In short, Facebook changed their interface again, everyone complained and said how much they hated it, then within two days, everyone shut up and just kept going, as if nothing had happened. I’m handling this by changing my habits. I’m switching, as much as possible, to Google+. I’m doing all my new posting on Google+ (other than my Hal’s Haiku page on Facebook) and I’m only responding to other posts on Facebook. I plan, over time, to reduce my interaction on Facebook more and more until I don’t use it anymore.
If you want to keep up with me online, then join Google+ and add me to your circles so I can add you to mine. I’m on there as Hal Vaughan and I’m staying there. I will be on Facebook less and less because I am just not going to stay on a site where the company running it actively disrespects its users and treats them with contempt. I have some reasons why we should all leave Facebook (and go to Google+ if you prefer to stay on a social site):

1. Mark Zuckerberg not only thinks it’s funny we trust him, but that we are stupid because we do. He has said on record, “They trust me. The dumb f—s.”
2. Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook company leaders have made it clear they think privacy is obsolete, even though users ask for privacy, Facebook continues to actively work against those concerns.
3. Facebook has had no competition for most of its existence and only showed the least concern for privacy when they saw what might be possible competition from Google+.
4. Facebook is not run by business people or sales people, but by software developers, who have little concern for making it easy for people to use. (See more later on the disadvantages of developers not being guided or responsible to others in a business.) In short I’ll say that developers, as a whole, don’t like users and are more interested in what they call elegant program code than in caring about user concerns.
5. While Google+ is run by a mega-corporation, the same as Facebook, and there is little reason to trust Google more than Facebook, at least Google does not actively treat users of their services with outright contempt. Many actions of Facebook have shown clear contempt and disrespect for their users.
6. When confronted with security bugs, Facebook will ignore them until forced to fix them. They do not care about the security of our accounts and information until publicly shamed into doing so.
7. Facebook has much more personal data on you than you think or know and is actively searching for more. (In Europe, some requests for personal data Facebook has on an individual yield as much as 800 pages of data!)
8. Facebook could easily handle the issue of web page changes that upset users by simply using allowing different interfaces that all interact with the Facebook database through common program routines. In other words, there is no valid reason for forcing an update of what the wall looks like and not allowing users design a layout that works best for them.
9. Facebook tracks every website you visit in your browser, even after you log out of Facebook. (They’re fixing that, but not entirely.) Do you have friends with different religious or political beliefs and you don’t talk about those issues with them because you don’t want them to know you disagree with them? Well, Facebook knows it, and soon they’ll know once Facebook reveals their new timelines and makes all that available to your friends.
10. Facebook has shown open disrespect and even contempt for their users, yet we keep coming back, thus making it okay and telling them it’s okay to treat us like dirt. The longer we keep going back to Facebook, instead of going elsewhere or leaving the social media scene, the more we are sending the message it’s okay to treat us in a way we wouldn’t accept in personal relationships.

Aside from this list, there are other reasons I’m doing this. In the interest of not creating a dull essay, I’m going to give you my reasoning first, so people can read that quickly and make up their own minds about what they think, and after that, I’ll give you the background on it for support. In short, if I’m making a statement, I can support it with facts and quotes. My opinions are based on these facts, not on rumors or over-reactions.

Back around 2000 I was working as a Property Manger for a realty and rental management company. The situation was intolerable. My boss would kiss up to property owners and yell at tenants and prospective tenants. He would chew me out (and when he did a “chew out” it was always at least 20 minutes of a tantrum accompanied by at least a raised voice, often yelling, and blaming everything on me, the property owners, the tenants, or anyone but himself), sometimes even for solving problems and making things better. I don’t use his name here or elsewhere so people do not know who I’m talking about, but when he died, it took me three days to think of a kind thing to say about him – not out of bitterness, but because of how he behaved and treated people.

I was blind, at first, to what was going on. He’d get nastier and nastier, then when things went bad and I was about to quit, he’d suddenly make-up and we’d have what’s called a honeymoon period for a while, then things would get worse and worse, until there was another explosion. I had started looking for new jobs (which were scarce in that field at that time) and when he would go through the “honeymoon” phase, I’d stop the job-hunting. Things would get bad again and I’d start again.

Then one time, when there was an emotional explosion and he started acting nice for awhile, I thought, “I guess I don’t have to keep up the job search now.” Then it hit me: He’d only get worse again and it would be best for me to get a job now, while he was nice, so by the time he got nasty again, I’d have finished interviewing and I’d be turning in my notice. If I wanted to feel like I was getting back at him, I could even wait until he started a tantrum and give him my resignation at that point. (Which I figured would include the benefit of him seeing the consequence for his nastiness instead of being able to call me dis-loyal because I left when he was being nice.)

The bottom line is nobody can abuse you without your consent.

That concept is so important it bears repeating: Nobody can abuse you without your consent. In this case, I could quit at any time. True, then I couldn’t pay the bills, but I could leave the job and his abuse. I’ve been in bad relationships where I realized how disrespectful my partner was and, in the days before I knew better, I’d let it keep going. Then, one day, I was engaged to a beautiful woman who kept yelling at me more and more and treating me worse and worse as time went on. I realized she would berate me as much as she wanted because she has no respect for me or my limits. So I left and never felt prouder of myself than I did at that moment.

What’s this got to do with Facebook?

Facebook has no respect for their users and continually treats users with contempt. We, as users, complain, then come back. Facebook is so disrespectful of users, they rank, in customer satisfaction, as low as monopolies and public utilities. People like their friends on Facebook, but hate Facebook.

And Facebook keeps abusing us and treating us with contempt and we keep going back for more and more.

I can’t do that anymore. I can’t keep going back to use a web service that has no respect for its users and continually sets itself at odds with them and treats them with contempt. I cannot keep providing them with a means to make money because I’m there. As Martin Luther King said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” I respect and love myself too much to keep using Facebook and dealing with their abuse.

Facebook loves to rile their users. Every time they add a new privacy feature and automatically set it to the least private setting, people get angry. It makes the news. And Facebook doesn’t lose users, but gains a number of them from the publicity. In other words, they benefit by treating us, the users, like dirt, and they intentionally do so.

Soon things will be worse. The default profile view of you and your friends will be the timeline, which shows the sites you visit, the links you click on, and more. If you think there’s not much privacy now, wait until you see the timeline! Even now, when I go to Yahoo news, I get windows telling me I can see which news stories my Facebook friends are reading.

So I’m reducing my time on Facebook and will be leaving it soon (other than, perhaps, Hal’s Haiku) because I can’t, in good conscience, support a company that hates their users.

Now, as I said, I’d save the support for my reasoning until later, so here it is, below. This is just my backup for what I’ve said above, so if you disagree with my comments or want support, keep reading:

I mentioned above that Facebook is a developer run company and this is a bad thing. A developer is, simply put, someone who does the work to develop a software program. Letting developers be in charge is good if you want elegant code in your program, but if you want a program intended for users, it’s bad. I’m a developer, or former developer, since I don’t do much of that right now. I’ve worked with developers and spent a lot of time on developer forums.

Developers have their own subculture and their own value system. Elegant and sexy program code ranks high in their values. If you can consistently write code that is short and does cool things, you’re admired. On the other end of the spectrum, from a developer’s point of view, is writing the interface for users, or writing patches for bugs. I’ve seen comments on developer forums about how much work they could get done, or what wonderful programs they could write if they only didn’t have to worry about “dumb users” or how “all users are assholes.” In the Facebook corporation, developers reign supreme. Without oversight to insist on things like a user-interface consistency, developers avoid working on features that help users and, instead, focus on items that are fun to program or that look cool to other developers.

Developers and users are often at odds, but this setup inside Facebook just encourages it and makes it worse. People who are more concerned about writing a cool program than in creating a good interface for users are the ones who create the user interface.

This is the same situation we, as users, face with Facebook overall. We want privacy, Facebook wants our information to sell. We want to keep up with friends, Facebook screens all our messages and posts and comments for any information it can find about it. It keeps everything and never deletes it and then uses it to determine who we are, what we eat, what we buy, and every little piece of info that Facebook can sell about us.

Now, to make it short, here are a number of links on this topic that back up a lot of what I’ve said. They’re worth reading:

• CNN’s view that Facebook needs us because they’re selling us (Interesting note: When I saw this link on a Facebook post and clicked on it, Facebook told me, “This site is dangerous and could harm your computer. Are you sure you want to click on it?”)
• A non-Facebook developer finds a privacy hole in Facebook and notifies them about it, yet they have no concern for fixing it
• But once it hits the news that Facebook is not fixing a flaw, they finally do something
• Facebook keeping data? It has over 800 pages of data on some of us
• General info about recent and upcoming Facebook changes
• Facebook’s complications (could that be Facebook’s undoing?)

I was on eHarmony from close to the beginning until about 2010, when I started a relationship with someone I met offline, through ballroom dancing. But from about 2009 on, I stayed on eHarmony only out of the slim chance it might work. By then I had learned something important: eHamrony is hiding important figures that show them as more of a failure than a success. A lot of online dating services are doing this.

True, there are people who meet through online dating and people who get married to someone they’ve met online, but after playing with some numbers, it turns out your chances of meeting someone online is far less than meeting someone special in person.

Here’s the short of it: While discussing this with other people in a forum, I realized eHarmony made two claims repeatedly. The first was how many marriages per day or week they could claim from members and the other was how many members they have. So I did the simple thing and found their membership claims for 2005 by Googling. Then I took the number of members and the marriages per week and worked out the marriage rate per 1,000 members. It came to between 3.5 and 3.8. Roughly 3.7 per 1,000. The numbers I don’t have in front of me are their claims for 2005, but they can be found with Google. Or I challenge eHarmony to provide those numbers. I’ve challenged them before, on a forum where eHarmony people spend time. They’ve never responded.

Now here’s what makes a difference: I looked at the U.S. census info for 2005 and checked the marriage rate. Before I give the actual numbers, here’s a reminder: The marriage rate per 1,000 people is how many adults out of 1,000 get married in that year. This includes Priests, prisoners, pensioners, and people that don’t want to get married. It includes married adults. In short, it includes ALL adults in the U.S. Now compare that with eHarmony, which is a site for people interested in serious relationships.

Think about this: if you have two populations, the first composed of people seeking serious relationships, and the other full of people who are already married and people who can’t or won’t marry, which one should have a higher marriage rate? Answer: The one with people seeking relationships. Almost everyone in that population is not only eligible for marriage, but is seeking either marriage or a serious relationship. In the other population, you have a large number of people not interested in marriage or finding a serious relationship.

So now we get to numbers. Check the U.S census. In 2005 the marriage rate was over 7 per 1,000 adults. Compare that with eHarmony, with a marriage rate of roughly 3.7 per 1,000. The eHarmony rate, which should be higher is roughly HALF of the U.S. marriage rate.

If you’re single, your chances of finding a spouse in real life are actually double your chances of finding a spouse through eHarmony. Now, go on YouTube and search for eHarmony ads. See if what they say matches the facts.

While still on eHarmony in 2009 I asked a phone consumer representative for their marriage rate and membership numbers. I didn’t write down the numbers, but I made a note that the marriage rate for their membership had gone down since then.

Now, if you don’t believe me, do this: Call eHarmony customer service. Tell them you’re thinking of joining and ask for two numbers: How many marriages they have per day or week and how many members they have. Then do the math. You’ll find their marriage rate is about half or less than the marriage rate of the U.S. population.

There’s a few other points to go with that. I found an article a while back written by the owner of OKCupid.com. He has since pulled the article, claiming it is out of date. (He’s also, since then, sold his site to Match.com, which makes me suspect of his reasoning for pulling hte article.) However, thanks to GeekOSystem.com, the article is still online. Here’s the link to the original GeekOSystem article and here’s the link to the screenshot of the article. (If your browser gives you a long picture down the left of your window, click on it to be able to read the whole thing.)

Go through the article. Notice the points he makes, including that it benefits eHarmony and other pay sites to not show which members are paying (and can communicate) and which can’t. This is a feature that causes endless frustration to paying clients while creating more of a cashflow for the business. There’s a number of other points in there I won’t restate here. While Yagan, the OkCupid CEO, claims numbers are not all accurate, go through the article and see how much of his reasoning makes sense even if his numbers are off. Much of what he says is still valid even if his numbers are off.

The main point is that if you’re paying for an online dating site, you MAY meet someone. But if you pay for a VA Lotto ticket every week, you MAY win a few million dollars as well. And that’s what online dating is: A lottery. There are enough free sites. Think about it: I was on eHarmony for 8-10 years and not once did I have a date that led to even a kiss. I made some good friends, but nothing romantic. I won’t get into what a good match I am or am not, but I will ask: Do you want to trust a site to find you a romantic partner when they can’t even claim to have more than half the marriage rate of the U.S. adult population?

Every year I look forward t o Arts in the Park, at Dogwood Dell and the Carillon (which is a local city park with a monument to World War I). The grounds are covered with tent after tent, each with a different artist displaying his or her work, in hopes that those of us wandering by will decide to buy something. Some artists are back year after year and, of course, every year there are new artists as well.

But even though I always enjoy the show, I find that it always challenges my ideas about individuality and creativity — and not in the way you’d think or in a good way.

I’m a romantic, or, really, a Romantic. I’m not a twenty-something anymore and ought to have more sense than to have a lot of the Romantic notions in my head than I do. I don’t mean boy-girl romance, but Romance as in the Romantics, meaning the poets and writers and artists. I’ve always had this idea that we are all unique and we all have our own individual voice and our own special take on life that we bring to this world — and that it is the mix of all these different ethnicities, religions, and views of the world that make humanity so special.

Back when I was in college there was a man who only went by “Ron” who would come by for a week each year and set up a spot in the student union. For that week he’d stand there, 8 hours or so a day, and paint. He had canvases, I think probably about 8″ x 20″ and he’d put one up for us to see, then slap paint across the bottom and the middle, pull out a knife and whip it through the paint to create what looked like sea oats and use a similar technique to make what looked like seagulls. In about 5 minutes he had a “painting” of the seaside at sunset or something like it.

I was fascinated with this process. He charged $15 per item and a lot of people were buying them. In about five minutes he’d produce a work he could sell for $15. The sign above him said, “Ron Art,” and he signed his paintings just “Ron.” He never talked with students, other than about money. My roommate called what he was doing masturbation. I can’t say I disagree. He had a skill. Not a talent, but a skill. He knew what images would strike a chord with people and he was producing somewhere from ten to twelve of those images in a single hour.

It’s a skill I admire, but it’s not a talent and it’s not creative. And it certainly is NOT art.

Which brings me to Arts in the Park. There are several hundred artists there and some not-artists with interesting wares to sell. The Twin Oaks commune is always there with hammocks and chairs everyone loves. There’s another group there with carnivorous plants.

But what always challenges my beliefs in individualism is that, every year, I see at least five people with what looks like the same watercolor style. Even down to the choice of their subject matter. And, by now, I am pretty sure there is an alley in Southern France or Spain, with all the clay buildings, that has a small bridge from the second or third floor of one building, across the alley, to another. This alley must have signs pointing to it from hundreds of miles away and I suspect if you are an American photographer, you are required by international law to take a picture of this alleyway.

I’ve seen that shot on display for so many photographers that I can’t think of any other reason every one of them would have the same photo. And it continues. This is Richmond and our “get away” beach is the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Which means every photographer, every sketch artist, and every painter has countless pictures of the Cape Hatteras, Bodie Island, and Ocracoke Island lighthouses. It’s not just the styles, it’s also the subject matter. It’s the same from tent to tent to tent.

In my Romantic set of ideals, artists are people with a creative urge and they can either create or suffer. Yet what I see isn’t creative. It’s duplicative, and there are times I go from tent to tent and see as little difference between one artist’s work and the next as I do from one Ron Art painting to the next. And I see it over time, as well. There are artists there with unique ideas, but the paintings they are selling this year are almost indistinguishable from the ones they were selling a decade ago. For all I know, they might still be trying to sell some of the same paintings.

I chatted with a few artists I know, in different fields about this. Each said they fight the tendency to fall into repetition. One pointed out that when you find the work is getting easy, you’re copying either yourself or someone else. That’s a lesson I learned in writing years ago: If it’s that easy, you’re probably copying someone else. But they all talked about the struggle and need to keep their work fresh compared to what they have done and compared to other artists.

But none of us could explain why so many artists are doing the same work they were doing ten years ago or why so many of them are the same.

My thought is that many people call themselves artists but are really well disciplined craftsmen, turning out something they know will sell. Once they’ve found the formula for what works, they continue to produce the same kind of work. That is a skill to admire, but it’s not art.

On the other hand, there was a woman with whimsical clay garden figures who told me they didn’t do photos of their work on their website because they were all so wildly different from each other that there was no point in photographing one style. There were others who did work that I, and others really admire. There’s the wood worker who has done amazing mosaics of cut wood that leave me amazed every time I walk by his tent. I keep thinking of buying one, but then I wonder if it would be safe in my house, or if I’d drop and break it even before I ever hung it up.

The last artist I’m going to mention is one of my favorites. He has photos of the Amish community near where he lives. I have a number of his pictures, including some with shadow boxes with tools that match the ones being used in the photos he’s taken. He’s done a fine job of capturing the lifestyle of a community that is suspicious of outsiders and allows few photographs to be taken.

So there are some wonderful artists and works at Arts in the Park. I just find it amazing that so many that call themselves artists have not made the effort to find a style that is uniquely theirs or to challenge themselves to grow and evolve over time. But, more and more, I learn to just ignore them so I have more time to look at the original and unique artists and their works.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  They always have.  They always will.  Two examples spring to my mind, one real, one not.  The first is the fictional one: Remember Dead Poets Society?  He challenged the students to make their lives extraordinary.  Some did.  One kid pushed the limits and his Father pushed back and he killed himself.  One rebelled and was kicked out (or so I remember) and the meekest of the bunch was the one that finally, at the end, stood on his desk and said, “Oh, Captain, my Captain!”  But what else happened?  How many of the kids just went along with the teacher but didn’t meet the challenge to make their lives extraordinary instead of ordinary?  And how many of them just stood on their desks at the end because others were doing it?

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  They won’t stand out, they don’t want to stand out, they don’t have the backbone to stand out.  They want to be part of their political party and follow a sports team and celebrate when they win, but they don’t want to stand up and take leadership or take the risk of being more than what they are.  They want to quietly learn their rhyme and meter and go about the business of achieving other ambitions — but they often don’t have other ambitions, other than getting a job with a good career track and a spouse and the chance to raise a couple of kids and have a divorce because they really weren’t thinking about anything but hot looks when they got married.  Most people will NEVER sound their barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the neighborhood, much less over the rooftops of the world.

At the end of the day, they’ve done their job, worked hard, and want to spend the evening enjoying a well earned rest.  (Or spend the evening struggling to get the kids’ homework done and get them off to bed!)

The second example has to do with me and dance.  Friends of mine remember I went to a prep school, supposedly one of the best on the East Coast.  I learned a lot there, including that I was smart, but a dork, that I should hate myself because I wasn’t cool, and, with the help of the coaches, including the one who called me a physical degenerate in front of the entire 7th grade and on at least one other occasion humiliated me in front of my own class in his Social Studies class.  While it started with the students, the teachers and coaches helped me learn, helped teach me, that I was a complete klutz.

I let that define me for years, but there were things I always wanted to do.  I never dared to dream I’d be an exceptional dancer, but I always wanted to learn ballroom dance and it was, by chance, a year ago this weekend, that I was at my first ballroom competition.  I entered 7 heats in the newcomer’s division and won all 7.  Philippe, the other dancer from our studio that rode down and back with me, had a rough ride back.  Literally ever 5 minutes I would say, “Damn,” then a pause, then, “Did I really do that?”  I was emotionally shocked and it took me a couple months to accept that I had won.  (I still feel sorry for Philippe having to put up with that all the way back from Raleigh to Richmond!)  But I had and about a month later I did my first showcase dance. (Shown below.)

I had friends that told me they were amazed at that routine.  I worked hard, but I didn’t see anything in it that took any special skill, yet I had people tell me, “I wish I could dance like that.”  I can watch it and see where I hesitated, where you could tell from my face it was all I could do to remember where my foot went on the next step, much less to remember how to add any style to what I was doing, but still, people kept telling me how they wished they could do that.

The funny thing is that for the 12-14 months before that routine, while I was taking lessons at that studio, I was trying to get friends to come with me and dance with me.  Nobody in my circle of friends or family has gone with me to any dance, other than my Mother and sister when they went to watch me.  And all these people have still said, “I wish I could do that,” or, “I’d like to learn that.”  I pointed out to them that for about a year I had been bugging them to come and dance, but every week, when I was going to beginner’s lessons, they’d say, “I’m too tired, it was a rough day.  How about next week?”  At the end of the day, they were looking for rest, not recreation.  During about 52 of their, “Maybe next week” excuses I learned enough to win those 7 newcomer dances at my first competition and all my friends knew about that accomplishment.  And I told them, “The only difference is that when you said, ‘I’m tired, maybe next week,’ I said, ‘I want to do this.’”  And after 4 more weeks of that, I did my showcase tango and uploaded it to YouTube so all my friends could see.

Now, granted, ballroom dance is not everyone’s life ambition, but the point is that they would see me dance, see my videos of me in a competition, and see my showcase dances, and say, “I wish I could do that,” and they mean it.  They really do want to do it. (Yes, some are just saying it, but some seriously mean it.)  And I offer them the chance and, week after week, they say they’re too tired or not up to it or don’t feel like going out.  They want to do it, but don’t take the chance.  They do not seize the day.

It doesn’t matter what you do or say, or what kind of teachers we have.  The mass of men will ALWAYS lead lives of quiet desperation.  And I’m okay with that.  It lets me rise above the mass and to the top when I compete in ballroom because many of the people that might want to do it, might get excited enough to pursue it, just put off taking that first lesson every night they get a chance.  When I pitched to Trek, the producer liked what I was doing and liked my stuff, I just didn’t hit it quite right.  But I still had to compete with hundreds of writers trying to break in.  I got in to Trek in something like 3 months when it took most writers a year to get either noticed or rejected and I got almost right to the top in who I pitched to.  If I had been able to pitch more, I likely could have made it.  I once heard David Gerrold complain about what most writers were like in a pitch session and how dense many were and how they didn’t do their research.

Most people do not take the chance to rise up and sound their barbaric yawp.  They’re too busy trying to make it through the day, then through until Friday.  When I go to a Friday night dance party, I ask people how their week was.  Many are thrilled it’s over and like that it went fast.  This is 5/7 of their life and they want it to go fast so they can enjoy 2/7 of their life!  And these are people that made the effort to go out and learn something new instead of just suffering through each day!

Most people want to be pacified and to make it quietly through life.  They don’t want to rise up and, honestly, I have no problem with them being pacified by pablum.  If you try to feed them Shakespeare, most will just get bored and go to the underground cock fights instead.

Even if there are people who need and crave power and wealth, if they have any wisdom at all, then they can see there’s no need for an Orwellian police state.  There’s no need to spy on people, to silence those few of us who do speak out.  Why?  Because most people don’t care and never will.  They don’t need to be controlled by force, as shown in Brave New World.

Is it wrong to pacify them through TV and other means?  Is anyone actually doing that?  Is it a plot, or is it just the result of a system where the show that gets the most viewers makes the most money?  I say it’s not a conspiracy, just a matter of greed on the part of those who are willing to do something more than be satisfied that they’re tired and don’t want to do more at the end of the day.  And the people they’re making money off of are the drones in their lives of quiet desperation.

But this means that those of us who want to think, who want more, don’t have to deal with the masses.  We have places we can go for more, for a higher quality form of communication.  If we want to rise up, we can.  True, it’s getting harder, but we can do it.

All it takes is a willingness to put in a little more effort at the end of the day.

For four years my sister and I, and a few friends here and there, have had something to talk about after almost every episode.  To keep humanity alive characters had to make decisions they hated, like forbidding any kind of abortion because the human population was so small.  And for four years, the humans, again in a rag-tag fugitive fleet, have been led by Commander Adama from the last remaining Battlestar for Earth, a planet they hope will be a safe place to life, will harbor advanced humans, and will give them the way to defeat the Cylons.  We’ve watched as some Cylons befriend the humans, but are still treated like outcasts by many due to hatred and prejudice.

And then the story is ready to wrap up.  I had read that the final episode may be 2 hours and the one before it sets up that episode.  I wasn’t sure if it was a 2 hour episode airing all at once or 2 separate episodes.  It was listed on the guide on my DVR as Daybreak, Part 1, and Daybreak, Part 2.  The episode before it was titled Islanded in a Stream of Stars.  So I wasn’t sure which one was the “ramp up” and if Part 2 was just the 2nd part or 2 hours (the guide didn’t show me for sure).  To be sure, I kept the episodes from Islanded in a Stream of Stars on the DVR, checking to make sure they were okay.  Then, last Saturday, when they were all on tape (and it turned out Daybreak, Part 2 was actually 2 hours and ten or more extra minutes!), I sat down with root beer and a special treat of store-bought (not air-popped) popcorn, ready to enjoy what I now knew where the last four hours of a journey I felt like I actually started 30 years ago.

I got through the first two one-hour episodes, then hit the ceiling in anger.  I have Verizon FiOS, which is usually perfect service, but somehow the Sci-Fi channel, and ONLY the HD feed, was messed up!  It actually stayed messed up the whole weekend, until some lazy idiot schmuck dragged his carcass out of bed on Monday morning and hauled his butt in to fix it.  So the HD version of the 2:10 finale was totally fubar on my DVR!  My sister had it on her DVR in the normal format, but that long a show won’t fit on a DVD for her to burn!  I finally find out it’s on On Demand, so Wednesday night I finally have time, curl up with another root beer, and find out On Demand is NOT working!

Well, tonight it was finally working.  Tonight, after 30 years I saw Commander Adama reach the end of his journey, along with tens of thousands of humans.  I know what happened to the humans now, and to the Galactica and to Starbuck and Apollo (the names of two pilots in the early version, but only their call signs in the later version).  I know how the Human-Cylon war ends.

And you know what?  While it was not worth waiting 30 years for that resolution, I do feel satisfied.  I feel like the ending fit the story and the characters all went in directions that were true to themselves and who they are/were.  There were religious issues and questions raised.  There were questions that were answered in ways I know a lot of people will just hate, and whether you hate the answer or not, in some cases, it only raises more questions.  I finished watching this hours ago and still my mind is spinning.  I’m still thinking about the implications, the questions, what I think the answers are, and where the show went from the start to the end.

I’m thinking about how the original was a cheesy show that couldn’t, with any degree of competency, address issues of good and evil, or bring up ethical dilemmas and make us agree that what we would normally consider wrong might, in some cases be right.  Yeah, it was cool for a teenage kid to watch, but this version, the good one, the real one, is for adults.  Many episodes don’t have a lot of action.  We’ve seen characters at their best and worst.  And now it’s over.  I don’t watch many TV shows, but there are some I’ve stuck with while they went on for a full decade, yet I have never felt like a show took me the places this one took me — especially in that finale.  This is one of the few TV shows that I want to have on DVD in entirety.  Not once did it insult my intelligence and every week it raised more questions to talk about with people I knew.  I can honestly say I am a better person because I watched all of this one show.

On the one hand, I’ll miss watching it, but on the other, I’m glad the story is complete because, at times, it’s been exhausting.  I think the series finale and the end of a two-part story earlier in this season are the most intense hours of TV that I’ve ever seen.  In many ways it’s good I did not see the finale after watching the two hours leading up to it.  The finale, on it’s own, was such a ride and, at some points, so intense, that I’m glad I was able to see it by itself and not after I had watched another 2 hours leading up to it.

This is probably only the 3rd time I have ever seen a finale that I felt was 100% appropriate for the show and the characters and it is the only time I have ever seen one that took me to some of the places this one did.

I still don’t know if doing seven dances for your first comp is hard or not. All I know is I did it. I figured I knew the dances so I might as well do them. It wasn’t costing me anything to try them.

Well, actually, it was costing me something. $25 an entry, but why pay for the price of a hotel room, the general entry fee, gas down and back to Raleigh (about a gazillion dollars at today’s prices), and not dance as much as possible? As long as it’s taking me a day and a half and I’ve already got a lot invested, why not just do as many entries as I could? After all, what’s the point in driving that far and spending that much money to do one or two dances totaling less than 3 minutes? So I ended up registering as a newcomer (as in never having competed before) in tango, foxtrot, waltz, Viennese waltz, cha-cha, rumba, and bolero.

To go into just what was going on when I was at the comp, I need to make two stops with the way-back machine. The first is in, as best I can figure now, the summer of 2005. I’ve already mentioned this in another entry, but it bears heavily on this, so I’ll bring it up again. One evening I drove over to The Dancespace to try beginning ballroom dance lessons. It took me a bit to find it and by the time I did, I was running a bit late. I climbed the steps (it’s on the 2nd floor) and looked through the square window in the door, at face level. I saw a line of men, moving in what seemed like unison, as they were trying a dance step. There was a line of women watching them. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, even though it was a beginner’s class. I’ve said I left. The truth is I bolted down the steps to make sure nobody would see me.

That’s what going through kindergarten to twelfth grade in a school with the same kids constantly teasing you for your lack of coordination will do to you. Even in my 40s, there was still that kid in me that never could do anywhere near as well as the other kids in school and was terrified of trying any kind of movement in front of the others. Having teachers call me names like, “physical degenerate” in front of the entire grade didn’t help either.

So I walked up the steps to a dance class, finally conquering my fears, and I see everyone moving like they knew what they were doing and I took off. I figure it was the next summer before I was finally able to go back and try it again. It took me that long to get over all those childhood and teenage images of being inept and incapable.

The second stop with the way-back machine is last Wednesday. My business computer was working well after a recent RAID crash where I lost 3 out of 4 drives within minutes of each other, thus bringing the entire system down (note to self: never buy a Maxtor drive again, in this lifetime or any other). I had gotten it working again the previous week and now the last drive, the system drive, crashed (and yes, it was a Maxtor as well). The computer my whole business was based on was not working and the backups I had didn’t work as well as they should have.

Then the window in my car door was rattling, requiring me to take apart the door to fix it and I had to make an unscheduled trip to Charlottesville on Thursday. Friday I was rushing to get my computer so I could at least verify I hadn’t lost data, as well as having to pull the car door apart. I was covered in grease and going back and forth, from my computer to the car and back, depending on whether the computer was working or waiting for input (and I had to continuously wash my hands over and over!). Both were taken care of, but it resulted in me leaving about 2 hours late, picking up another dancer, then getting to the hotel 2 hours late and starved. By the time I finally got to sleep, knowing I’d have to be up early the next morning, it was late, even for me.

It’s my first competition and I get up for it exhausted from the past few days and can’t help remembering, as I’m getting ready to look smooth and suave, that less than 24 hours earlier I was sitting on the concrete, in grimy shorts and t-shirt, with grease splotches from the car window device all over my legs and arms. I don’t know if I clean up well, but at least I can be cleaned up.

We get to the dance studio for the comp and they’re running late. By now I’m really glad I know the Litany for Fear from Dune and I keep reciting it to myself under my breath. Then the dancing starts, about an hour late. (”I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller…”)

If you’ve never been to a dance comp, it’s all done in heats. In each heat they have a number of couples on the floor dancing for about 60-90 seconds. You could be competing with dancers in that heat or in other heats. You can practice for weeks or months and it comes down to about a minute of dancing when they judge you. Sometimes you’re doing another dance in the next heat so you just stay on the dance floor for that one. If not, you leave the floor.

I’m in the 4th heat so my instructor and I walk out on the floor when we’re called and wait. Instead of starting the dancing, the announcer says, “Just a reminder that lunch is ready in the other room so you can eat it whenever you can take a break.” My instructor looked at me and said, “Okay, I’m ready for a break,” and started to walk toward the other room.

It was all I could do to keep from cracking up. For all I know, that made all the difference because right after that, I was much more comfortable and when the music started, we did a foxtrot. I wish I could say what the song was. I did notice it, but I didn’t recognize it. At least I wasn’t so nervous I didn’t know what was going on. I do know that when we did the Viennese waltz it was to a Strauss waltz, but other than the Blue Danube, they all sound the same to me.

Immediately after the foxtrot, we had the waltz, then skipped one heat and did the tango, where, again, instead of starting the music once we got out there, something else was going on, leaving me to start at my instructor and stand ready to dance for somewhere around a million years, until the tango music finally started. Then it was few hours off until it was time to do the Latin dances. That started with the bolero, then a good break, then the cha-cha and rumba.

By the time we reached the rumba, which was right after the cha-cha, I think my brain was a bit scrambled. While I haven’t taken French since high school, I was thinking in French and may have even started talking in French. I don’t know, but I missed them saying it was the rumba and was trying to ask my instructor what we were doing. It just wasn’t straight in my head, but once the music started and I heard the slow-quick-quick beat, I knew what to do. Then, when we finished, we walked off the floor and I was about ready to just collapse.

We have no idea how we’ve done until the awards, which were after dinner (which was about 45 minutes late and, of course, the awards were delayed even more). After announcing the big rewards, they announced certificates of participation. The other dancer from our studio, was called up first, then my instructor. We were surprised they called her up, since she wasn’t competing. (My heats were pro-am, with her being the pro, so I was being judged and she wasn’t.) She came back with a score sheet of all the dances she did with me and the one other dancer and I started looking at them when she pointed out one to me. I saw a box, with three columns, the first was our names, the second said, “Average Score,” and the third column said, “Place” and under that was “1.” I looked at it, wide eyed, then asked her, “Does that mean actual place as in first, second, or third? As in if it’s a one, I won?” She smiled and said, “Yes.

She let me have the sheet and I scanned it in a hurry, looking at every box with my name in it. One. One. One. One… All the boxes I could see with my name in them said “1″ in the place column. I looked for the one titled “Contested Tango.” Yep. One. And that’s when I started feeling happy. I did another scan and saw that all seven of my dances were there, each with a “1″ under “Place.” I looked up at my instructor. “Does this mean I won them all?” And she smiled, nodded, and said, “Yes.” “Yeah!” I said, then, without knowing I said it, “Yeah! Who’s your daddy!?!”

About that time they called my name for my participation certificate and the two of us walked up to get it and my smile got bigger and bigger as it dawned on me that I really did win every single dance I did!

We left soon after that, just the other dancer and I, so we could get back to Richmond. (After all, I had nobody to walk the dog that night, so I had to get back!) The poor guy! All I could think of was that first dance lesson, the one I saw through the door, and ran from. Over and over, on the drive home, I kept saying, “Damn!”, then, after another second or two, “Did I really do that?” It just would not sink in. It’s still not sinking in.

I honestly don’t know what it means. I don’t know what the other dancers were like and haven’t checked to see how many I was up against (I know I was competing with several others in some dances), but my lowest average score was 94, so I must not have done too poorly.

I do know it means a lot to know that the kid a teacher called a “physical degenerate” in front the entire grade did something a day ago that most of the show-offs at that school who called me names will never do: I placed first in seven different dances at my first dance comp.

It’s not about revenge or proving anything to them, but I do think with as much self-improvement work I’ve done on myself, it still took that to prove something to me.

(For pictures of me, my instructors, the other dancer from our studio, and some other dancers, click here.)

However, I’ve realized there is something that’s become a passion of mine in the past year that I have yet to write about here and it’s something I do love doing and talking about. Anyone that knows me knows I love cycling and enjoy walking and lifting weights, but that’s about the limit of any training I’ve had in movement.

And yet in August I’ll be competing in tango and a number of other ballroom dances. How did that happen?

What really gets me is when people say, “I can’t dance.” And I’ll dump some personal history here on why. I was the kid who never did any sports in school. It was a private school so we had to stay extra for athletics in high school. I helped with the trainers and did the hiking and canoing program when I could. I was not good at any sports at all and would have never made any team even if I had tried. All through school (I went to the same one from K to 12) I was constantly teased about my lack of coordination. One time we were playing volleyball and I swung at the ball, thinking I was going to actually get a good shot. Everything lined up perfectly and I put force into that swing and watched as my hand went up to meet the ball, then kept going. I missed the ball by 2-3 feet. Later my eye doctor explained that I have slight astigmatism. Long story short, the ball looked like it was where my hand was heading but there was no way I could tell it was farther away than I thought.

Fast forward to about 18-19 months ago or so. Actually a little later than that. I thought learning ballroom dancing would be neat and knew where they did lessons on Wednesday nights. I drove over there, went up the stairs, looked in, and saw one row of men and one of women and they seemed to know what they were doing. According to the clock, they should have just started. I was terrified looking at all those people who knew what they were doing. The men were in sync and the women could see everything the men did. I took off.

Finally, a few months later, I went back and started trying. Even for a simple foxtrot (for the guys, step forward on the left, forward on the right, step to the side with the left, then bring the right foot over to close — for steps, forward-forward-left-close — see how easy it is?) when the teacher started to show us, I started to feel like that kid in elementary school and felt like everyone was looking at me, taunting me and just waiting for me to fail (or fall!). I was facing a deep fear to do this and I kept coming back each week. After six weeks we were back to the same dance and I had forgotten everything. I didn’t learn much that first 9 months or so, but had started enjoying it.

About the only thing I did learn by going once a week was that I could face the fear and make my feet move the way the instructor showed me. Then about a year ago, that instructor opened her own studio. I started going one night a week, then two, then three, then also including their Friday night dance parties, which scared me to death when they first started because nobody was there telling me what to do when I got out on the floor.

I started this, in part, to face my worst fears and that’s what I did. Then, a few months ago, I realized that I was out there taking lessons or going to the party 3-4 or even 5 days a week, not to face my fears, but because I wanted to be dancing. It occurred to me during an advanced tango class that I no longer felt like the kid in elementary school that was scared to death of learning something new that I might fail at. I was actually looking forward to new steps and was facing them with confidence.

And now I’ll be competing in tango, bolero, and several other dances this August and am expecting to do a showcase dance for a special event at the dance studio this September. All this from the school klutz.

I’m so sick of people saying, “I can’t dance.”

There are a number of music services available now that let you pay a small price for a song, download it, and play it. But the question is what are they really offering? For example, Major League Baseball used to sell videos of games online. You could pay for a game, download it, and watch it as much as you wanted on your computer. Then, a little while later, MLB changed their system. Suddenly all the videos people had downloaded would no longer play. People had paid for videos, expected to be able to watch them whenever they wanted, and without any warning these videos were suddenly nothing but useless files on their hard drive. Someone I know has a subscription to Rhapsody, a music service by Real.com. Rhapsody has made some changes and suddenly this person is not able to download or play their music as before.

This is the result of something called DRM. Officially DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, but it might be more accurate to say it means Digital Restrictions Management. Record companies are scared. The big stores have had to close and their entire business model is changing. This fear is leading to a lot of dumb moves, including heavy use of DRM. What this means is that you can pay for music and they control it. You can buy a song, but only play it on certain devices. If they decide to change their business methods, you may no longer be able to even play that song again, just as all the customers of MLB’s video service suddenly lost the ability to watch videos they had paid for.

This is where “free as in speech” comes in. Free speech is about being able to say what you want, to express yourself, and to have control over your freedoms. Even most music on iTunes is not free as in this sense. Buy a song for 99 cents and you can play it on your iPod or several other devices, but that’s it. You’re limited in how many places you can play it and adding and removing devices can be problematical. Recently iTunes has added a new possibility. For $1.29, instead of $.99, you can download songs that are in a higher quality sound format than their regular MP3 files and these new songs are DRM free. For an extra $.30, you can download songs you can play anywhere you want.

This is free music. Yes, you pay for it, but once you get it, you control it. If your computer crashes and you want to play it on another computer (provided you’ve backed it up), there’s no issue with authorized devices. Free. Play it where you want, when you want it and they can’t change their system down the line to make it unplayable later.

Another interesting side story involves Microsoft and their take on DRM. They have been pushing DRM for a few years. If you examine the new features in Vista, you’ll find that there is more in Vista focused on DRM than anything useful. From their point of view, this makes sense. If they can control what you do with songs and videos you pay for, and collect fees for doing so, they make a lot more money. They start controlling how, when, and where you can listen to and view your songs and videos. Last year they came out with a music player called the Zune. At that time they had been using a format called “PlaysForSure” for DRM. Here’s the catch: If you had downloaded songs under “PlaysForSure,” then tried to put them on Microsoft’s own music player, they wouldn’t play. After buying music from Microsoft and their partners, if you wanted to listen to it on their player, you had to pay to download the songs again. You buy it. They control what you do with it.

So what makes sense? Paying someone for music they can control or paying someone else for music you control?

So far I’ve only covered a small part of the story. I haven’t touched on the file sharing issue. In short, record companies feel they are losing money because people buy songs, then make them available, for free, through file sharing. I won’t go into that on this post, but in short, it’s not only illegal, it’s immoral. It’s one thing to have control over my music, it’s another to give it to the world so people don’t pay those who created it. There’s also Sony’s debacle. To protect music on some CDs they were selling, they put a hidden program on the CDs. If you ever played one of these CDs on Windows, it secretly installed this program which actually made your system vulnerable to attacks by viruses. At any level, hurting your customers like this is just plain dumb — and that’s going with a polite interpretation.

So, after saying all this, how about doing something to solve the problem? Here are links to several places on the web where you can download music that is not restricted by DRM:

1. iTunes: Perhaps the best known online music store of all. They sell music that is both DRM protected and DRM free (as in no restrictions). Just be clear on what you’re buying before you buy it. The DRM free tracks sell for $1.29 instead of $.99. The only issue to be aware of is these tracks are also in a different format, providing a better sound (MP3 files have some issues with quality). Instead of being MP3 files, they are in AACS. Check to be sure your music player can play this file format before downloading.
2. MTraks: Sells DRM free music of all different types. They also seem to be focused on providing a place for discussion and to build a community around the music you like.
3. Amie Street: Not only does this site provide DRM free music, which is free as in speech, but it provides music that is free, as in beer. They have an interesting pricing model. The more a track is downloaded, the higher the price goes. If you’re like me, and more interested in the non-mainstream, then you can find a lot of music that’s free.
4. Amazon.com: The granddaddy of all web stores offers music for download, but, even better, is that it offers DRM free music. I’ll add a warning that I have not fully explored what they offer, so I would advice checking to see if the tracks you’re downloading are DRM free or not. Perhaps it’s all DRM free, I just haven’t had time to check it.
5. Walmart.com: It hurts me to include this, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. While I boycott Wal-Mart for many reasons, one thing they’ve got right is selling music without DRM. This is a link to the music part of their site where you can buy DRM free music.

I have not bought music from any of these online stores. I’ve checked into them and looked up some info on them but I have to admit I’m still stuck on the idea of physically owning what I buy and still prefer CDs. Besides, I don’t run Windows, so I can put in any CD that will play on a CD player into my Linux computer and copy the files to my hard drive so I can play them through Slimserver.

So why would I, a strong supporter of local stores, come within an inch of saying to someone in a store, “That’s okay. I’ll get it on Amazon?”

When I was a teen, my second job was working at a local grocery store named Ukrops. I learned a lot about business by watching how the store worked. While I still think, as an adult 3 years (okay, stop laughing and stop adding a zero to that three!) later, that the manager of that store had some issues and did make work harder for some of us than necessary, overall, I learned how to treat customers and employees. The store closed at 9:00 P.M. That meant at 9:00, we’d lock the door. Then one of the managers would step over to one of the intercom phones at all the cash registers and page the store and say, “Joe, turn off the lights.” I saw them do it even if Joe or Bob or whoever they paged was only 3 feet from them. However, nothing was ever said to a single customer about us closing the store. Joe (or Jeff or me or anyone else) would go around and turn off the lights in the coolers and freezers, but the overhead lights were left on. Most lights were still on. If customers asked for help, we helped them. Then we’d get a customer count and they’d keep only as many cashiers and courtesy clerks (the polite job title for grocery baggers who also carried the groceries to the customer’s car) as needed. I remember waiting over 20 minutes on some nights for customers to finish up and check out before I could take their groceries to their car. One friend told me he waited 45 minutes one night.

It didn’t matter how long we had to wait, we were patient. We didn’t complain. We helped the customer. There was a woman who would show up at 8:55 three or four nights a week and rush in and would often finish about 9:10 that night. We called her the “Nine O’Clock Lady.” It wasn’t a mean name. The Front End Manager might say, “Hal, get a customer count,” and I’d come back and say, “Just the Nine O’Clock Lady.” He’d roll his eyes, as if to say, “I should’ve known!” and dismiss all but one cashier and courtesy clerk. One rare night she bought enough that she wanted me to carry her bag out for her (she usually only bought a few items). We chatted and she told me she was a nurse in home health care and she worked with a woman at her home and could never leave before about 8:45. The reason she was in so many evenings at 8:55 was because she was on a long shift and that was as soon as she could get there. She didn’t want to keep us late, so she didn’t want to pick up much at a time.

We just never know what is going on in someone else’s life and Ukrops made life much easier for this woman by staying open and not kicking her out of the store at 9:00 each night. If we were more aware, and if I, or any other courtesy clerk she had talked to, had thought about it, we might have made sure that we were expecting her one night a week so she could shop without rushing.

Tonight I was at a dance party. (I’m taking ballroom dancing lessons and on Friday nights the ballroom dance studios usually have a party for their students to enjoy.) At one point they played a song for the Viennese Waltz. I had never heard this song before and thought it was beautiful. I asked the studio owner the name of the song and she showed it to me on the CD. (For reference, it was written as “Once Upon a Dezember”, but I found it spelled with the normal American spelling for December on the soundtrack for the animated “Anastasia.”) When I left, it was 10:45 and I headed straight to Barnes and Noble, which closed at 11:00. Personally, I strongly prefer Boarders Books and Music, since they have a much broader suggestion. I think Barnes and Noble has a nice atmosphere, but their selection is quite limited, more like the “Top 40″ than an in depth selection for a broad range of book and music lovers. I also tend to prefer the smaller, local stores over chain stores. Still, I don’t hate Barnes and Noble and buy a lot from them.

I got there about 5 minutes before closing and told the clerk in the music section I had heard of a song, what the title was, and could we find it? We thought it was on a Disney CD (I only found out which movie it was from later). I was looking and he helped, but their search system is limited. If you search for “December” in a title, it only looks at the start of the title. It won’t match a title that ends with December or has it in the middle. (From a programming point of view, this is easy to deal with and it’s hard to see how anyone but an idiot would overlook this.) We were looking when the announcement came out over the intercom: “It is 11:00 clock and Barnes and Noble is now closed.” We were still searching and I had started looking for “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” to see if I could find it on an album since their search system was crippled. The clerk was back behind the counter and he called out, “Sir, We’re closed.”

I almost hit the ceiling! I didn’t say anything, but I was shocked. Anywhere I’ve worked, you don’t just kick out a customer you’re helping at closing time. You try to finish up with them, but he said I could come back tomorrow. I left, came home, and found the song with 1 search on Google, then got the album on Amazon immediately.

Any wonder why I’m not going to bother going back to Barnes and Noble tomorrow to see if they have the album in stock? They had me in the store and could have had my cash in their pocket, but the clerk said to come back the next day. I’m not going back. I will call the store and ask the manager if it’s their policy to finish helping customers at closing or to shut off the register immediately and tell the customer to go home when it’s possible to make the sale rather quickly. I don’t care what their answer is, since their attitude has already told me just how much they wanted to make the sale. If I don’t order this from Amazon, I won’t buy it from Barnes and Noble. Would you?

There have been times when I’ve made a friend and within a day after I get a forwarded email that ends with, “Forward this to 200 people within the next 5 minutes and you’ll have great luck, the war in Iraq will end, and global warming will cease. If you do not forward it, then you’ll hit and kill 12 squirels while driving tomorrow and you’ll be in misery for the rest of your life.” If it’s not that, then it’s an email about how the Roswell UFO incident was exactly 9 months before Hillary Clinton was born.

That’s untrue, by the way. However, approximately 9 months after the Roswell incident, Al Gore, Wolf Blitzer, Rhea Perlman, John DeLancie, Andrew Lloyd weber, and Stevie Nicks were born. Does that mean anything? Does anyone care — that is, unless they’re so desparate to trash Al Gore and make their candidate look good that they’ll go to any lengths to trash him.

And that’s part of my point. Many emails I get that are forwarded to me are often full of hate and invective. Recently I got one about Barack Obama and I am so used to people using these emails to trash people that I just assumed the woman sending it to me was doing so with the intent of making Obama look bad. The truth is she was fed up with the same kind of slander and lies that gets forwarded for no good reason, just like I was.

There are problems with forwarded email. The least of the problems is with emails asking to be forwarded to others to bring some kind of good will. Many don’t see how they can be a problem. They are. If I forwarded every such piece of email that arrived in my inbox, I would have soon done nothing other than forward emails. Soon a number of people in my address book would never want to read a single email of mine again.

Email is for communication. It’s so I can tell my friends what is going on, so we can joke back and forth, so we can discuss serious issues, or for other forms of communication. When that channel of communication is needed for clarity and it gets blocked up by many “feel good” emails, people don’t hear what needs to be communicated. I have a policy, hard and fast, that I use with any such email. Any time I get a “warm fuzzy” email from someone that asks to be forwarded, I return it to them and say, “I do not forward emails to other people. I do not return emails that ask to be returned. No exceptions. If you do feel this needs to be forwarded, I’ll forward it to you 20 times.”

I’ve never had to do this more than 2-3 times before I stopped getting “warm fuzzy” emails from a person. I’ve never seen any indication it’s hurt a relationship with a person, but people do seem to get the message. The plain truth is that before I started doing that, I got so many warm fuzzies asking to be forwarded I couldn’t keep up with them.

For some people, such emails may serve a purpose. They’re a way to let others know they’re thinking of them, but when you add the burden of forcing someone to forward it to more people, it becomes, as I said, a burden. It’s just not right and not fair.

The other situation is worse. I’ve gotten, literally, hundreds of emails about political candidates and personalities telling me that they did this and said that. Whenever I get one, I think of Socrates and his three filter test.

A man came up to Socrates and said, “I have something to tell you about one of your friends,” and Socrates said, “Is it good?” And the man said it was not, then Socrates asked, “Is it true?” and the man said he didn’t know if it was. Then Socrates asked, “Is it information I can use?” and again, the man said, “No.” Then Socrates asked, “Why do you want to tell me something about someone if you don’t know if it’s true, it’s not good, and it’s not useful?” His three filters are if something is true, good, or useful.

I’m not trying to insult or slam anyone. I am making a point about forwarded emails. People get an email from a friend and think, “I know this person, so it must be true,” then they forward it without checking it, not realizing their friend probably did the same thing, and so on, through a good 20-30 people.

Isn’t this even worse than gossip? It is spreading information that is often negative and hurtful without even making sure it is true, or even just assuming it is true without checking on it.

When I get email like this from someone, I look up the key words on one of two sites:

http://snopes.com
http://truthorfiction.com

There used to be one great one, UrbanLegends.com (or .org?) but it seems to now have most of it’s data on snopes.com.

If I find that the data being forwarded is false, I reply to the email with a link to the page verifying it is false on one of these two sites (or another if I use Google). Most of my friends have gotten the point: Don’t forward something until you have checked on whether or not it’s true. Some even send me emails they’re unsure of so I can check it out for them.

The bottom line is that many people forward emails, over and over, to others without ever checking if those emails are true. Many times these emails contain nasty rumors that make others look bad. Forwarding them amounts to lying about people and spreading lies to make others look bad. It’s not nice, it’s inappropriate for pretty much any religion, and it’s just plain wrong.

If you want to forward an email, please use Socrates’ three filter test to see if it’s worth sending and please check to see if it’s easy to prove true or false first.

Thanks!