Ran across this great (and scarily accurate) satire Stuff White People Like from the facebook news feed (I forget who’s it was, my apologies). My personal favorites include apprearing to like classical music, outdoor performance clothes, threatening to move to Canada, and Facebook.
Stuff White People Like
October 18th, 20083..2..1..Resume Posting YouTube Videos…
October 18th, 2008Carmen has indicated that she needs more help procrastinating at work, so I’ll do my part.
These gems are from a recent gem that was on Digg.
White Coat Ceremony
August 23rd, 2008On another family note, my sister Kendra just started Med school this week. My parents took her down to Kirksville, MO where she is attending AT Still. Pictures from the white coat ceremony are available here.
Katy Realizes a Dream
August 23rd, 2008She milked a cow at the state fair. They thought she was crazy for being so excited. Pictures here.
Left-turn Madness
June 8th, 2008Shanley has posted a great rant about red left turn arrows in controlled intersections. Anyone who has driven in a car with me in Woodbury has probably heard a similar complaint (in addition to all the swearing).
Shanley frames the question in terms of political ideologies (big brother versus democracy). I tend to think of it more as an interesting technical problem, as I have some vision-based sensing ideas that could make the light algorithms more efficient in low traffic density situations. Either way, right now it’s just dumb.
One Year Anniversary
April 16th, 2008No, not of being married (I’m coming up on three years of that). Today marked the first anniversary of me starting full time employment. One down, 39 more to go…
Full Circle
December 22nd, 2007I remember a year or two ago when I discovered Digg when linked from a Slashdot article. At the time, I was bored with Slashdot because the churn wasn’t fast enough and I had some serious time to waste while I avoided school and working on my thesis. Digg seemed like a savior with its endless supply of interesting stories that had a bit more variety than Slashdot but also covered the great technical topics that I loved.
Fast forward to today, and I’m moving back to Slashdot as my primary news feed. Digg today is full of so much junk it’s not interesting to read anymore. There is a huge social and political bias, but worse than that 90% of what you find there is random pictures of stuff that’s only somewhat entertaining.
I think we’ve observed a unique point in history. For years and years, pictures and video was accumulating without an outlet to share it with more than a few close people. Then sites like Digg and YouTube burst on the scene and allowed all this funny and interesting content to be viewed by the masses. Problem is, we quickly got through all of that content, and there is no way for the world to produce that much on an ongoing basis, so everything got stale.
A similar thing has happened with Facebook. This one could be more related to the fact that as you leave school, these social networking sites become less interesting, but I think the problem is more related to the applications that were introduced to the platform less than a year ago. I can think of lots of great ways to use this API for things that are useful, but it turns out that’s not what the masses want. The masses are interested in turning people into zombies, taking movie quizzes, and giving each other virtual free drinks. Yep. That’s about it.
Turns out the problem with these social technologies is society, as a whole, is not that interesting. I’ll take then endless stream of stories about linux making inroads on the desktop over that any day.
Congrats, Shoe, I’ve just validated your opinions.
