Interacting with reality

In the past few weeks reality has crept into my life full force.


I don’t normally talk about my private life. In fact I avoid it. I even limit how much info I put in the “about me” areas. But having just lived through it all, it seemed right to share. Share a bit anyway.

You see my partner of 4 years, whom I was engaged to, and I separated. Very adult reasons and we will remain friends however as with any relationship breakup – it’s incredibly sad.

Unfortunately in that same week, our house was burgled. They took all my jewellery, my daughter’s macbook and my personal laptop. The fact that I hadn’t backed up my laptop was a sorely learnt lesson (3 years of digital family photos gone forever and if you have kids you will know that’s a bitter lesson for anyone to learn).

The interesting point through all this though – and why I decided to share – has been passwords. Gosh.

Just before all this happened I had taken the very wise step of collecting all my passwords into the one place. Sensible. If you are a facebook friend you may even remember me chatting about the software I had decided upon. It worked well – I agreed with Lee that the interface wasn’t that exciting – however it was simple to use. Unfortunately though, the password manager software went with the stolen laptop. As did all my passwords.

Now, I appreciate they will just wipe my harddrive and sell the shell or “something” equally boring. Plus I can’t imagine they’ll do too much with my facebook password (etc) but to be honest I had taken myself into a comfort zone where I didn’t NEED TO REMEMBER.

And remember I don’t.

I’m sure you’d all in the same boat if it happened to you? How many passwords do we have to remember each these days? A lot. At work I have an 8 character alpha/numeric combo that changes every 30 days. It needs to be unique each time I change it ie wont accept part of the previous password. And that’s a password for just one login?

I then have my online banking, PIN, facebook, plurk, twitter, google analytics/maps/services, skype, UTube, flickr (which I have sworn about a lot already, so I won’t go there), blog, ping, linkedin, technorati, FTP, email, webmail, client FTP’s, to name just a couple. To be frank, I am still stumbling over ones I had forgotten about!!

Thanks goodness I didn’t have a security code for the house.

DOH. I should have and kept the burglars OUT!!! I will in the new place.

In confession, most of these services have made it relatively easy to retrieve a password for a tech savvy girl (OK, except flickr). But gosh – in reality, how many people are tech savvy like me?

We expect the masses to pick up and adopt some of these trends that we sprout on about. I have to say that I have complete empathy and a slightly better understanding of some of the difficulties that the regular joe experiences. So I’ve come down from my ivory tech savvy tower and joined the real world. We need to do something to make all this easier guys. What's going on???

As a plug, I have to say I have appreciated ping.fm as a service. From this one platform I have been able to update my various different service statuses AND my blog with ease – all together. Now, that’s cool and at least I was able to stay in touch.

So, I’m back. And real.

Dead Reds Wine Group, Wake 2

DSC00050
Originally uploaded by charlierobinson1966

So the next dead reds wine group event is nearing. Have you RSVP'd? It would be good to do so.

Next event booked for Friday 25th July from 7pm

After scouring Adelaide for the next dead reds event location, we settled on the David Evans Gallery. The gallery is located in Rundle Street, just above Alfresco’s and it’s a great spot – nice and central. Not only will we be able to test and taste the wine, we can also admire the very excellent views – the photography and artworks that are on display! Now we just need to unearth the next dead red.

Entry for the next event will be $10pp entry with bottle or $20pp entry without bottle. Bottles must be dated prior 1999. I am personally opening the 1966 St Henri Claret Penfolds Auldana however I’m not expecting anyone else to provide such an old bottle and am happy to win the deadest bottle on the night prize!! The black star. But you can try and beat me if you wish.

As I’ve previously mentioned we have purchased a few bottles for labeling. So, for this next very special event location – these bottles will take on added meaning as they will be labeled using a selected print image provided by David Ginter himself, one of the gallery directors.

The David Ginter image will also be up for auction on the night.

Finally the event price includes: wine samples on arrival, water, cheese and nibbles (and an excellent night of entertainment). Please RSVP either via the FaceBook event or to me direct. If you want, I am happy to accept payment up front for quicker entry on the night.

Spread the word – everyone is welcome. xc

interacting via another new service

Hi everyone, this is Charlie typing to you from another new service called ping.fm

This one is letting me update all my status' etc from the one location. Makes me wonder why then we have more than one. But... i guess each has its own particular focus.

Let me know if you are using the service and what you think of it so far. All the best xc

interacting in her own time...

Hey – stop pestering me OK? In my time please.

Oooh. That was harsh hey. Sorry.

OK. It’s interesting though how with online services like Email, FaceBook (regular), Blogging and LinkedIn (as examples) we are patient. Well I am. We (I) give each other time to respond, answer and action. Even the times that we poke each other on FaceBook, it’s just a “yes, I’m still here and know you’re still there” message that doesn’t need an instant reply.

Well, it seems not so with our FaceBook (chat), Twitter, Skype and Plurk (to name a few) worlds. These worlds demand instant or at least extremely quick responses – or don’t bother. Using the FaceBook chat feature tonight (that I like), I had a couple of conversations going at the same time (as you do). There were a few moments of “are you still there?” simply because the reply wasn’t immediate. Instant.

It’s curious. But very normal. I remember going through this scenario with emails. Way back when.

I remember when…

interacting in different languages

there's really only one language that is common to me. and that's english. it's fact. settled.

but i'm amused by how many other languages have come into my life in the past few years (and people speaking different languages too - but that's another story). fascinating in it's amusement as is it, i've never been a language studier/learner. to be honest, i tried french once but was never very good at it. same with german. i tried but didn't come up trumps.

these days, its seems i am an expert at languages. i'm an absolute whiz chatting about tweets, peeps and plurkers like nobody's business. and don't forget the woot woots - i heart them.

classic.

ok, so what's this new language? it all started way back with sms/txt words. gosh - that's old fashioned. that moved us to speak in just plain abbreviations of words (for speed). that then moved us to develop a whole new set of rules of engagement where we ask our friends to be our peeps or tweets. **oh, but if you wanted to tweet with me you have better be able to do it in 140 characters or ya off the page anyway.

but it's even gone further. these past few weeks, we are now debating what's better; to tweet or not to tweet - that is the plurk.

if only my mother could here me talking this way... she'd be wondering. but if you'd like to come plurk with me, here's my ID: http://www.plurk.com/user/charlierobinson

as Rove says: what the?

interaction clean up day

A few years back when I was working with CISA we came up with this strategy to “clean up the internet”. Not CISA personally – we just wanted to encourage and help business achieve it themselves. At the time (for CISA) I was interviewed on radio and there was quite a buzz. But where are we today? Not much further along it seems.

There are many reasons to clean up the Internet. Firstly, from a user’s perspective, what they find after their research is far more reliable and accurate, and secondly, from a company perspective, dollars.

Dollars. Reputation. Brand. Responsibility. Basically, it costs real money to keep files on an ISP web server. It damages your reputation and brand if your information is out of date and old. And, it’s a company’s responsibility to make sure information is accurate and not misleading! In South Australia ALONE we have 100s of websites that are sitting idle in cyberspace with information stored on them. People and companies link to these websites thinking the information is accurate and current.

So, come forward a few years – to today – and in my day job I signed the company up for google maps "all the works please". Nothing unusual in that. However, in accepting the option that photos from the web be included, we have accepted and included a photo from a CEO who is no longer with us. In fact, has not been with us for many many years.

So, hence revealed, the web’s old files and untidiness is not just on my ISP servers where I can control them. They are in cyberspace as well. Whilst this doesn’t surprise me, and there are administrative ways of sorting it out via Google (in train), it still makes the purpose of the "clean up the internet day" all the more relevant. Seriously, how often in our day to day operations do we really sit back and think “well, what’s out there?”.

This day came to being to make people think about what they had out there and what could they remove. The original intentions were to save money. You can take this much further. Go on.

xc

PS the FaceBook Event page is here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=8641539004

interacting with more or less?

More and more targeted FaceBook groups, individuals and (what to me look like) teams of people are sending out friend requests. on a quest to reach the highest score. their aim is to increase their personal friend numbers. they all want the most. It’s a game!!

one guy today congratulated another for reaching 5000. wow. the mind boggles what they will do with 5000 friends – certainly not develop any form of meaningful interaction and certainly not even a decent spam list because as we know FaceBook bans that (and I’ve known a couple who have suffered the consequences and been deleted).

so, why? but more importantly, should I get involved?

To be honest, I accept friend requests. more people to throw sheep at? Hmmm. at the start l only added them if they included a message and explained why. then it came down to what they had on their profile and their personal interests (but you couldn’t always see that til you were friends) and then it kinda got a bit hard (too many coming through!!). I could easily have gone over 400 friends but instead I have started “culling”. trimming back. clearing the wardrobe. spring cleaning. My aim is to remain UNDER 400.

so, that’s my game.

but, after all is said and done, where am I? where does that leave me and what should I do? There are some friends I’ve made through this process that I didn’t think i would and we have had great conversations online. then there are some that are just well… how does one put it politely in a public domain? Hmm maybe I’ll just leave it there.

so, I guess I will have to remain a little risky on the friend acceptance side of things and fingers crossed, and hope for the best in order to continue to find the people who I value and enjoy interacting with?