First year of school has been interesting. I’m surprised that what takes up my time is absolutely not classes, which haven’t been too demanding, but all the external stuff:

• TA duties
• grant applications
• conference submissions
• journal submissions
• research team meetings

I guess in that sense it’s good preparation for academic life.

I really don’t know what to do with this site, and a lot of posts about not knowing what to do with this site aren’t very interesting. I don’t feel like I have anything new to say. If I did, I’d make sure the syndication was feeding to Facebook, but then no one would comment on here because everyone would comment on Facebook. I really hate how FB has taken over so much of our communication, and yet… it’s taken over our communication! There are “friends” (admittedly, not close ones) who wouldn’t bother to reply to emails but who reply to FB messages.

I don’t know the way out of this. I think we need to be as devious as the blue menace. Someone should write a FB app that sucks in content via syndication (RSS, Atom), but only to the cut line, and then offers a link for more. It should allow FB comments, since everyone’s conditioned to them — but cut them off after 80 characters, offering to let the user post more on the native site. It should allow Likes, but periodically fail, and instead post a “Like” comment on the blog.

I’m not so silly as to think my empty content would lure people over here, but some people’s would. I don’t know, what solutions do you have?

I’ve considered myself Libertarian in the past (to the point of actually leading the meetings for my city’s LP for a year) and admire the LP’s ideological consistency. In a better electoral system, I would be very likely to vote for a PRAGMATIC libertarian-leaning candidate.

My biggest critique of the LP is that they don’t show much pragmatism, either in how they propose to govern or in organizing people to get to that point. Most Libertarians I’ve met would be far more inclined to sit for 2 hours praising Hayek than knock on doors for 2 hours doing outreach.

When the 2008 crisis hit and all my libertarian friends basically proposed letting the whole system go belly up and sort itself out from the rubble, I parted ways.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_09/arctic_ice_melt_record_being_s039757.php

Here’s my current Facebook status:

I ask this from time to time, but how would one really “get off of Facebook”? I don’t mean quit cold turkey and sacrifice the benefits of S/N, which is obviously possible; I mean to replicate as many of those benefits as possible in a less proprietary setting.

E.g., I can use Twitter for my statuses, but that’s a pain because I don’t buy into the artificial 140 limit. So I’d like someplace to put my statuses that’s less clumsy than Twitlonger.

More after the jump.

I’ve messed around a bit with Diaspora, which I’ll discuss below.

I want to develop my understand of the problem a little further, and maybe make progress disentagling myself from the Blue Satan, but first I need to break down the use cases that explain why this is so hard. I’ll start with the most common couple of pieces of functionality

1. I want to post microblogs (statuses) my friends can see

   Well, I can pretty much do this with Twitter and a Facebook app to suck in the text. But I absolutely loathe the artificial 140-character limit.

   (I should write a rant about this sometime, but yes, I totally get that Twitter devotees think it’s wonderful that they have this imposed limitation, and that Twitlonger insists that it’s a service to be used sparingly in keeping with the philosophy of terseness. Screw that. If artificial limitations so important to you, then write a plugin for the social microblogging platform that will hopefully one day replace Twitter that will limit you to 140 characters. I’m all for terseness at times, but sometimes I like to be verbose.)

   Anyway, for this reason Twitter feels kind of Luddite and stupid. For now I think I’ll just microblog here, on my blog, which will lead to lots of mundane statuses and random, undeveloped thoughts. Alas, I still have to suck it into Facebook for anyone to read it or to check my comments, so Facebook is still storing all my personal data. But it’s a step.

2. I want to read others’ microblogs (statuses) and comments

   OK, this is where it gets really hard to separate yourself from Facebook.

   1. You can convince the whole world to leave Facebook and join something else

      I’m sort of joking, of course, but it’s effectively what FB did to Myspace by developing a look and feel that blew Myspace out of the water. It’s effectively what Diaspora proposes. People are resistant to change, but they will overcome that inertia if the see the value. Right now I don’t think many people are offended enough by Facebook to make the switch.

      Regarding Diaspora specifically: I found the project to be way too overcome by “geek mentality” to become a serious social network platform for anyone but the open-source community any time soon. (“What do you mean you need the UI to work predictably? You just write a little code here, tweak a few settings there, do some configuration, report a few bugs that we may or may not ever look at, and voilà!”) Although I still find the concept promising, I’m not too hopeful any time soon.

   2. You can find ways to get the information you want out of Facebook

      This is much more incremental. Does the FB API provide a way for me to get at my comments and my friends’ posts? I honestly don’t know. If it does, I’d imagine someone’s already written the code to export it.

      Again, it doesn’t really solve the core issue of one corporation getting all my data. It just sets the stage for a more dramatic break. It gives me something I could point a friend to, to suggest that they leave FB with me without giving up their own benefits from their social network.

   ]]> http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?feed=rss2&p=160 0 http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=158 http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=158#comments Sun, 25 Mar 2012 21:07:39 +0000 philip http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=158 I certainly don’t think anyone is turning to this blog as a source of advice on how to live life (and why aren’t you? hmmmmm??? oh, that’s right, because i often wonder if i have any clue on how to live life myself). But i’ve been thinking about what would be my one pithy thing to share, as though i could ever be pithy.

   Don’t torment yourself with trying to find the one blessed path of what God wants you to do with your life. Just look for any path, any good path, and trust that he will correct your course as needed. (Proverbs 3)

   ]]> http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?feed=rss2&p=158 0 http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=155 http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=155#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 23:29:22 +0000 philip http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=155 Obviously i am now the absentee blogger i feared becoming. (Is that really such a bad thing?)

   I still have things to say, and this could be a venue to say them. Maybe not important things, but important-to-me things. So i need to get back to writing here, and that starts now, with a mostly contentless post about how little i have to say.

   I’ve been under the weather a bit, and it’s times like that that remind me how much i need to slow down. (Carl Honore: In Praise of Slowness. The last couple of days, i’ve gone crazy watching TED talks.) It sucks that i don’t feel like being around people, but i also feel so isolated.

   What do single adults in the US in 2012 do to keep from feeling isolated?

   ]]> http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?feed=rss2&p=155 0 http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=154 http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=154#comments Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:13:05 +0000 philip http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=154 In pondering whether to pursue an academic career, it all comes back to: Does anyone actually use research to make anyone else’s life any better? I’d rather not spend the rest of my career in a parlor game, even a parlor game with the goal of keeping myself employed.

   So…. now i want to find “metaresearch”, research on the use of research. Actually i can see myself happily doing *that* sort of research. Thoughts?

   ]]> http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?feed=rss2&p=154 0 http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=151 http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=151#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:03:26 +0000 philip http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?p=151 Although GothiCon attendees came from both coasts, the bulk obviously came from the states closest to Cincinnati, hence from the Midwest and to a lesser extent the South. Therefore the level of detail below isn’t meant to slight the coasts, the South, or Texas — it’s just some suggestions based on the geographical distribution i observed:
   • MN, ND, IA – suggested hub: Twin Cities – Des Moines and Fargo are both 3-4 hours away. Much of Wisconsin would be within 3 hours.
   • Chicagoland – enough population to be its own cell.
   • Central IL – hub: Peoria (?) – Decatur, Quad Cities, i’m not sure who else. Could also extend to Southern IL and even metro STL.
   • Greater Cincinnati, KY-IN-OH – Donna and her associates have done such a great job here that it probably stands alone as its own cell.
   • NW OH / MI – hub: Toledo – A half-dozen of us within an hour’s drive here; we could also join in with Cincinnati on occasion.
   • TN and other parts of the South – hub: Nashville. Also Florida could easily stand on its own, even tho i didn’t meet anyone from FL at GothiCon.
   • MO: I know there were some people from KC there, not sure about St Louis, but if so then this could be another logical grouping. The distance from KC to the Twin Cities is a bit farther than would be reasonable. Perhaps the central IL folks could meet up in STL.
   • East Coast – There’s obviously a ton of population here. I don’t have the feel for it that i did when i lived there, but at the very least one cell covering PA and western NY, and another covering say metro NYC up to New England, seem logical.
   • Texas – its own thing
   • CA – San Diego and the Bay Area are about 8 hours apart, so there’d logically be somewhere in the middle to meet. There might be other ways to organize this to include the desert SW (AZ, NV, etc.)
   • Pacific NW – plenty of people, i’m sure, but i don’t really know them.
   • And i don’t even know where to begin in talking about outside the US.

   I propose that Grave Robbers (or Asylum or whomever) start to build these cell groups by creating a very simple communications infrastructure for each of the above. Email lists would be great. Facebook groups would be OK.

   I want to emphasize that these are just suggestions to get things rolling. If the individuals involved find that another organization works better, more power to them. Like any living organization, i hope that these groups will grow organically, divide, plant new ones, etc.

   ]]> http://www.godblessthefreaks.org/?feed=rss2&p=151 1