Techy-Feely

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.

Blog Action Day: How we connect and unite in action against Climate Change

Today is BAD ‘09! Blog Action Day. If you are on Twitter, the hashtag is #BAD09

This is the third year that T-F has participated and I am happy to do so, as always. This year’s topic is Climate Change and it is something that has been on my mind a good deal in the past few years. I have some close friends who have made very radical changes in their lifestyle over the past two years as they work to become as sustainable as possible in the expectation of the changes they expect in the world after Peak Oil. I admire them, yes. I emulate some of their choices, yes. Can I do everything they are doing like sell their house, farm most of their own food, make their own bath soaps, etc? Well, I probably could given enough time and training but will I? Probably not.

And climate change is a direct result of our lifestyle choices, it does seem so this is something that I do struggle with. Especially given my current employment. It is directly driven by computer technology and directly draws on natural resources for energy and, given my current location and energy source, directly impacting climate change. So, I try to find ways to help reduce my carbon footprint as much as possible in other aspects of my life since my career feeds into it. This is where the carbon calculators like the ones you find at Earth Lab, the Nature Conservancy Carbon Footprint Calculator (see my results below) and the United State Environmental Protection Agency Household Emissions Calculator

I feel like we do a pretty good job as a household of being as low impact as possible while keeping a fairly modern, technologicaly lifestyle. But, I know I could do more, especially with hot water and lighting.

As much as I learn from my more activist friends, I also learn from the social network I have created within Twitter and other sites where I engage. Participating in Earth Hour last March was inspiring as is writing this post today. I really did like watching the earth go dark for an hour in a wave around the globe. It was fascinating to be a part of it as well as just absorb it. If we can pour the energy that folks had just sharing what they were doing during that hour via photos, tweets and video.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by AJ Wms

The increased use of technology to promote action, while also using energy and producing carbon dioxide, does allow us to feel much more aware and connected with others who feel the same way and to empower us to feel that our actions are not being done in a vacuum. I feel like that is very important as the issue of climate change is certainly not going to be solved by one country or one organization but by all of us and one way we can feel involved is to take part in these global actions, which is made so much more easy by today’s technologies. Can anybody say conundrum?

Want more global community actions to connect and be involved? Try these or share something else in the comments:

International Day of Climate Action (October 24)

Join TckTckTck: Global Citizens for Climate Action alliance of faith groups, organizations, trade unions and individuals.

This is my generation of movies

Feel like I have been saying goodbye to a good part of my childhood/young adulthood lately.

RIP – John Hughes.

Happy 3rd Birthday to Techy-Feely!!

In some ways it seems like a much longer time has passed since I blogged for the first time here at my own little corner o’ the Intarwebs! And, in other ways, I still feel like I am just figuring stuff out. I certainly am on other parts of the web. But, I clearly recall installing Wordpress and then staring at it going: “Now what?”. Now, I have a version of the multiuser platform running at my college and I feel much more comfortable diving into the database tables and taking a peek.

But, today marks the third anniversary of this here website. It has been joined along the way by several others in my account – mostly for friends and family but I also grabbed my own Vanity URL because I truly believe in the not to distant future, it will be crucial to control and own your personal space on the web. Not necessarily for “brand control” – although for folks who live and die by their online rep, that is not a bad idea but just because it can serve as a central point to pull together all of the places where you are on the web into one spot. Makes the whole out of the parts, so to speak. Still working on that project for me as well.

Anyway, enjoy some virtual cake for Techy-Feely today! Between the Project 365, finding tidbits to share with my three readers and just plain thinking “out loud”, it has been fun – even if only for me!

The Inaugural Post from 2006: Techy-Feely » Hello World!

Image: ‘He’s so Pleased!!‘
www.flickr.com/photos/48915783@N00/28051595

Where were you forty years ago?

I am a space fan, I am the first to admit. I almost have to be, don’t I? Can you claim the word “techy” and not have at least some passing interesting in space and space travel?

Besides the requisite Star Wars and Star Trek fandom, I am also a big fan of NASA program and have been since I was a youngster. All of the excitement and re-enactments of this historic fortieth anniversary (See http://wechoosethemoon.org/) has got me reminiscing back to those days.

Of course, I answered “astronaut” on the forms that asked: What do you want to be when you grow up? (I also rotated between TV cameraman, nurse, teacher, paramedic and cowboy – among others). But, space and traveling through space has always fascinated me. And, it still does. I applied to the Teacher in Space program even though I was still in undergraduate school. I remember talking with other teachers about it later and them asking if I could still want to do it after the Challenger accident that claimed Christa McAuliffe. My answer is always: YES!

I WANT to see the Earth from above.
I WANT to see the moon up close and personal.
I WANT to feel the lack of gravity
I WANT to see so many stars that my mind cannot comprehend what it is seeing

I remember watching the Apollo 11 mission with my family. Mom and Dad got a new television that summer and I have always heard to reasons: one to watch the lunar landing and the other (since it was a color TV) so that Mom could see the red hair on some character on a soap opera she watched. I pretty much believe either one but chose to go with the first reason.

So the names of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were easily thrown around our house like we knew them. I built NASA models like the one above (my favorite but I also build many of the rockets and the lunar rover buggy – that one was hard!). I read books about NASA history. In fact, I totally latched on to the Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom as a favorite. I think I picked him out from a group photo and decided he was my favorite. When I read that he died when I was about 5 (before the space fascination began, I suppose), I remember being pretty sad about that.

So, as we have the web sites with historic photos, NASA releasing digitally enhanced videos and many Twitter historical re-enactments, take a few minutes to think about how awesome this trip of Apollo 11 truly was: we did go where no one had gone before. The technology itself might seem less than sleek and modern but it got the job done and the feeling that crew must have had when they landed back in the capsule splashing down in the ocean must have been something else.

I will enjoy my Twitter feed today as we think back 40 years to the one giant leap we made.

RIP – Michael Jackson

I am so saddened to lose on of my truly major icons yesterday. I am not sure icon is the right word but hero is not right either. I didn’t want to be Michael Jackson but I did want to marry him at one point. When I was about 12. Then, after reading the biography of the Jackson 5 that I got in the Scholastic Book Club, I did the math on his birthdate and realized that he, being well over 3 years older than me, was WAY too old for me to marry and it would never work out. I recall being a big heartbroken over that fact at the time.

But, I stayed a fan through Jackson 5 and then well into his heyday of the 80s/90s. Thinking over definitive moments, it had to be this one. I still remember watching the Motown Special on live television with my siblings. When he broke out the moonwalk for the first time…on my.

First, we screamed: O no, he didn’t (or something like that)
Second, we all got up and started trying to do it ourselves. Badly.  Really, really badly!

His dancing has always intrigued me. He floats in space rather than just dance on a stage. Magical. There are so many strong performances and videos, but I think the dancing in Smooth Criminal has always stuck with me.

As his legal battles went on and his musicality waned, I remained a fan but did wonder what the extremely hard life of being in show business since the age of 3 had done to his mind and body.

Rest in Peace Michael. You are the King of Pop and that will never change.

Wordle – Beautiful way to share tags

A colleague reminded me of Wordle. I truly find it beautiful. Both in the elegance that the Java app works (cannot say that about all java apps!) and in the actual creation of the tool. So, without further ado, here is my Wordle based on current tags in my delicious account!

A Magic Number – Schoolhouse Rock

I was at an ed tech conference this past week. At lunch, they had “edutainment” speakers, which is a great idea since everybody is usually eating and so on so a “serious” speaker is often not the best idea.

Schoolhouse Rock – Three is a Magic Number