Before I start on this entry, did I mention that Mad Mex has the best Margaritas ever… probably only about 20 times over. But any how, now that that is out of the way, on to the substance du jour.

I’ve now been on the web from about the time that it came around. I still remember the first day a friend of mine told me about this thing called Mosaic (this was back in 1994-95). he said that it combined text and images and you go to an address and it pulls the information each time. My first thought at the time (honestly) was what a utterly stupid concept, because each you have to get the information you have to go and get it. Seemed like a waste of bandwidth to me! What I was missing at the time and learn’t very quickly thereafter was the fact about the dynamic nature of information. Information changes. Every day, every hour, every minute. The tagline for the BBC News says it best: “Updated every minute of every day.” That in itself is a gargantuan task. I learnt about the dynamic nature of information and it became a passion. A blog is a form of dynamic information.

So of course when things are constantly changing we need a way to track that change. Well, earlier today my good old Q (who I’ve reference multiple times) shows me a site which is both a boon and a curse all in one. It’s called The Internet Archive Now, when I initially got introduced to the web, I created myself a vanity web-site like every other geek on the face of the earth. What initially started at sneaker.pc.cs.cmu.edu turned into www.sneaker.org.

I took down sneaker.org a while ago because I was ambivalent about posting personal information online (of course now I am at the other extreme where I post some of my inner most thoughts for public consumption — with the caveat that sometimes they are covered in a shroud such that only people really close to me or sometimes just I will know what I am talking about. To figure out the real meaning of it all it left as an exercise to the reader … damn I always wanted to say that! 😉 )

But there is a new peoblem emerging on the Net. And that problem is not of seeking, sorting or classifying information, but it is a problem of getting rid of information. The Net has a life of it’s own. And as Q put it earlier today, it is it’s own time machine. The Net captures all, the Net knows all. The Net is not a a network of wires, the Net is all the people connected to it. It is alive. Because the people are alive. I took down the old sneaker.org and led myself to believe that I had successfully eradicated it. But no. That doesn’t happen. because once something is posted on the Net, its traces are there to stay. The Internet Archive project is simply one such example which is a lot of fun and at the same time a scary experience. If you go there and put in any old URL, it will give you a historical snapshot of that site going back to sometime in 1996.

History is being made on the web. And it’s here to stay.

One of the “problems” that emerges from this of course is how do you eradicate certain information. There was a case recently that I heard on NPR where some California government agency posted all the birth, death and marriage records for all Californians on a website. And even though they may try and revoke that information now, it’s too damn late. Because if it’s posted on the web once, it will always be there. There is a huge opportunity in figureing out the solution to this problem… alas, I don’t any any ideas on where to start just yet.

Think about it… this blog entry is going to exist forever… because as soon as I hit the post and publish button, it will be cast into the books of web history….

I’ve never been a real people person. I have a tendency to find myself a quiet corner and stay there. Especially in a new environment or in an environment full of strangers and even more so in an environment fill of strangers of the opposite sex. When I started my own business necessity became the mother of invention and I had to teach myself to network. And no people think that everyone knows me and I know everyone. That is about as far from the truth as can be.

I had to make a real effort in order to get myself to learn how to network in the business world and even more of an effort to be able to “sell”. I’m still probably not very good at “selling” but I get by. There is always room for improvement. But I don’t think I’ve yet made similar strides on the social side of things.

Tonight’s blog is inspired by a night at Doc’s. Now, Jim, the guy who owns Doc’s he is a realy social networker. And an overall good guy. I find that I really like to frequent the places where I know the owners. It gives the place it’s own charm and it’s own awe. Like the new My Thai restaurant on Walnut and Aiken (above Anne Taylor is how most women would know what I’m talking about! 😉 ) and Mad Mex in Oakland. Anyhow, I digress.

I went to Docs after dinner @ My Thai (yes, again) to get a drink and watch people. I like doing that once in a while. To just be an “observer” and watch people. Watching people is fun as you don’t know who they are, what they are like but you sit there and you watch their actions and their behavior and you can make up things of your own. Karen says that’s how people write fiction. They observe people and from it grows a character. Now I definitely haven’t developed an incling for writing fiction. I doubt I’d say I’ve developed an incling for writing yet… it’s more rambling!

But I realize that I am again a hypocrit. Because in a way I am guilty of doing the very same thing that I fear people are doing to me: judging. Or is it not considered judging until you interact with the person? But either way I am forming a preconceived notion of the person(s) I’m observing. And it is this very fear of being a victim of preconceived notions which often makes me more likely to go hide in my own corner and not really engage any new person in conversation.

There is a lot more learning to be done…

I warned Q at some point earlier tonight that he better not send me home to bed at 8:00 PM lest I wake up and start writing about crazy stuff. You see, I took the whole office to Mad Mex tonight for Kiwi Margs. And boy are they good. And boy should you not even try to have more than two big-ass ones! Anyhow this blog entry comes with the caveat that it is being written after two and a half big-ass Kiwi Margs.

I’m fascinated by ordinary people. By the people who I meet in ordinary locations in ordinary circumstances. here’s a “story” behind every person that is shielded by the ordinary-ness of every day interaction. It doesn’tcome out too often. But I’m fascinated by thinking about what that story might me. For a lot of the people I meet in these ordinary interactions I can concoct a story that fits, but being able to validate/change that story by getting to know the person is intriguing — figuring out why they became who they are and what shaped them so far.

Being a skeptic by nature, it is easier for me to doubt than not to doubt. But I know that I have been wrong before and very often the same people who I develop a very wrong firs impression of, turn out the be the most genuine individuals. It’s a matter of cracking the shell. And sometimes multiple shells. I’m probably the same way towards others, hiding behind a facade of normalcy or what I think other people would consider normal. But it’s intriguing to get to know people for who they really are, if that’s possible.

With that in mind, I love being in an environment where there are people from all over the world. Pittsburgh is not the first place that comes to mind when you think of a culurally diverse population. But, the area around Carnegie Mellon and it is probably so for all the areas which are around universities, is especially unique in that sense. I have had friends from so many different countries and ethnic origins — the US of course, china, vietnam, japan, ivory coast, guatemala, peru, spain, brazil, philippines, czech republic, turkey, malaysia, indonesia, india, canada, uk. And what’s notable is that the first time you meet any of these people, the first thing that comes to mind is the sterotype — or I won’t even say sterotype, but the general impressions of the culture that you would expect. But the fact of the matter is that we are a lot more global that most people think and a lot more similar than first impressions lead us to believe.

Change topic. The other thing I’ll ramble about today is dreams. Since that is what wakes me up in the middle of the night so often. Dreams are weird. Though I have read a little about Freud’s interpretation of dreams, I can only say that from the little I know, I do not agree with Freud’s opinions at all. I do not believe that dreams have any special meaning or subliminal message to them. For a while I was able to sleep fairly well without being “disturbed” by dreams. Lately however, I wake up from the dreams fairly often either because they are genuinely disturbing or because I can’t breathe in the dream and it’s because I can’t breathe in reality since the damned convection heating in my apartment doesn’t agree with the nose one bit! Anyhow, I figured it would be interesting to read more about Freud’s theory to see if I agree or disagree with it. So I ordered his book On Dreams from Amazon to check out.

My current belief is that Dreams are nothing more than a rambling of thoughts in a fairly unconnected and meaningless manner. Essentially different thoughts which are in your head and get smushed together – sometimes in a very disconnected and senseless way. If I were to draw an analogy, I would draw an analogy to a box in a zero gravity environment in which objects are held in place because of an electromagnet. As soon as you turn off the electromagnet, everything gets mixed up. Similarly when you go to sleep different physiological and psychological stimuli get mixed together. Now if you believe that the resulting “mixture” in this box has any hidden underlying meaning to it, then more power to you and I’m not even going to try to proceed any further since that would be equivalent to beating my head against a wall. But in essence, similar to the objects int he box which come loose in a zero-g environment when the force holding them in place is gone, thought patterns mix and result in dreams. What meaning we ascribe to them post-fact is up to us and essentially is a re-arranging of the objects in a conscious manner once the switch is flipped back on.

But I’ll read what Mr. Freud has to say about this since that is supposed to be his big thing – besides linking everything to sexually repressed childhood memories of course – and I’ll post what I think about his theories at some point.