Funk Babblings

hi rob. your blurbish here has several points that i really identify with. for the most part, i don't really get it either.


i come from a systems admin background. in fact, i saw you give a lecture on "how to use linux" about 10 years ago at THE osu. you were running mandrake which now seems funny for some reason. anyway, i've been eavesdropping on the cult of ruby for a while myself.


like you, i was at first a little surprised to see such an avid mac community among rubyists (i'm typing this up in kubuntu). people used to justify a windowing system for development by saying, "i need visual studio". wtf. i sometimes think of ruby as "turbo bash". or "bash++". you can completely debug on the command line with irb, and in fact, all of the cool kids do that. so, it struck me as peculiar that all of these ruby kids use macs, and STILL work on the command line. i'm still not completely sure what to think of it, other than the fact that the terminal in mac OSX is so pretty you could code for days without getting eye strain. also, you can use standard unix pathing and chmod/chown works as expected, but i still don't really get it.


like you, i've also noted that ruby developers are totally into twitter. at first i thought it was an act of solidarity. like, "let's support twitter since it's a big rails app". but these guys are actually *using* twitter just to say, "hey, i think i'll try to serialize a ruby proc into postgres" and then later, "hey, i just made spaghetti for my sister". go gadget go.


the september 2008 issue of scientific american is fully dedicated to the notion of privacy. in it, the authors suggest that this new "facebook" generation has a completely different expectation of privacy. none. my juvenile disasters and embarrassments are distant memories and only a few people share those memories and rib me about it. this new generation puts all of their foibles onto youtube, facebook, etc and unlike dns, there's no time-to-live on that content. that video of you pretending to have light-saber skills in your living room will live on forever on youtube.


twitter, i think, takes that willingness to self-exploit even further. instead of saying "hey, look at my periodic self-documentation" these twitter users seem to be saying, "hey behold my *stream of consciousness*". "hey experience my life *at the same rate that i am*". talk about a diminished expectation of privacy.


wow. i don't get it either. it just doesn't seem practical.