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Where you grew up

Pete Sam McPheeters and I are the same age. We didn’t know each other growing up. He grew up in New York, and I grew up in Wisconsin. We didn’t meet until about 1991, when his band was on tour and came through town, and then again when my band was on tour and we played together in D.C. It was a good show… A memorable show.

There was no World Wide Web back then… I didn’t connect with Sam through some social networking site. We met people in person, bands went on tour, people traveled, we published zines (think blogging, but on paper, delivered by the USPS.) And most of all, we had some degree of privacy. I mean, if you wanted someone in New York to see a picture of something, you had to get some film developed, and either mail it to them, or put it in your zine and hope that somehow they got a copy. It’s weird to think publishing was to a small, select audience, instead of, you know, to the entire world, as it is now.

So Sam and I are of the age where all the stupid stuff we did in our youth was not put up for all to see on Facebook, or Twitpic or some other web site where in less than 5 minutes your embarrassment can be shown to the world. (At least, it wasn’t then, but thanks to the future, it could show up, right now, today!)

Sam McPheeters In Screwed by Search Sam touches on the topic:

I know now that there is an angry, overweight black woman lurking over everything I do. Her name is The Internet, and she will not rest until every self-inflicted pie strike has been chronicled, archived, and exposed for all to see.

We didn’t grow up online, but we’re here now, and we’re the last generation who can say that. Kids today are growing up used to living their lives online. It’s completely normal. In fact, when I met a college kid a few months back who didn’t use Facebook, everyone thought he was a weirdo.

It’s obviously your destiny. What can you do besides accept it?

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BarCampMadison: My Resume Sucks!

Here’s a video from BarCampMadison, which took place August 28, 2010 in Madison, Wisconsin. The session was titled “My Resume Sucks: Do I still need a paper one?” and was presented by Luci Klebar of C2 Graphics Productivity Solutions.

Just a note on this video, the production is a bit poor, but I felt it was still worth sharing. I basically set up the camera, hit record, and ran off to another session. I did the best I could to clean up the audio, but didn’t really edit the image quality at all.

This video is also available at blip.tv and Archive.org and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

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BarCampMadison: Matt’s Research Paper

Hey try this link: https://www.archive.org/download/MattGauger-ResearchPaper/

The BarCampMadison3 Lightning Talks were awesome! Listen up, and you’ll get to hear “Professor” Matt Gauger discuss a SCIgen paper he created.

You’ll probably love this so much you’ll want to download an MP3. (And for our freedom loving friends, enjoy an Ogg file.)

Also, if you want to get all of the audio automagically downloaded podcasting style, subscribe to the feed. I’ll add in more BarCamp stuff as I get it all edited and published.

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Lanyrd

Lanyard

Lanyrd has launched. It’s a social conference directory. You log in using your Twitter credentials. It sounds like a neat idea. Obviously I need to complain about it…

Lanyrd is for Twitter users, and no one else. Got a Twitter account? Click the gigantic “Sign in with twitter” button. Don’t have a Twitter account? Sorry, you can’t use it. I could not find any way to create an account, or even login using an OpenID. Twitter users only are invited to this party.

Now, I’ve been a fan of Simon Willison for many years. He’s a blogger/developer who has done a lot of interesting things. He’s even written a lot about OpenID over the years. I sort of feel like that’s all been thrown out the window with the launch of Lanyrd. Twitter is your only identity.

Now, to be fair to Simon, I have no idea what is planned for Lanyrd, and it may grow to support other identity options, or maybe it’s just another tool that was built for, and works specifically with Twitter. It does make sense, as it would use your Twitter network to make all the connections.

But part of me sees this fracturing of the web, and makes me a little depressed. If Lanyrd was a services I wanted to use and I was not a Twitter user, I’d feel excluded. It makes me feel like Twitter is my main identity online, and I guess that bothers me. I’ve been using things like usernames, and emails, and even URLs to log in to web sites for years, but now it’s just my Twitter account. Don’t have a Twitter account? You’re out of luck.

Again, I don’t mean to be hard on Lanyrd or single them out… I guess I just see sort of thing as another step in the centralized identity that you can’t really own, and I’m a fan of decentralizing things.

I guess the old method of making connections would be something like:

  1. Create account.
  2. Verify account.
  3. Provide your email address, or Gmail account info, or address book, or some other means of exposing your connections (including perhaps, your Twitter info.)
  4. Have the system attempt to make connections for you.
  5. Approve the connections you want to make.

Yes, that’s probably inefficient, and a lot more work, but sometimes freedom comes at a price. There must be some sort of middle ground between making a system elegant, simple, and easy to use, and providing choices. I just don’t know where that middle ground is.

FOAF probably isn’t the answer. XFN probably isn’t the answer. OpenID isn’t the answer in this case… Maybe giving up and accepting the giving away of your identity to a free service is the only option.

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BarCampMadison3 Schedule

This is/was the session schedule for BarCampMadison3, which took place on August 28, 2010. Feel free to ignore it. I’ve put it here for my own reference, as this is information I will need…

Start End Session Title Room
10:30am 11:30am Teaching Machines to Learn by Studying Nature 9-4
10:30am 11:30am LinkedIn Basics 9-5
10:30am 11:30am Empty Houses & Homeless People 9-2
10:30am 11:30am Ruby on Rails Build and Deploy a BarCampMadison App to Production 9-1
10:30am 11:30am Mathematica Training 9-3
10:30am 11:30am Drupal Theming 101 3-1
10:30am 11:30am Virtual Goods & Currencies 3-2
11:30am 12:15pm Git & Git Hub change open source 9-2
11:30am 12:15pm Linked In: Integrate with Multimedia 9-5
11:30am 12:15pm Bootstrap Your Company 3-2
11:30am 12:15pm Kids Camp Discussion [audio] 3-1
1:30pm 2:15pm The HackerSpace Movement [audio] 9-4
1:30pm 2:15pm Photoshop Touchups 101 3-1
1:30pm 2:15pm Build a Search Engine with Apache Solr & Lucene 9-5
1:30pm 2:15pm Freecycle 9-2
1:30pm 2:15pm Free Mathematical and Statistic Resources on the Web 9-1
1:30pm 2:15pm Personal Branding 9-3
1:30pm 2:15pm Linux on Low Powered Computers 3-2
2:30pm 3:15pm RFID Green Shed 3-2
2:30pm 3:15pm Intro to Hardware Hacking and Arduino 9-4
2:30pm 3:15pm SAAS Web app: Interface/signup/conversion discussion 9-5
2:30pm 3:15pm Mining on the Moon 3-1
2:30pm 3:15pm My Resume Sucks: Do I still need a paper one? [video] 9-3
3:30pm 4:15pm Net Neutrality 9-3
3:30pm 4:30pm Intro to Expression Engine 9-5
3:30pm 4:30pm Geeks & Sex 3-2
3:30pm 4:30pm How I learned to stop worrying and love the process 9-2
3:30pm 4:30pm Intro to Hardware Hacking and Arduino 9-4
3:30pm 4:30pm Our Ballot Box Startup Demo 3-1
3:30pm 4:30pm 5 ways to blog w/ Posterous 9-1
4:30pm 5:15pm Future of Web608 [audio] 9-1
4:30pm 5:30pm Open Share Tools and Techniques to Manage Web Devs 3-1
4:30pm 5:30pm Building Strong Communities for Hacker/Maker Spaces [video] 9-4
4:30pm 5:30pm Death of ads 3-2
4:30pm 5:30pm DIY Liqueurs 9-5
5:30pm 6:15pm Drupal Q&A / Drupal Toolshare 9-3
5:30pm 6:15pm How To: Make Dinner for your date 9-4
5:30pm 6:15pm Crowdsource Local Tech News – Tech in Madison 9-5
5:30pm 6:15pm Intro to Inkscape 3-1
5:30pm 6:30pm Accessibility for the Web 3-2
5:30pm 6:30pm This App can Text – Building a Twilio app in half an hour 9-2