Keeping myself honest

Seeing as I just won a ‘Diplomatic’ victory in my game of Civilization 4, I decided I should sit down and do something productive (other than specing my new links management system) and write about something that has been on my mind to put on the blog for a while; and that is a question of how people use the internet and what their digital footprint is.

I first starting thinking about this a lot while listening to the first episode of the Out of the Game podcast entitled ‘Born Before Digital’ as one of the topics brought up is how life will be different for kids growing up in this age when a large chunk of their life will be recorded online for everyone to see indefinitely with things like myspace, facebook, blogs, twitter and message boards.

Like some of the member of the podcast I too did many a thing in my youth that I don’t think I’d want to be on the internet when they happened and certainly wouldn’t want to be reminded of now. That’s not to say there a great deal of things that I regret doing in my life but there are many things that people do (and some of the most entertaining) that you don’t want or need an exact record of.

I remember in late university cleaning up some files on my computer and coming  across some 5 year old msn conversations that I usually save so I can go back and find information I might have been sent. It was nostalgic and also weird as many of the conversation were very intimate and private and while I had a vague memory of them it was a much different thing to see them line by line completely correct and unbiased by the passage of time right in front of me.

This would be amplified if I had facebook from the time I was 10 and I (or anyone else) could look back and see the dates I started going out with (and then broke up with) past girlfriends, the social events I attended in high school, the fads I thought were cool and the people I used to associated with. Now I wouldn’t consider any of this information privileged and would tell it to almost anyone who asked me about it but there is a difference between that and it being right there for everyone to see.

This is probably only a matter of perception but that can make all the difference in the world. If I tell my grandmother about the crazy bachelor party I just attended (this is hypothetical, way to go Josh and James for having no strippers) she’ll probably just laugh and say that’s part of life, whereas if I post pictures of me on stage with a face full of boobs I’m guessing her reaction is along the lines of disowning me.

—- Woo once again almost at 500 words and not really into my main topic, so continuing on after a Call of Duty 4 break—-

My main thought for this blog is the idea of a person’s digital footprint and how it gets used both by that person and by the rest of the world.  For a long time I didn’t have a blog or get on facebook or twitter because it seemed ominous that the information could be out there for everyone to see until the end of time. As I’ve matured I’ve taken on an attitude of being very open and honest with everyone I meet as I found trying to satisfy everyone and change your attitudes in different situations was a recipe for disaster.

Earlier in the year I figured that as a programmer I should have a professional and public profile, hence the creation of my website and the blog along with it. While the website doesn’t have a lot of things on it right now I’m statisfied with what it is for now and I’m working on some Silverlight applications and a links manager to keep me busy. The blog is a more interesting entity as it exists and a lot of the time I’m not sure what I should be talking about (although when I come up with something it’s usually long) as I feel like I should be writing for a broad audience (anyone on the internet) and should say something both insightful worth reading.

It takes a certain kind of ego to start up a blog or twitter feed as you need to believe that you have something worth while to write and it it sometimes hard for me to get into that mindset as there is so much good writing out there that I often don’t have time read so why would any of my stuff be worth it for someone else. For anyone about to send me a ’snap out of depression’ email the last statement isn’t meant as a ‘woe is me’ statement but to bring some insight on how I view my writing.

So to bring this conversation full circle to make my blog something that I feel is worth reading I decided to use it for long form, more formal writing about topics that interest me or are important to and at the same time I feel I can talk intelligently about and bring something interesting into the conversation with the reader. Twitter is where I like to write quick little tidbits of information and opinion, while also trying to keep it interesting for anyone reader. I’m still learning the ‘performance’ part of writing online but I can’t be doing all that bad cause you just read to the end of this blog post.

Scotty B Commentary, Personal, Technology

Well because Mesh (a great free service for online file storage and web remote desktop from Microsoft) is down, I’m here watching curling  and internet so I thought I’d quickly make a rant blog post on a story I just read.

The story is this one Sperm bank sued under product liability law. No if you think the title is absurd enough, read the article I’ll wait for you to finish and come back. It will also give me time to get sufficiently angry to write a good rant.

Ok so I will start with the first thing that should be coming from everyone reading that article: WHAT THE HELL!!!!! I had a conversation over dinner last night with an old friend and my mother in which the topic of parenting was brought up. While my parents were somewhat strict when I was growing up I am glad that it taught me not to be an idiot and have some common sense  and respect for society and other people.

What continually amazes me is not the people who come up with the hair brained ideas to sue people for no reason and the people who will jump on the bandwagon for a quick buck. What amazes me is the courts who allow these moronic people to get something other than thrown out for how dumb their claims are. The idea of having judges and not computers deciding law is that it brings in the element of common sense and realizing that there are areas of gray to everything.

I’m not here to condemn lawyers or judges, because like every section of society they have those who are good and bad in their talent and common sense. It just baffles me that stuff like this can happen, if you look at it logically where can this go? Recently a Quebec man lost his appeal after he was sued by his daughter when she was grounded and couldn’t go on a school trip, once again common sense does not prevail even on a second chance.

So now you can be sued by your kids for grounding them and possibly having bad genes, something that my science friends will point out you can’t control. Next on the list you should sue over your hair colour, that fact that your mother didn’t have large breasts and you think you deserved a pair from birth. Can we take this the other way? Can society sue you for bringing up kids who get arrested, can parents sue their kids for the money they have to spend in order to feed and cloth them after they get a job? Do we not let people who have bad genes procreate as a public service so they don’t get sued by their kids later?

The answer is NO, I don’t know where this sense of entitlement came from and what happened to taking responsibility for your actions went but they seem to be gone from a lot of society. Guess what people, like if unfair, it sucks sometimes, deal with it. Dealing with it does not entitle you to a free ride by suing people because you feel like some tiny little detail in your life is somehow unfair in your opinion, you want to see people living with a life that is unfair go move to a third world country, I’m sure they would be happy to switch places with you.

In the mean time let the rest of us spend our time helping out those who actually might need it, sit in your room for the week your grounded and read a book, you might learn to have some common sense.

Scotty B Commentary

Well as I say around this time every year (at least for the last 5 or so), I’m getting old. Having just turned 24 (or 24 for Chris Langley) and coming back from a run with my brother in which my knee is totally killing me the previously stated fact is definitely true. Unlike many on the web I’m not here to prove how deep I can be and instead like to be straight to the point.

I had an interesting conversation with a good friend of mine on my birthday and we talked about seizing opportunities and being at an age where you should go out live and have fun with life. This was interesting as my party, which I had planned to be large and more over the top than my usual outings (last year was finding an xbox and copy of rockband and playing it all night), but ended up being hanging out at the bar for a couple of hours.

While I enjoyed the night out and all of the unexpect (and amazing) presents at the end of the night I couldn’t help but feel a little underwelmed by the experience and for that I have no one to blame but myself. I’m making my night sound bad which it definitly wasn’t but maybe this is just a lesson in expectations and how to manage them. I’m sure I could have dragged everyone dancing and will at some point in the future but the night seemed to move at a slow pace and continued that way until the end of the night.

I’m now left to ponder the parallels between that night and my own course on the road of life right now, and whether I should even care. Currently I’ve taken the road that has lead me to finishing my university degree in 4 years and then 2 weeks after that starting my career which will be one year old in a few weeks. While this has left me with in a very stable position in my life it is never the most fun course to take and my friends are great but usually low key (ex. The bachelor party with no strippers).

Maybe I need a little more spice in my life (not the Dune kind) or maybe I’m just a reserved person who doesn’t really go over the top and has settled into his spot in life, the only problem right now is that I can’t really tell where I am. Like Battlestar Galactica (at least until the final episode) I don’t really have the answers just a lot of question, so we’ll see where they lead.

Apparently my next post will have to be comedy related to make my previous statement about not being pretentious on my blog into a reality, onto something with YouTube and hookers!!

Scotty B Personal