just an asterisk

I don’t publicize my blog very much at my day job.  It’s just not really relevant to what I do for a living and frankly, I like having a strong line between work and play.  However, this is a luxury that may disappear soon (if it hasn’t already).  This past week, I read this article which demonstrated the elephant memory of the internet (and resulted in me learning something new about that expression.)  Basically, one of the contributors of DownloadSquad.com (a great blog for software) attempted to remove himself from Facebook a few months ago.  He was surprise to find that his Facebook image was still available from Google’s image search, even when his account was closed.

The truth is this:  when your picture goes out into the lovely webs of cyberspace, it’s never gone.  It might be just sitting on a shelf without a label – that is, until the technology to link you to the evidence comes along.  As an example, try Googling yourself on Google’s image search:

When I tried this, I found my photo on page 17 of the results from a site that I had never seen before.  That alone was pretty strange.  However, don’t stop there – add a piece of information about yourself that others might know (like the company you worked for last) and you might be surprised how much the field narrows.  I went from page 17 with millions of hits down to page 1 with my picture as number 2, just by adding a former job to my search.

Companies liked LinkedIn and Facebook are the source of many of these images, but there are also companies that archive older pictures from the Facebook or LinkedIn database.  For example, Radaris (which does background checks) has a copy of my LinkedIn image (how is that ok?).  Long story short, even if you remove a picture from the site you’ve signed up with, you might be too late.

There really isn’t a fix for this. The best answer is probably not to post things unless you’re sure you want the world to see it.  I know that we’ve heard this before, but the supporting evidence is rarely so easy to find.

Best of luck staying safe out there!

~ab

I received a request from Dave on this one – Thanks Dave! – and I couldn’t resist trying to do it.  Here is the Frankenstein-like result:

What the program does

This program is for emailing new events to your Google Calendar.  It checks your Gmail account for new events that were sent to a special label every ten seconds.  It can only process one calendar entry every ten seconds (but if you’r emailing in more than that, it’s pretty impressive and you are far too busy to be playing with my software).

I couldn’t find any 3rd party services that do this, so I had to improvise using AutoHotKey and a script I wrote previously for quick adding events to Google calendar.  The result is a bit rickety, but it does the job.  Improvements may or may not occur over time and currently it does not work with google apps (although it couldn’t be that hard to fix this).

Setup

It requires three pieces of setup (these are the defaults which can be modified if you know how to script):

1. Create a Gmail filter that puts take email sent to youraddress+jaacal@gmail.com into a new folder/label called jaacal.  You can also say “skip the inbox” so these emails don’t clutter things up.

2. Download the zip file from this link – Email to Google Calendar (93) – and unpack it to a directory of your choosing.

3.  Change the logon.txt file to include your email, your user name (email without @gmail.com) and your password.  Make sure you keep this file in the same folder as the EXE file.

Workin’ it

Once you’ve done these three steps, run the EXE file and walk away.  Send an email with your quick add text in the subject line to the address above and it will appear on your calendar within about 20 seconds.  An example of a quick add subject line could be something like “dinner with Dave to thank him for such a good idea tommorrow 10pm”.  It doesn’t matter what you put in the body, the program will just ignore it.

Download Email to Google Calendar (93)

And that’s about it! Let me know your thoughts at ab@justanasterisk.com or in the comments.

~ab

Tired of PowerPoint? Want a simple online alternative that beats Google Presentations? Checkout Prezi.com. I won’t write much more about it – you can see my demo presentation embeded below.

Good luck!!!

~ab

My dear wife,

You were right.  It took me nearly a year, I swore up and down that my Flickr account was the bees knees, I wrote articles and explanations of how to use Flickr’s advanced tool set, and I ruined perfectly good cocktail party conversations, berating all services that did not stack up to my personal choice.

A year has gone by and now, like a dope, I have to reverse my position.  Why?  Because Picasa just changed the game, and I can no longer ignore the beautiful integration between Picasa and all my other apps.  Before I start into the details, this isn’t to say that Flickr is a bad service – it’s just no longer for me (yes I’m trying to save face – but let’s not write off Flickr entirely… there are too many devotees).

Without any more ado, here are the top 4 reasons I’ve decided to change over.

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