FTS volume two
I had a lovely conversation with a friend today; let’s call her B because she’s looking for a job and apparently doesn’t want anyone to know anything about her. She warned me about some scary information-aggregating sites and how much of my information was out there. ‘Doubt it,’ I said in my best Carl the bartender voice. I know what I willingly give up, and I’m okay with it.
‘I’m listening to your Pandora station right now.’ Yep, I like Stiff Little Fingers. ‘Your Amazon wishlist!’ If you want to buy me Man Walks Into a Pub, I’m certainly not going to stop you — and I made sure that it didn’t publish my address before I made it public. ‘danconley.net!’ Oh damn, you found my super secret website with my name in the url.
I’ve covered this a bit before, which is why this is volume two. Then I was perfectly happy at CIRRIE, but now I’ve decided that I need to look for a new job not because I’m unhappy but because I would really like to be able to be the sole income while my wife stays home with our son when he’s born. I’m looking for web development jobs, so I assume it will be standard practice to Google applicants, and while my doppelgangers are currently DAs in Boston and apparently football coaches and the like (I wonder if Boston got the sheriff from Pennsylvania; he seems to have disappeared) it appears that the lawyer or real estate agent who used to own me.com has let his registration lapse and so I am King of Google.
So has anything changed? Am I now furiously protecting every scrap of information about me? No. The thing about me is that I am a person, and I have interests. I’m not going to give you every detail of my personal life — my Facebook profile has every privacy setting on ‘nuh uh’ — but I’m not going to pretend that I am a blank canvas, not interested in anything you might not be or might find offensive. Not only would I not want a job that would require that, but they shouldn’t want me either. It’s not just that I have published lists of my interests — homebrewing beer, video games, writing, Coheed & Cambria — it’s that I also have unintentional snippets of myself out there, particularly Twitter. Currently, glancing over my recent Tweets (a stupid word, but it’s the standard) you can see that I hate frames in html, that I’m excited for The Decemberists concert I’m going to tonight and that I think being offered to ‘meet new moms’ on a pregnancy site sounds kind of weird if you’re a guy. That’s by no means a complete picture, but I’d say those are all fair snippets of who I am.
As I put it to B, there’s nothing you can find that I wouldn’t tell a person at a party. You’re not going to get long political tirades from me (though it’s easy to see I’m left-leaning) and if there are any drunken photos of me you aren’t going to see them, but I’ll probably sneak in a reference to Dr. Horrible or something geeky (last night at a friend’s I pointed out that we already have the technology for a replicator, as long as it only serves you ‘Earl Grey. Hot.’).
Oh, and TNG was better than TOS but if you disagree we can still be friends.
