No, I’m not leaving my job as a web developer. I’m still working there. What I have done is applied and gotten a job as a part-time tutor at Sylvan Learning Center. I could use the extra money, especially with the holidays coming up, so I decided to take the job. I originally applied last April when I was working at a school but they didn’t call me until recently. I’ll tutor for a couple hours a night a few times a week. It will suck giving up my free time but it’s only for a couple hours and I could use the money. It will also feel good to help the kids and interacting with them, something I’ve missed since I started the web development job. They want to start me out on reading and math and then train me for accelerated reading, speed reading, and ACT prep. So, if I’m not around as much, that’s the reason why. I start my training tomorrow.
I was thinking about how connected the world has become with the social aspect of various websites. It really is amazing how connected we’ve become with other people. I think that in the future we’ll be even more connected. For instance, right now if we want to become friends with someone we have to add them to each social network we use. This becomes tedious when we use a lot of different websites. In one scenario I might make a new friend. I’ll add them to IM to keep in touch. Of course, I’ll want to know what the person is up to so I’ll ad them to Twitter and Facebook. Maybe I want to know what their interests are and what websites they find interesting, so I’ll add them to Delicious and Digg. Oh, and when we get together and have a blast and take pictures I’ll want to see them, so I’ll add them to Flickr as well. I’m sure in the future in the natural development of the web, adding a person to all these will be much simpler (for instance, check out HelloMyNameisE.com for how they are doing it with mobile phones). Since this isn’t widely adopted yet, you still have to go and add one by one. That brings me to another problem. Deleting people.
When you finally want to break ties with someone, you have to go and delete them from every service and website. This is a giant pain. It’s amazing how much of our lives we share with others and even more amazing how much it takes to get them out of your life completely. Of course, even if you do remove them from the services, that doesn’t mean they are completely out of your life. They have the potential to keep tabs on you via your personal website, checking status updates on Twitter, checking images on Flickr, etc. It’s amazing how open we are with our data these days and how truly hard it is to break ties with someone. I wonder if services like HelloMyNameisE will allow you to remove the users just as easily as you add them. I think it is definitely something to look into. I wonder if, say in 10 or so years, we’ll see our openness backfire on us, or will we become even more social?
I have a few friends that set their IM status to Invisible when they are online. Since IM is my primary means of communication with some of my friends it bugs me a little. The reason that they are invisible is because they are hiding from someone (or multiple people). I know what you might be thinking. Maybe they are hiding from me. Well, I don’t think they are. A lot of times they will IM me when invisible, and if I do IM them, they respond right away. So they are obviously hiding from someone that’s not me.
I think if you are going to go as far as to hide from someone, why have them on your buddy list to begin with? These friends that are invisible aren’t invisible just when they don’t feel like talking to a certain individual. They are invisible most of the time. The least they could do is set their status to away so if the person they don’t want to talk to does IM them, they can just pretend they are not there. That I don’t mind as much. One of the reasons I hate when people are invisible so much is because a lot of times my messages won’t go through because they are invisible. They just bounce back saying offline messaging isn’t available or the message was not sent because the user isn’t online. This happens most if they are using MSN. I also can’t send them files a lot of the time. So, if they are asking for a file and are invisible, it won’t let me send. If you feel the need to hide from certain people all the time, then delete them from your list. It’s that easy. Stop causing problems for the rest of us :)
This week I joined the St. Louis Bloggers Guild. I know a couple other people that were part of it and I figured it would be a good way to meet fellow St. Louis bloggers. I’m interested to see what kind of things they do, what the meetings are like, and what kind of wisdom they can impart on me. I’ve been blogging for 4 years now so it will be interesting to see the different opinions on blogging, social media, software, etc. that I’m sure the fellow members will have. I really want to get more involved in social media, hit up events such as the Bloggers Guild meetings, tweet-ups, and blog conferences, if we ever get a big enough one to hit St. Louis. BlogOrlando sounded like a great time this year. I would like to see something that big hit St. Louis. One of these times I’m going to have to make it to a conference. I know I’ll never blog for a living, but I think it would be cool to meet people who do and see how they do it. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get into podcasting, but I have no idea what I’ll have to talk about. Unless there is a market for Saved by the Bell podcasts. Is there? Please tell me there is. :)