No, really, I promise!

Like many things I write, they’ve come off a bit as “explanation” and/or “justification,” but– also like many things I write– they were meant more as “exploration.” They are a personal exploration, through writing, of my own decisions and motivations. That is what writing is to me. That ability to use it as a forum, not with others, but with myself. It’s as much an internal dialog as an external representation. It is more-so that, actually.

And that’s the point of this post.

Longform writing

I’m going to be honest with myself and not describe the way I like to write as “essay.” It often doesn’t have the deep research and editing that such writing would require. Still, it is longform writing. It’s not sound bites, it’s analysis. It allows me– forces me, really– to dive deeply into myself to ascertain my own thoughts and motivations. Whether I’m writing about myself, or about someone else, or about some arbitrary situation removed from me completely. Writing is analysis.

Facebook is not writing as analysis. Facebook is a focus on the soundbite. Facebook is a headline. Headlines are catchy. They are short and pithy. Headlines grab people’s attention, and Facebook is really good at that. But that was the limit. Longform writing is the actual story, and I truly believe in “story.”

Longform writing is what I want to do, but Facebook writing is what I did.

Strangely, I would find that I was spending almost as much time internally preparing a Facebook post as I would spend preparing a longform blog post such as this. And no, that’s not to say that I spend only a few minutes preparing a blog post. What that means is that a stupid Facebook post would take, quite literally, days to prepare.

Just think for a moment about how incredibly fucking stupid that is.

I mean, seriously, did you read the previous posts where I describe how I don’t take Facebook seriously? Good. So I’m not the other one who realizes that I’m completely full of shit. I take it too fucking seriously!

A day to swim, a week to post about it

Think about this small post:

The Hood River pool, where you learn that no matter how out of shape you thought you were, you’re more out of shape than that.

Which took me almost a week to write. Yes, you read that correctly, almost a week.

I’ve written before about trying to learn how to swim with the masters swimmers. It’s difficult, but it’s also amazing who’s there. There are 60+ year old women who, despite my best efforts at focusing on what I’m doing, I can’t help but notice are really in shape and… well… hot! There are people who are so in shape and so good in the water that it’s difficult to believe that I’ll ever be that good.

So, I’m there watching people who I can’t help but compare myself to– me, this former martial arts loving competitive cyclist who is now little more than an out-of-shape middle-aged oaf. I watch them while meanwhile I can barely make it back and forth across the pool once before I’m out of breath and dizzy enough to pass out.

And there’s this aspect of body preparedness, which I’ve never thought of, but which explains why I can get on a bicycle after two years of doing basically no riding, and still hold my own in the Tour de Hood. It’s the reason I keep thinking of myself as “fairly fit” despite all the evidence to the contrary. It’s not that I’m “fit.” It’s just that my body, after an entire lifetime of doing this sport, is uniquely prepared to, well, do this sport.

But any other sport is up for grabs. I can ride 40 miles at the drop of a hat, but jogging around the block is deadly, and swimming kicks my ass.

That’s a sampling of the analysis I did before writing that Facebook post. It’s a sampling of what I wanted to write about. But, of course, on Facebook, you’re not going to write all of that. So, I took a couple days thinking about that, then a couple more deciding whether I was going to write about 60 year old women who look hot in bathing suits, and how I could do that in a way that was funny, but still appropriate and respectful to them, and then a while deciding whether I was going to mention body preparedness or just feeling out of shape, and a couple days to…

And what do I get out of that? One fucking sentence that doesn’t express any of that.

Don’t give up writing for writing

Here in Hood River, wind sports are big. The windsurfers and kiteboarders here have a saying: “Don’t give up wind for wind.” There’s a lot I learned from that saying.

Say you’re out on the river, and you have wind, and you’re windsurfing, but then you look way up the gorge and it looks windier. You might be tempted to go there, but you shouldn’t. You have wind here, and you don’t know that the wind is better up there. Furthermore, even if it is better up there, by the time you get off the water, break down, get there, rig up, and get back on the water, that wind could be gone. That wind could have left by that time– and the wind you had at the first place could have left too.

Don’t give up wind for wind.

I realized that what I was doing was just that. I was obsessing about posts. Do they capture everything I want them to capture, do they have enough comedy, do they poke at, or not poke at, family members who will be upset, or not upset, at being poked at. I’d spend a week thinking about how I was going to post a short two sentence statement on Facebook, and I found that I had no mental energy for actually writing the longform analysis that I wanted to do, so I didn’t do it. I was doing all the longform analysis for shortform writing.

I gave up writing for writing.

Archery and The Final Twist

But that’s not even the real, really real, reason I gave up Facebook.

I obsessed over Facebook posts. I would literally sit with someone in conversation and think about how I was going to relate that conversation– or maybe even think about how I was going to relate a completely different conversation on Facebook. At the pool, I thought just as much about how I was going to relate my experience at the pool on Facebook as I did about how I was actually experiencing the pool.

I had inklings of this for a while, but it hit home when I was practicing archery one day. Coming from a martial arts background, I have a consciousness of focus and presence. I use that in many things, of course, but I’m more conscious of them when I do martial arts-like things, of which archery is one. So one day, I’m out shooting, and I shoot a really beautiful quiver. I was calm, focused, present, and 5 of 8 arrows are all virtually dead center and spaced about the distance of two quarters. Beautiful.

Now, what I should have done, what I knew I wanted to do, was to ignore those arrows that I’ve already shot. They don’t exist. I needn’t think of the two arrows still in my quiver either, because they don’t exist. The only thing that exists is this arrow I have nocked and the target. There is nothing but this shot. Quiet, peace, breath, and this one shot are all that exist in the world. That is what I should have thought.

But what I did think is this: Wouldn’t it be awesome to post a picture of 8 perfectly shot arrows in the target! I’d love to post that on Facebook.

The next shot I fired was almost a foot off. The shot after that missed the target all together. My final shot even missed my backboard and hit my shed. I realized at that point that I hadn’t given up writing for writing. I’d given up the presence of my life for Facebook.

I unstrung my bow, collected my arrows, came inside, and deleted my account.

A Farewell To Facebook

Me leaving Facebook had nothing to do with the concept of friends, or with the concept of interaction. It had to do with the concept of presence. Specifically, with my inability to have that presence while I was focused on my obsessive, stupid desire to describe that presence to others.

Sure, I think about how I’m going to post something on my blog, but it’s different. I can’t explain how it’s different except to say that when I think about my blog, I don’t actually think about how will I say this on my blog, but rather I think how do I feel about this– and then I write about those feelings on my blog.

Maybe it’s because longform is the process of understanding of how I feel about something, and then the writing of those feelings. It’s focused on the feeling, the understanding. Shortform writing is, for me, often focused on just the writing.

I can’t explain it, really. But I know that when I was standing there with my bow in my hand, looking thirty feet beyond my target at a fletching sticking out of my shed, I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry not because I missed a good shot, or because I missed the opportunity to describe that good shot, but because I was thinking so much about Facebook that I missed the experience of living that shot.

And of so much other living.

It just seems that much of Facebook is not “interaction.” It’s short anecdotes that people comment on. That’s not interaction. Interaction is real conversation with someone, where you learn about what’s going on in their lives, in their head. More importantly, interaction is where you learn what’s going on in your own head.

It’s growing, it’s changing, it’s becoming. It’s not talking about your cat and having someone else comment on it.

But that’s what I kept feeling. I felt as though we’d all sit with our Facebook comments and think that we’d really interacted with someone because we read about them being sick, or read about them mowing the lawn. I’d see people that I hadn’t seen for some time, and they’d start talking about things that happened a couple weeks ago that they’d read about on my Facebook page. Most of the time, this would not be comfortable- not because I was uncomfortable with them knowing details of my life, but because they didn’t know details about my life.

When someone reads a quick Facebook post about something anecdotal that happened in someone’s life, all they have is an anecdote about what happened. They don’t have the story, they have a soundbite. They just have a meaningless quip, because they haven’t actually interacted with the person, with the information.

This is especially true for me and my information. Since I felt that way about Facebook– that it’s not real interaction– I would liberally sprinkle my anecdotes with comedy, or spice them up to make them much more funny than they’d otherwise be.

Rate these two possible Facebook posts for comic value:

1. 1) I didn’t feel too hot this morning, but after I ate breakfast, I felt a little better.
2. 2) While sickness sucks in general, throwing up immediately after breakfast is a surprisingly effective weight loss strategy

See? Number one is boring. I generally shy away from boring– or at least things that make me feel like I’m being boring. So I’d… embellish a bit… and add some comedy… because really, it’s Facebook, no-one’s going to actually take it seriously, right?

Wrong. I’d see someone and they’d start talking about what’s going on in my life as if they know about it, and I would often think “Eh, yeah. Uh, so, that’s not even really close to what’s going on. You take Facebook seriously, don’t you?”

After enough of these interaction, I start thinking that either a) I need to start taking Facebook seriously too, or b) this is not the best place for my type of semi-realistic humor.

The joy of rumor

So, one day, my wife, Jessica, get’s a call from her sister saying that shit has hit the fan and she really needs to call her mom.

So she calls her mother, who starts immediately bitching at Jessica for keeping her in the dark and not telling her what’s going on and why does she have to learn about me getting fired by having Jessica’s aunt call to gloat about how maybe her son-in-law is not so great after all and maybe she’ll know what it’s like to have kids who are unemployed and maybe when one of us gets unemployed Jessica could think to call her mother and tell her her mother instead of giving her aunt a reason to call and gloat!

Now, I’m a contractor. I have a small business– me– that provides services to other companies that they cannot provide for themselves– software development. Most of the time, those services eventually, well, end. Not in a bad way, mind you, because hopefully I’ve actually done my job, which is to do something, afterwhich, since there’s nothing else to do, I leave. So, you could say that I am a complete failure unless I leave a job, because if I don’t leave, it’s probably because I never actually finish what I’m supposed to do.

But sometimes– most of the time really– I really like the people I work with, and grow to think of them as friends, and miss them when I’m gone. Also, quite often, I’m not sure about how my work is going to live in the context of the company. Usually, I build something near completion and then the company has to take it and finish it and/or use it. So, because I care about what I make, I worry that it’s good enough, that it lasts, that it solves the problem I wanted to solve.

So, one day, thinking about all of this, I posted something on Facebook:

“Last day on the job. Always a bittersweet experience. Gonna really miss it here and the people, and worried about what’s going to happen next”

This post is read by my wife’s cousin, who apparently tells his mom that I’m leaving my job. His mom, apparently assuming that I’m only leaving because I’ve been fired– which is good because she’s constantly in competition with her sister– i.e. my wife’s mother– so she calls her sister to gloat. This makes Jessica’s mom freak out because her daughter’s husband has been fired, so she naturally calls Jessica’s sisterto freak out and complain about how she’s been left in the dark about me being fired because her daughter doesn’t care to tell her anything.

Jessica’s response to learning all of this was “Huh, what?”

You could just ask, people

Now, admittedly, this isn’t Facebook’s fault. The family political firestorm that swept through Jessica’s family was entirely fed by the dry tinder that is “Jessica’s family members relationships with Jessica’s other family.” Which is to say that it’s basically the norm if not exactly normal. Facebook was, at worst, a match carelessly thrown from a car into a pile of dry grass.

Still, the family is flammable, and so we need to be exceptionally careful with sparks. We, I, need to be ever conscious of my matches. And it’s not just hers. My own family has mis-read sometime comic, sometimes off-color, posts on my Facebook wall and assumed the worst. The thing about all this is that, if it were honestly interaction, then there would be… well… interaction. Think of the two ways the situation above could have been handled:

1. Freak out and immediately assume the worst. Call all the other members of your family to ensure the firestorm is as big and as violent as possible. Start preparing your daughter’s spare room for her post-divorce life, and prep yourself for your unemployed son-in-law to start borrowing large sums of money and never paying them back
2. Actually talk to your daughter and find out that they are celebrating over a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir.

One of these really stupid and childish, the other is thoughtful and involves interaction. The thing about Facebook is that it encourages us all to take the stupid and childish path. Facebook does this because it tells us that it is providing interaction- and we all, me included, are dumb enough to believe it.

You see, true interaction would be “call your daughter and find out that everything is fine.” That would be interaction. But Facebook has already provided “interaction.” So we assume that the actual interaction has already taken place, so the next logical step is to freak the fuck out, right?

Another twist

Of course it’s an exaggeration. Just as with Facebook, I’m going for comedy as much as anything. Still, the point remaint, and the point is that if Facebook, as a system, honestly was interaction, freakouts probably wouldn’t occur at all. And if Facebook honestly encouraged interaction, then the freakout would be avoided because we would all… well… interact!

Rather, Facebook encourages us to assume we have the whole story. It encourages us to assume that the soundbite is all the information that we need. This is bad enough, but it’s worse when someone like me doesn’t take it seriously at all, and further obscures reality with comedy and embellishment.

But there’s another twist. Similar to the first. This wasn’t the reason I had for leaving. It wasn’t other people freaking out that caused me to have second thoughts, it was my own change.

I found that I had to be really conscious of what I posted. “Can I post this? Will her family freak out?” “If I post this, can I make it comedic without fallout?” It was becoming troublesome to make sure that what I posted was… safe.

And so I actually swung the other way, purposely posting stuff that was unsafe just because I shouldn’t have to worry about it being safe. I’d post about Jessica walking around wearing nothing but cellophane, not because it has (or ever actually would) happen, but because “dammit, if I have to worry about posting something that might upset her mother, that pisses me off, so I’m going to post something that will surely upset her mother.”

So I went from posting whatever I wanted, to posting only what I thought was safe, to posting what I hoped was unsafe. Which means I went from being angry at other people being stupid to actually being more stupid.

No. Stop. Time to leave.

That’s the real reason. Because, apparently, I don’t have the wisdom and self-control to fight stupidity with integrity. Maybe one day I’ll learn, but until then, I just thought it best for me to go away.

Deleted. Completely.¹ When I did this, many friends and family expressed surprise, sometimes outright frustration, that I would leave Facebook. According to them, there were a number of reason I should not have left, but primary among them was that I’d be eliminating that important way to communicate with me and see what I’m doing.²

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing a “why I’ve left Facebook” post and almost didn’t. After all, I dropped off the radar on a random day, at a random time, without any warning. I wanted a clean break, and writing a “why” isn’t really clean. But, I do want to express my reasons for leaving. They amount to three fundamental things

1. Confusion over what it means to be a friend
2. Confusion over what it means to interact.
3. My own personal tendency to obsess.

Because I’m a loquacious SOB, I decided that each of these warrants it’s own post. Here’s the first.

The meaning of “Friend”

One big reason Facebook drove me crazy is that way too many people just got way too caught up pouring as much emotional meaning into friending as they possibly could. I didn’t see Facebook’s use of “Friend” as meaningful as others did. When I started using Facebook, I made a rule for myself that I’d have no more than 100 “friends.” Why? Because I personally couldn’t honor more than that many people with the real, honest communication that I wanted to.

Now, this is a personal decision, I admit. Many people friend everyone on Facebook and don’t feel they have to “honor” them at all. I may seem ridiculous when I say this, but I truly believe that everything we use, we should use in the way that best supports our own personality and personal growth. Everything we do, we should do mindfully and with intention. For some people, that means friending everyone. That’s fine. My mindful– my personal– decision was to friend a small enough number of people that I could truly interact with them all.

I also made a conscious decision to friend only family, and people whom I actually considered friends in person. People whom I saw regularly, or for whom continuous strong communication was important. If I would regularly go out of my way in everyday life to see you, or to be with you, or to contact you (or you, me) then I’d probably friend you. If I didn’t have that opportunity (because, say, you lived far away), but wanted to, I’d probably friend you. If you lived in the same very small town as me, and I only saw you when we bumped into each other accidentally, then no, I probably won’t friend you.

Again, not the way many others use it, and that’s fine, because that’s the way I, mindfully, intentionally decided to use it in a way that best supported my own personal convictions.

What I found, however, was that people were often offended and angry with me because I didn’t not want to friend them.³ So, I would ignore friend requests from people whom I didn’t actually know, or from people whom I didn’t consider an actual friend, or people who I very occasionally saw around town but whom I never really interacted with. This caused a surprising number of “why won’t you friend me?” problems.

I would also un-friend people whom I had been “friends” with, but whom I had not interacted with. Let’s call this “the normal dissolution of a relationship that’s happened quite naturally for at least 1.5 million years before Facebook existed.” I mean, seriously, I don’t read what you post, you don’t read what I post, yet you’re angry when I suddenly disappear from your stream? (A stream that might be active enough that you can’t actually read what I’m posting anyway).

Then there was what I would call “the regular culling.” I would end up with 150 “friends,” and decided to pare it down to my decided maximum 100. And people got surprisingly angry with my decisions, angry with my reasoning for why I would un-friend them vs. someone else. People would ask other people if I dropped them because of something that they posted that I never even read. It was ridiculous.

Facebook as emotional support mechinism

The result of all my mindful decisions on how I wanted to use Facebook was that I found myself needing to justify my decision on how I would use this piece of software strictly so that I could appease other people’s emotional security. If I un-friended someone, I would often get very stern demands for an explanation of why I unfriended them.

Really? I need to justify myself?

I found myself not wanting to explain, but to shout. Look people, it’s fucking software. It’s a goddamned tool. It’s like a wrench. It’s useful for some forms of communication. You don’t get all sobs and whines when I say I don’t have your phone number, do you? No! You don’t get upset and demand an explanation of my reasoning when I say I lost your email address, do you? No! Why? Because it’s not a statement of your worthiness as a human being for fuck’s sake! It’s a fucking tool!

I used Facebook as a tool. As another in a large suite of communication methodologies which I could use to transmit thoughts and information to and from people with whom I wanted to communicate. It’s nothing more than that, to me.⁴ I realized however, that to many other people, it was a statement of whether you cared about them as a person, or whether they were good enough, or whether their emotions could handle the personal decisions of other people– decisions which have nothing whatsoever to do with them.

I realized that it often felt like high school all over again. “You don’t want to take 5th period english?! But you know I’m in 5th period english! Did you drop it because you don’t like me?!”

No, I dropped you because I had 120 “friends” and chose 20 almost at random, and you happened to be one of them. Grow up, put on your big-boy panties, and

Get over it.

The truth of Reason #1

But here’s the plot twist at the end of the movie: That’s all bullshit– well, it’s all true, but it’s not the real reason.

I didn’t leave Facebook because because people were being emotionally childish about my arbitrary decisions at all. I left Facebook because I, myself, was becoming caught up in the personal politics. It wasn’t that people were demanding reasoning for my decisions anymore. It was because I, myself, was making decisions based on whether they might demand my reasoning.

I would look at my friend count and see “150″ and think “there are only about 90 that I’d really like to keep, but the other 60 will get grumpy if I un-friend them.” Even worse, I would friend people just because I knew that if I didn’t, there’d be fallout.

Really?

So, I’m all mad at people for playing stupid, emotionally immature political games because of a piece of software, and how do I fight that? I play stupid, emotionally immature political games!

No. Stop. Time to leave.

So, that’s my real, honest Reason #1 for leaving Facebook. Not that other people were being ridiculous, but be I was being ridiculous. It was affecting not only the decisions I made, but it was affecting why I was making decisions.

And I decided that wasn’t positive.

1. or, as completely as Facebook will delete any account, which is likely not very complete
2. This, I state clearly, is patently ridiculous. Twitter, blog, web, I have a rather active internet profile. Google John Metta to see why anyone can get a hold of me, and know almost everything I’m doing in real-time. I suspect that the real reason for any frustration is more honestly that it won’t be as easy to get a hold of me.
3. It’s an unfortunate reality that many people on Facebook expect you to use Facebook the way they use Facebook, and if you don’t, then you are #doingitwrong.
4. Well, that and a comic platform, but that’s the topic of another post

She wasn’t always the best role model, my mother, but this decision was superb. It came with intent, a reason: She told us that she couldn’t afford this thing that she didn’t understand, but that she knew that it was the future. She wanted us to have access to this thing called a computer. She hoped that we didn’t get left behind like so many other children of The Projects would.

Over 25 years later, I own two software companies. They are small, barely worthy of the title “company,” but they are extant, and they exist, entirely because a small, poor, geeky kid in the projects had a mom who was smart enough to go out one day and buy a cheap computer she couldn’t afford.

I’ve been a programmer ever since that day.

Today, I bought an iPad.

I already own an iPad, as does my wife. Among other things, I’m an iOS developer. I didn’t buy an iPad for myself. Today, I bought an iPad for my sister, and for my sister’s children.

It wasn’t planned. It was impulse. Strangly, suddenly, I felt strongly compelled to buy it. Compelled to make an impulse purchase in a way that is rare, to say the least. For some reason, I wanted them, I needed them, to own this thing that they should have access to, this thing that defines what we think of when we say “the future.”

Today, I bought an iPad. At almost the same time, a man died.

He was a man who re-wrote our world. A visionary who didn’t wait for the future, but created it. The man who changed the way we think about computers, about music, about information, about movies. The man who changed the way we think about life. At almost the same time as I bought an iPad for the same reasons my mother bought a computer, the greatest visionary and CEO of the modern world passed away.

And so as my sister plays with her new “iFun,” and my niece plays Plants vs. Zombies on mine– as they discuss email settings and games and calendars, I find myself needing to periodically leave the room to hold my head and sob.

It had to happen. I wish it wasn’t so soon, but it had to happen, and he himself said why:

“No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs, by describing why death is so good, you described what it means to live. You changed entire industries that laughed at you while showing us all what we could achieve. You’ve touched us, you’ve inspired us, you’ve shamed us. For the forth time today I find myself weeping for you, a man I’ve never met. A man who has changed my life.

Today, I bought an iPad. I bought it for my sister, so that she and her family would not be left behind by the technology of the future– the technology you created. The future you created.

Today, I bought an iPad. I bought it for you, Steve, so that my sister’s children can grow to be the new that sweeps away the old that was you, the old that is me.

Thank you, Steve Jobs. You have changed me.

I know, you love your free wifi. You love being able to post your whereabouts on Facebook, and constantly connect to your email. Trust me, I do to. But all this free wifi comes with a cost- and it’s not one of those vague “you might forget to smell a flower” costs, either.

When you use free wifi, you give everyone around you access to many accounts that you use. They don’t need a password, they don’t even need to know where you are. They could be in the building next door and not know you’re sitting in the coffee shop. The fact remains that while you’re sitting there on Facebook posting videos about your cat- they can be on your Facebook account- logged in as you.

Wifi and Security

Why is this true? You ask.

Let me explain using an analogy. Think about a wired network- where you have a physical cable running to your computer- sort of like a telephone. People around you might hear what you’re saying (unless you whisper) but your conversation is pretty much safe from them. Others can tap the phone, but they have to actually connect to the wires you are using. It’s a pretty unlikely scenario, realistically, so you can be fairly confident that no-one really cares that much about your cat videos to go through the trouble of going to your building, breaking into your phone box, and wiring up a listening device.

Now, think about a wireless network sort of like shouting to your friend. You scream all of the details about what’s going on to your friend, and your friend screams back. The communication is not confined to a cable- it’s out there in the air. In fact, it’s actually out there in the air in a way that everyone else almost can’t help but hear it.

The “Don’t Tempt A Thief” Analogy

It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s basically the difference between an iPod sitting in a glovebox of a locked car and an iPod sitting on the seat of a convertible with the top down. Someone might not care enough to break into the car and search for a possible iPod in the first case- but there’s a heck of a lot less of the “care” part needed to steal that iPod on the car seat.

The same is true of your information. You’re probably not important enough for someone to find your house and physically tap your DSL network in order to find out your passwords, account details, etc. But if you sit there in a coffee shop and scream out your passwords to anyone around you, well, there’s a lot less of the “care” part needed for someone to steal your accounts.

Passwords don’t protect you

Okay, technically, you are not shouting your password. Whenever (let’s hope) you log into a site, the login is encrypted so that no-one can actually see your username and password information. That’s a good thing. Whenever you see the site’s address start with “https” instead of “http,” you are safe. The “s” is the tasty bit that stands for “secure.” Your password details are pretty safe. But, and here’s the main problem with wireless security today, that’s the end of the encrypted part.

You see, when you go to Facebook and login, you get the https connection for the login process, but the rest is done with “sessions.” When you login, a tiny piece of information is created and that information is shared between the site and your computer. It’s basically a receipt for the login process- or maybe even like a hand stamp at a bar. The site says “Let’s go to over here, I’ll look at your ID, then you can come and go as you please through the public door. Just show me your stamp.”

After you have that stamp, the site drops the “https” part of the process and goes back to plain old “http,” because it knows who you are now. It does this because https is more expensive, so why use it when you don’t have to. Here’s the problem: That handstamp is not a physical piece of paper or something attached to your body. It’s just a number.

And on a wireless network, that number is shouted out into the air.

So, here you are, sitting in the coffee shop playing around on Facebook, or your email, and your computer is shouting your receipt number out to anyone who cares to listen. And anyone with that receipt number can get in the front door. That means anyone sitting around you can read your email- and there’s not much of the “care” part needed to do so.

Firesheep: No “care” part needed

That can’t be true! Why haven’t I heard about it before?

Because there actually “was” a bit of care needed. In order to listen to wireless network traffic, a person has to be able to pull non-direct (to his/her computer) traffic from the air and analyze and decode it. It’s a process known as “sniffing” and involved a wee bit of sophistication. Nothing beyond many techie people, but it took effort. Someone had to make the decision that they were going to go through the effort, and there were simply not that many people- so your overall chances of being “sniffed” were, well, relatively low.

Until last week.

Last week, a concerned coder created a plug-in for Firefox called Firesheep that does this for you.

Now, before you freak out in anger, I want to say that I’m glad he wrote this, and I support him writing it. He did it publicly, and vocally. He did it because the majority of sites out there are lying to themselves and to you, they are putting you, everyone, at risk- and they are doing it, basically, out of laziness.

He wrote it because he wants it to stop.

The story is that if it’s easy- if anyone can do it- then companies will soon find it necessary to stop lying to themselves- and to you. This is A Good Thing™.

However, that doesn’t make it safe. Now, if you are on an unsecured wireless network, anyone with Firefox can press a button and connect to your email, your Facebook account, whatever site you visit that requires a login and does not force a secure connection.

You are an iPod, sitting on the seat of a convertible, and the top is down, baby.

What to do about wireless security?

Fret not. All is not lost. There are steps you can take to prevent people from stealing your email account. Here are a bunch of possibilities:

1. Don’t ever use free wireless. Yeah, I know- me neither. It’s just not gonna happen. Let’s be serious.²
2. Force a secure https connection. I do this with my Google Apps accounts. I can login to the administration interface and force the system to use https for everything. That way, whenever I connect to my email, calendar, documents, anything that is on my Google Apps account, it is automatically secure. Still, this is not possible for many sites. Facebook doesn’t have an option for “enforce a secure connection.”
3. Various technical solutions. I’m writing this on a non-tech blog, and so terms like “ssh tunnel” are going to be lost on most readers. Still, since these posts are often syndicated, I’ll point the more geeky users to other posts.
4. Pay someone to save your bacon. This is, arguably, the best solution. For a small annual fee, you can download a bit of software and basically never worry about all of this again. This is a solution called a Virtual Private Network, or VPN.

Personal VPN: Security in an Insecure World

You can think about a VPN as something of “a network inside a network,” and it’s kind of like having a lawyer sitting next to you in a trial. Someone asks you a question, and you whisper in the lawyer’s ear, he whispers back in your ear, and then the lawyer answers the question for you.

The information between you and the lawyer is secret. And the lawyer interfaces with the world to protect you.

Remember that it takes a lot of effort for someone to connect to a wired network, find your traffic, and get your information. It takes a lot MORE effort if that wired network is not even a network that you’re ON. They’re trying to listen to you, but your lawyer is the one talking.

So, you create an encrypted connection to a VPN server somewhere. Then everything between you and that VPN is encrypted. Your computer only talks to that VPN server. That VPN server then goes out to the site, talks to it, and sends information back to you. The information between the site and the VPN server might be unsafe- but everything between the VPN server and YOU is encrypted- which means your not shouting anything out on that free wireless connection.

Witopia: Security heaven

Normally, VPNs are a bit difficult to set up. However, lucky for you, there are companies that make this mindlessly easy. One such company is Witopia.³

Witopia is a company that lets you download a little bit of software that allows connection to their VPN. The great thing about this company is that you have to do very little to be very secure, and it’s dirt cheap. For $40/year, you can go to any coffee shop, airport, or strip club anywhere in the world, and browse to your heart’s content. They have VPN servers all over the world. Plus, they’ve got things figured out for nearly any device you’d use- including the wonderous iPad.

Yes, I know. You don’t want to spend $40. That’s a lot of money, blah blah.

Let me ask you something: How many times per year do you actually go to a coffee shop and use the free wifi? Is it free? Don’t you, well, buy coffee? How about if someone suddenly took over your email account, changed the password so you couldn’t get in- or even just downloaded all of your email to read at their leisure- how much would that be worth to you? If someone got into your Facebook account and read your private messages? How about if they locked you out?

I’m not a salesman for Witopia, but I do think that saying something like “eh, $40 is too much, I’ll just risk it” is stupid, at least it is now. Because we’ve reached the point that it’s just too easy. There’s too little “care” needed.

Whether you opt for no-free-wifi, Witopia, or another option, I hope you do something. Things are way too easy now. You’re an iPod sitting in a convertable. You are going to get stolen.

Now, it’s just a matter of when.

1. Although it is syndicated on my very technical blog: http://mettadore.com
2. However, I do notice that taking the time to ask yourself “Do I really need to check my email that I just checked a half hour ago?” Is a good question. Not only am I more mindful about being online- I find that the majority of the time, it’s honestly not necessary- and that gives me more time to stare off into space… or at the legs of that really gorgeous red-head that just walke–
3. Note: There are many others. Some of them are maybe better. Witopia is the one that I chose, because it was fast, easy, cheap, and works with everything I use.

This is something that should thrill you.

At the very least, this is something that should make you think.

It should make you think about what you do and who you are. More importantly, it should make you think about what you are, because you are certainly not what you think you are. You see, to a great extent, you are what you do- and what you do is process information.

You, my friend, are no-longer human.

You are a computer.

The Prophecy of William Gibson

Back in 1982, way back before cell phones were more than a strange idea, an unknown author wrote a short story about computers and software. Before most people ever realized that a computer could be useful for anything other than playing Pong, a relatively unknown author named William Gibson wrote a short story in which he created a new word. Later, he wrote the seminal work Neuromancer in which he fleshed out this new word into a vision of the world of the future.

That word was “cyberspace.”

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.¹

The world that William Gibson described was one where people were connected to a global computer network. It was actually a world that, at the time, the top computer scientists of the day said that could never become reality.²

It’s reality.

Not in exactly the way that William Gibson envisioned it, of course, but it’s a reality nonetheless. This is proven by the fact that I am now writing this story on a computer, connected to a dozen other computers, one of which is the computer that you are connected to- on which you are reading this. There’s a good chance that we are simultaneously exchanging information in a dozen other ways as well: Twitter, email, other websites.

We are all pieces of a large computer network, connected to other pieces of this computer network, all exchanging and processing information.

We are cyberspace.

Google’s Earth

Recently, William Gibson wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled Google’s Earth in which he questions many things not so much about Google itself, but about what Google means. I can’t express enough how much you should read his piece. In fact, I feel so strongly about that, that I want you to do it right now.

Go ahead, it’s right here. I’ll wait.

…

See? There’s something really important here- much more important than we are giving credit to. It’s so important that I can’t adequately excerpt it to illustrate my point. The best I can do is this:

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products… We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. … Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.³

This is pretty dense, but the salient point is this: Cyberspace is not some external thing that we visit, it is a very internal thing that we compose.

Put another way, Cyberspace is composed of us.

Google does very little work collecting information. Each of us provides information. We are all tiny parts of an enormous information collective, each providing minuscule amounts of data and information- and often processing that information- for the collective. We get search results and, by doing something as simple as up or down voting entries, we improve the efficiency of the greater collective with each usage.

This is the part of the story that should make you scared.

You are a computer.

More importantly, you are someone else’s computer.

A million monkeys

Yesterday, I heard an interesting news article on the radio about a game called Fold.it. Some microbiology researchers created a game where people learn to manipulate proteins in order to create new proteins by folding amino acid chains. The idea behind the game is to get people all over the world to play a game that could actually result in new, actually viable, usable proteins. Basically, scientists have a hard time figuring out how to create these proteins, so they outsource a bunch of the work playing around with them to people who want to play games.

Think about it. I’m a scientist who wants to manipulate proteins, and have computer models that do some of the work, but can’t do it all. I have to do a good deal of it myself, but I’m only one person, and so it takes a great deal of time for me to accomplish anything.

A million monkeys playing on a million computers. We’ve gone from ridiculous joke of a statement to definable fact.

This game, this collection of people, each adding a tiny bit of protein chain manipulation processing capability, is, in essence, one large human microbiology computer program.

This is one of the most amazing and ingenious ideas I’ve heard of. Nothing new, of course. SETI has been doing something like this, and it’s the foundations of marketing in the modern age. But the application!

A single definable problem, spread across the entire planet, using essentially the entire human species as a single computer!

This is the part that should thrill you.

Think of what the human race could accomplish working with such capacity!

You can be a computer.

The question to 42

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, Douglas Adams envisioned a race of pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings (whose three dimensional protrusions into our universe are ordinary white mice) who create a computer named Deep Thought which is tasked with finding the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything. After seven million years of computation time, the computer finally arrives at the answer: 42.

This answer, 42, confuses and astounds the pan-dimensional beings who demand an explaination, to which Deep Thought responds:

I checked it very thoroughly, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question was.

Frustrated, the beings are stuck, and Deep Thought offers to help design an even more powerful computer to compute what the question is. This new computer is called Earth.

Of course, you see where I’m going with this.

Look, I don’t actually think that white mice are pan-dimensional scientists performing experiments on humans to ensure that our computational efficiency is up to scratch. I do, however, think that Douglas Adams and William Gibson have much more in common that we would have thought back in the 1980s.

Earth is becoming one enormous computer. Actually, more correctly, the human species is becoming one enormous computer.

Let me say that again:

The human species is becoming one enormous computer.

Resistance is futile!

I cannot even express the frightening reality of this fact. We are a computational collective⁴. We are becoming a species of cybernetic organisms- cyborgs; each one of us connected to the global collective; each one of us processing, collecting, analyzing for the collective.

We are The Borg.

This is something that should scare you.

This is something that should thrill you.

At the very least, this is something that should make you think.

It should make you think about what you do and who you are. More importantly, it should make you think about what you are, because you are certainly not what you think you are. You see, to a great extent, you are what you do- and what you do is process information.

You, my friend, are no-longer human.

You are a computer.

Actually, you are merely a small piece in someone else’s very large computer that you neither own nor control.

That’s scary, because a computer this large can do some simply amazing things- but it can also do some simply horrific things.

How will we define which path it will take?

1. Wikipedia: Cyberspace
2. This was described by William Gibson himself in an interview on Oregon Public Broadcasting
3. New York Times
4. and one which, as William Gibson sagely notes, legislation will never keep up with. We are part of something that will always be beyond legislation, and therefore beyond regulated humanity- becoming what it will become before we have the ability to know what that thing is

The John Metta Brand Logo

I recently spend some money on something frivolous.

Branding.

I, John Metta, a person living in a small house in Hood River, have a logo.

I actually worked with a graphic artist who specializes in branding to create “The John Metta Brand”

Seriously.

Yes. Yes, I know.

The Branding of Mettadore

The obvious question, and one I would’ve asked a couple years ago is this:

Why should I brand myself? I’m a person. I’m not a company!

I never would have thought of coming up with a brand because, well, I’m just me. Branding myself would be- there’s no other word for it- vain. Really vain. Who am I? Madonna?

But then I started to notice that something interesting was happening: I was being accidentally branded.

I say “accidentally” because I didn’t know it was happening, even though it was me who was doing it… on purpose. How’d I do it? Easy. I signed up for my Last.fm account using the username “Mettadore”

I signed up for my Github account using the username “Mettadore”

I signed up for my Twitter account using– well, you get the idea.

For years, I was using Mettadore as a username. One day, I woke up to discover that I was Mettadore. Who the hell is Mettadore? It’s not my name. It’s not my nickname. Where’d it come from?

You want to know what “Mettadore” really is? Mettadore is a name that came from a laughter-filled lunchtime conversation years ago while I worked at Oregon DEQ- where everyone was trying to think of funny porn-star nicknames they would have. My nickname was “The Mettadore!”

I was being branded as a joke pornstar, and I didn’t even really know it was happening.

This became clear to me when I presented at Ignite Portland and people called me Mettadore. Suddenly, there were pictures of Mettadore on Flickr and people talking about Mettadore’s presentation. People over the last few years have often introduced me as Mettadore.

It became much clearer that branding was something that I needed to take control of when I was working as lead developer for a small start-up called EcoApprentice and the CEO thought- for the majority of my time working with him- that “Mettadore” was a company. He thought he was hiring me through Mettadore.

I was an accidental brand. I was branded by my joke pornstar name and by people’s Google Searches.

Taking Charge of My Brand

Years ago, none of this would have mattered. Years ago, an online account was merely a way for you to access information that you stored, well, online. That’s not the case anymore. The reasons are part Google, part Twitter, part Facebook and all internet, but now, your online accounts are as much a way for other people to access your information as they are a way for you to access your information. And you, my friend, are information.¹

We are quickly becoming branded by the sum total of our online activities, and I decided to take the step to make that branding intentional, rather than accidental.

Step one: Ditch The Mettadore

Textmark

Well, not really. I mean, it is a really cool name- and for some reason seems to endear me to the ladies… and anything that helps endear me to the ladies is A Good Thing™, but I decided that I wanted people to know me, not my joke name. I want to be open and build relationships with people, so my I started using my real name instead of a nickname. “JohnMetta,” I decided, would be my brand.

I decided to keep Mettadore, but to use that name for stuff that was not directly me. My Mettadore Twitter account sends out any automated messages that people interacting directly with me wouldn’t necessarily care to see. My Mettadore Github account holds not my personal code, but code I’ll collaborate on heavily with other people- group code.

For stuff that is me, directly me, JohnMetta is what I want people to connect with.

I also decided that there would be no space between my first and last name in the textmark. It is still obvious that it’s a first and last name, but also connects better with my JohnMetta usernames online.

Step two: Think up a Logo

This was the hardest. I wanted a logo that reflected me, but that reflected the work that I do as well. As such, it had to have a number of qualities that were somewhat orthogonal. It had to be whimsical yet serious when needed. It had to be approachable, inviting a relationship (both personal and professional). It had to be strongly related to my name (both John Metta and Mettadore) as well as related to the various work that I do (computer programming, scientific data analysis, etc). And finally it had to be simple- like any good logo should be.

WordPress

All of this took a lot longer than I thought, and many of the initial rounds were actually based on an “M” in a circle that was very much like the WordPress logo. That beautifully elegant “W” in a circle. The initial proofs of my icon looked much more like this because I wanted the icon to be connected to WordPress. I do most of my writing in WordPress, I program for it, I maintain sites for other people using it. It’s a big part of what I do, but creating an emblem for myself that was strongly aligned with just that wouldn’t leave much room for, say Rails development or data analysis.

MettaIcon

I started thinking about the @ symbol. It’s like an ‘a’ that wants to have a bit of fun. It’s an ‘a’ that doesn’t need the ‘t’ because it’s lazy enough to not want it, but smart enough to think of a way to still have it. It was used in accounting early on, so is related to quantitative practices, but it’s also a symbol that has really helped connect people. Email is the biggest example of this connectivity, but Twitter and Facebook have both encorporated it. It’s a symbol that anyone working with data and/or computers sees everyday, and it’s simple.

It had everything I needed except that it wasn’t a letter that mattered. So, I found a graphic artist who could make something like that happen. He made an M in a swirl that simultaneously suggested an @ symbol while also being it’s own powerful representation. He created an ‘M’ with flair. An M that was whimsical but also serious.

Step 3: Colors

Color should be intentional, meaningful, a reflection of you.

But I was tired.

Diego initially gave me a list of possible colors, and I chose a random orange as much because I was so emotionally tired from the whole process as anything else. I originally chose an orange and blue combination that is almost exactly that of the New York Mets (I know this because a friend pointed it out). It was also the colors of my high school, and the orange of my graduate school. But, that was the final, so I figured I was stuck with it.

Then, I realized I wasn’t.

Stacked logo

Because I saw this excellent page on the WordPress logo which included the official WordPress Palet which is- holy of holies- orange and blue! But it’s a different orange and blue. The orange deeper and the blue lighter. I saw this and thought to myself “It’s my logo, it’s my identity, it’s my brand, so it’s my decision.”

So I decided to use that color palette to tie it to WordPress in a more loose fashion.

I also decided to take another page out of WordPress’ book and separate the words in the name by color. WordPress is only one word, but the logo often separates the “Word” and the “Press” elegantly by color. Doing so in a similar way to “JohnMetta” helps to differentiate the first and last name.

I showed a bunch of people the initial version with the old color scheme and got comments like “New York Mets,” “cartoon,” and “politician.” This color scheme elicited responses like “smart” and “cool,” much more inline with my hopes.

Should you brand yourself?

So, I’m branded now. I’ll put this stamp on everything I do, and hope that people start seeing it… and associating it with me… and associating me with good work. I’ll be intentional about the “face” of JohnMetta on the internet, rather than just letting it happen.

Should you do this too?

Only you can answer that.

You might be like my sister who doesn’t need branding because she’s basically not on the internet at all. You might be like my friend Harry, or my friend Pete- someone who doesn’t need branding because you’ll always be “that guy,” you know, “the guy who did the amazing incredible thing?” You might be good/smart/lucky enough for people to associate you primarily with some great success.

But chances are, you’re just a no-body like me. The only problem is no-body is a no-body on the internet- you just need to determine which somebody you’ll be.

I don’t know if you need branding. I don’t actually know if I need branding. But I know that I at least need whatever I become to be intentional.

So, my suggestion to you is this:

If people are going to Google you, if people are going to see your reflections, shadows, and fingerprints on the internet or elsewhere, if anyone, at anytime, is going to look for you, then you owe it to yourself to create the presentation that you want to be associated with. You owe it to yourself to give them the view that you want them to see. Because there’s a view out there… of you… right now.

You’re already branded.

You don’t have to hire a designer and go about it like I did, but you should at least think about it.

1. This is more true, of course, for someone like me, who works daily in a connected world, interacting with connected people, and communicating through all of those online accounts (this blog being one of them). Truthfully, my little sister, without any online presence, is somewhat out of this realm. She is “Jacqueline Yates from Rochester.” Me? I’m “John Metta from a Google search”

Here’s a story. It’s apropos of nothing, but I’ve been too busy to write enough here, so I thought this would make people smile.

I could go on and on about how it’s a story of Social Networking, and how sometimes the world is a better place because we’re closer, or at least more able to contact people for random bits of meaningless and make friends.

It could be a story about how we’re not so distant, or maybe how we’re differently distant.

But it’s not, because then I’d feel the need to actually do a bit of research to support my theory, and post it on mettadore.com, which I know plenty of people are sick of. So, rather than anything meaningful, it’s merely an amusing anecdote.

I was at work, drinking maté, typing away, la la la, work work work, data data data, la la l–

AHH!

I spilled maté on my mac!

Well, the story’s a happy one, because, as you can see from the image of my tweet, physics saved me. That’s not always the case. At certain times, physics is a right bastard, particularly when I’m on my skateboard, or ice skates, or standing on my roof trying one more time to get my Superman Underroos to do their damn job!

Anyway, physics is sometimes a bastard, but this time it was cool.

So today, I got an email message from someone that made me chuckle:

Hi John-

Google led me to your tweet from 1/28: “The surface tension of water is strong enough that water won’t flow into certain sized holes… like those of a MacBook Pro’s speaker.”

I just spilled a (small) bit of iced coffee onto my 15″ 2008 MBP left speaker grill, so the topic is near to me… The coffee seemed to just sit on the grill for the couple of seconds it took me to wipe it off. My empirical evidence supports you theory.

First, I looked on the web for teardown photos to see where the microphone was. No luck. Since I’m wondering if I might have any trouble, I was wondering if you had any more background for your MBP speaker/surface tension info.

Thanks!

I thought it was pretty funny that someone would actually look up “surface tension” or something like that- what a total geek. What was funnier was that I actually looked it up, and started to do a calculation the day it happened, just to see. Now “that’s” a total geek!

Anyway, I sent a message back, mostly to be funny, because I always feel both funnier and more helpful when I connect to someone through social networking.

Hi! Wow, pretty funny connection. Social Networking FTW!

So, no, nothing. No problems and no later developments. I did calculations of surface tension in grad school and the size of those holes are, in fact, too small. However, I will give the caveat that certain things increase or decrease the surface tension of water. “Uh oh? Where’s he going with this?” You ask.

For instance, cat spit. I have some knowledge of cat spit, and it decreases water’s surface tension. Don’t ask me how I know this, it’s an embarrassing situation that I’m still in counseling for. Suffice it to say that if you have a cat, you may want to be careful letting him drink beverages around your laptop (The whole “lack of a thumb” thing is hard for them, but I’ve learned that now, and we’re moving on)

Anyway, I’m not sure where coffee is on this. Whether it increases or decreases it. However, even if it decreased it, it would have to be an insane amount to get into that grill. My suspicion is that the Apple engineers are somewhat sloppy drinkers, and have thought about everything– based on they’re own klutsy habits!

I think your safe. Yay Mac!

Hope everything else is equally peachy.
-J

The whole exchange got me thinking about my New Year’s Resolution for 2009, which I’ve re-resolved for 2010. That was “to be more Irish.” It’s a tough goal. Being Irish is nothing to sniff at. It’s no easy feat, but I’m convinced I can do it if I work hard enough. This exchange bodes well, because the Irish have a saying that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.

This person shot me an email out of the blue, and email to a stranger, and email to a friend she hasn’t met yet. That’s the cool thing about social networking. We’re all friends.

Yay for Social Networking! (and yay for the Irish, too!)

I’m finished posting geeky stuff like mathematics, programming and social media on Positively Glorious! and phasing out the Software & Media category here. I will henceforth only post those topics on Mettadore.com.

Why?

Because I have a large number of people who read Positively Glorious! because of my writings on topics non-geek topics, and they don’t want to read geeky topics. Furthermore, I have a number of people subscribed to the Positively Glorious! “Software & Media” stream, and only that stream. Thus, I’m assuming they don’t want to read about spirituality, or my incompetence as an uncle.

So, because I’m one to give the people what they want, I’m creating a Geek-only blog.

From now on, if you want ridiculously long diatribes on topics I don’t know enough about go to Positively Glorious!, and if you want math, programming, social media and other geeky stuff, tune in to Mettadore.com.

For me, this tagline has become something of a… well… tagline. Many people use the default “Share and enjoy” tagline.¹ This is probably because most people see the tagline as an introduction to the “link to social media” function of Sociable. Me? I actually like the semi-Shakespearian “ending of a chapter” feeling that the tagline gives. It’s like a way to tell the reader that we’re at the end of this post, this thought, this… chapter.

When I started using Sociable, I periodically changed the tagline from “Whaddaya think, sirs?” to “Push the button, Frank.” and back again. These are two good “ending taglines” from that greatest of all shows: Mystery Science Theater 3000. Eventually, I got sick of the tagline being the same thing for all posts, and of having to manually change the tagline. So, I thought I’d hack the plugin source to allow for random taglines.

Random Taglines Rule!

Sociable-random's admin page

Thus, I give you the sociable-random plugin. It’s exactly the same as the sociable plugin, except that it allows for multiple taglines and it automatically uses the <strong> tag for those taglines.

At the bottom of this post, you see a tag that has been randomly chosen from about 7 MST3K quotes. You also see the way I formatted the tagline to separate it a bit from the post, while still connecting it to the sociable links. The CSS for this is:

.sociable_tagline {
            padding-bottom: 5px;
            margin-bottom: 3px;
            margin-top: 5px;
            line-height: 1.5em;
}
.sociable_tagline strong {
           border-top: #444 1px solid;
}

Download

Download sociable-random from its archives link on Github. Feel free to let me know what you think, and if something’s broken, either fire a message along on of the various channels you see on the right edge of your screen, or using the Github Issues page.

1. which is something I’d expect to hear from a space ship’s computer that’s trying to recreate tea, not something I want on my blog.