Techy-Feely

Happy Fourth!

Circle of Life

It’s the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life

I took a workshop a few years ago about finding your life’s purpose. It was an appeal to my Feely side and it turned out to be much more beneficial than I dreamed it could be. The end result of the day-long seminar was to create a personal mission statement. It was supposed to be short enough and easy enough to remember if you were being held at gunpoint and asked to recite it. After going through several worksheets to help identify verbs and values that should be included in the statement, I eventually derived this statement:

My life’s purpose is to illuminate, celebrate and participate in the circle of life with friends, family and the Universe.

I like it. The verbs really resonate with me and what I find valuable, useful and important in life- both at work and not. It also was important to me to recognized the Circle of Life as I know it is constantly moving and must be a part of how we live in this world.

Parts of the circle of life are easy for celebration and participation. Birthday parties. Graduation. Weddings. First bike ride. All kinds of things. And, some parts are harder.

Yesterday, I had to participate in one of the hard parts of the circle of life as I said good-bye to my dog, Haleakala. From a post I wrote back during my Project 365:

Back in March 1999, this skinny scared dog showed up in our yard upon returning from a trip to Hawaii. We named her Haleakala and on April 22, 1999 (Earth Day) she came inside the house for the first time. So, we declared Earth Day as her unofficial birth day. She got some treats from a vendor at yesterday’s Earth Fest. She loves them!!!

Saying good-bye to her was one of the hardest things I ever have had to do. She was diagnosed with cancer three months ago and the decline started shortly after that. It is a gift that we can prevent suffering and pain but it is a hard gift to give.

But, I want to celebrate her life and what she gave to me.

I went through my Flickr account and pulled together a slideshow of good, bad and ugly photos of her over the past 4 years or so. You can see what a pretty girl she is.

The Circle of Life keeps moving and so will I as I keep illuminating, celebrating and participating.

And now back to our regularly scheduled quizzes

Been a while since I took a quiz.

Decentralizing the Web

The more irritated I get with Facebook and other sites who keep changing their privacy policies and yanking around my information without me fully understanding what they are doing or when they are going to start doing that, these four guys and their project makes perfect sense to me. So, I helped fund it!

The internet is a small place

I know that I have already blogged about how BIG the internet is. But, in many ways, it does feel small.
For example….

Earlier this month, I was sitting in a webinar learning about new functionality for a system used at my school. It was quickly getting over my head so, of course, I went to Tweetdeck to see if anybody was tweeting about the same webinar. I found one person who mentioned he was watching the same session. Okay. One other person. Fine.

Later that same day, I was dealing with a technical issue with a plug-in for our WordPress Multiuser system and started working via email one-on-one with the developer of the plug-in. He was very helpful and we got the issue resolved relatively quickly. (it was one of those issues where it finally started working with settings that made no sense but neither of us wanted to take the time to figure out why it broke or why is was working with those settings – sometimes you just have to take the victory and run).

After working with him, I decided to check on Twitter and see if he was there. One search query later, I found his Twitter page and in his tweet history was the ONE TWEET about the earlier webinar.  He was the one person I found also watching the same presentation.

Small world, isnt’ it?

Are you in this year?

Last year, I celebrated Earth Hour in my home with my pets. I will do the same this year with my family.

Are you in for Earth Hour this year?

What I have been doing lately

Yes, poor little T-F has been neglected as of late. But, I have been quite the blogger over on another site this past week.
http://blogs.pstcc.edu/variations2010/

January Snow

Went back to Vuvox to remind myself how it worked and found the Vuvox Express. Fun and fast!

Thinking about the new meaning of online “privacy”

It’s a snow day, which means I “get” to play on the computer more than work since it is a Monday and all. I have had the new interface for Facebook for a little while now. I like it. Cleaner, easier to use and things make sense up at the top rather than the bottom of the page.

But, the changes have got me thinking about other changes in Facebook from December as well as other social sights as well as with my own thinking about privacy. Facebook basically appeared to do a 180 degree turn in their thinking. What used to be a very closed network that only allowed first folks from one school ever increasingly morphed into a site that only those with a “dot edu” email address and then full tilt when into encouraging well, the entire universe to join. The founder of Facebook basically has said that “privacy is over“.

I hope he is wrong.

I am not thrilled with 100% open with no privacy. I want to have control over what I want to share. And, if you give me enough time I usually get comfortable with it. I started out on Twitter and protected my tweets. Eventually I decided to open it up to all to see. While many social network types seem to think that if you don’t open your tweets you are not “worthy” to follow. I have also read some pretty good reasons on why someone would not want to open up their tweets.

It’s all good.

Different streaks for different freaks, I always say.

The point is, on Twitter you have that control. So far on Facebook, you do have some control But, the controls are much more granular and much more, shall we say, complicated. On something like Twitter, the binary of YES or NO is pretty easy. Facebook becomes shades of gray very quickly: “Let’s see, I want my family to see that I am a fan of HGTV but I don’t want my co-workers to see what 80s hair band best fits my name”. Hmmmmm?”

But, if the privacy controls are too hard to use, way too open upon creation of an account and more opt-in for increased privacy rather than opt-out for increased openness, then I am thinking that will become a “count me out” opt-in for this girl.

It might be all about control and my friends and family will be the first to tell you that I certainly enjoy things my way. But, in the case of privacy, that should be the case all of the time. Privacy should be MY way on any site.

So, check your Facebook settings. Organize friends into groups and apply settings for each group. Take yourself out of search if that is what you want.

Need more help? I like this guide as a starting point and this one does a good job of helping you think through the options as well.

Image: ‘Privacy is not a crime‘

Year End/ Decade End Listings and such…

I am a big fan (sucker?) for the end of the year summaries that abound at this time of year.
And, I love lists. So, here is a list of lists….

Presenting my faves for the end of 2009 and the end of the first decade of the 2000s (naughties? noughties? oughts? aughts? What did we call them?)

DJ Earworm – United States of Pop 2009

NPR All Songs Considered Best Music of 2009
I always find new music via NPR’s All Songs Considered

Lifehacker’s Most Popular Hive Five Topics of 2009
Crowdsourcing has grown in popularity, easy and usefulness. And why not? It usually works!

Entertainment Weekly’s Best of 2009 (highs and lows)
Since this is my guilty pleasure reading at the gym, I felt that I must put it in here

The Top 10 Everything of 2009  and the Best Movies, TV, Books and Theater of the Decade from Time Magazine
well, they said everything…

Top 10 Internet Moments of the Decade from ABC News

And, for good measure, I just had to use the “My Year in Status” application in Facebook to build a status collage for 2009.

I also had to go visit Wordle and do something there with my blog posts from 2009. And, here it is.