A sysadmin/programmer/Mac geek blog
Posts tagged I’m probably going to hell
Auctions, Dates, and Guns
Mar 19th
This past monday was the halfway point of the month, and what better way to celebrate than with a fundraising event? The Federation of BC Writers held a fundraising auction on the 16th at the Vancouver Police Museum, featuring a silent auction, wine and beer sales, and last but not least, a date auction. That’s right, dates with some of Vancouver’s finest were auctioned off on Monday. An exciting evening for all involved, with beer and wine, good conversation, and saxophony.
Or at least, that’s the theory. Having attended, it seems to me like most people came for the spectacle and the shoulder-rubbing, but no one came with chequebook in hand – or at least, few people did. I came with every intention of bidding, but it seemed at points like I was the only one. I quickly became paranoid, lest I inadvertently bid on (and win) every auction. The excitement seemed to be limited to the people trying to get everyone bidding, but not to the bidders themselves. Everyone came broke or reluctant. I was perfectly willing to engage in a spirited bidding war on many of the dates, but knew that I would rapidly surpass what everyone else was willing to bid, and find myself broke much faster than intended.
In the end, I’m sure the money raised was a big help, but it seems like more people who came to participate in the festivities instead of sit on the sidelines would have made it a more spirited and lucrative evening.
Among the people auctioned off were several people from Twitter, including Raul Pacheco (@hummingbird604), Jules Morgan (@julesjulesjules), Chris Matheson (@cognoscento), April Smith (@aprilfilms) and myself, but what seemed to end up happening was we all bid on each other. I nearly won Hez’s auction, I temporarily won Jules’s, and Chris won mine and eventually outbid me on Jules as well. Despite everyone being bid on, getting people to start bidding was like pulling teeth, and most of the prizes were only bid on one or two times, it seems.
Ironically, the final auction, the one that was held when the party had essentially wound down already and most people seemed to be leaving (and the one held two whole hours after the festivities were *supposed* to start), was the most lucrative. @Zoeyjane (Terra) was the last individual to be auctioned, and went for, in the end, $270 – about $90 more than any other auction went for. Despite her trepidation about the whole affair, Terra fetched the largest sum of all the participants, so congratulations to her for that.
In the end, I don’t think anyone went for what they were really worth, and a more spirited bidding war would have benefitted the Federation much more, as well as made the evening more exciting and energized, and a better time would have been had by all. Still, it seems like people had fun, socialized, and gave some money to a worthy cause, so it’s hard to complain about a good event not being better.
Thanks goes to Lorraine (@Raincoaster) for organizing the show and Chris for hosting us at the Police Museum, and congratulations to Lorraine and the Federation for an excellent (and hopefully profitable!) evening. And of course, congratulations to Terra for being the Federation’s breadwinner for the evening. ;)
LinkedIn is really, really spooky
Jan 5th
This actually happened a while ago, but when Tod Maffin posted a link to a blog post entitled ‘My TiVo Thinks I’m Gay‘ it reminded me of an issue I had with LinkedIn’s suggestions algorithm.
LinkedIn, if you haven’t used it, is basically a networking site. Not so much social networking (meeting, chatting, discussing), but professional networking. The idea is that I can keep in touch with people I’ve worked with, for, near, and so on, and then if I ever need to reconnect, I can do so. I can also post recommendations for people (‘This dude is hardcore!”, “Punctual, smells like potatoes”, or what-have-you), and there’s even a job search feature that also tells you the shortest path to the job – ‘So-and-so at Google is hiring, and you know Jon who knows Felicity who knows the hiring manager’. It’s actually a really neat idea, and it’s a good way to keep in touch with people, get recommendations, and so forth. I assume. I don’t really use it, to be honest.
ANYWAY
One of the things LinkedIn does that every other social networking site (except Twitter) does is suggest people ‘you might know’ – people from companies it knows you’ve worked at, people that a lot of your contacts know, and so on, the typical stuff. Except it’s spooky. Really spooky.
The thing you have to understand is that my mother got married not too long ago, and so changed her name. I didn’t change my name though, so she and I have different last names. This also makes it really weird when forms ask you to put in your ‘mother’s maiden name’ as a security question, because my mother’s maiden name is my last name, and really they should be asking my mother’s married name, which would be far more secure, especially now that I’ve told everyone what my mother’s maiden name is.
ANYWAY
So my mother and I have different last names. We also have different first names. We’ve never worked for the same company. In fact, according to the information she and I have given LinkedIn, we’ve never worked together or even lived in the same province, and we don’t know any of the same people.
Let me repeat that: nothing in our profiles indicates that we have ever been on the same half of the continent at the same time.
So imagine my surprise when I logged in and who’s in my ‘people you might know’ box but my mother. Right there, staring me in the face, except she hadn’t put up a profile picture so she wasn’t actually staring me in the face but I imagined her face sitting in that little box where her face would be saying ‘I found you!’ in exactly the way I know she would.
Now, there’s one possible explanation I can think of, and that’s that at some point in the past, I gave LinkedIn my address book and they kept that around and at some point saw that that e-mail address was suddenly assigned to someone and decided to point them out just to mess with me, and I suppose that’s the most likely explanation.
Really, I’d like to think I’m such an interesting person that someone at LinkedIn saw that I was registered and they totally started Googlestalking me and they somehow found out who my mother was and told the system that we totally know each other, but let’s face it, no one cares that I’m online, especially since I don’t use the service so I’m just clogging up their database with junk for the sole reason that I like filling out forms.
Database admins like me hate people like me for crudding up the database, so if their DBAs are like me they hate me, but then they probably do it too so I hate them too.
ANYWAY
This also reminds me of the whole issue with Picassa web albums, where Google is using facial recognition technology to identify people in photos, so that after your mother (or my mother!) uploads a few pictures of you, suddenly Google has enough information to find you in any photo in the world (all of which it has archived), and suddenly this whole ‘Google is archiving your life’ thing gets like a thousand times creepier.
Think about it. If you use gmail, they already know everything that goes through your e-mail. They know your web browsing habits thanks to Google Ads, your search habits thanks to Google Search, and if you use Google Reader, GTalk, or Google Analytics, they also know what you like reading about, what you like talking about, and how interesting you are to the rest of the world.
Combine that with facial recognition technology and their huge cluster of computers, and they can now identify you in every picture ever taken. And even once you convince your mother to delete those photos, they already have your information, and can automatically tag you in all those pictures of your bachelor party where your friends dragged you to the Titty Church on Spedina and 12th, and now when your fiancée googles her new married name because it’s like the 2009 version of writing out ‘<theirfirstname> <yourlastname>’ on a piece of paper 20 times, it’ll be like ‘Did you mean <your name>‘ and you’ll have to explain that that goat was just a friend and you seriously don’t remember having that many midget strippers on your lap at once and maybe it was someone else.
I don’t know how a conversation about LinkedIn’s suggestion algorithm turned into references to midget strippers, but I hope my mother doesn’t read this even though she will because now if she googles our family name Google will tell her that her son is a creep and I’ll get written out of the will and she’ll leave everything to her cats who love her, rather than her son who’s a weirdo.