I recently received a very interesting email from an old co-worker. He wanted to know what he had done to offend me. Wha?! He said that on Facebook, he didn't have access to my wall or pictures or notes or anything. The poor guy was genuinely distressed! Oh, my.
Until I decided to leave Seattle and drift, I avoided social networking like the plague. I'd rather hear from you in person. Preferably over a beer. That you bought. Ahem. But from the road, social networking is simply the best option for staying in touch with folks. So I caved and joined. And it was fun.
But then co-workers started friending me. Aunts and cousins, too. You know the drill. I started worrying about offending someone with an offhand remark, or getting in a tussle with some loved one about politics or religion. It's easy to offend, out there on the intar-webs. So I dialed my privacy settings up to 11 and (oh, the shame!) put my friends in bins: friend, friend, family, friend, co-worker, etc.
But some co-workers are friends. Family, too. Why do social networking sites encourage us to bin our friends like that? And in case you missed the irony: by trying to avoid offending people, some people got offended!
So, f*%$!k all that. (Apologies if that offended you.) I'm done with putting my friends in bins. Friends are friends, and that's that.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
"Another roof, another proof"
I'm not dead. I'm not done traveling, either. If anything, I've been too busy traveling. After Melbourne, I spent 2 weeks in San Francisco; 3 weeks in Seattle; a long weekend in Spokane, WA; a week at a programmers conference in Aspen, CO; and a week in Phoenix, AZ. I'm now burning the midnight oil at a friend's place outside Charlotte, NC. Next week, I'll be cooling my heels at my parents' place out on Long Island. Whew!
Why all the moving about? Necessity, in part. Being a traveling professional means keeping up professional contacts; hence, the conference in Aspen. Besides, Aspen is purty:
May snow in Aspen, Colorado
But in larger part, my moving about was to see friends and family, who are inconveniently located all over creation. (Why can't you all just move to the Bay Area?)
After Long Island, my next move will again be of a professional nature. I'll relocate to Boston to collaborate with another freelance programmer on a project that interests me. I was inspired by a stray comment made by a fellow conference attendee after he heard about my nomadic lifestyle. He said, "You don't look like you sleep on the street... much." Hah. That wasn't the inspiring bit. He then compared me to a mathematician named Paul Erdős. I'd never heard of the guy, but apparently he was a bit of a nomad himself, showing up on the doorsteps of other mathematicians and sleeping on their sofas while working together on papers. In fact, he's published so many papers -- more than any other mathematician in history, in fact -- that other mathematicians calculate their Erdős number as a sort of geeky six degrees of Kevin Bacon. (The title of this post is a nod to Erdős.)
Anyway, this whole Paul Erdős thing is just a round-about way of saying that I've found a solution to a central problem of my wanderings: no interaction with professional peers. I often prefer working alone, but sometimes it's nice to have a hacking buddy. Since I'm free to drift, I can just drift in the direction of the people and problems that interest me.
I'm really looking forward to the upcoming Boston hack sessions. I won't be crashing on my Boston buddy's sofa, but I still think Paul Erdős would approve.
Why all the moving about? Necessity, in part. Being a traveling professional means keeping up professional contacts; hence, the conference in Aspen. Besides, Aspen is purty:
But in larger part, my moving about was to see friends and family, who are inconveniently located all over creation. (Why can't you all just move to the Bay Area?)
After Long Island, my next move will again be of a professional nature. I'll relocate to Boston to collaborate with another freelance programmer on a project that interests me. I was inspired by a stray comment made by a fellow conference attendee after he heard about my nomadic lifestyle. He said, "You don't look like you sleep on the street... much." Hah. That wasn't the inspiring bit. He then compared me to a mathematician named Paul Erdős. I'd never heard of the guy, but apparently he was a bit of a nomad himself, showing up on the doorsteps of other mathematicians and sleeping on their sofas while working together on papers. In fact, he's published so many papers -- more than any other mathematician in history, in fact -- that other mathematicians calculate their Erdős number as a sort of geeky six degrees of Kevin Bacon. (The title of this post is a nod to Erdős.)
Anyway, this whole Paul Erdős thing is just a round-about way of saying that I've found a solution to a central problem of my wanderings: no interaction with professional peers. I often prefer working alone, but sometimes it's nice to have a hacking buddy. Since I'm free to drift, I can just drift in the direction of the people and problems that interest me.
I'm really looking forward to the upcoming Boston hack sessions. I won't be crashing on my Boston buddy's sofa, but I still think Paul Erdős would approve.
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