American in Spain

Although I have not yet actually used Google+ (I’m waiting on my invite), I have been reading a lot about it, watching demo videos, and thinking about it. One feature that Google+ is offering to set itself apart from its ubiquitous rival, Facebook, is the concept of “circles”. The idea is that you define circles, subsets of your friends, that are defined by how you know or interact with them. You’ve got your coworkers, your ex-coworkers, your bowling buddies, your book club, and your ever ubiquitous “people I took a class or worked with once that no longer have anything in common with me, but that I was mildly curious to see what they are up to these days and so accepted their friend request”. I don’t know about you, but this latter group makes up the majority of my friend set.

One thing Google+ is using circles for is to allow you to optionally restrict who can see your status updates to only certain circles. While on the surface, this seems like a good idea, after giving it a little thought, I’m convinced that it is an inherently bad idea.
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For a long time, I have been unable to understand the point of political and social demonstrations and parades and such. I have at least two posts to this effect. What does Congress care if a bunch of rainbow-flag-waving hippies are out on the National Mall? That’s not going to change anyone’s mind!

With the combination of a number of successful political demonstrations – the most successful being that of Egypt – in the first quarter of 2011 and a video lecture I saw on YouTube, I finally had an epiphany about why demonstrations matter, and how they can be effective.
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Some of my mornings at the local park feel like an infinite loop of watching Nora climb up the ladder and zoom down the slide. Unfortunately, in most of the playgrounds, I don’t quite trust her to get up the ladder by herself, but there’s one that has stairs rather than a runged ladder. I took her there last Sunday and recorded a windy video of her from the stability of a park bench. If the wind wasn’t moving all the trees, I think this animated gif would have compressed a lot better and the quality could have been improved. As it is, it does have an Ye Olde Cinema look to it, especially in grayscale!
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Over the last year, our boiler (the appliance that uses propane gas from our community tanks to heat water for the sinks, showers, and radiators) slowly stopped working. Well, it heated the radiators just fine, but the hot water in the showers was only lukewarm at best. My wife and I could be brave and take cool showers, but towards the end, we were having to boil water separately to fill the bathtub for our daughter. Finally we couldn’t take it anymore and we called up our friend, Manolo, who says he’s not a plumber, he’s a Hydrosanitation Engineer.
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As I’ve approached and entered my thirties, I’ve become increasingly interested in politics. Not that I would ever, ever participate beyond the ballot box or a donation, but as a spectator, I’m fascinated. Another of my interests in recent years is the psychology of decision making, belief, and logical fallacies. Of particular curiosity is the growing ideological gulf between the political left and right in the United States brought on by increased access to information.
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My blogrollmate, Simon, shared this article with me today, by a US citizen who has lived in Europe for a decade, about the superiority of American domestic appliances. I must say that, after having spent a decade myself living in four houses and a dormitory in Europe, I agree completely.

Allow me to address my experiences with a variety of appliances.
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Spammers can be really clever sometimes. Apparently there is some way to game the Facebook “Like” button such that any click on a webpage can be sent to Facebook as if you had clicked the “Like” button. So what people do is they bait you with a juicy looking webpage, and then once on the page, when you click to view a video, or sometimes they pop up a dialog saying “To verify that you are human, click here!”, and that click gets registered as you “liking” that webpage. With the change last week where there is now no longer much difference between “liking” and “sharing” in how a web page shows up on your Facebook wall, this technique is gaining even more steam. From what I can tell, they aren’t doing anything particularly malicious other than tricking people into posting salacious looking crap to their wall.
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The state of interconnectivity between social networking these days is a bloody nightmare. For me, anyhow. I’ve been trying for months now to find the right balance and how to use each service to best connect me to my peeps, allow me to share things I find and ideas that pop into my head and little things I do that don’t warrant an entire blog post, but I’ve been unable to strum the right chord.

All the services I use can connect to one another and “cross post”, except for Facebook, which, in its ironic privacy, only receives information. Twitter can post to Tumblr and Facebook and Google Buzz; Tumblr can post to Twitter and Facebook; Flickr can post to Facebook and Tumblr; Instagram can post to Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Facebook; etc. etc. etc.
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As an expat parent of a toddler in Spain, I have noticed a rather bizarre parenting behavior exhibited by Spaniards caring for small children. A typical scenario goes something like this:

A toddler is careening around and hits her head on a table. Tables and desks are right at forehead height for a two-year-old. The parent or caretaker rushes over and hugs the crying child. Immediately the caretaker turns to the table and shouts, “Bad table!” and smacks the table hard with his hand and encourages the child to hit and scold the table as well.

If you’re like me the first time I saw this parenting technique, you have a big “WTF?” thought bubble above your head.
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Rant alert! I’m really sick and tired of seeing “[Your Name] likes I’m against children getting cancer and dying painful deaths on Causes” on Facebook. Really? You really thought that you needed to share that with me? Thereby implying that if I don’t click “like”, that I am, indeed, in favor of childhood cancer, or domestic violence, or female genital mutilation, or rapists, or serial killers, or autism, or cerebral palsy, or pedophiles, etc. Good freakin’ grief, people! What good does it do to post that you are in favor of a morally unambiguous “cause” on a social network? What? Tell me!

And another thing…while I’m on my high horse…
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