Required Watching

Say what you will about the show "Glee", but I think this scene from this week's episode is one that EVERYBODY should see. Obviously, spoiler alert for those who watch, but aren't yet caught up.

(Quick background for those unfamiliar with the show: the first kid talking, Kurt, is openly gay. The second kid, Finn, has just moved in with Kurt, because their parents moved in together. Finn isn't happy about moving in, or sharing a room. The third guy is Kurt's father, Burt.)



I like this clip for two important reasons - first, the early half does a good job of bringing up the difference between words on their own, and what you're REALLY saying when you use them. Trying to disguise your true meaning doesn't make you clever - it makes you a coward. And in cases like these, it makes you a cowardly bigot. Second, it's just some damn good parenting.

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The Show Must Go On

Right now, it's 2:30am, and I'm listening to Queen and I just finished writing my "senior will" (basically, my letter to my current team, to be printed in our yearbook). Very fittingly, the song that is currently playing is "The Show Must Go On".

Sitting down to write my will was far more emotional than I anticipated. It forced me to confront the fact that, in 4 weeks' time, I'm done. An entire chapter of my life is closed, only to be remembered, but never relived. I'm not okay with this now, and I know that in the coming weeks, it'll only get harder.

But at the same time, I'm comforted by my music. The show must indeed go on, even after I (and many of my closest friends) have left. Our show is changing, but it will still go on. The Dykstra show also continues, to played out by the very capable people I've had the honor and pleasure to work with this past year.

And as one of these soon-to-be returners so wisely predicted, writing things out has been really helpful. It's not making the process any less painful, but it's helping me to accept it.

After all, the show WILL go on.

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Facebook Privacy Overhaul

I've been meaning to really clean up and lock down my Facebook account, given that I'm going to start looking for jobs in the near future. And given all the general privacy concerns that keep cropping up, I decided tonight was as good a time as any.

I don't really like Facebook, but considering the massive install base, it's not really useful for me to just delete it altogether. There are lots of other services that do specific things better than Facebook does, but they're decentralized. I wrote about how I like that Google Buzz works to correct this, but it's still not all the way there. So for now, Facebook needs to remain. But I wanted to go more draconian on it.

Basically, I set up 3 main contact lists: Friends (for close, personal friends), Family (for family members, and family friends), and Professional (for work-related contacts, past and present). I then went through every one of the privacy settings, and set which of these groups were allowed to view that aspect of my profile (or if it was open to my entire friends list).

Most of my profile is visible only to those on the Friends or Family lists, with select things made more or less restrictive, depending. For example, only people on the Friends list can see tagged photos of me, but anybody can post on my wall. The Professional list gets access to some of my contact information that is hidden from the vast majority of my contacts, because the people on that list might want/need to email me, where random kids from high school can just use Facebook to contact me. Things like that.

Of course, this doesn't mean I'm going to just post anything and everything to Facebook, and trust these settings to keep it away from most people. I'm going to continue to be proactive in what gets put online associated with my name and such (as I always have been), and I would recommend that anybody who uses this method still goes through and cleans stuff up manually.

Also, I still have concerns about Facebook's storage and use of my info, so I pulled out a lot of it. Granted, much of it is easily discoverable on this blog, or my site, but at least it isn't being automatically aggregated.

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