Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease and one of the worst in my eyes. It certainly affects the one infected in negative ways, but it also impacts all of the loved ones around them. My grandmother was diagnosed with this disease while I was in my late middle school, early high school years. Since I was unable to drive during that time, I would go to my mother’s school after the day ended at mine. From there we often would drive to the nursing home where she was later placed in order to check on her. These visits didn’t have the effect on me then that they have on me now. Maybe I was too young to really let it all sink in, but after her death it hit me the hardest. I soon realized that the woman who I had seen in the last years of her life was no where near the woman that I had known for the first many of mine.

She’d probably kill me for posting this picture, but I love it.

Sure during those bad times, my family tried to find a way to laugh and we did, but that was only as a way to get through those times, such as when my mother had to retell the death of her father to someone who was expected to remember it. Alzheimer’s is a disease that many fail to understand until they have someone close to them be affected by it. The memory is one of the most powerful things that we have. To have it all disappear almost makes you think that life may not be worth it. In everything that you do and with every memory you make, you assure yourself that you will remember this for years to come. What if you don’t? What if you forget those very special memories that make you you?

This is the real reason I do the Memory Walk. This is why raising money and awareness is so important to me. My biggest fear is that I will end up like my grandmother and many others. That I will forget all of my friends, family and loved ones. That I will essentially let all of these important people down and not be able to look them in the eyes later in life and remember who they are or anything about the times that we had shared. This is not how I want my life or anyone else’s to end.

Now I’d love to end this post saying that’s it but I can’t. With a fund raising event such as the Memory Walk, I must advertise it. I must tell as many people as possible that I have a goal that I want to reach and I have 13 days to meet it. However, I want to state something even more than that. If you have the time, find a Memory Walk near you. If you have the funds, donate to the cause. It doesn’t have to be the Memory Walk, mine, or anyone else’s. Just find a way to donate or spread the word to others who may be interested in the cause. If you want to learn more or share how you have been impacted by Alzheimer’s leave a comment or send me a note. I’ve finally found that talking about it has helped me more than those years I kept to myself.

For those interested in donating towards my participation in the Walk, please use my personal Memory Walk page. Thanks to the generous support of many, I’ve already been able to increase my intended goal from $1,000 to $2,000. Hopefully I will hit this secondary target before the Saturday of the event.

Recently I wrote a post about the state of social media in my eyes and somewhat on the potential of many of the most popular outlets that exist for presenting many of the most mundane and daily activities.  Within this post I didn’t paint a picture of love or anything stronger than basic like for Twitter.

Well since that time, I have actually signed up for an account on twitter and my thoughts have changed.  But why have they changed?  Simply put it is because of the following:

• Let Twitter be my Facebook status update - I don’t like logging into Facebook because I’m lazy and often I just want to post a quick update without getting sucked in to seeing the latest updates from random people.  I’d rather see updates from specific people instead of my entire Facebook social graph.
• I can follow those interest me – As I stated above, I want to have the control of who will provide updates to me.  It can almost be compared to having a speed dial for life updates.
• Shortened Blog Posts – I have many ideas running through my head but never enough time to write them down for a complete blog post.  Hell, I have about 10 ideas in draft for my site but haven’t sat down to finish them.  Forcing me to stay under 140 characters makes things fast and easy.
• Connection to many regardless of status – I can connect to friends in the same way that I “connect” to celebrities.  My celebs range from Leo Laporte to Conan O’Brien to Brent Grimes.  By following them, I can stay informed on those that interest me without requiring them to approve my access.
• Access is granted where otherwise its blocked – I recently began following the Atlanta Falcons and I’m certainly glad that I did.  I receive the latest updates regarding the team (injuries, stats, trivia, etc.) but I also stay informed during games.  Now that I’m on the west coast, I can’t always enjoy watching my team play, but the twitter account gives me fast in-game updates that are greatly appreciated.
• Information from strangers – While recently attempting to troubleshoot a computer issue I was facing, I decided to reach out to complete strangers via twitter.  If my updates are already entirely public, what’s it matter if I reach out to someone I don’t even know?  Therefore, I performed a real time google search on my topic and replied to another user who was just installing the same application.  Within a few hours (time difference I’m assuming), I received a reply.  Didn’t solve my issue but provided me added information.

Having myself enjoy twitter might still be weird for some, but I’m enjoying it.  Feel free to follow me if I don’t bore you too much with my lame tweets.

Quick backstory, a friend of mine was recently in a contest that required a community to vote on the best. Most votes wins the contest. Therefore, of course we wanted to vote as many times as possible but the contest was using Polldaddy which allowed only a single vote per day. That’s no fun and I assumed there had to be some other way.

My first step was to see how votes were being blocked. I cleared the cache and cookies.  Well that didn’t work as that would have been just too easy for anyone to do.  Therefore, I began to assume it was IP based as that’s probably the best way to ensure a single vote for users, but it also prevents say a house of roommates for voting.  It’s a single vote per household and not the more accurate single vote per person per day.

I setup to research the tools that I would need and came up with the following:

• polipo – Polipo is a small web proxy to funnel my requests through.  This was my first time using it.
• iMacro for Firefox – This is an easy tool for scripting tasks within a browser.  I’ve used in the past to vote daily in contests where I’m too lazy to navigate to the site myself.
• Firefox – If I’m using iMacro for Firefox, then I have to use Firefox.
• Torbutton for Firefox – This is another Firefox extension that I had not used before.  It allows a browser to use Tor for online anonymity.
• wmctrl – This is a command line tool for interacting with X Window Manager.  You’ll see how this is used in my bash script below.
• Bash – I am using linux and not the best programmer so I just used what was available to me.  Please no jokes about my terrible scripts.  Everyone’s learning here.

Now that I have the tools, I need to write two scripts.  The first script is the iMacro which is really easy to do.  The second script is the one to integrate the various components.

Upon installing iMacro, open the command window for it within Firefox.  It should open by default after installation.  You will find a record button.  Once pressed, anything you do in the browser will be recorded for playback or “automated browsing.”  Here’s my script for polldaddy:

VERSION BUILD=6700624 RECORDER=FX
TAB T=1
URL GOTO=http://polldaddy.com/poll/[INSERT POLL ID NUMBER HERE]
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:RADIO FORM=NAME:formPoll ATTR=ID:[SELECTED VALUE FOR POLL]
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:BUTTON ATTR=VALUE:Vote!

Now that the simple script is out of the way, its on to the more “difficult” one because my real scripting skills are beginner at best. But armed with the internet, one can do almost anything.  I needed the bash script to do the following:

1. Start Polipo
2. Start Firefox
3. Initiate the iMacro script I wrote above
4. Close Firefox correctly instead of just killing the process
5. Kill the Polipo task

Well, here’s what I did with comments to state what each line is doing:

#!/bin/bash

echo "#####################################";
echo "###     VoteOnPolldaddy Script   ###";
echo "##   created by Benjamin Trice   ###";
echo "###         July 06, 2010        ###";
echo "####################################";
echo;
echo;
echo;

echo "START SCRIPT";
#echo "Clear cahce for polipo";
#gnome-terminal -e "polipo -x";
#echo "Sleep for 2 seconds";
#sleep 2;
echo "Start Polipo";
gnome-terminal -e polipo;
echo "Sleep for 10 seconds";
sleep 10;
echo "Start Firefox";
gnome-terminal -e "firefox http://www.google.com";
echo "Sleep for 5 seconds"
sleep 5;
echo "Start Firefox with iMacro"
gnome-terminal -e "firefox http://run.imacros.net/?m=[INSERT IMACRO NAME].iim";
echo "Sleep for 75 seconds"
sleep 75;
echo "Close Firefox correctly"
wmctrl -c firefox;
sleep 5;
wmctrl -c firefox;
sleep 5;
pkill -f polipo;
echo "END SCRIPT";

Here’s a few extra notes about setup.

• Not sure if it helps or not, but go into Firefox and set the preferences to clear the cookies and cache when Firefox is closed.  This option is why I had to use wmctrl to properly shutdown Firefox.  Killing the process, in my limited testing, seemed to not clear the cache and cookies properly.
• Setting up Polipo with Tor and Firefox is simple.  The Tor Project even has a great guide for that.
• Setup a cronjob or other automated task launcher to run the bash script every 10 minutes or so.  I ended up using kalarm (yes, in Ubuntu) as my cronjob didn’t seem to run and I was getting aggravated at this point and went the lazy GUI route.  I did have some issues with the script not starting properly, but I attributed that to kAlarm and not the script itself.

Now before any potential readers who care about this subject start attacking me, I know this solution isn’t perfect nor does it vote an infinite number of times.  It seemed to be limited by the IP addresses that Tor masked me as and as Polldaddy learns what anonymous IPs exist they will begin to block them.  My original goal was to figure out how to vote an infinite number of times in a day.  That goal failed but I was able to at least get the 5+ votes in a day that Polldaddy was blocking for myself and roommates.

Anyone have a better solution?

New Face
Ok, that header isn’t exactly accurate but it works. After trying to order more contacts, I had to make an appointment in an effort to update a prescription that was well over 2 years old. Well, in the appointment I heard the usual speech about my eyes and the blood vessels within them. For those that don’t know, if you wear your contacts too much, your eye will create more blood vessels in an effort to bring more oxygen to the eye. That’s great unless it keeps getting worse. Long story short, you could end up needing a cornea transplant.

Since I didn’t want to have that, I decided to just update my glasses and stick to just them for a few months in an effort to reduce those pesky blood vessels. And of course in San Francisco, you just can’t buy normal eye glasses. They have to be a fashion statement. Well, here’s my fashion statement of “I’ve got to see.”

Pencak Silat
Thanks to my roommate, I’m trying out a new form of martial arts. New in the sense that I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve only ever worked out via weights, sports, or simply not working out at all. Pencak Silat is an Indonesian form of martial arts that, according to my knowledge thus far, is centered around the use of weapons. Hey, anything sounds awesome if I will be taught how to wield the coolest weapon of them all. I have many years (and years and years) before anything like this.

I’m not into this for the true self defense or fighting aspect. I just wanted to try something new that would also offer me a great way to workout.

MLS
With the World Cup coming to a close (and on such a terrible finale), a friend of mine and I have decided to adopt an MLS team in an effort to follow the American soccer federation. After a brutal decision making process of about 5 minutes (probably much less), we settled on the newly formed Philadelphia Union. I’d love to state that we chose them because of great players or supreme talent, but I can’t. It was more of “Hey, they are a new team” from David and “Those uniforms are awesome” from me.

Besides, who can resist the tagline of JUNGITE aut PERITE or for those non-Latin speaking readers (and myself), JOIN or DIE.

Athens Half Marathon
Speaking of “JOIN or DIE”, I’ve decided to join up with my old roommates in our old town of Athens, GA to run the Half Marathon. I have never ran a full marathon or a half marathon or probably not even a quarter marathon. But you have to start somewhere and I guess this is where I’m starting or at least I’ll be starting here. I only have a few minutes to train so hopefully I train well enough that I don’t embarrass myself too much. At least the workout regime has helped me find a new tool in mapmyrun.com and even comes with a cool Android app.

For those who have been following me somewhat, I recently joined into a venture of sorts with friends in order to post our many movie reviews collectively under a single banner known as The Amateur Critics Guild.  It was a simple idea and tons of fun to actually build the branding, especially the About page, which still cracks me up when I look at it.

Anyway, back to the original purpose in this post.  We needed a domain for the site and finally settled on theacguild.net because we liked the name and it was available.  Mostly it was available.  We only wanted to pay for the domain and not the hosting since my current site, this one, was probably only using about 30% of its full capacity.  We knew we could just forward the domain and be done with it.

I setup wordpress for The ACG within a new directory on my site and set the forwarding rule through my provider (1and1).  The site was up and running, but one glaring issue continued to bother me as the URL of the site would always be something like “heroinc.org/theacguild/<some post naming structure>”.  This may have been a cheaper route than purchasing more hosting space but I knew that I had not had this issue earlier when I had the domain apenguinandme.com.  After a few bad attempts, here’s how to have it work so you can have 2 domains and 1 host (recursion anyone?).

Setup The Second Domain

1. Buy the second domain.
2. Within the domain, setup a forwarding rule.  1and1 allowed me 2 options for forwarding the domain:  1)  Provide a url, 2) Provide a home directory for the domain.
3. Choose the option to “provide a home directory for the domain”.  Option 1 would just forward the url and you would always have “domain1.com/domain2directory” for your website.  Option 2 allows for “domain2.com” and “domain1.com” without anyone needing to know the difference.

I assume that the option of forwarding to a particular directory will only work if the domains are purchased from the same hosting company where the site is hosted. I could be wrong on that, but I doubt it.

Now that the forwarding is setup, you are good to go.  However, what if you were like me and setup the wordpress site improperly the first time?  Well, good thing I did this first for you.  Here’s how you correct your wordpress installation.

Bad WordPress Installation Fix
Perform these steps during offhours for your site so that you don’t cause problems if issues come up.

1. Backup the database associated with wordpress installation.  I’m always a fan of backing up so that you can revert back to the original if things go wrong.
2. Backup the wordpress directory where wordpress is installed.  Like I said, I’m a fan of backups.
3. Within the admin page of your wordpress installation, navigate to the Settings / General page.
4. Change the “WordPress address (URL)”.  For example, before mine was “http://heroinc.org/theacguild”.  After I updated it, it said “http://theacguild.net”.
5. Change the “Site address (URL)”.  Same example as before.  Mine was “http://heroinc.org/theacguild”.  After I updated it, it said “http://theacguild.net”.
6. Save the changes.  The site might act up for a second but don’t worry about it.
7. NEXT STEPS ARE DANGEROUS WHICH IS WHY WE TOOK BACKUPS.  If you skipped steps 1 and 2, do them NOW.  I’ll wait….
8. Navigate to the database for your wordpress installation.  With my site, I use phpMyAdmin.
9. Use the search function to query the database tables for the old domain name.  The returned tables from the search all need to be updated to remove the old references so that all of your site links work.
   

   

10. Using a sql query, you can do a quick replace throughout the database table. The following sql query will do the replace for you and it should be repeated for each table that was returned by the query. Just remember that the query will replace all instances and that may not be what you always need so use caution. I know that I had a post or two on the new site where I linked to my actual real site and I had to manually make those changes so not to override what my post was meant to use.
    

    UPDATE wp_posts SET INSERT_TABLE_NAME_HERE = REPLACE (
    INSERT_TABLE_NAME_HERE,
    'olddomain.com',
    'newdomain.com');

11. Within your wordpress installation directory, search for “olddomain.com”. I believe it was within 4 of my files (404.php, header.php, sidebar.php, and style.css).
12. Within each returned file from the search, do a find and replace to change “olddomain.com” to “newdomain.com”.
13. Finally, in the words of the great wordpress instructions, go do something nice for yourself as you are now finished in updating your site to properly use the new domain.

Here’s hoping this will help other people who made a stupid mistake like I did.

Big Idea Name: Hudba. Hudba in the Czech language means “music.” Sure, a new name might be needed for marketing purposes, but at least this is a decent start.

This image was made thanks to Bramandsons

Business Pitch: With the current music industries distribution from CDs to digital media, they have struggled to keep up. Consumers have turned to pirating for their musical means. The industry has made partnerships with many different companies to sell their products and business promptly picked up. However, the issue comes in sharing the overall pie across so many different companies and keeping the products and services interesting every day.

Hudba provides the central location for all things music. Here are some of the many functions and features of the Hudba community:

• Purchase music via the large and comprehensive library – A music library that provides thousands of artists, albums, and singles across multiple genres.
• Music recommendation based on smart algorithm and music genome project. Currently Netflix provides a great interface and recommendation system to allow individuals to find more movies and builds further interest in the service by making the recommendations more accurate and personal. The music genome project currently employed by the Pandora service already provides quick, accurate recommendations based on similar artists. By providing suggestions that closely match a user’s tastes, impulse buys can result providing greater revenue.
• Simple music updates and reminders – Individuals can purchase music and signup for artist updates. Updates could include: new album releases, upcoming tours, band blog posts, etc. Often consumers find artists they enjoy but have difficulty remembering to check yearly for new albums or look for upcoming shows in the area.
• Merchandising and ticket sells direct to consumers – With consumers signing up for updates at the time of purchase, further sells can be managed with the checkout. As consumers purchase albums, a recommendation could be made that the artist will be appearing locally at a venue and tickets are sold.
• Band page personalization – Bands control the amount of marketing found within each artist page. This information can control the albums released, blog posts from band members, and the ability to create small fan communities that receive the latest and greatest information.
• Social Media Connection – The internet is now a social place to interact with anyone and everyone. By providing integration with multiple social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, an artists latest creations (music, videos, etc.) can be spread into the internet wild in an effort to reach mass population.
• Customized dashboard – Customized rss feeds or updates (stated above) could be generated in order to develop a central dashboard within the Hudba system that provides the relevant information that interest the user. The dashboard could provide quick feeds to news, upcoming starred/tagged albums, suggested recommendations (automatically and socially), and upcoming tour dates in the area based on purchases and recommendations.

Who to Pitch To: Record Companies, RIAA

Competitors: Apple iTunes, Napster, Amazon Music

Acquisition Potential: Any of the major competitors mentioned above would love to have this service as well as additional future players within the space (such as Google) who want to provide a simple interface to direct consumers to the music that leads their lives.

Another four years have passed and the World Cup has returned. From my previous post, you can tell that I was/am pumped about this quatro (?) annual event. Now that we have a few games under wraps and nearing the end of group play, I’d like to provide my initial thoughts overall.

Well the best place to start will be my bracket (sorry for the pdf format). I suck at putting any type of bracket together so this one should be no different. However, so far my final pick isn’t looking so bad. Argentina has looked the strongest of the teams that I have been able to see (work gets in the way). Here’s hoping most, if not all, of my predictions come through (mainly the US).

Otherwise, here are the quick thoughts:

• The main talking point of the tournament has been the vuvuzelas. It is the sound of the South African people and the buzz that you hear during every broadcast. When I attended an international friendly last year in Atlanta, I learned what they were like first hand. If I was in attendance, I would absolutely hate them. However, watching in the comfort of my living room at home, they don’t bother me. After about 3 games, their sounds start to fade for me and I don’t focus on them as much. Of course, that’s not the same for everyone else. I did find an article that helps you remove the buzz but for me, I’m just content at watching great competition on the field.
• After watching Greece’s first game against South Korea, I thought I had watched the worst team that qualified for the tournament. Of course, I didn’t realize that France would be playing only days later. I firmly believe that the team of Ireland should be waiting at the airport for France to return so that they are allowed to punch each and every player in the face. It’s one thing to steal a team’s spot. It’s another to just not even show up for play.
• After enjoying the Socceroos in the last world cup, I was pumped to cheer them on and expecting good things. However, it seems they have taken a US turn for the worse. The red cards don’t help but this team has looked at times to take way too many steps backwards as opposed to the needed direction. Granted, still helps they have one of the best kits of the tournament. To me it looks like if you crossed a soccer and rugby jersey.
• Speaking of kits, uniwatchblog had a great article where a designer provided their perspective redesign of all competitors’ kits. Many look amazing and the inspiration is interesting. For the US one, I can’t decide if I hate its bold nature or love it. And it kills me to say that the US’s current blue kit is really growing on me. Hall Monitors of the World, Assemble!
• So England, eh? This team seems to fall from all expectations about as bad as the Flying Dutchmen do. If they fail to make it out of group play, I’d hate to be the coach or many other positions on that team.
• Goals are down this year. Does that mean bad play or does it mean that the even nature of the tournament is growing? I’m going to split my decision 25-75, respectively. The 25 is because top scorers such as Messi can’t find the back of the next while other “small” teams are holding their own overall.

I can’t go this far without talking about the US, especially as a separate piece. On the short description, they have been dreadful in the first half of their games thus far. The defense, which I have always been very critical in my comments, has played exactly as I expected, except that the worst player has been the captain, Carlos Bocanegra. Without Timmy, we would been in much worse situations than we have already placed ourselves. If the US could just convince FIFA to only play the second half of games then we could be a favorite in the tournament, but alas that is not the case.

The most recent game vs the Slovenians still leaves a bad taste in my mouth for the goal that was waved off, but I must applaud the US for showing so much determination. They battled back from a 2-0 start where most previous teams might have given up. However, we powered forward in an effort that I will remember for quite sometime. Here’s hoping that Wednesday’s game provides another flash of top play but this time from start to finish. I predict goals by Dempsey and Donovan will spark the team on to the next round. They are 2/3 of the passion of our team (Howard is the remaining 1/3) and that’s what the team needs to rally behind.

While walking to work earlier this week, I happened upon a woman who was starting her day with music from the world’s most popular music player. Now I can’t guarantee it was an iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone, or whatever the next overpriced item maybe, but I can guarantee she was using those white earbuds that come with each fruity musical purchase.

Now let me preface the rest of this letter that I have never been a fan of Apple. I don’t own any “i” or “mac” product nor will I. I personally believe that the products are overpriced for the functions they perform. The “mac” products are even farther away from my wallet since the extra charges for beauty can also be provided with open source (FREE) alternatives. However, it is a free world for the consumer and they can purchase whatever they so choose. But with all of my negatives, I must state that Steve Jobs, good or bad, has done so much to spread the modern age of music to the world.

With that being said, I believe that Steve better begin working on the next input devices for his devices that will be centered around touch, smell, or sight. Basically anything not related to hearing because all of his consumers will soon be death or at least everyone around them will be. Those white earbuds are going to kill everyone’s hearing and that’s coming from someone that loves to turn up the music loud and “rock” out. But its not good when, back to my original story above, that I could hear every lyric perfectly and the earbuds were NOT IN MY EARS. In college, I remember sitting 5 rows (yes 5 rows) away from someone using the same earbuds and the same result.

Steve, you claim to be a music purist, an audiophile. You stated:

“I’m an audiophile. I’ve had stereos costing, well I won’t say because you’ll think I’m crazy. But, costing a lot more. And, I’m thinking of getting rid of mine for this.”

Maybe there should be less iPod HiFi and more work providing people with better earbuds that actually push the sounds into the ear instead of to everyone around them. The thought might have been that if others heard the music they’d be interested in the device. Just the opposite is true. When I hear the music from 3+ feet away, I want to rip the earbuds out, stomp on the device, and promptly smile at the sound of silence.

Just spend the extra 20 dollars or so and provide decent headphones. Your consumers won’t even notice the extra price since it is only a two digit number change.

Sincerely a non-customer,
Ben

Facebook, like many of the other social sites, is in the business of making money and staying in business. As a site that is quickly becoming the home for one’s identity on the web, one needs to understand what an identity entails and why it is important.

Now according to a quick google search, an identity is “the individual characteristics by which a thing or person is recognized or known.”

For my purposes here, I want to split up the explanation and value of an identity into two main components: personal and business.

Business
The business identity is probably the easiest to explain and handle as it is being managed by one’s employer. Essentially, the business identity describes:

• who you are at your company or place of employment
• what you can and can’t do
• who you report to and who reports to you

Now the most important part of this description is item 2. Access is the key that opens the doors for all of the work you are intended to perform, but it can also be the key that refuses to unlock the systems or information that are outside of your acceptable range. If you are writing checks, should you be able to cash them? If you work in the graphics department, do you really need to access the HR or Finance systems? Of course not and there in lies the worth/value of one’s identity at a business. Without valuing that worth, terrible things can happen by preventing you from doing your job or someone attempting the company from being able to do theirs.

Personal
In the current world of sharing as much information as possible online, people quickly lose site of how valuable the personal identity can be. The quickest explanation could be provided when discussing identity theft. With just a few basic tidbits of information, an identity can be stolen.

Take a quick second to think about security questions that you are asked in order to verify yourself and all of the passwords you currently have to remember. Got them? Good. Now go look at all of the public information you have provided online via Facebook, Twitter, etc. If I wanted to guess your passwords or security question answers, how long might it take me if armed with a quick look at one’s online profiles? If you are now (hopefully) rushing to remove certain elements of your profile, good for you, but you need to realize that maybe you should not have placed that information there first. This is basically why I made my facebook profile default privacy settings as public because it forces me to rethink anything that I post. If I wouldn’t scream the information from a megaphone, why would I post it online via a website controlled by some 3rd party?

Still doubting any of what I have said about your personal identity? Just quickly use one of the many people search sites out there and be prepared to be scared within the few seconds it takes for the search to return. Now that was for free and even more information can be returned by paying a small fee to retrieve public records.

I guess basically my rant here is to think before you post and protect your identity no matter if it is based in your personal or business life.

For those that have not been keeping up with twitter posts, the media, or some dude on the street, it seems that the new hip thing to do is complain about Facebook and point the finger the other way. Now I’m not an advocate for Facebook in anyway, but I have tried to hold back in what I have posted to Facebook in an effort to control my privacy.

However, I know that others have not used the same form of caution.  Some have treated the internet as a private conversation between friends when the basic principle of the internet is public.  From the moment you connect to a website, you have already created an open channel between three people (you, the website, and your ISP).  Therefore, I will be creating a new Facebook account and deleting my old one.

Why not leave altogether?  Well, when treated with caution and care, Facebook is a great tool to keep in touch with people.  Notice I didn’t say a great tool to find out what people are up to because that would defeat one of my reasons for creating the new “me.”  Basically, I envision my new facebook account to:

1. Limit the “who the crap is this person” factor.  When I first joined Facebook I was a simple minded freshman in college.  I just wanted to have as many friends as possible in an effort to seem cooler and more connected.  Now I am a simple minded post graduate who knows that’s just stupid.  I don’t need to accept invites from people I know from someone’s 3rd grade best friend’s dog’s original owner twice removed cousin.  If I don’t know you, I won’t add you.  [Let's just see how long this one lasts....]
2. Reduce my use of the social site even further.  Currently, I only login to facebook to make a comment here or there on someone’s status or create a link back to this site.  Why do I even need to go that far?  Why not try to connect on a more personal level via email, phone call, or meet in person?
3. Contain the amount of personal identity information that is present on the web concerning myself.  With Facebook’s ever growing love of making one’s privates public (yeah, I know how that sounds but its true), I think I need to pull as much off to make a baseline minimum and then decide piece by piece what to add.  If I wouldn’t state where I work by name on my website, why would I do it on Facebook?

Now for those thinking to follow in my (and others) footsteps, check out this handy guide.  As I started the process, I even began to rethink joining Facebook again thanks to the message provided to me when I wanted to limit my full name to the site.

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If you don’t want to delete and recreate, then at least check out another handy tool, so that at least you know what is or can be out there related to your identity.

I’ve finished writing, but I haven’t finished migrating to my new facebook account.  Well I guess I know what will be taking up my time later this week.