I have been reading Wil Wheatons blog off and on for several years. His stories and things that interest him seemed to always be not quite what I expected. I was kind of thrilled to follow some of his tweets and see that he is a a Led Zepplin fan.

Then I saw a tweet a few minutes ago that he was putting a PDF version of his latest book up for sale for $5. I told myself, “Self, you should go buy that!”. Then I did a dumb thing. I went to his blog instead of following the link in his tweet.

There, was a post about an artist named Zoë Keating. There was a youtube video embedded, so I hit play. I totally forgot about the tea that I had just started steeping upstairs. Like 20 minutes later I finally went upstairs and got it. I spent those 20 minutes listening to the youtube video, then reading her website and blog, then going to iTunes and ordering both of her albums.

So now, I am going to sip my tea, listen to Zoe Keating, and hopefully make it back to Sunken Treasure.

In a tweet from LeoLaporte, he linked a blog post from Mark Zuckerberg where Mark explained that they were pulling the previous version of the ToS out of revision control and putting it back into place until they can come up with a better one. Way to go for public pressure and outcry!

I’ll be honest, until the recent discussion about the changes that facebook.com had made to the terms of service, I haven’t thought about it since I started using it. I won’t say since I signed up, because I did that initially with no plans to ever use it except to look at some pictures that a friend had posted there of his house.

Later on, a few other friends found me on facebook and so I started to slowly use it. Adding friends from High School that I had long ago lost touch with, even connecting up with someone that I went to gradeschool with! It was all kind of fun and exciting, creating links back to people that I just didn’t have the time or inclination or resources to track down before.

But now, with the changes to fb regarding content, I am unsure if I want to continue using it. As I look back at things I have done on fb, I discover that the main thing that I have been doing is just updating my status, and reading what friends are updating for their status messages. I don’t need fb for that. I have a blog. I also have a twitter account. With those two thoughts in my head, I have been kicking the idea around of either killing off fb entirely, not that they will delete the small amounts of content that I have put up or of just piping my twitter updates to it along with my blog posts and not going to facebook.com at all anymore. But would that be enough?

I know that it is too late to get the genie back into the lamp, I have far too much information on the intarwebs from mailing lists, old websites, et cetera. But I am trying to think more about what I put out there, even if I can’t un-ring the bell.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I do want to feel connected to people, even if it is in a superficial, in passing kind of way. I am on multiple IM networks, I am on IRC almost any time that I am awake. I check my email with the kind of compulsive habit that I wish I could apply to other parts of my life. And of course I also play World of Warcraft, which has a whole list of other people, blogs and forums that I “connect” with in some way.

After much thinking about it (I started this blog post several hours ago, then went to bed), trying not to be hypocritical or to jump on a somewhat popular bandwagon, I am going to keep my facebook account. I will just be little more careful about what I put on there, and most likely will try to integrate twitter and my blog into my life a little more.

After reading a blog post again that a … well, I can’t say we are friends anymore, it’s been a long long time since we had a meaningful conversation, lets call him a possible new-old friend. Anyway, he posted about using Blog RSS Feed Reader fb application, so I am going to follow his lead and see if it works for me.

I just watched “Bill Gates Unplugged” and I liked some of what I saw.
Having lived in Swaziland when I was a kid, malaria is more than just something I have read about. My father is a teacher right now in Public schools, so the issues that we have with our education programs in the USA is again, more than just something I have read about.

One of the things that Mr. Gates suggested was to use cameras in every classroom. On the one hand this sounds like a great idea, and I realize that there is little to no expectation of privacy in a classroom. However my fear is that once people get used to the idea of being “spied” upon, they will accept and even welcome, more and more scrutiny into their daily lives. That said, I am hard pressed to think of a more scalable way to accomplish what he suggests of having classroom content recorded and available for anyone to review.

I know several people, many of them teachers, will feel threatened by some of the ideas that Mr. Gates brings forth. Including that after three years of teaching there is little, to no improvement in a teachers ability. Or that having a Masters degree does not mean you are a better teacher.

I think I may have to have a chat with my dad about some of these ideas, since he is a teacher who has been doing this for more than three years and has a Masters degree.