My mind is churning through the typical Monday mush and I can not find the means to write a coherent blog entry today, so we’ll go with a picture of some pretty clouds. I took this picture on Saturday.
March 2012
Rambling.
I have mentioned before that I place a certain amount of credibility in my dreams. While most thing that a dream is nothing more than a brain defrag, the opportunity for our brains to exercise themselves when the rest of the body isn’t doing much, I’m part of the minority that puts a little more stock into the content of our dreams. I remember at least one dream at night, and I have actively maintained a dream journal since my high school days. One of the earliest dreams I recall involved playing BINGO with the Brady Bunch, because they’re showing opening had that grid thing and I figured they must have loved BINGO. I know I was pretty young when I had that dream, because it was when my sister was still in her crib (she’s two years younger than me) and I had my own bed in the back bedroom of our little mobile home we lived in at the time.
Anyways, back in 2002 or so I wrote in my dream journal that I was driving along Route 5S near the Village of Fort Plain (with a question mark next to ‘Plain’ because that didn’t feel quite right). I was in a black car (at the time we owned a maroon Impala) and I was driving home from work (I didn’t work anywhere near Fort Plain, today I do). I encountered a tornado and had to take shelter. It was a thrilling dream for me as I survived the storm just fine and I had always wanted to see a tornado. The black car even survived.
I had the same dream last night, though the black car was a black Jeep and I wasn’t in Fort Plain. I was in Fort Wayne. This is interesting, because I have never been in Fort Wayne in my life but I do suppose that because of their geographical location, they are apt to get a tornado or two during the appropriate season.
Perhaps Earl and I need to visit Fort Wayne.
There wasn’t much else remarkable about the dream. Just a lot of wind and rain and thunder and me crouching in a ditch as I watch the tornado go by a little ways up the road. My work badge, which hangs on a lanyard around my neck, is flopping around a little bit but I didn’t notice much else about me. The terrain was relatively flat in that I could see quite a ways off and I could see sun off in the distance, so I knew the storm would be short-lived. I woke up with a feeling of exhilaration, though, because I had finally experienced a tornado up close and personal.
I think I’m ready for some spring storms.
I can’t decide if there is a meaning behind the dream, other than me living out my desire to chase storms. Perhaps the flapping badge indicated that work interferes with chasing that dream.
What’s most important about the whole thing is that I felt relatively rested when I woke up this morning, despite my chasing tornadoes.
Privacy.
So to ready myself for Google’s new privacy terms of service and search methods, I deleted my Gmail account last night. If you’re still sending email to my old imachias-at-gmail.com account it won’t go anywhere anymore. I also deleted my Google+ account because no one seemed to be saying anything over there anyways, so I didn’t want any data left hanging around where I would ultimately forget about it.
I’m obviously not paranoid about online privacy since I write in a personal blog and share good chunks of my life right there through words and photos. But there is something that creeps me out about the fact that starting today, if I were to search for some random phrase on Google, it’ll present me with a list of search results that contains what Google thinks I’ll want to see, based on the content of my email, calendar, Google+, previous searches, YouTube views, etc. I find that creepy. I don’t want predictive search results and I don’t want someone randomly labeling me as eccentric until they have met me in person and realized it for themselves first hand. I am not comfortable with a scenario where I search for a news article, for example, and am presented with results from MSNBC, based on what I’ve said about politics in the past, whereas the same person is presented with results from Fox News based on their leanings. That’s taking the autonomy away from the individual. It should be up to me to decide whether I want to look at MSNBC or Fox News as the source of the information I am seeking, without being encouraged by my search engine based on what I’ve done in the past. I feel creeped out and I feel pigeon-holed, and if there is one thing that really gets on my nerves, it’s being pigeon-holed.
“Well, you’ve always wanted to look at MSNBC News before.”
Well what if I am trying to expand my horizons by trying to seek out all points of view?
I am working on ridding myself of my Google account completely. The only thing that remains is Google Reader account, and I use that because it keeps my RSS feeds in sync between multiple devices. I wish there was a generic way of doing that, but I haven’t found a solution to that yet.
My search engine of choice has become duckduckgo.com and I highly recommend it. No tracking, no suggestions, no telling my Facebook friends, no hollering at the empty caverns of Google+ telling my former circles what I am looking for. I type in a search phrase and it gives me results. Once upon a time that could easily be accomplished by AltaVista and it was a beautiful thing. Today it’s DuckDuckGo and I am sticking to this for as long as I can.
I think part of my privacy concerns is fueled by the fact that all this data is designed to improve advertising metrics so that ads are targeted specifically to me based on my life history on the web. I hate ads on the internet. I hate sites that squeeze a bunch of mediocre content between flashing, bare-chested advertising panels in an effort to generate revenue. The more ads, the more mediocre the content, because the site owner is just throwing crap at the web trying to generate as much traffic as possible to their site. I find this approach offensive to my sensibilities.
And now I’ll probably get twice as many ads in my email because I’ve written about them.
