shadowspar

There is a Rant, Gentle Readers, that I have long avoided subjecting you to; a Rant about how Certain Persons, helpful though they may be, invariably fall upon my Domestic Goodes, steal them away, and turn them to Ends such as Home Improvement, from whence they never return. I speak, for instance, of having all Laundry Baskets and Plasticware Disappear from the Laundry Room and Kitchen, respectively, only to make their reappearance in the Storage Room or Garage, having there been Converted to Storage Containers; or of Finding one's Prized Corkscrew, long having Vanished from the Kitchen under circumstances of Great Mystery, bravely serving in the Shed as an Opener of Painte Cans, and covered in Various Wondrous Shades of Latex Painte therefrom.

Tonight, however, I am not Ashamed to say that I had My Retribution, in that I had opportunity to Abscond with an unattended Painte Tray, and turn it to mine own Devious Ends; namely, the Storage of Rags having been Used for Cleaning as they wait upon the Chance to make into the Laundry for Washing. Vengeance!

Douglas Crockford whines that people have baggage.

Isn't it kind of hypocritical, or at least wilfully ignorant, to build a social media website -- something of which people are a central component, and getting them in the door key to its success -- and then complain that these damned people don't behave deterministically and don't fit neatly into the system like nice little cubes?

Well, surprise! People are mushy bags of mostly edge cases, and if you're building social software, you're going to bloody well have to deal with it.

Damn users, getting to have opinions about software, instead of just using it or not!

⁰: Self-loading cargo: airline industry slang for passengers.

Noticed a conversation on twitter right now where two acquaintances of mine were talking about exchanging business cards at conferences, both of the dead-tree and vcf varieties. It came as rather a surprise to me that people at tech conferences are still exchanging business cards. Who really does that any more?

When I meet someone interesting in the tech scene for the first time, we essentially exchange URLs, because the vast majority of us seem to have some flavour of website/blog/profile/activity stream that links to most of the other personal information we care to publish. People I'm meeting in a "strictly professional" context get my twitter account. From there they can find my "professional" blog, which directly or indirectly links to GitHub, my résumé, a general idea of where I live (city & country) and my mobile #. Folks I'm more comfortable with probably get a link to this DW account, from whence they can also find flickr, last.fm, and so forth. Details like home phone number and exact physical address get given out on an as-needed basis.

How exactly does this tie in with how we see our own identity? I can't help but wonder if there's some kind of online-persona/offline-persona spectrum going on here, and what kind of identifiers we give people has to do with where we feel we mainly reside. There's a tie-in with wallet names and online handles here too. I think "shadowspar" is a rather puerile and somewhat meaningless handle, but back when I picked it (1999-2000-ish) it was essentially unique. If I tell someone that my nick is "shadowspar", and they feed that into a search engine, pages referencing me are largely what come out.

Dunno where I'm going with all this, it's just...business cards (at least the "traditional" variety, for some value of "traditional") seem to be a link to an offline identity, and just...that's not the world I live in any more.