Archive for December, 2006

Facebook is FINE.

daniel on Dec 31st 2006

I just started really using Facebook… well, yesterday. And as I used it, I began to understand the vision its founders have for the site. Or something. Maybe it’s the fact that I got close to 20 hours of sleep yesterday (figure that out).

But Facebook is lining up to be the next internet, the way MySpace is sort of the youth internet right now. Sure, to my younger brothers and sisters, there are neat things that happen outside of MySpace, but they’re just some neat things. The meat of everything happens in the interactions between profiles and the additions to them, the gaining of friends, the miscellanea. Sort of the way the blogosphere works for us bloggers.

But Facebook is better than MySpace because it minimizes the amount of customizing that people can do, and instead of focusing on individuality and letting everyone glitter their profile up to high heaven, it concentrates on interconnectivity. This is a good thing. The News Feed page is a really, really good thing.

For instance, all my friends and I have blogs. But reading 100 blogs a day is a pain. So we aggregate (I, for instance, use Google Reader), and the content gets pushed to us. But what if you want to comment? You can’t comment via RSS, so you have to visit the blog, which is a barrier to entry, so to speak. (I personally think aggregation reduces commenting.) What blogs lack is a unified method of communication with eachother – a framework for interaction, if you wish. HTML doesn’t provide this. There’s nothing wrong with having ten thousand different blog sites and types of blog software, but what would really help the blogosphere become more social is enabling users to see what’s going on the way social networking sites do. Or the way Facebook does really, really well.

This is, of course, rather tangential to my main point. But what if Facebook expanded its reach just a little? It’s already got a note-creation mechanism that a lot of people use as a type of blogging space; what if Facebook allowed me to set up an incoming RSS feed that copies content from my main blog as it is updated? That would be neat. It could circumvent the blog integration problem altogether. Friends would get updates in their News Feeds, and could comment from there. Sure, it would create an abstracted layer of comments, but I’m not sure Facebook users would care that much.

It’s just an idea. In any case, I have to take a shower and go to church. Or as my crazy sister and her husband would say, I have to take a shower so I can have the privilege of going to church. And I would add, smelling less like roadkill than I do now.

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The Real Me

daniel on Dec 30th 2006

I am a man of a thousand faces and identities. You may have guessed at this before, but I’m telling it to you now so that you know for sure. It’s my job, albeit a job that I’ve chosen, to be ten people on any given day; sometimes that many people in an hour. Meet me in France, and I am making cheese in a humble village. I don’t know much about the world. Laugh at my quaint dialect, my rustic inflections. Meet me in Toronto, and I am wearing a hockey jersey. Ask me the forward line, and I’ll tell you. Believe that I care more passionately about the game than politics. Meet me in Washington, and I will bore you with the intricacies of policymaking. Understand that it’s difficult to make laws. See how one must write them thus and such and file them in the right desk drawers.

Is there a real me? Of course, if you’ll explain to me what is real.

Foremost, I’m an observer. I write things on a computer and email from one of a thousand addresses to one of a thousand other addresses, to a complete stranger that I don’t know. Or least, if I know him, I don’t know that I know her. I am these thoroughly unremarkable people in order to watch, and to write, and to change my clothes and do it again somewhere else.

This is my job.

This is also my life. You know of course that men and women who excel at something in their personal lives generally find professions based on that pre-existing aptitude. I have an aptitude for copying, like I copied that last sentence from an old field manual. I am good at being everyone because I am good at being everyone to almost everyone. I read the odds and see that most people believe they know me, while a few others understand they don’t know me all that well, and a slim few understand they don’t know me at all.

You’re now in the last category. Ignore what you think you know, and grasp what I’ve told you instead. The slim few. So far, it’s just you.

Smart as you are, you’re going to ask me questions I can’t answer, and meta-questions that don’t even have answers. For instance: if I’ve told you that you can’t trust me, how are you to trust me in that? But then, that question isn’t a matter of trust, but a matter of language. I am an Irishman telling you the Irish always lie. I am God making a rock heavier than I can lift.

I’ve learned one thing about trust: it isn’t given, and it isn’t earned. You can’t trust someone who hasn’t earned it, but you can’t earn the trust of someone unwilling to give it. Thus the issue at the heart of the question — trust — is as much a matter of language as the question itself. An abstraction two layers deep.

One of my identities likes to play philosopher.

You think you know, but you don’t, not really. Can you even know that you know what you know? Does that sentence even make sense? Is anything at all more than illusion? We all function as if reality is reality. Functionally, the question of how we know is meaningless beside the assertion that we do, in fact, know; we must assume that.

But I’m asking you to assume that you don’t know, but that it’s possible, that you can in fact know the real me. The real me is that thing inbetween waking and sleeping, when the me that suppresses and molds me is too groggy to function. The real me is when you punch me in the face as hard as you can.

As far as I can see, you’ll find a French cheesemaker, a Canadian hockey fan, and a bureaucrat in those moments. And in those moments you’ll find in yourself those things as well.

For all I know.

I am fluid, like you are fluid. This is how people grow apart, because men and women are not like trains on a track. They are like currents in an ocean, if you’ll pardon the simile. And job be cursed, the only way to stay in sync is to watch carefully, to be deliberate.

You’ll find, one day, that you are more like me than you used to be. Then, I think, you will find the real me, because the real me is you.

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links for 2006-12-29

xmlrpc on Dec 29th 2006

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Good time v. Bad times

daniel on Dec 27th 2006

I think we post about our lives when they’re bad because we’d very much like to see a change. We don’t post about it being good for much the same reason. Call it knock-on-wood syndrome, but nothing good seems to last. Thankfully, nothing bad seems to last either, except when it kills you, in which case you and the bad end at the same time. Nothing lost.

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links for 2006-12-27

xmlrpc on Dec 27th 2006

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links for 2006-12-26

xmlrpc on Dec 26th 2006

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Ringing of the Bards

daniel on Dec 25th 2006

The latest edition is online here. Enjoy.

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It’s Christmas!

daniel on Dec 25th 2006

It’s Christmas morning, and the internet is awfully silent. So in lieu of having any actual content to spew forth, I’ll just say Merry Christmas. Or for those of you who don’t think being merry is quite right, Blessed Christmas. And good luck with the rectal stavectomy.

Filed in main | 10 responses so far

Chroma

daniel on Dec 25th 2006

Again with the Notion, and again with the staying up well past any sort of bedtime. But this little ditty is the result, and for once I quite like what I’ve made.

Chroma (MP3)

Tell me what you think, peoples.

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links for 2006-12-24

xmlrpc on Dec 24th 2006

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