If you’ve met Steven, you’ll understand when I say he was larger than life.  He was persistent as hell, and he loved to tell stories.  Sometimes it was challenging to get a word in edgewise :)  When Steven was convinced of something, nothing in the world could stand in his way.  I grew to really respect both his cheerful approach and his scrappy determination.

He called me about a month ago about a project he was working on — a very ambitious project to collect a massive amount of impostor data for his favorite password, frodolives.  iMagic had created a facebook application with the hope of having a wide range of people type the same password, so that research could be done on how to better keep impostors out.     The plan was to incent people to enter the password by having them enter to win an iMagic t-shirt.  I told him honestly that he’d have a much better turnout if he instead donated to charity — that way people would be much more likely to enter the password multiple times, and he wouldn’t have to worry about delivering t-shirts after the fact.   I’m happy to say he took my advice.

Sadly, Steven won’t get to see the results of his experiment, he passed away March 5th.  I had a chance to see him just days earlier and I missed him – I’ll regret that forever. It’s hard to really comprehend that he’s gone; it still feels like some day he’ll simply call.

The iMagic facebook app can be found at http://apps.facebook.com/trustable_passwords.  Consider typing ‘frodolives’ a few times into it, if you have the time.

It seems that the damage in Xcalak is mostly cosmetic, and as far as I can tell, nobody was hurt.

This pic and more, plus commentary here.

Eugene, I hope I can offer my original 5, and supplement to get to eight here:

1. I would much rather wakeboard than waterski; I would rather sled than ATV; I gave up telemarking for the snowboard when I met my husband, but I’m not sure it was a good trade; none of the above compares to chasing down a flying disc with a defender in hot pursuit.
2. My first “real” job in the computer industry was a summer job where I researched Modem configuration strings for a digital whiteboard company. I didn’t actually have the modems — I just had to find the manuals, read them, and extrapolate what the strings would be. It was excruciatingly mindless.
3. I once got busted by the Moscow Police for attempting to buy a matryoshka doll from an old lady in the long tunnel entrance to a Metro station. It is illegal to sell wares in the metro tunnels, and whenever a cop shows up, all the old ladies selling things tuck everything into their coats in the blink of an eye, and melt into the crush of commuters. I was holding the merchandise when the alarm went up in this particular instance, and I didn’t understand what was happening quickly enough to react. The poor vendor whose doll I was holding ended up hovering beside me, terrified but unwilling to flee and sacrifice the merchandise. I did my best ‘dumb tourist’ schtick and the cop let us go – but not before advising me that (a) the item was overpriced, and (b) I had better buy it, to make up for the serious trouble I could have gotten the poor little old lady into.

As most of you know – I’m not exactly a wilting wallflower. I’ve done a lot of things, been part of many and varying circles of people, and generally I’ve had myself a hell of a time. Many of my friends from the less-geeky parts of my life have been talking about and using Facebook for quite some time, and I finally caved in.

One of the very first people I added was an old, good friend from my gloriously misspent youth. I had run into him earlier, and he mentioned he was on Facebook, so I looked him up. Once we were connected, he sent me this message:

Hey!! Nice to see you check in my albums there is a photo of you that has sparked the longest comment chain around.

Next thing I know, I see that a photo has been ‘tagged’ as being of me. And I click over to see a picture me from my first year of university. It was a nice picture, nothing embarrassing or racy. The conversation around the picture, however, gave me pause. Let me paraphrase:

Commenter #1: I dated her in high school

…

Commenter #10: I dated her after high school

…

Commenter #17: I dated her after #1 and before #10…

Well, where does a person even start on this? As a conversation, this thread was funny & endearing and I am really excited to catch up with all of the people there, they are wonderful wonderful people. Nothing in the thread was secret – and all of the commenters were truthful in their remarks (except that I actually think that I dated Commenter #17 after Commenter #10 not before, but that’s neither here nor there). All of the people in the thread are part of the same circle of friends, and so this is no different than the same people sitting around at a party and looking at a physical photo from a shoebox.

but.

But.

BUT.

As much as I enjoyed the repartee, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the implications of the situation in general. When my friend posted that picture, only those in his network saw it – generally speaking, those that were interested were all a member of one of my circles of acquaintance. No problem – until I join Facebook, and link all of my various circles TOGETHER. Suddenly, a photo & conversation intended for one circle is accessible to another. Yes, I can ‘limit’ what people see – but would I have the foresight, tools, and memory to figure out all the ways in which I really don’t want past circles to intersect in the future? What about current circles? What about friends who span the circles? I am suddenly the hub, and all my different spheres are the spokes, and those spokes are suddenly connected through me in a tangible, interesting, and researchable way. You may not need to be a direct friend; sharing a friend, a group, or a network may suffice as well (depending on whose account ‘houses’ what discussion, and who you and your friends open your accounts up to).

And once a meme starts, it’s tough to stop. There is a tipping point that could be reached. Why wouldn’t someone from some other part of my life or history cruise through and add his own dating history into that photo thread? Heck, maybe my husband will chime in, he’s on Facebook too. If there was enough interest, I do believe that an entire timeline could be constructed, and what could I do? I could scream and freak out and have the photo removed I’m sure. But such anti-social behaviour would become the object of discussion in turn. When you protest, people assume you are afraid of something :). Taken separately, nobody’s dating history is secret – but peer-to-peer publishing of cumulative results makes me feel vulnerable to the same phenomena occurring around some other, less innocent set of facts.

I have to cogitate on this a bit. And I have to figure out what to do when a professional colleague who isn’t also a good friend wants to ‘add me as a friend’. As I’ve said before, tools like Facebook blur the lines between social spheres, and we all get to slide down this slippery slope together, guinea pigs for the new digital age. Perhaps even worrying about controlling the descent is, in fact, no more than a delusion. For those of us who try to keep some lines drawn in the face of intense social pressure from all spheres to openly network, a long road is ahead. “All in” or “all out” are much simpler attitudes. I love the benefits of Facebook already; they are enough to put me into that scary no man’s land of trying to control multiple spheres, allowing some to meld and attempting to keep others apart.

One final question to ponder – by simply writing about this experience, have I compromised or complicated my ability to keep my social spheres separate? We shall see.

Wish me luck. I’ll need it.

In other words, it isn’t the magazine’s fault that you & I mistook an artist’s concept for reality. How very bourgeois of you & I, don’t you think?

Let’s face it. We are in a world now where every cover photo is a lie, uh, image, every song is digitally “corrected” to be perfectly in tune; and all of these images and sounds are fed to us like pablum to babies. Most of the time, most of us never even know.

Time breaks most of these fantasies, for those with an interest and a memory for such things. And yet – there is always a current set of supposed ‘role models’ whose white-washed perfection we optimistically adhere to. That is the true role of magazines like Redbook.

Authenticity is so totally nineties. Didn’t you know? OMG!

At this year’s Catalyst conference, I saw Jonathan Schwartz speak at the Sun hospitality suite. Jonathan’s vision of the future is that one day, systems he deems as “uninteresting” such as e-mail systems, ERP systems, and such will be outsourced to Web 2.0 darling companies, who will host these boring but necessary functions, so that companies can focus on the sexy stuff.

The exact logistics of such a strategy were left to everyone’s imagination, although what was implied was that such a strategy would result in fewer servers being maintained, and fewer IT staff to do the maintaining. In other words, a CxO’s wildest dream.

Risk & Liability involved with such a strategy were not discussed.

Now – as it turns out, I happen to be a student of Mr. Schwartz’s methodology, on a very small scale. As someone who did not wish to pay for or maintain a server from which to publish my personal blog, I contracted with a Web 2.0 darling company called wordpress.com to host my blog alongside hundreds of thousands of others. It is and was a steal of a deal — they maintain the machines & the software, and I get to blog for free!

Today, however, I feel that I may have encountered the fly in Mr. Schwartz’s enthusiastic ointment. As you may have seen from my last blog entry, I was the subject of some syndication feed shenanigans this afternoon. Apparently so were a lot of other people.

During the course of administering their many separate hosted accounts, the wordpress.com staff installed software that mixed RSS feeds up for some unknown number of blog accounts, resulting in content from one persons’ blog being published under the name of someone else.

I can’t help but wonder – did somebody get my content? Was it a swap, or an off-by-one? I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

How about a quick post-mortem cost assessment based on the following factors:

1. Probability of loss of reputation due to my identity being associated with someone else’s content or vice versa.
2. Probability of loss of income or other tangible asset due to either my identity being associated with someone else’s content or vice versa.

In my case, there was little cost. A few people might have come to erroneous conclusions about my personal life – but for the most part, my reputation and income stream were not affected. Additionally, it is technically possible that a bunch of strangers saw my content and assumed it belonged to someone else. Heh, more power to them if they were able to make sense of it.

But. What if this wasn’t my personal blog affected. What if this was, instead, my corporate ERP system affected? Or my corporate Email system? What happens when a hosting company mixes up the account identifiers of two different companies’ finanical accounts? What could the possible cost be, in both reputation and income, of your company’s confidential data being temporarily disclosed to another company’s users? Or of your company’s identity being temporarily associated with somebody else’s confidential data?

Can’t happen you say? Surely those kinds of hosting companies would be more careful? Yeah. You keep on believing that. It will be impossible until the day it happens. Then it will be irreversible.

Here be dragons. Mark my words.

My name & the name of my company are currently attached to blog entries from an incorrect web address within the Planet Identity aggregator. I have no idea whether my own web address has been replaced altogether on the site (if so, this post is somewhat futile, since nobody on Planet Identity will see it), or whether both my blog entries and this other blog’s entries both get to make it to Planet Identity under my name. All I can hope is that this problem can be fixed as soon as possible, and the incorrectly referenced blog entries removed.

In the meantime, please don’t assume that everything with my name attached within the last day has come from me. I would ask you to click through to the actual blog page and to ensure that the blog you get to is http://eternaloptimist.wordpress.com.

Thank you,

The real (as in really mortified) Pamela Dingle.

Who’s to say
What’s impossible
Well they forgot
This world keeps spinning
And with each new day
I can feel a change in everything
And as the surface breaks reflections fade
But in some ways they remain the same
And as my mind begins to spread its wings
There’s no stopping curiosity

I want to turn the whole thing upside down
I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found
I’ll share this love I find with everyone
We’ll sing and dance to Mother Nature’s songs
I don’t want this feeling to go away

Who’s to say
I can’t do everything
Well I can try
And as I roll along I begin to find
Things aren’t always just what they seem

I want to turn the whole thing upside down
I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found
I’ll share this love I find with everyone
We’ll sing and dance to Mother Nature’s songs
This world keeps spinning and there’s no time to waste
Well it all keeps spinning spinning round and round and

Upside down
Who’s to say what’s impossible and can’t be found
I don’t want this feeling to go away

Please don’t go away
Please don’t go away
Please don’t go away
Is this how it’s supposed to be
Is this how it’s supposed to be

– Upside Down, Jack Johnson

‘Twas the wild flowers I preferred
Who owed nothing to nobody
Who blossomed in the ditches
And made their own way in the world

‘Twas the wild flowers I admired
Who never done nothing to you
But driven from the garden
They sang their own songs in the spring

You can have your lily
You can have your rose
That were taken and broken
And bred by people
They were grafted and lamed
Twisted and tamed

But the wild flowers I enjoyed
They had nothing to do with you
They flowered by the roadside
And they wore their own colours in the sun

That were there before you
Will be there after you
That will out, that will out
Like your own true nature
You can try, you can try
That you never will defeat

The wild flowers I admired
They had nothing to do with you
But banished from the garden
They made their own way in the world
They wore their own colours in the sun
And they sang their own songs in the spring

(john spillane)