Tag Archives: New York City

Friday Flashback – March 8th

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2004 – I got my IRS return back from the Feds, $1700, a part of that went to GenCon. Boy, were those the days. Since GenCon went to Indianapolis, and I don’t travel through Indiana unless driven by a myrddraal, that won’t be happening again. Some funny Andy-abuses-popsong-lyrics humor and the almost daily work issues, which at this point are at the focus where irritation and cliché meet. Moving along…

2006 – The big thing on this day was Project Runway was concluded. The most important bit from this show happened this year, “Where’s Andre?” Yes. Where.

2007 – Owning an American Made Car made the headlines on this day. Getting screwed over by General Motors makes 2013 a laugh-fest. We saved GM, Quist-ler, and Ford. Oh hooray. $1200 for replacement bearings and fourth set of brakes. It’s one of the reasons why I’ll never own another American made piece of shit car again. American auto companies can fail – hah – or not. wry smile The start of my debt was this awful car, one small little golden brick of it at least.

2009 – The beginning of the end for my odd benign cyst that was on my leg for years and years and years. This was when that whole thing started on the path to the end. Now I’m delightfully symmetrical and ever so daintily scarred. In the movies? Watchmen. Those were the days.

2010 – Wireless carriers still mattered. Sprint was good for highways, Verizon was slow but everywhere and AT&T was shit. This also was when AT&T bought Centennial wireless. So, whatever. Little did these carriers know but they were on the path to becoming commodity carriers. Nobody cares about their products or their employees, just their towers. In other news, I was hopeful that La Palma would break off, hit the ocean and several hours later erase New York City with a megatsunami. Alas, my hopes were for naught. New York City still exists. Blah. I started to blog and lauded how I could link dump automatically on Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, social networks as whores, take it bitches. It was at this point I realized that Apple Sales are whores. If you approach them and jingle money at them, they’ll do anything for you, but after the sale? You’re full of Santorum and the beer goggles have worn off. I also wished for Fax Machines to disappear. I didn’t get my wish.

2011 – A bit of Sage love as an email brought me great joy. I still thought Daniel Tosh was pretty neat, before the rape jokes and general wretchedness set in. WMU rolled out the Bronco Transit Mobile GPS and I thought it was neat, then I stopped using the system. I started thinking about how awkward it must be for Christians when Easter isn’t a fixed date but based off a calculation on the moon after the vernal equinox, lulz. Extra special work-fun and I started talking about AES–256 and how smart people look it up and take advantage of it.

2013 – Reality TV and Contest TV kind of suck. I decided to make a change to what I do at home, after dinner and cleanup are done. A very old friend and I shared a special moment, but they have no idea because it was just a dream. My daily tarot card readings pretty much jive with my horoscopes and so, I do my best to not go all “Hulk Angry/Hulk Smash”. I dealt with work issues, did things I’m not proud of, found FBackup which was okay, and generally felt that the day was best forgotten. I laughed heartily at the foibles of folken, they don’t, so I do, and it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me, which is why I do it. What is it? Ah, yes. Work stuff… you’ll never be knowing. Trust Issues. Dangly Bits. LOL.

Privacy is Stupid

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The echo chamber of Twitter, the Blogosphere, and Facebook are reverberating with journalists and pundits going on at length, with intense fretting and dry-handwashing regarding the respect of privacy in social networks. I have two problems with the complaint over privacy in the 21st Century.

My first problem with privacy in the 21st Century is that privacy is the antithesis of socialization. The rage now is social networking, joining sites, finding others, connecting with people deep in your past and right around the corner. There is a kind of magic when you put a whole bunch of people in a social web, from the dissemination of news, information, to the most recent demonstration of altruism regarding the fellow on Metafilter who had people coming out of the woodwork to prevent a possible instance of human trafficking in New York City. We have tasted the candy of socialization and we like it, we have expanded into Facebook, Twitter, even WordPress in order to share ourselves with the outside world. Each of us consumes vast amounts of information now, instead of hunting for it at a Library we now wade through information online, and the places where we engage this social network are vast and varied, the bedroom, the bathroom, the boardroom. We have seen something shiny and the herd has put its head down and begun a social stampede. How does privacy last in this situation? It simply cannot! Privacy is DEAD. If you want to share, then how can you be private? “I want to be found, but I don’t want any of my information to be found.” This is utterly irrational.

The second problem with privacy in the 21st Century is this odd predilection for being utterly truthful to a fault. Lets say you would like to preserve some small shred of privacy online, why would you be utterly 100% honest to social networking sites? There is nothing absolutely binding you to only one email address, and you can elect to not include information you don’t want to provide! Even if you are pressed for information, what prevents anyone from stuffing the box with bogus details? What is my address? 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Obviously. Why are we so driven to be utterly honest online and then pitch a fit when that information is misused? I cannot understand why people who are driven to privacy haven’t yet constructed an alias, a completely fake persona, or even bogus contact information!

These two problems I have just bounce around in my head and I get more and more agitated and irritated when I see people whining at length about their precious privacy. Declaring that they will abandon Facebook because their privacy policies don’t fit in with their utopian ideals. It’s a free service, you aren’t held to be 100% truthful, so why all the bitching, moaning, and above all else impotent whining? If you haven’t poisoned the well when it comes to personal information in order to preserve your privacy, then your privacy is dead. Utterly DEAD. Get over it! Stop complaining about Facebook and Twitter and how you don’t want to share information. You are in a social stampede, all you can do really is stop running with the rest of us and allow yourself to be trampled.

It’s lonely being all by yourself. But at least you’ll have your precious privacy to keep you company.