confusion

Congratulations to R█████ on his getting hitched this weekend. And I’m sorry I did not make it to the wedding…

Well, it’s a year ago today that I left London and came back the Virginia. In some ways the year has gone by really fast. In other ways it has crawled by at a snails pace. In the most important way it has crawled by—It’s been a year since I saw C███████. That’s way to long. And there is nothing I can do about it right now. I hope I can pull together enough cash to go see her over the summer, but I don’t know because airline tickets have gone up in price. I still really wish I could find some way to go back to Europe—not only to be with C███████ but because I would like to live there for a few more years while I am still in my twenties. To emerge myself in another culture totally as part of that culture, not as a visitor. Even being in England and traveling around Europe for a long as I was there was still the “i’m visiting, I go back to the US in X months/weeks/days.” I would like to be there and not have that, to say, I live here. I feel like the last time I was truly happy was when I was broke walking around London, counting the pounds in my wallet to know if I could take the Tube or not. Maybe I’m just romancing it but… I guess I need to stop living in the past and get on with it. I don’t like living in the past, I think people do it way too much, but when it’s quiet and I’m not busy that’s where my thoughs go, to Islington, Angel, and The City. To the Tube, St. Pauls, and Tower Bridge. To pubs, khebab vans, and fish and chip shops. I have not found anything here to fill the void left by leaving London. I have picked up my life several times—for good and for bad reasons, and started over and it always takes a long time to rebuild. It’s never easy and it’s depressing. I’m happy with who I am, I’m happy with my job, I just wish I was closer to the people I love. Mostly to C███████ but also I wish A—– and Sherman where here, and I wish I got to see and hang out with S██████ and J███████ more. Ok. Enough…. I just need to keep moving forward fixing the things I can and not worrying about those I cannot.

I found this story [indyweek.com] linked from Jeffery Zeldman Presents [www.zeldman.com].

Basically:
School sets up new computer system
Student starts online journal
Computer system has serious problem
Rumors at school say someone hacked the system

Student posts journal entry entitled ‘Someone hacked the Gibson’

School initiates investigation of computer system problem
Student is called to office
Student is interrogated by two supposed FBI agents—who turn out to be FBI Agents in training (no clearance yet!)

Best part of the story:

Freaked out by what she thought was a brush with the feds, Carter went home and decided to close down her experiment with online expression. True to its name, “Text into Nothing” disappeared with a few commands from Carter’s keyboard. In its place, she posted a farewell missive that warned her readers to lie low: “To anyone who has ever posted on my journal: I am sorry. The FBI most likely has your IP address and your blog address/e-mail address if you posted that. The FBI has been reading my diary.”

Carter described how she’d been interrogated about the blog, and wrote that, given recent events, “I am sorry that I’ve had an online journal. I would highly recommend anyone to take down theirs.” Carter says that the main lesson she’s learned is that it’s time to retreat from posting personal information online. “I know that the government now has forever my extremely personal teenage diary,” Carter concluded. “Hell yes, I’m mad. I will no longer be posting in this
diary.”

First off, any FBI agent working with or in training to be part of the ‘High Tech Crime Task Force’ should be familiar with movies like Hackers, Sneakers, War Games and the like. Because they are, no matter how unrealistic, a part of hacker culture.

Secondly, anyone who post ANYTHING to the Internet should have no expectation of any privacy. The Internet by default is in the public domain—and chances are that anything you have ever posted has been cataloged, categorized and indexed by Google and one or more branches
of the government. Not only are the things you put on the Internet out there for anyone to read—so is a lot of stuff you would not think about. Many localities and government bodies have been or are posting records to the Internet. Things that have long been in the public record but where only accessible by someone who bothered to go through the effort to fill out requests or go to the records building can now search for information online—court proceedings, police records and other things that could contain information on you. This is the stuff privacy advocates scream about. The Internet is no more than a ‘ministry of information’ which is not run by big brother, but is usable by him—or anyone else who cares to.

At least she got the moral: if you don’t want it to be public information—keep it off the Internet.

And honey! Use a brush!

issue number one :: So, I moved confusion.cc from my old web-host to a co-hosting site with codejunkie and several other sites. This caused a little bit of confusion last week with the site coming and going for several days. All is better now, my email works again and the site is up. I have some ideas for things I want to change—but they are ideas I have had for some time… maybe now I will change them. But probably not. C’est la vie.

issue number two :: Anyway, I was very depressed last week. Lazy, tired, unhappy. I think going to a my friend Rob’s bachelors party was the trigger. Hanging out with a bunch of guys talking about and staring at girls just drilled into my head how lonely I am because C███████ is in England. That on top of working long hours and the copious amounts of rainy days we have had in the past few weeks just got me down. Things feel much better now.

AAA! AAAAAA! AAAAAAA!!!! Ok… got that out of my system. Confusion.cc is back online! Been a week or so since I started the whole process of moving the website. Everything seams ok now, but if there is a f*uk up or two in the next few weeks please excuse me. Anyway. I am going to my parents house for the weekend, but I will fill in the gaps about the past week early next week.