Category: Chapters

I wrote this earlier but didn’t actually post it. There is no explanation.

Recently I read a popular blog post regarding the September 11th anniversary coverage in the media (the post was popular, not necessarily the blog). Essentially, the author stated that he was tired of hearing about it. I won’t repeat him, you can read it for yourself.

Five years ago I woke up at 8:45am to shower before class, and as I normally do I checked my computer for new e-mail or instant messages. Once I went unidle I received an IM from my friend Art, telling to to turn on the TV, as “a plane just hit the wrld trade centr”. I woke my neighbor up with some door pounding, and twenty seconds later we were greeted with what has become a familiar image. I spent the next ten minutes waking up the rest of my building.

In a way, I’m not tired of hearing about that day, even five years on. That day will be one of the defining days of my life and of my generation. Terrorism strikes a nerve because of the “every man” quality of it. Any of us can be on a plane or in that office building. The people who died didn’t deserve to die, they hadn’t done anything that put them in a position to make a choice. I think that’s what gets to people about flying in airplanes. You have an incredibly larger chance of dying in a car than in a terrorist act or a plane accident, but people fixate on planes and terror because they don’t have their hands on a wheel.

The part I am tired of is what the war let us as a nation do. I doubt George W. would have been elected to a second term without September 11th and the ensuing wars. Notice how I say wars, not war.

I’m tired of everything the government has done in the name of terror. I’m tired of color coded warning levels with no meaning. I’m tired of the word terrorist being used as the new catchall evil doer. I’m tired of someone telling me to be afraid.

But I’m not tired of September 11th. I don’t mind hearing about the fireman who ran towards the building before it collapsed so he could help more people. I don’t mind hearing about how the nation came together and for one day played on the same team.

I’m not usually a big fan of the actions of the United States, but sometimes I’m rather fond of America.

As a brief introduction, Facebook is a social networking site primarily aimed at college students. It lets you post a profile listing contact information, lists of favorites, your general political leanings, etc. More importantly, it also lets you become ‘friends’ with someone. This process involves sending an invitation to another member to become your friend, and if the other member accepts you will both be put on each other’s respective friend lists. You can even decide you want to list your relationship information. You send a ‘relationship’ request to your better half, which they can accept or deny. If accepted, your profile a tag called “In a relationship with:” and will then show your boy/girlfriends’ name with a link to their profile.

Up until very recently, all the information that could be gleaned from your profile (name, high school, college, e-mail, phone number, AIM name, relationship status, circle of friends, personal website, political leanings, clubs, organizations, job, etc) were passively displayed on a page that anyone that was friends with you could see.

But then Facebook decided they wanted to aggregate all changes your friends make to thier profiles and actively display it on your start page. They did this as a time saving measure for the user, and, not surprisingly, people freaked out.

Keep in mind, the information is the same, and the same people can view it. The only difference is that now, instead of having to navigate to someone else’s profile to see any changes they make, Facebook lists them on your home page. Let’s look at an example listing (the names were changed to protect the guilty):

Jennifer Aniston went from being “single” to “in a relationship”. 6:08pm
William Gates added “pie” to his favorite foods. 8:59pm
Bill Murray and Bobby Digital are now friends. 10:06pm

This scares people. Instead of Bill Clinton reading about my listed relationship to Ann Coulter only when he reads my profile, now when I decide to ‘cancel’ the relationship he will read about it on his main page the very next time he logs on.

This clearly constitutes an invasion of privacy … except that it doesn’t.

The same information is given to the same people. No information that was private before is public now, and no one who couldn’t read about your love of the movie “Space Cowboys” can suddenly read about it. The difference is people’s misconceptions between the passive and active distribution of personal details.

Most people are willing to pour their heart and soul into a personal blog because they view it as a passive publication, somewhat akin to publishing a book by putting it on the back shelf of a public library. Anyone can walk there and see it, but you have to make an effort and already know it’s there.

An active distribution method would be putting a copy in everyone’s home mailbox, or shouting it from the rooftops with a loudspeaker. If I find your blog from a Google search and e-mail the link to a couple hundred of my close personal friends, it might make me an asshole, but it certainly doesn’t constitute an invasion of privacy. You said what you did in a public forum, and you cannot complain if people show up to listen.

In my opinion, the new Facebook change is the best thing that could possibly happen to social networking sites. There is no difference between an ‘active’ or a ‘passive’ distribution of personal details in regards to an assumption of privacy. It’s still distribution. Before people could delude themselves into thinking that the personal details they divulged were somewhat protected by the nature of requiring a user to explicitly visit their page. The change forces people to think about every small edit they make, from adding a friend to adding a hobby, as now being visible (even broadcasted) to everyone they know.

If you’re not comfortable sharing a personal detail/website with everyone you know, don’t publish it.

P.S. You can send this to my mom.

Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I picked up my backpack and wandered down the hall to the elevator, taking it to the alien lobby of the building that wasn’t mine.

Life as a nomad is lonely, but freeing in a way. It’s been close to a month since I moved out of my old apartment, the furious hours of throwing things in Wal-Mart bags so that they could sit in my car. Outside of a brief stint on the other side of the Atlantic, I’ve been sleeping in my friends’ living room.

Last night I spent a long time talking about philosophy, love and the finer points of crab-cake economics. I stayed up past when I had planned on going to bed, but good conversation has tendrils that keep you from wandering away too quickly. This morning I had errands to run, things to do, missions to accomplish.

However, when I reached my intended destination, a little bug told me to keep driving. I asked him, “Why?”, but he wouldn’t tell me. Bugs are like that. I kept driving.

I turned down King street, which is the cultural corridor on which Old Town Alexandria is situated. Today it was alive with couples, kids, food vendors, people walking around smiling at the good weather. The proceeding several days were occupied with a tropical storm hit that had drenched much of the East Coast. Yesterday, when I stepped in a pool of standing water, one of my dress shoes announced that it had a hole in the bottom.

Rounding a corner, I headed north, along the Potomac towards the airport. Past the Torpedo Factory that houses all of the local artists. Past volleyball games filled with yuppies wearing sunglasses. Past the family with the adopted asian child playing on the rocky beach. Right up to a parking spot that looked out onto the water.

I got out of my car and walked onto the grass. I took off my sandals and felt the green blades run through my toes. Families having picnics, a game of frisbee, the elderly riding bikes by the train tracks, all under the most perfect of partly cloudy skies.

It’s been a while since I’ve been completely overwhelmed by a sunny day.

It was like sitting in the shallow water at the beach. The water is warm, and you face the shore with the wind at your back. You feel the water slowly pull out in anticipation of a wave, and suddenly you’re lifted up by this rush that surrounds you. It picks you up and glides you forward, your arms floating and the surf tickling the back of your hair.

It will put you down eventually, but for a brief instant in time you fly in the warm embrace of the surf.

A moment can be like that.

When I first loaded Google I was all ready to search for important things. Save the world. You know the drill. Instead I get this.

I was stunned by such a shocking logo. There was no name. There wasn’t even any color. Had Google gone Dada? Had Larry and Sergey decided that Nihilism was the answer?

My universe was collapsing. Not Google. They stood for life, not death. Color, not greyness. The link wasn’t even clickable, so I couldn’t discover what special day it was. Won’t someone think of the children!

When a browser downloads an image, it stores it in a cache. A cache is like the top of your desk. If you put something down (close the browser window) and five minutes later you need it again (load google.com), you don’t have to walk all the way to the bookshelf again (download the logo).

When I distractedly reach for things on my desk, sometimes I come up with the wrong item. Computers are normally much better at not making this mistake, but it seems that Portable Firefox is more human than it’d like to admit.

The following is the original image that Firefox somehow thought was a cached copy of Google’s logo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:March_on_Washington_edit.jpg

The image still loads when I go to Google, and in some ways it’s refreshing. Firefox innocently shocked a comfort zone I didn’t even know I had.

Google’s dad could beat up Firefox’s dad ANY day of the week.