The Abstract Truth » net

The Social Networking Madness has to stop!

rbpasker — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 20:35:38 +0000

This social networking thing is getting out of hand.

Over the past week:

I have been inundated with dozens of requests to join Spock. A few months ago, I also deleted my accounts from Friendster, Hi5, Orkut, and various others, and I’m not going to join another Social Network without a good reason.

People I have met in a work situation, and with whom I have never shared a meal, a cocktail, or a social conversation, are asking to add me on Facebook

People who I don’t know at all are sending me LinkedIn and Facebook requests.

People who have metaphorically dropped me off their Christmas card list are inviting me to add on Facebook

It has got to stop.

From now on, LinkedIn is for work, and Facebook is for play.

And I’m only adding people to those networks if I actually have some connection with them.

Therefore, I am unceremoniously dropping people off Facebook who I know only through work, and sending them LinkedIn requests if I don’t already have them on there. I deeply value my work relationships, and fully intend to continue using LinkedIn to interact with them; but neither they nor I need to have the same level of disclosure about our respective private lives as we do with the people we socialize with.

I am also dropping “friends” off Facebook who for some reason have stopped calling, writing, inviting, or responding. The easiest way to reverse this is to invite me out for a beer

The Limits of Search

rbpasker — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:53:58 +0000

I got an email today asking me about a comment I had made in a 1992 letter to the editor of the New York times Book Review:

Could it be that ideologies, like “compound characterizations,” leak as well?

The writer asked what I meant by “compound characterizations” and, 15 years later, I had no idea. I figured it had something to do with the original Book Review article, but I couldn’t get the NY Times search engine to cough up the original article (and God forbid they should hyperlink letters to the articles to which they refer).

Here are the terms I tried: “William F. Buckley”, “Joseph A. Cincotti”, and “In Search of Anti-Semitism.”

I came up with lots of articles by and about both of the authors as well as a number of references to Buckley’s book, but none were the article by Nathan Glazer with Cincotti’s sidebar. I even narrowed the search to Sept. 1992, the date referenced in my letter.

What finally did it was searching for “compound characterizations” and “leak”.

The referenced article had both Buckley’s and Cincotti’s name, but they had not been indexed by the Times’ search engine.

For a full-text search system, I don’t know why my name and title searches failed to find the article.

Please Resubscribe

rbpasker — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 18:22:36 +0000

I just realized that WordPress, unlike Blogspot, doesn’t allow entries to redirect RSS subscribers to my Feedburner feed. If you are subscribed via a WordPress URL (or are not sure), please resubscribe using this one. Thanks!

My first post on the internet

rbpasker — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:46:53 +0000

According to Google Groups my first USENET post was on 24-March-1989 from my account at RTI (AKA Ingres).

I had moved to California from NYC just the month before.


Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!EDDIE.MIT.EDU!think!rtech!bunny::pasker
From: think!rtech!bunny::pas...@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Bob Pasker, X2434)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: Gnuemacs
Message-ID: <8903240329.AA22688@rtech.rtech.com>
Date: 24 Mar 89 03:29:23 GMT
Sender: dae...@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: gnu
Organization: GNUs Not Usenet
Lines: 10

Mail seems to be the only thing I know how to use on the internet.
How can i fetch a copy of the latest GNUEMACS manual from your node?
Can you just mail me one via the internet?Any help would be appreciated.

thanks, bob pasker

Relational Technology
VAX Development

Goodbye Friendster!

rbpasker — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 20:17:00 +0000

Friendster was the first social networking site I joined, back in Aug 2003, and I get about 2 messages per year from it, none from anybody I know or want to know.

With systems that crawl and consolidate social networking data like Rapleaf and Upscoop, I want to keep a good handle on my web identity.

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to delete my account, but a little link at the bottom of this page was all it took. Well, it took 5 tries to figure out the right combination of boxes to check. And I had to reenter my password all 5 times. I hope their signup doesn’t have as much friction!

Goodbye Friendster!