I really wish the woodpeckers would stop jackhammering at the house.

Oh that Rush game starts at 7:30 PM if you need a time to decide.

It's kind of interesting what kind of information we are willing to put on facebook or similar sites. Even if you don't put on to much information it can still be sold as a commodity by the owners of facebook. Not like they really care about your actual identity but the demographic information and the activities you do can be used for some purpose. They don't need to actually see your page to ge this information either, I'm sure they have all our stats and such databased on some nice little spreadsheet. All our names are replaced by numbers but the info is still there. Not to make you paranoid or anything but as a means for market research facebook's strategy is brilliant! No more annoying polls or phone calls, just need to get your mark to make a personal page on a "social networking" site.

Sounds too smart for a morning Al post.

Alison, to answer your question, which was unfortunately placed, it's because I originally wrote the new version here when the damnyouparas.com server was on central time (so I would subtract an hour from posting times.) Now it's on eastern time, but they haven't upgraded to a version of PHP that would let me automagically correct for that.

In short, my posts were an hour late because of a bug. But it's fixed now (I think).

I guess I'm going to have to concede the point on this one. While that video wasn't necessarily a politician, and while I guess the US Director of National Intelligence isn't really a politician per se, it seems that non-satirical people are indeed capable of that level of circular logic about very serious matters.

1) Waterboarding has been approved at the highest levels of the US government:

When higher-level al-Qaeda operatives were captured, CIA interrogators sought authority to use more coercive methods.

These were cleared not only at the White House but also by the Justice Department and briefed to senior congressional officials, according to a statement released last month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Waterboarding was one of the approved techniques.

"Waterboarding would be excruciating," the US director of national security, in overall charge of intelligence, said in the interview in the New Yorker magazine, speaking of the simulated drowning technique that many regard as torture.

"If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful! Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture," he said.

When asked to define torture, McConnell replied: "My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain."

But [McConnell] told the magazine flatly: "We don't torture."

Actually, I already do all of that, but I'm less concerned about what they're trying to sell to me than what they're trying to sell about me.

Clearly, I'm not so uncomfortable with it that I'm deleting my account yet. That said, that it takes so much to delete one's account is somewhat disquieting.

(Your point about using browsers without adblock is well taken, though. Using the computers at the hospital -- often with just IE6 and, hence, no tabs -- drives me insane.)

Hey Par, where are you that you're an hour later than the rest of us? it is only 8:15 right now... right?


*Edit: this post would have made more sense if Par's post above it had actually been below this one, as he'd posted it before I posted this one... if that makes any sense...

Good news everybody!

I just won 2 tickets to the Edmonton Rush game this saturday!

So who wants to see this game with me? If you could let me know by the end of tuesday that would be nice. Otherwise I'll give the tickets back so another lucky person can win them.

You know how to contact me. (Don't phone my cell, it's kind of not working right now)

well, if you're thinking along those lines, you should join the How To Permanently Delete Your Facebook Account group. It appears as though they make it just about the most convoluted process ever to entirely remove yourself from the website.

And, while I can understand what the critique is saying, if you keep your profile private, and you don't join too many things or add on applications, it's not that intrusive, provided you don't share too much. AND, if you have Adblock, you really don't get all the ads, targetted or otherwise. I love wandering through the internet and ONLY looking at content. I realise it's not exactly representative of the entire world's internet experience (and quite honestly, I don't like surfing the 'net on anyone else's browser now), but it works alright for me.

I'm starting to feel conflicted about this: no one wants to look like a hypocrite, but while I still use the site for now, I can't help but point to interesting critiques of Facebook like this: With friends like these ...:

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.