him at all. This is the way many friendships start, and I could same about myself in relation to him. The conversation starter was “what if something had happened to one or both of us on some dark back alley in India?”

The easy case is both of us “disappeared”, because quite frankly that would be it. My friends and family would have no idea where I was. Aside from my odd email home to give an update on recent events, I never gave addresses of hotels or any indication of future plans. Truth be told as we got on the plane to India all we knew was that we were landing in Delhi, nothing more about the rest of our journey.

I read an article once about a man whose girlfriend was on vacation in Hong Kong. She txt’d him one night saying she was going to bed and was never heard from again. He flew over to Hong Kong with conviction that in a city of 7 million he could track her down. Of course as the news usually goes, I never saw the end of the story. 

That was in a city of 7 million, Delhi has 14 million. I doubt very much that doubling the population or even halving it for that matter changes the magnitude of a search like that.

But the case that is more interesting is what if one of us had disappeared.

Back to technology.

When I was in highschool a friend passed away suddenly after being struck by lightning. His closest friends created a collage of photos, printed them on large paper in colour and gave them out in remembrance of him. This poster still hangs on my wall in my room 9 or more years later.

If I fast forward 9 years, will my colleague’s facebook page still exist? Certianly not.

Technology is a double edged sword. It has the potential to bring us together easier, we can share photos, events, news instantly around the world, but in the same regard, once the medium we use to do that sharing is obsolete we have nothing left but a memory.

If Andrew had disappeared in India, I could have used Facebook or some other technology to find his friends and family and notify them of the situation. We could then use mobile phones, email, webpages, news media etc. to get the word out. While tragic, technology would help me almost isntantly get to the people who need to know, without me having ever met those people. 

The other edge? In 30 years we won’t be able to sit with our grandkids and flip through a photo album. Assuming our harddrives/USB keys/DVD-Rs last that long, we might be able to flip through them on the some antique JPG viewer. But somehow I think this is unlikely. How many memories have you lost because of a harddrive crash? A computer virus? A lost usb key or a misplaced CD? 10 years ago it would have taken a basement flood, or a fire to destroy these things, now it is as simple as a magnetic getting too close to your MacBook or a power surge in your apartment, or a thumbdrive slipping out of your pocket.

I am not a Facebook page, a Twitter account or even this blog. These 3 things are put into an infinite equation that makes up “me”. The fact that these will outlast me, regardless of when I die is a scary thought, because that means that in theory  instead of people’s last memory of me being the last time we met for a beer or our last day of work together, it will be my last blog entry, or my last update on Twitter.

I have been in countless museums and read and seen images on papyrus, animal skins, bark, stone… These are universal and although they decay, in general they transcend time. They are hundreds and even thousands of years old. You’d be hard pressed to find something to look at files on a floppy disk these days, and this medium was still widely used just 10 years ago, and jsut plain forget about the technologies the files on those disks are stored in.

I hope I remember the times I had with my friends mentioned above 30 years from now, hell I hope I can remember my own name 30 years from now… I just don’t want to have to bet on technology to be the mechanism for my memories.

The other day in the paper there was an article about a 22 year old English man who died due to liver failure. The doctors were quoted as saying “He had the worst case of cirrhosis they have ever seen”. In fact his alcohol consumption was so bad that he was denied a liver transplant on the basis that it was felt he could never kick the habit enough to treat the new organ properly.

The mother has come out saying that he “made a mistake” and was not “given a fair chance” at a transplant. He also “didn’t know what he was doing …  He didn’t know he was going to die.” The articles stated he started drinking at age 11 and binge drinking by 13. I am never one to trample a man’s grave, but does anyone else see anything wrong with this?

Just yesterday I was treated to a wonderful article linking alcohol to cancer. Wow. It sounds like this alcohol stuff is the worst substance on this planet! Killing humans! Causing cancer! We should definitely fear this beverage! It’s almost as bad as dihydrogen monoxide*!

But then, a little bit of my faith in humanity was restored, with an article talking about how a drinking age of 21 in the US is hurting society, not stopping any drinking.

The truth is everything is harmful. You can die from drinking too much water (DHMO?), people are struck by lightning by doing nothing more than standing outside! Hell, LIFE KILLS YOU! Every notice that 100% of lives, end in death?

The problem here is not the substance, whether it be alcohol, pot, tomatoes, red meat… the problem is the over consumption and lack of education about a substance.

I hate to say it, but one thing the government got this one right with the Canadian Food Guide. Having a moderate amount of various foods. Another example where our government succeeds?

Check out these 2 pages:

Health Canada Drug Facts

Drug Enforcement Agency (US) Drug Facts

Canada explains in calm and clear statements what we need to know about drugs. Click on any of the drugs listed and they use phrases like: ”May be addictive”, “Scientific studies are not complete”, “Smoking can lead to bronchitis”.

The US site in contrast uses phrases like: “It’s like playing Russian Roulette.”, “can lead to addiction, impairment and even death.”, “far better not to start, not to experiment, not to tempt fate.”

See a different approach here?

Moderate consumption of any and all substances is fine. Binge drinking is bad, period. We’ve all done it, I hope not at age 13 and hopefully not every day, but we have all done it. Smoking tonnes of pot, while popping e? Yeah, probably not an ideal hourly activity. But remember your 21st Birthday? Yeah, neither do I.

I hate “Top” lists. I do. All of them. I’ve hated them since before Letterman tried to make them his own, and I hate them even more now when webpages take 10 links to show 10 pictures of the top 10 potentially homophobic animated characters as judged by someone with the television knowledge of my left ass cheek.

But here is a list that I cannot even begin to tell you how much I hate. The Top Seven Ways Technology Owns You. For those of you who don’t want to (or can’t) read:

• OnStar cars
• Google’s data mining
• Facebook and other social networking sites
• Digital Cameras being used in public
• Credit Card data mining to determine your risk as a card holder
• CCTV
• RFID Tags

OnStar: OnStar uses is the combination of 2 major technologies. One is a similar system to the black box on a airplane. This technology in cars has been around since 1970! It tracks data on crashes and is used to make cars safer for the general public and can be used in court to show dangerous driving. The second is GPS. Now, although this become operational globally in the 90’s, similar technologies have been around since the 40’s and were widely used in WWII. Having cars speeds controlled by these technologies is not scary, in fact it is probably the best method of accident prevention. Several years ago they started demo’ing Magnetic cars in California where there was no need to accelerate or drive. Speeds were controlled by magnets in the roads and a computer system. Cars could drive 70 mph within 5 feet of each other without any human error causing accidents… computer error, well, that is for another entry Oh and BTW, don’t you have to voluntarily buy OnStar?

Sometimes advertisers don’t seem to understand how things will look or read after they spend their 9-5 day creating the ads.

JD and Their Ducks	It’s very good that Jack Daniel’s would like to let us know about their expert quality controllers. I am sure they provide a lot of benefit to the end product. However, I am very very unsure how employing ducks could in anyway improve the quality of a fine American Whiskey. I also would like to ask a few questions to the makers of Old No7: Was the ducks involvement in the process limited to any particular component? Perhaps ducks have taste buds that can discern between a quality and a shitty whiskey. This is a fact I would expect to see on Wikipedia. Can ducks hold their alcohol? I suspect that due to size restrictions on a duck the tasting of alcohol could lead to severe drunkeness and perhaps odd duck-behaviour. How do you slur a quack?
Does anyone look at this and see a severe case of some communicable disease? There are clearly disease sores covering this person’s lips. I am also not sure why lips were chosen for this ad. Is it not common knowledge that taste buds are on your tongue? And what is wrong with this person’s face. usually  the chin kinda “rounds off” below the mouth, here it looks like Jay Leno’s chin if he portrayed Carrie.	Do I have something on my lips?
Gremlin Earth man to the rescue	Why must every product or ad have a mascot? It isn’t necessary and all it causes is people trying to come up with something “new and clever”. Unfortunately as Hollywood proves with every single movie they release since Usual Suspects “new and clever” means attempting to combine a couple ideas into one and passing it off as unique. Exhibit A: Scary Gremlin Earth man. How the hell can a mutant earth with a patch of “ice cap” hair and zits be considered a mascot to help conserve energy? Aside from the disturbing image of the puffy eye’d monster with Africa as a goatee, I don’t think with a hairpiece that bad you can even pass off as “receding” anymore, you are pretty freakin’ bald!

It was recently announced that 1 month ago perennial Stoss Blog antagonist Twitter had a security breach when a high ranking executive’s account was accessed by a “hacker”. The hacker correctly guessed the users’s secret security questions to gain access to the account then surfed through corporate data and released it to well known techie sites. As the hacker himself posted: He did this to make people aware of the importance of security.

The articles I have read have used this as an excuse to bash the practice of “1 password for all sites” and the use of easily guessed security questions like “hometown” or “mother’s maiden name” which are ubiquitous it seems in the land of web sign up sheets. It’s almost as if some assmonkey whose only knowledge of security was the aluminum key that locked his pansy-ass diary decided one day it would be great if we could secure our most personal data using such totally secret, impossible-to-find-out data such as our pet’s name or the street we live on! Yeah, no one would be able to penetrate that code!

But I don’t so much have a beef with this. It’s security practices in general, both corporately and personally that are appalling! We focus so much energy on enforcing ridiculous rules that are absolutely unsubstantiated and yet no energy on the flaws in the human logic of password selection.

Here are the fallacy’s behind my favourite policies:

1) Change your password every 3 months & don’t use the same password for 10 changes

The genius that came up with this should be shot in the chest simply because it is now become the most ridiculous belief since the Hayley’s comet morons killed themselves to ride it to utopia. Would you change the lock on your house or your car doors every 3 months? Hell! Most people don’t change them when they move or sell their car! How many previous owners have a key to your house do you think? I have never figured out the logic behind this absolute waste of time policy that does about as much good as putting duct tape over your monitor to stop UV radiation. If someone finds out your password, they aren’t going to wait for 3 months then go, “drat, foiled again!” when it fails. It only takes a few minutes to download the entire contents of your harddrive, so by the logic of preventing data theft we should change our password every 5 minutes, right? If anything this helps hackers, because people are not random! We get lazy and append a number or capitalize a different letter to form our new password, so a hacker can guess for months on end and, once he has “your pattern”, will perpetually have access to your account. And this is the reason why not using the same password for 10 changes makes no sense! If anything this encourages using mypassword0 through mypassword9.
I also love the idea of “3 months” and “10 changes” seemingly being industry standards. What possible study could have resulted in these numbers being determined as the “optimal” values?
I love policies that seem picked out of a hat and then spoken about like they are a gospel to the industry. As if 91 days is a magic number for a criminal to guess your password, so better change it before day 90!

2) Password strength monitors and post-its

“Don’t tell anyone your PIN”, “Never write down your password”, “We will never ask for your password in an email”. BUT what we will do is analyze every character and tell you if your password is “strong” enough. Strong enough for what? To knock out Superman? To cut a diamond? We are talking about basic mathematics here. A password of length 5 made up of all small letter only has about 12 million combinations, throw in one capital and it is about 60 million combinations. Throw in a number somewhere on top of that and you are now at 3.5 billion combinations! That is a pretty big number. But consider most companies/websites have a 3 wrong and you’re out policy (A policy that does make sense), that is a hell of a lot of attempts on your password and if you can’t figure out after the ten thousandth time your account was locked that someone was hacking you than you deserve to be shot like the guy who proposed the stupid policy above.
The thing here is that the combination of letters, number, capitals and special characters is almost irrelevant, the most secure password is random, entirely random. I am still using a random letter combination I got generated for me by Geocities when I had my first webpage over 12 years ago. Sure, mathmatically it is probably trivial for a random generator to exhaustively guess it, most personal computers can do 1 billion+ calculations a second. But the point is it ain’t that likely! Just don’t use a simple dictionary word like “idiot” or “password” and you are probably in good shape.
I also love how secure it is that we are typing in a password that no one is supposed to know, but it can tell you “how strong” it is, meaning somewhere your password characters are analyzed. How is that different than me saying “psst, tell me your password 1 character at a time and I’ll tell you if you need more numbers or capitals, but don’t worry, my mind will forget it immediately”.
And of course this is where post its come in. The problem is not writing your password down, it is writing it down in the context of your computer and login. For instance:
Stupid: Writing your password in permanent ink on your monitor
Bad: Writing your password down and placing it in the top right drawer at the office
Less Bad: Writing it on the birthday square of your mother in a day planner you keep with you that has no reference to what that random word could mean or what login is associated with it.
Even better. Hiding it in a tattoo on your ass, written backwards and upside down. Of course you’d have 10 of them and have to re-design it every 3 months….
Writing a random word and placing it in a random location is not a bad idea at all! In fact if anything it’s a safeguard in case someone needs access to your data!

Locking all of your secrets behind a single alphanumeric combination is as logical as locking a door to a convertable or keeping your safe key hanging on the number dial. However in this day of technology we have to have something to allow us secured access to our information, and until we all scan our eyes, fingers and ass prints into a global database or want to prick our finger for DNA each time we want to read email, we are stuck with it. Be smart and just don’t fall into the trap and think that your security policies actually have as much bearing on security as they do on wasting your time. Oh and I know your mother’s maiden name and eye colour, so don’t use those as your “secret” questions.

My Lonely Planet Guide for India (which was a God send of a book) had countless warnings about scams in India. Almost each city/section had special headings on the type and nature of scams in that region and spoke about how to spot them and avoid them. Aside from being a yet another fear mongering product of the US, this made me think about cons in general.

I recall the first scam I encountered abroad was in Rome when I  visited my friend Sarah who had lived there for several months.. Along our walking tour a man offered her a rose as a gift, she declined rather poignantly and continued to walk on. I inquired shortly after why she turned down such a nice gesture. She replied that if she took the rose I would then be expected to pay for it. An interesting and simple scam that acts upon a female’s desire for something nice and a male’s inherent ego to be the provider and not wishing to disappoint his partner.(Ah conventional gender roles, is there any area of life you don’t penetrate?)

So how do we define a scam or a con? If a con is pulled off well, it may be that the victim wouldn’t even know it was a scam. Sort of like the tree falling in the woods making that inaudible sound (an oxymoron I suspect, however entirely suitable to the analogy), is it a crime if the victim doesn’t feel victimized?

For example: In Beijing I watched an artist chisel a beautiful image of the Great Wall onto a small piece of marble. I asked the price and was given a response which was well below what I would have been willing to pay for such a unique piece of work. I happily paid and continued on my way. What if the price of this was much lower in reality and he had in fact taken me for a rube? If I was willing to pay more, then really in my mind I got a great deal, all this while the artist was potentially laughing all the way to the bank.

So perhaps the definition of a scam is written by the victim and not the perpetrator. An interesting notion in that this fits my previous discussion on living in the reality that we ourselves create. Not everyone experiences the same scam the same way. Some people truly think the queen is one of the other 2 cards in a three card monte game. I pity those poor bastards.

Then enter movies such as the Die Hards, Clooney’s and originally Sinatra’s Ocean’s <insert numbers here> series. Each of these contain elaborate plans with an end goal of financial gain. Maybe the last sentence could be a definition for a con as well. But we never hear about these plots in real life. If someone attempted to pull of a Nakatomi heist or rip off the Bellagio, it would be on Twitter in real time and on CNN before Bruce Willis got in an elevator shaft.

In India the scams were not sophisticated at all. In general they were mainly just lies like: “No No, this is a gift” or “I am an employee here” or “I don’t want money”. And here in my opinion is the problem with cons: Everything could be a con. Charity donations, the moon landing, (dare I say religion?) etc. In India we met an English couple and discussed this very aspect. Because of the fear-mongering instilled in us by Lonely Planet no matter who spoke to you, there was a little voice somewhere in the back left side of the brain saying “How is this guy conning me?”.

If a tourist guide to the US outlined all the possible measures for “protection against terrorism” you’d do exactly what the American media does to their population already: Put them in a constant state of fear. A recent example is the (rather stupid idea of a) photo shoot of Air Force One in New York at low altitudes. Immediately the thoughts of NY’ers turned to 9/11, their “little voice” immediately turned to what they were programmed to turn to, a connection between low flying planes and terrorism, just as ours minds in India turned to the connection of Lonely Planet warnings and people wanting to scam us.

We are constantly scammed. We pay more money for beer in Skydome than in a pub across the road an economic scam that happens in all wakes of our consumerism (explored in The Undercover Economist, an excellent read). People get screwed on Ebay every day by “mildly used” products and P&G owns several brands of toothpaste so they can charge varying prices for each and skim all the demand it can.

Ever wonder why you can send snail mail to your MP or to the Prime Minister without a stamp? Because the government way back when invented mail as a way of communication for itself. It then decided that the public could use the service, but instead of funding it on generic government revenues, they would tax mail users on a per use basis. The fact that you paid the tax was put on your parcel in the form of a “stamp”. Nowadays we pay tax on top of the price of a stamp. We are paying a tax on a tax! Sounds like a scam to me…

They may not be scams in the traditional definition, but then again if, as I stated above, we define our own sense of scams, and if none of the above is considered a scam by you, you’re never scammed! Or, alternatively the collective human population is the most gullible group ever.

Those of you fortunate enough and/or with enough spare time to read my Facebook, Twitter and Blog sites are aware that I recently de-coupled Twitter updates automatically updating Facebook statuses. I did this for a very specific reason, and have just “un-done” this for another. I had a few people comment on that decision, and felt I should explain it in more detail.

I think the concept of “Status” has vastly changed and continues to evolve in the virtual world we tend to view each other in.

When Facebook first was rising it was no more than MySpace without the annoying interface, I held off signing up for a good couple years, as I was more about “doing it myself” at that time. As such, I wrote my own blog program which was basically a minimalistic Wordpress without any skins or fancy add-ins and definitely didn’t dominate in the professional and amateur world of blogging. But it worked for me and allowed me to learn new PHP and CSS skills, so why not?

My “Status” at this point was really static. I had a basic About page that essentially (with a little more wit I hope) said: “I’m 21 years old @ UoG and I tend to drink a lot of beer”. But technology and inquiring minds were not content with this dorment and long term relevant data, so as tecnology and speed of access continued to grow, Facebook moved “Status” into a changing forum of “Craig Stoss is …” land. And while “Craig Stoss is 26 years old, a UoG grad and still drinking too much beer”, our voyueristic tendencies have taken this even further.

What used to be a daily update or two on Facebook from “Craig Stoss is sleeping” to “Craig Stoss is at work and eating snacks” to “Craig Stoss is going out tonight”, the public demanded Facebook remove the “is” and spawned a new concept of our “Status” world where at a click I can get a brief summation (and an accurate timestamp of said “Status”) of all my Facebook friends. It allowed your “Status” to not be tied to you are all. By removing the small ‘is’ the freedom was given to type any update you chose. But Facebook had a few problems. 1) it isn’t an easily visual medium for mobile devices and the Blackberry and iPod apps are still HCI nightmares and 2) logins and security were hindering lay people access to the up-to-minute details they so craved without all that pesky permissions crap getting in the way.

Enter Twitter.

Twitter not only gave us the ability to see anyones realtime “Statuses” in chronological order, but now we had an interface that was agnostic to medium. Its vast extensibility all but encouraged and begged developers to find ways to dig deeper into our personal lives, and at the same time make them instant and accurate! Now I can post a photo in real time of the shutter closing. I can provide you with a map accurate within meters of where I am standing and locate others who “Tweet” in my vicinity.  And I can follow trends of what people are talking about most and join “conversations” with absolute strangers.

Our “Status” literally has become the very thing we were doing that instant, not a generic or vague reference to something happening or about to happen, but an actual view to that instant in time.

There is a Vedic language where each word is in itself the make up of the object the word describes. So the word “tree” would describe the tree itself. We have now converted this to ourselves: We are no longer a series of long running activities and chapters of our life such as “I am 21 and attend UoG” we are now a series of points in time strung together and interleaved with other points in time “I am 26 and 9 months and am currently in Paderborn Germany at the Best Western room 705″, or even more granular “I am taking a crap in said hotel room, it had corn in it”.

I de-coupled Twitter and Facebook for that reason. In my opinion, and as sure as the sun will shine tomorrow there will be disagreement, Facebook is not a place for granular updating of the milliseconds on my life. It is a more gradual timeline of my growth in various friendships, the travels I have done and the activities I do on a generic scale so that people close and formally close can understand the person I am and am becoming. It has generic references to me being single, my birthdate, my trip to Australia, not specific instances of un-censored details held together via nothing more than the neurons in my brain firing in different patterns when I react to something external to me.  Twitter is just that (for me). A timeline of quick random thoughts I have as my days progress. I minimilize the experience into a phrase of 140 characters, hopefully with a bit of wit and insight to my “Status” at that given point In time.

They serve different purposes and will continue to do so until we replace Facebook and Twitter with whatever comes next in the technological journey we are on.

However, all that being said, I have chosen to recouple them as of this week as over the next 4-8 weeks I will on the road extensively and, while I want to maintain a separation of who I am vs. the instant I am experiencing, I feel the two have a MasterCard style Venn diagram when remote from the comfort of my home and work laptops.  So, please excuse the amount of updates, but also enjoy the ride! I hope to bring you plenty of updates via Twitter/Facebook from India, Germany, Switzerland, the US and wherever else I am taken and hopefully will have some chance to blog a bit along the way! I am a bit geeky after all