For a long time, I resisted. This was partly for privacy reasons (though ironically, one of the people who in the end convinced me to sign up through multiple invites was one of my favorite InfoSec professors), but mostly it was because I didn’t want my information overload problem to get any worse.

Call it my fear of artificially induced A.D.D.

And when an old-school lifelong friend of mine tried to talk me into it, I resisted that too, at least initially. But then, after finding out how much of my high school class was online and knowing my twenty-year reunion was coming up, I succumbed. And as much as aspects of it annoyed me, being able to talk to wonderful people I hadn’t seen in decades was great.

Email requires consciously contacting people. Facebook was like passing people in the hallway and getting a little window on their lives – the choice to comment (or not) was mine. And, to be quite honest, it’s allowed me some RL opportunities that not being on Facebook wouldn’t have (mostly, the chance to see old friends who wouldn’t have known where I was otherwise as they passed through Denver or Munich).

There’s a reason even rational people sell their attention and privacy to Mark Zuckerberg.

That doesn’t make a good idea, but there’s a reason for it.

In this world where we all abandon the villages which would have helped us become adults, raise our children, be families, and grow old together, in some sense, Facebook allows us to reconstruct those villages, if imperfectly. I see my friends’ kids grow from across an ocean, get parenting advice from old friends, laugh with people I love. Especially in my situation, where my meager support system was completely obliterated by moving to another continent and where the language around me isn’t the one I dream in, it’s had particular value.

But… I know better.

Facebook’s sole interest in keeping your information private begins and ends with keeping you around so that they can sell your attention and your data. (This is the same, let’s face it, for any “free” service provider – *ahem* Google *cough*) If the pull of the relationships you’re maintaining is much stronger than your desire to keep your information private – or if the policy is confusing enough that you think your information is private when it isn’t – you’ll stick around, and they can continue doing whatever they do with your data. And given that they change their privacy policies on a daily basis, well, generally, Facebook wins that battle.

I’m a smart girl – I know better – and yet I know I’ll lose touch with some people I adore when I leave.

It’s not their fault – life is incredibly busy, and while you may love browsing the pictures of your high school locker partner when you can do it casually, contacting her directly is work. After a long day of work and kids and commutes and blah blah blah, who needs more work? Sometimes, reading a whole blog post seems like work.

Of course, that’s probably because we’ve all had our attention spans shattered by reading mass quantities of Twitter and Facebook updates. I find myself skimming posts because of it that I would have read before. In fact, I’m going to be shocked if anyone reads this far.

But.

Rationality has to win out eventually. I hope – I sincerely hope – friends will still make contact with me once I’ve deleted my Facebook account tonight. I know lots of folks will try to talk me out of it, but it’s the right thing to do. Call it reallocation of attention and an attempt to control which information Facebook owns about me in the future.

(N.B. Even if Facebook claims (and I don’t know that they even do) to delete all information associated with an account, one would be a fool to believe they actually do.)

Look, as a person, I’m actually not all that private, but I am intensely aware of what I make public when I tweet or post here. But because Facebook feels like you’re having private conversations with your closest 300 friends, you tend to have the private conversations you wouldn’t have on public channels. And Facebook has – and keeps – all of that information.

Not good.

It’s the price you’re paying to chat with your bandmate from senior year.

So: much as I am going to miss contact with friends, I’m deleting my account. I need – and want – to reallocate my attention away from Facebook.

I’m not disappearing from the Internet – I’m not even completely avoiding Short Attention Span Theater (i.e. I’ll still be on Twitter) – but I’m going to delete my Facebook account for good.

So, old pals, if you’ve read this far (or you find this post later) and you still want to find me…

Blog: http://blog.kgrothoff.org
Website: http://kgrothoff.org
Email: krista at kgrothoff dot org
Twitter: @kristamonster

Skype and RL phone calls on request (the latter cost me nothing in a large part of the world), snail mail address available if you email me.

I’ll delete the account late tonight CEST. I have very mixed feelings, but I’ve been threatening to do this for more than a year and never go through with it. No, I don’t think I’m so important that this has a major impact on anyone’s life, but there are some beloved people with whom I have only maintained contact with through Facebook that I don’t want to disappear from without a trace.

N.B. I’m well aware there are other alternatives developing out there – Diaspora, for one. We’ll see. And Twitter has its own issues, but that’s for another post.

It’s just the way I organize my brain. (My husband and every former roommate I’ve ever had are all now choking at my use of the verb organize with I as its subject and no negation in the sentence. Bite me, suckas!) I like the chronological approach, and that’s just how it is.

So what I wanted was something that would 1) download from feeds, and 2) organize them like an LJ Friends list. I wanted control over how far back the posts would go, and I wanted it to run on Linux.

I’ve tried all sorts of aggregators under various OSs, and they were all either annoying to install under Linux or just didn’t do what I want (and didn’t allow me enough room to tinker) or had craploads of features that I was uninterested in while still not having the ones I wanted.

But today… today, I got what I wanted. Behold rawdog. Written in Python, easy to configure yet providing me with as much room to mess around as I want, and writes an offline RoN html page (or pages with the paged-output plugin) for me to read at my leisure when I’m offline. No screwing around with GUIs that crash, no messing around with crap I don’t care about, and no being forced to use “features” I have no need for.

Beautiful

(I am spartan when it comes to software – your mileage may vary.)

But oh, horrible me for finding it funny!

Well, apparently today, seven months after the fact, some woman from one of the boards found this post, apparently deciding I was bitter about their acronyms. (She also said it was kinda funny, and to that woman, if she ever visits here, please know that you are totally entitled to your opinion, but how in God’s name can one be bitter about an acronym which has nothing to do with one personally? ) I wouldn’t normally have known that anyone had posted anything about this particular blog entry, of course, because my vanity searches on the Internet are just not all that vain, but then the abuse started.

From “None Ya”, from address “ip68-103-179-95.ks.ok.cox.net” and an ISP somewhere in the vicinity of Wichita, Kansas:

You are pathetic. And have way to much time on your hands to be making fun of people. I think someone needs to write a blog about you!

Oh boy. Name-calling! That always helps! I always feel pathetic when someone I don’t know and don’t care about names me as such. I think I may cry! Ah, nah, wait. I’ll just respond:

Dearest None Ya:

Oooo, wow. Very middle-school playground of you. I’m impressed, and I’m afraid you’re only proving my point.

I would say you have way too (proper spelling for the modifier indicating excess, as opposed to “to”, which has several functions in the English language, including a preposition indicating direction or a marker indicating the infinitive form of a verb) much time on your hands if you spend Thanksgiving morning visiting other people’s blog posts of seven months ago to call them pathetic. And anyone other than me who’d write a blog about me certainly has too much time on their hands – I’m just not that interesting.

But thank you for amusing me. I’d suggest you also get a sense of humor about yourself – it can be quite refreshing.

Ok, so that’s done.

But ah, but wait, there’s more! Oh goody!

From “urfuturewife”, a visitor from address “c-75-67-110-231.hsd1.ma.comcast.net” and an ISP somewhere near Hyde Park, Massachusetts:

You must be MALE

Hrm… breasts? Check. Huge pregnant belly? Check. Penis? BZZZT. Sorry, it appears I do not have the requisite equipment. This may indicate some of where your difficulties lie. See, men have penises. If you want to get pregnant, you either need someone with one of those (there are a lot of them around) or you need to consider artificial insemination. This thing I have? Not a penis. Not going to help another woman get pregnant. I hope that helps.

And so to this fine young woman, I say:

Dear urfuturewife,

I’m afraid you have me confused with some other person – first of all, I’m strictly heterosexual, although I support your sexual preference as indicated by your name and the fact that you are claiming to be some pregnant woman’s future wife. Secondly, I’m already married, and I don’t foresee obtaining additional spouses in the future. Finally, I’m afraid I could never marry anyone who can’t type out the whole word “your” – if you’d read my post, you’d know I have a strong aversion to AOL-style text abbreviations like “ur” (unless you are referring to “Ur“, the ancient city in the cradle of civilization, in which case I can only say I think you’re probably a little late to be any of the denizens’ future wife. My condolences!).

As for me being male, that is going to be a huge surprise to my husband, who somehow managed to get me pregnant anyway. I suspect there is some flaw in your analysis, as the only male parts I have currently are attached to the sleeping baby in my belly, but I can see how you might make the mistake.

I suggest you and “None Ya” get together and work on better insults – the fact that I was tempted to answer you with “I know you are but what am I” and stick my tongue out blowing raspberries at you indicates the level at which your taunts fall.

I mean, you’re funny, but, um, not for the reasons you mean to be…

Happy Thanksgiving!

Seriously folks… come on.

Get a sense of humor. Especially about getting pregnant. Trust me, if you make it all about the stress, you’re not going to enjoy it at all. And if some random person on the Internet on their own blog says something you disagree with, let it go. Seriously.

As for me, while it was funny to begin with, I don’t really care to be abused in my own sandbox by random strangers, so I blocked anyone visiting directly from that board. There’s nothing here for them anyway.

(Note to regular readers: you may find you are permanently blocked if you visit directly from where their original post is located, which is why I did not post a link; normally I wouldn’t post the details of exactly how I’ve blocked someone, but I’m not really worried about circumvention measures this time around, if you catch my drift.)

Yayyyyyyyy!

But I am woefully behind on writing and blog-reading. Oh soooooooooooooo woefully behind. Part of this is busyness, part of this is being tired and in some pain, and part of it was, frankly, some annoyance that the perpetrators of the FFD™ (something that I am finally starting to get past through sheer force of will) are getting rather persistent about trying to read my blog in order to find out what’s going on with me. The key word here is trying, but eventually they will succeed because I simply don’t have the obsession, energy or time to think so much about them that I remain ever-vigilant about them reading a public blog, and as long as I don’t know about it and they don’t bother me, I don’t really care. But for the moment, I do find it rather creepy and annoying that people who I’ve said quite clearly that I’m done with and who have in turn told me never to contact them again (um… why would I want to????) can’t stop trying to get the details of my life anyway. It’s like, move on, people. Make your decisions, accept the consequences, and move on. I’m not taking my blog down (or moderating my comments very much) for their sake, but geez… it’s uncomfortably like being stalked.

Anyhow, I didn’t intend to go off on that, but it certainly does get my creep on.

And now, to the shout-out portion of our program:

NaNoWriMo-sters!!!!: This weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) is big-assed NaNo catchup weekend (presuming Small Monster doesn’t decide to enter the world). To my NaNo peeps who’ve been keeping up, I challenge you to write the number of additional words I have to make up before Sunday at midnight between now and the end of the weekend – 14884! (I’m evil, aren’t I?) And for those who are behind, let us all join in solidarity and get caught up, even if we have to add clowns in buttless leather chaps to our stories to get things moving (“Hmmm… how do I integrate that into a historical romance?”).

Hot Blogging Chicks!: To my favorite bloganistas, I will get caught up eventually in reading your fine writing, although if you can convincingly integrate clowns in buttless leather chaps to your ongoing narrative, I will be much more likely to catch up quickly, probably spewing tea onto my monitors. I will also give you extra points, although if one of my monitors shorts out as a result of the tea, I will have to take those points back

God I need sleep. I’m so going to regret posting that last bit later, aren’t I?

ETA: Ok, so there is a German final, but, eh, I can do that at home and make my husband deliver it anyhow once I’m done with it

I exported the feed list to Google Reader as well, so that I can still read feeds on other computers, but eh… it’ll probably never get used and will be out of date by last week Tuesday. Just like this blog

Of course, none of you care, and I only mention it so that members of my mutual admiration society who know that I used to read your feeds via my friends’ list know that the lack of hits coming from there isn’t because I don’t love you… I just love you from somewhere else now

If I had a thicker skin, I suppose the best revenge would be to actually SEND such losers naked pics of me. But, um, not even I want to see those…

Now, I wouldn’t normally post about this – I tend not to post configuration details for obvious reasons – but given that the plugin is already catching a bunch of traffic, I want to make sure it’s not catching anyone it shouldn’t. If you were mistakenly caught in the Bad Behavior filter, not only will you get a 403 page, but you will get one with a message as to why you were caught there as well as a means to resolve the situation yourself. Feel free to leave a comment here if you’re being repeatedly blocked for no apparent reason and you aren’t some sort of sucky, evil spammer. I will fix what can and should be fixed. (Obviously, to even read this message, you would have had to use the fix proposed on the error page or e-mail me, so if no one contacts me or uses that fix, I’ll never know… c’est la vie)

On the other hand, if you get a 403 error without information about why you were blocked as well as the means to fix it yourself, it is likely, you know, on purpose. As in you’re either trying to access something you’re not allowed to, or you’re not welcome here. Consider this latter version of the 403 error as a not-at-all subtle hint to stay the Hell out of my sandbox and get on with your life Don’t worry – if I haven’t already dropped this hint to you personally, you don’t fall into this latter group. I loves my readers. Just, well, not in that way. Except for that one German guy who reads it, but he’s married to me.

Anyhow, do let me know if you’re a legitimate user and there are problems.

What the Hell? The police obviously don’t understand how Tor works or what it is for, in spite of now having some experience with Tor operators, and yet even after being proven wrong again and again they still harass the same guy for various content that supposedly “came from” him.

I don’t blame the guy for shutting down the node – it’s one thing to hang on to an important ideal, but there are only so many lawyers fees and investigations – and so many groundless arrests – one can take before deciding that personal interest is more important than “the greater good”. Of course, I suspect this is what the police intend – if you can’t beat anonymous p2p networks by actual analysis or even shutting them down across the board, you can just scare the crap out of the operators until they cry uncle out of concern for their lives and family.

I might expect this kind of ignorance from our guys over here, but I expected rather more from the Germans…

So here goes <enter super-pedantic smartassed mode>:

My blog, entitled “Don’t look now, but…”, is hosted here at my website.

Blog is short for weblog. As in a log, on the web.

Now, a log is, among other things, a record of events. Each event is an entry in that log.

A weblog is a set of entries, although they may not necessarily be events. This entry, entitled “Pet peeve ”, is an entry or post. It is a blog entry.

It is not a blog.

It is a post on my blog. There are many posts or entries in my blog, but there are not many blogs on this website. There is only one.

When you say, “My last five blogs have been nearly incomprehensible because I was smoking crack”, you are not saying your last five posts or entries have been incomprehensible. You are saying your last five, for lack of a better way of putting it, entire online journals (or whatever you use your blog for) have been incomprehensible. And that is probably not what you mean.

(Note to the good friend who told me this week that she’d dedicated a blog to me – you are excused, because you are you, although I have to tell you that your initial email scared the living crap about of me at first until I figured out what you meant )

Just for illustration: Wil Wheaton has an awesome blog. His blog is at http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/, and you should read it.

You will note that when you click on the link to his blog, there are many, many entries. There are not many, many blogs on this page. There are just many posts, or entries.

His blog is composed of many posts, like this one entreating people not to become victims of FUD and Michael Chertoff’s colon.

Get it? Post/entry: part. Blog: whole.

Easy, no?

<end super-pedantic smartassed mode>

You are not allowed to hurt me for this. I am providing a public service, after all

(Ok, you’re allowed to hurt me for that…)

Yes, I know how to use filters. Yes, I know how to use the delete button.

It’s just a typical example of my lack of organization

Now, for the next task… replying to the backlog