Facebook is Magic

I am sure you have heard Arthur C Clarke's famous quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I recently signed up for Facebook, and received a powerful demonstration of this principle at work.

When you first sign up, it asks you for an email address. I gave it my Gmail account, and so it went into my address book and found eveyone I had ever sent an email to who used that email address for their Facebook account. Then it prompted me with a list of about 50 people I might want to add as friends. So I choose from this list, then went on with the sign up. I told it were I worked and where I graduated from school, and it gave me another round of recommendations for friends I might want to add.

Then the magic part happened. It seems like it looked at all the people I wanted wanted to add, and looked at all their friends, to search for friends they had in common. Then it started kicking out recommendations from that list. This is where I started to see the names of people I hadn't thought about in 20 years. For example, I was in a band in High School. Of the four other guys in that band, I had only stayed in contact with one of them. A week after I joined Facebook I was back in contact with two more, and they each know how to reach the fourth one. And so we are seriously discussing getting the band back together for a one time reunion show.

This is very interesting to me. Sometimes I feel as though I have worked hard to distance myself from my past, but then Facebook works to bridge the gap I built. There is a sort of almost artificial nostalgia to seeing photographs of yourself and your friends from decades past. It is almost an instinctual reaction to be attracted to the beautiful youths shown in the photos, and it is charming to see yourself among them. But at the same time, not all of the memories from that time are particularly happy. Sometimes you get friend requests from people, and you take a long while deciding what to do.

I am not as good about expressing these mixed feelings as I would like to be, so I am linking to an article by Lissa Soep at NPR called “Facebook And The Over-30 Crowd. If you would like to read more about this, her article is a great place to start.

How I keep up with the Global Financial Crisis – Part 1

So, the borderline economic emergency we were facing in the fall is now a full-blown Global Financial Crisis (GFC). You might ask, “how can I stay informed during a GFC? The people on TV seem more confused about it than I am, so they really are no help at all.”

What works for me is podcasts. I have three that I follow now that do a great job of explaining the GFC in an understandable way. The first one I will cover is The Wall Street Journal This Morning.

This is a daily, one hour news show based on business and financial news. It is put together by the good people at the Wall Street Journal, so you know going in it will be pretty conservative. This show really resonates with my and it has become an essential part of my daily routine. In my area, it is broadcast on the radio, but the show wraps up just before I get in the car each day. So instead, I download the podcast and listen to it that way. One cool thing is, by about the time I am halfway to work, their timechecks pretty much sync up with real time, so you lose the feeling that you are listening to a recording and it starts to feel real-time.

Another interesting thing about this show is the way I am right in their target demographic. As you get older, you start to notice that people stop aiming the full force of their marketing at people like you, and start hunting for younger people, you like things that don't really interest you. Not so with The Wall Street Journal This Morning.

There is a long list of little things this show does that help me bond to it. First, the music. It is all music I recognize, mostly from the 80's. Their theme music is Golden Earring, “When the Bullet Hits the Bone.” You may not think you know this song, but when the show starts up, you will recognize it. Coming in and out of commercials, you hear Devo, the Cranberries, Van Halen, all kinds of songs that you know. Second, the show's host, Gordon Deal, is extremely likeable, and pretty much like me. If you look at my older posts here, you will see I am completely self absorbed and view everything through the lens of my own experience. Mr. Deal is a man about my age, with a daughter about my daughter's age. He uses Firefox, is on Twitter, loves the NBA, and is in many ways a down to earth, regular guy. If we must have a GFC, this is the kind of person I want to get my news from.

So go to Itunes and give it a try. I am to the point now where my day doesn't start off right if I don't get to begin it with Gordon and Gina.

Five and a half months!

Wow! That's a pretty long time.

It is fair to say that I have been doing other things. Mainly, I was writing here as an outlet for my frustration and anxiety leading up to the election. When that turned out the way I had hoped, I didn't need that outlet as much.

Then I gave in to the Siren's call of Facebook, and it sucked up all my free time. But I have noticed that I have things I want to say or share, and Facebook isn't the right place for it. So I am back, and this time I am probably back for good.

Just for good measure, here is a left over picture.