Hopefully I’ll be writing here a lot more now than in the past. My situation has changed so I’m thinking a lot more freely now. Stay tuned…

Take a look at the screenshots of the two Youtube videos below and pay particular attention to the viewer counts highlighted in red.

I have nothing against kittens and the fact that so many people are getting enjoyment from one of the most Awwww inspiring videos on the web makes me smile. The problem I have is with the huge difference between the viewer count of the kitten video and the video on learning.

If you look at the viewer counts on the more intellectual videos on Youtube and compare them to videos that are more popular or have been promoted, you’ll immediately see the trend. With Youtube being so big and having so much traffic, the trends on the site give us a pretty good overview of what a significant portion of the general public are more concerned about in their daily lives. And it’s definitely not learning new things.

I chose to use a screenshot of Sir Ken Robinson‘s video on learning for a reason. Ken is an advocate of learning and has devoted a large part of his life to helping Governments, Colleges and Schools change the way they teach young people by giving them more freedom to choose their path in life, rather than having the school system do it for them. Ironically, the school systems around the world have taught kids in such a way that very few of them have the desire to take it upon themselves to learn outside the school system, which is one of the reasons why Ken’s videos and others like them have relatively little attention given to them online.

As a respected friend of mine pointed out on Twitter “The kitten is a moment of pure joy that makes people smile…” and I agree with her wholeheartedly. The problem is that learning needs to bring joy as well. Without that balance, the human race is doomed.

In the book, the main character tries to re-invent his life in an effort to add more excitement and adventure. As part of that re-invention, he basically shuts down his life in one country and moves to another, leaving as little of himself behind as possible.

I won’t go into any more detail about the book, I’ll just outline some of the things I’ve found while doing my research.

Anything and everything people do today leaves behind information. If you go to a store and use a credit or debit card, not only is there an itemized list of the things you purchased as well as the date and time, but there’s likely to be surveillance video of you entering the store, how you act and what you do while inside the store and of you leaving. Oftentimes there’s also video of the vehicle you’re driving and it’s license plates.

It doesn’t stop there. If you go to your bank or any ATM machine, go through a coffee shop drive-thru or most urban street intersections, you’re on video.

Now this tracking information and video is all stored in different databases for different reasons. The store surveillance tapes are used if there’s criminal activity like shoplifting or a robbery. The cash register keeps a record of what you bought and at what time for the store’s records, inventory control, taxes and other financials, etc. The credit card or debit card info is needed to debit money and transfer it to the store’s accounts and also for banking records, so even though it seems scary when you think about how much info is collected about you and your shopping trip, it’s not like someone is sitting in an office singling you out and watching your every move. The data is fragmented.

But if necessary, someone with authority like the police or a government organization could collect all that information and build a startlingly precise profile detailing your every move, and why you do what you do in your daily life.

Lets do a run-through, shall we?

A 29 year old divorced woman with no children has gone missing. After 24 hours using only electronically collected data and without searching the woman’s home or interviewing friends, family or co-workers, here’s what a police investigation can turn up:

1. Birth certificate showing the woman’s name, her parent’s names, where she was born, birth date, etc.

2. Social Security number which leads to detailed tax records, bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards, education like colleges or courses and other training, etc.

3. The above would also lead to drivers licences, cars owned, a complete history of where she has lived since birth, library cards, frequent flyer cards, retail cards, utilities like landline phones and phone records, cell phones and records, power, water and gas bills, whether she was renting or owned a home at the time of her disappearance, etc.

4. Now that we have all her background info, it starts to get more interesting.

She buys groceries with her credit card which has the store location, date and time of her last purchase, plus a transaction number that can be paired up with the sales records at that store. With this info, we can pull the store reciept and see exactly what our missing woman bought two days before her disappearance. She likes healthy but convenient food, buying things like ready-made salads and pre-cut fruit, as well as fish like shrimp and tuna. She likes her coffee strong, buying expensive robusta beans and grinding them at home.

Whole grain cereals and power bars top off the list of food items, but while there she also picked up vacuum bags, a lint brush, toilet bowl cleaner, dry cat food and tampons. Yes, very personal info. Go back a few months through those credit card purchases and a cop could pretty accurately map out the missing woman’s menstrual cycle on a calendar based on when she usually buys her personal items.

The store surveillance tape reveals some other details. While shopping, she wore black leggings, flat sandals, a pink top with a hood and her dark hair with lighter highlights was in a loose ponytail. As she made her way around the store collecting her groceries, she didn’t do much browsing. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted and quickly but unhurridly gathered her items, with no grocery list. This would indicate she’s a well organized person or a creature of habit, only stopping a couple times to check text messages and reply using a touch-screen phone.

Phone records indicate that her phone was a Samsung Omnia and she replied to three text messages from a 30 year old male who was at a stationary location approximately 7 miles from her, according to cell tower triangulation data. Records also indicate that she had received several dozen texts and 6 calls from the man in the past 30 days. Hmmmm…

Instead of heading straight home from the grocery store, she drove her 3.5 year old silver colored Honda Accord sedan to a local coffee shop, passing a Starbucks and a Dunkin Donuts along the way. At the drivethru she paid for her 12oz skinny latte by tapping her MasterCard on the terminal outside the serving window. 2 blocks away, while turning right onto the main street leading into her neighborhood, a camera at the intersection caught her turning wide and jumping into the center lane without using a turn signal.

One hour and 29 minutes later, her home internet service provider recorded her 15.4 inch Toshiba laptop with a screen resolution of 1280X800 and Windows Vista Home Ultimate OS logging onto Facebook using a Firefox 3.5 browser. Seconds later, she logged into a gmail account containing over 1000 archived messages, no doubt some of them containing other revealing info about her likes, dislikes, people she knows and companies or online services she’s dealt with over the past couple of years or so.

A cursory look at her public Facebook and Twitter profiles reveals just over a hundred photos of her, some of her alone, some with both male and female friends, all tagged and interlinked to their own accounts and their accounts lead to other social networking profiles they own.

She also has a Youtube account with 22 videos. Some of the videos are vlogs where she’s talking about personal things and feelings. Some of the videos were shot on a beach during a vacation just over a year ago. The photos on Facebook and her ramblings on Twitter reveal a near complete story of her trip, who she interacted with as well as key aspects of her personality.

Her entire world is now wide open for further investigation.

——

I could go on and on but I’ll stop here.

All of the above info and volumes more can be collected by any law enforcement agency within a matter of hours.

The basics like birth certificate, SSN, drivers license and credit cards can lead to everything else and the blanks can be filled in using credit card purchases, surveillance cameras and social networking profiles.

For the purposes of research and character development for my book, the info I’m finding and stringing together is not merely helping me set the scene for what the main character does as he’s trying to erase his former life and start anew, it’s helping me piece together the character himself, right down to imagining what brand of shaving cream he uses and how it smells – important info the feds could use if they ever had to look for him

First, start with a sentence consisting of 4 to 8 words that means something only to you so that it’s easy to remember. Then capitalise the first letter of each word:

My Mother’s Maiden Name Is Smith

Now, find punctuation or a symbol on your keyboard and use it between each word to fill in the spaces.

My*Mother’s*Maiden*Name*Is*Smith

Next, convert letters in the sentence to their similar numbers and symbols. For the purpose of this example, I’ve used 0 (zero) in place of the letter “o”, the # symbol for the letter “h”, the @ symbol to replace the letter “a” and the number 1 to replace the “i”.

My*M0t#er’$*M@1den*N@me*I$*$m1t#

You have upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols in a format that’s simple, a password that’s really easy for you to remember yet extremely hard for someone else to guess or crack. In fact, if you were a spy who was captured and was being tortured in a foreign country and they asked you what your logins and passwords were for your online contacts, you’d have a hard time telling your captors!

For added security, never use the same password on two different sites, and for heaven sake, never use the same password you use on Facebook or Twitter on your banking site or PayPal. If one of your accounts gets compromised, the person doing the compromising is smart enough to know that most people use the same email and password on lots of different sites and they may try to log in elsewhere using your credentials.

Be safe. But sadly, more and more people are falling victim to password phishing and cracking. Long, complicated passwords may be a pain in the butt to type in, but they’re worth it. Don’t be the next victim.

Let me repeat that last part “I read a post on a blog that said blogging is dead.”

Isn’t that sort of like if I picked up the phone and called my Mother to tell her that talking on the phone is dead? Or how about if I walked over to my neighbor’s house and told him walking was dead?

Now if that, in and of itself, isn’t already a good enough indication that whoever wrote the post is full of mongoose poop, lets travel back in time a few years so you can get a feel of where blogging came from, where it is now and where it’s heading:

In the middle part of the 20th century, animal bones and tortoise shells inscribed with a primitive pictorial language were found in the Henan province, China, at a Neolithic site at Jiahu. The artifacts are estimated to be at least 8,000 years old and are the earliest known examples of a complex written language. Over the next few thousand years, other cultures evolving in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa and Western South America all developed their own forms of written language.

In the earliest examples, the medium and tools used to spread the written language were shells and bones. In other cultures it was the walls of their homes, temples, rocks, trees, pieces of leather, etc. But the medium was usually some type of convenient surface that could be carved, etched or painted on with relative ease. In other words, they communicated knowledge, beliefs, thoughts and art by writing on whatever was around at the time. The medium and tools simply facilitated the communication.

But that doesn’t mean the medium wasn’t important. Advances in technology have certainly facilitated advances in communication, even thousands of years ago. People eventually figured out how to make mud and clay tablets where, while soft it was easy to write on them quickly and then when they dried and hardened the message was preserved. The same happened when people discovered that you could easily carve, paint and/or dye messages into animal skins and the message was durable for years to come. And I certainly don’t need to explain how paper and the printing press revolutionised written language and communication.

And the medium has advanced now to the point where if someone in Melbourne, Australia typed 140 characters and clicked an Update button, milliseconds later you’re reading that message 12,000 miles away in Canada. But the purpose hasn’t changed at all in 8,000 years – the medium and tools were developed to facilitate the communication.

I’m writing this message by typing on a computer keyboard. That keyboard enters and stores my message onto a medium, like the hard drive on my computer, the RAM, whatever and when I click the Publish button, I tell software on a remote machine to store my message there until you decide to access it on your computer or device. Then you read my message. All that technology is there to process, store and serve my message to you.

8,000 years ago you would have been reading this message scratched into a tortoise shell.

Blog software and other tools like WordPress, MovableType, ExpressionEngine, Twitter, Facebook Status updates, whatever, are just tools to facilitate that communication. They’re modern day tortoise shells.

Blogging is just a newfangled way of saying “I’m using this tool to communicate my message.”

The word “Blogging” might eventually die or be replaced, but communicating won’t. Even after we’re gone.

Someone, or something, somewhere, will eventually find our proverbial tortoise shells. How much do you think they’ll snicker at us when they decipher our scribblings and find the message “Communicating is dead?”

And that’s a problem. Here’s why:

If you are not building anything for yourself, be it a site, a reputation, a brand, or even just blogging a few times a week, you are dead. Plain and simple.

What happens (not if, but…) when the client work dries up? You have nothing to fall back on.

So from this point on, the work I do for clients will be used to fund a real business. That is all for now.

My computer is running a lot cooler, with the fan only speeding up occasionally, the OS isn’t constantly bugging me to pay attention to it, tons of work is getting done with less distractions – just the way it should be.

I’m all about keeping things clean and simple, so my desktop is not cluttered with icons, there are no flashy backgrounds, no desktop effects, etc. and that’s what I find so sexy about the way I have Ubuntu Linux set up – it’s naked. Zen like. And that inspires me.

Not much of an update, I know, but there’s really nothing to say about the OS on this computer anymore. It’s out of the way where an OS should be so I can get on with my work.