saraewood.com

I don’t normally read sports coverage. I make exceptions during the World Cup and the Olympics. This story caught my eye

Bolt under fire

I thought Usain Bolt showboated too. On his world-record-beating 100 meter sprint he started pounding his chest and making the lightening bolt sign before even crossing the finish line. In the 200 meter he preened auspiciously before the race. After winning the sprint - and breaking the world record- he took it up about 10 notches. I thought, geez, enough already. And if you saw him run, well, he deserves to preen. He is amazing. Like Phelps is amazing. (side note, I love how they keep showing these athletes mom’s in the audience)

But then they interviewed him. He was sweet and humble and said he was just proud of himself and I liked him instantly.

And everyone knows the IOC is run by a bunch of corrupt goons.

I rarely go into Facebook these days, preferring to keep my profile updated via Twitter. But for some reason, last week I decided to go in an waste a few minutes. While there I also decided to update a few things in my profile with the aim to make it a little less personal. I’ll get to some of the reasons why in a minute. At any rate, I went into the “edit profile” and changed a few settings. Namely the ones that let you hide things.

I also selected not to show my relationship info, because it is really no one’s damn business.

What I expected to happen, ie, my personal information simply be hidden from my profile is not what happened. Instead, this note:

“Sara E Wood and John B Pike ended their relationship”

was sent to my 276 friends and John’s 354. How is that something you would expect to happen when choosing to “hide” information from people?

(Within 5 minutes both John and I had both received countless condolences. Even phone calls and people in my office coming to see if I was all right. Thank you all for you concern in my non-crisis moment! )
Another reason Facebook is for losers, I have had to unfriend people - who I actually maybe knew for like 5 minutes sometime in High School possibly because I was being sent Facebook CREEPY cruft such as:

And even being invited to groups like:

DESPITE not yet having blocked my personal info like my political affiliation (Vote Obama!).

LinkedIn, Flickr, etc know to give the content provider decent controls over their own private content. Seriously, how hard can this be to grok? That content is about me, provided by me upon which Facebook exists and claims to have some value in the world. At the very least allow me to control my own bytes!