Posts filed under “Personal”

I rarely consider just how fortunate and privileged I am to be a heterosexual, middle-class white male.

Cops don’t pull me over for driving while white. Women don’t clutch their purses more tightly as I walk past, fearing that I’ll mug them. I’ve never been killed for looking suspicious on my way back from the corner store with a bag of Skittles.

I get paid on merit, not as a percentage of what someone else makes for the same work. There’s very little chance that someone will try to grope me. (Even if I could use a little action sometimes.)

When I go online, I’m not harassed for my appearance, or threatened with violence, or assaulted with slurs based on the type of body I was born with. No one tells me to eat a cheeseburger, go on a diet or make them a sandwich. No one tells me my only place in this world is the workshop or the kitchen or out clubbing gazelles for dinner.

The worst stereotype I might face is my inability to jump.

No one sees the name “Tom” on a job application and immediately judges me like they might for someone named Roshanda.

No one would look at me like a lesser being for buying contraceptives or refuse to ring up my purchase based on their religious beliefs. No politicians have suggested I’m roughly equivalent to a farm animal.

I don’t have to endure looks of pity when selecting a form of payment for groceries. So far I’ve been fortunate enough not to have to choose between a doctor’s visit and food. No one is making it impossible for me to exercise my right as a citizen to vote.

I don’t have to wait for others to grant me basic civil rights. There are no laws barring me from being in a relationship with a consenting adult¹ of the gender to which I’m attracted. There aren’t churches full of people lining up with picket signs reading “God Hates Straights“. “No hetero” isn’t a phrase anyone uses.

I’m a straight, white male from a middle-class background, and that gives me enormous privilege in today’s world. It’s remarkably easy to take it all for granted, and of that I’m absolutely guilty. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

You don’t have to be gay to support gay marriage. You don’t have to be pregnant to support the ability for a woman to get an abortion. You don’t have to be a minority to oppose discrimination. You just have to be a reasonable human being² with a shred of empathy and the mental capacity to understand that allowing someone to lead a lifestyle of their own choosing will probably not bring down fire and brimstone upon the world.

Humans are humans, regardless of their skin color, their access to bits of paper, their dangly bits or who else’s dangly bits they enjoy. That shouldn’t be a difficult concept to embrace.

This sounds familiar:

If you have social media profiles set up online, you should create a statement of how you would like your online identity to be handled. Just like a traditional will helps your survivors handle your physical belongings, a social media will spells out how you want your online identity to be handled.

– The Government Would Like You to Write a ‘Social Media Will’ by Rebecca J. Rosen for The Atlantic

She rightfully notes that, as a public, legal document, a formal will is hard to update as regularly as you (should) update your passwords. The article suggests you at least set up an informal agreement about your digital assets.

That’s exactly what I’m working on creating, as noted previously in my #digital death post on death and digital posterity. Exactly what form that takes is still a bit murky, but it’s important to consider it.

Hat tip to @blueglass for the link.

You are going to die.

It’s okay, it happens to the best of us. But it is going to happen. We may not know when exactly you’ll succumb to the Reaper, but eventually the bell will toll for thee. Then, presumably, those left among the living will be tasked with handling the aftermath.

It’s likely you’ll have left some physical remnants behind – some furniture, maybe a few books, your prized peanut butter jar collection, whatever. We as a species have had some experience with death over the centuries, so the process of dealing with all that stuff is pretty well defined by now. But what about your digital life?

For most survivors, coping with the physical possessions and conventional assets of the departed can be overwhelming enough, but at least there are parameters and precedents. Even if a houseful of objects is liquidated through an estate sale or simply junked, mechanisms exist to ensure some sort of definitive outcome, even in the absence of a will. And there’s no way of ignoring or forgetting it: eventually the stuff will have to be dealt with.

Bit-based personal effects are different. Survivors may not be aware of the deceased’s full digital hoard, or they may not have the passwords to access the caches they do know about. They may be uncertain to the point of inaction about how to approach the problem at all.

– “Cyberspace When You’re Dead” by Rob Walker, for The New York Times. You should really read that article – it’s quite good.

When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, we started sorting through the various papers and effects she left behind. Among them was a fairly well-documented family tree dating back a couple hundred years, along with a handful of newspaper clippings about this family member or that. But none of it really gives a sense of who those people were, no sense of what their lives encompassed. All those moments have been lost in time, like tears in rain.

tl;dr: I tweet too much. There's proof of this.

As of the writing of this post, I have a grand total of 22,853 tweets, using about 2.2 million characters.

In the last 12 months

There were two ways of doing this. One was to look at it purely by calendar year, January through December. The other was to do it based only on data since my previous Twitter analysis. To reduce the impact of duplicate data, that's the way this is organized – all numbers and stats are on data from April 22, 2011 to today.

So. In the last 12 months, I've posted about 14,300 total tweets, using about 1.3 million characters – 653 of those tweets used the full 140-character allotment. Since the last analysis, about 300 new people have started following me (though I still have no idea why), and I started following about 100 new accounts. Not too bad.

You start to see some trends when it's graphed out like this. The dark green at the bottom shows original tweets, the lighter green in the middle shows replies to others, and the lightest strip at the top shows retweets. My average proportion of "broadcast" tweets has stayed pretty consistent at about 38% compared to replies at 46%, though some days it still feels like I'm tipping the signal-to-noise ratio the wrong way. Still need to work on conversing versus broadcasting.

The when

If the previous graph didn't make it clear enough, this one will: I tweeted a lot more over the last year than the one prior. The orange section in the center of this graph represents tweets from April 2010 through April 2011 when I did the last analysis. The green is everything since then. The significantly higher volume of tweets is hard to miss. Overall, though, I remain a creature of habit; nothing in the wee hours from midnight to 6AM, and relatively even distribution the rest of the time.

The what

PeerIndex now lists my notable topics as "privacy", "science fiction", "technology", and "internet and web", among others, which seems about right. Interestingly, it points out just how much I've moved away from a focus on technology and media to business and life, which reflects the shift in my career as of last year when I moved into a web content manager role from my previous position as a front-end developer.

Klout, on the other hand, lists "technology", "Milwaukee", "Movies", and "Pizza". \o/ (And, since Klout allows others to add topics to your profile, I'm also considered influential in "Sheep and Goats (Goat Farms) (Industry)". So there's that.) While I don't put a lot of stock – or any, really – in Klout as a serious measure of anything, it's also interesting to note that it recently added "Amazon Kindle" and "Books" to my list of topics, which is awesome; I've tweeted a lot about ebooks and reading since buying my Kindle Touch in January. (Side note: I absolutely love my Kindle. It's amazing. Highly recommended.)

Hot topics in terms of hashtags: #DoctorWho, #Bond, #sttos, #kindle, and #hulksmash. A pretty accurate roundup of my life, I should say. The first three reflect my marathon of TV shows courtesy of Netflix – I caught up on five seasons of Doctor Who, watched all 22 official James Bond films, and am currently working my way through Star Trek: The Original Series.

The who

Top offenders interactions, based on mentions of their usernames, in order: @sawaboof and @ashedryden way out in front of everyone (with 800+ mentions each), @desjardins, @senvara, @brennanMKE, @ejbenjamin, @personalgenius and @joshdean (tied), @bananza and @gesa (tied), @mathiasx and @thebestsophist. I've met all but four of these lovely people in person, whereas two years ago I knew none of them. All but @personalgenius are in or around southeastern Wisconsin, so apparently my online socialization radius pretty closely mirrors the real world.

The so what

So what? So nothing. There wasn't any point to be made here, other than the realization that I tweet too much and should probably scale back before I have an aneurysm or something. That said, Twitter's been an amazingly valuable resource for finding information, soliciting opinions, sharing ideas, having a laugh, and supporting others. That's the point, if there is one.

The Mega Millions lottery jackpot is now set at $500 million. If one person wins, that’s a $359 million lump sum payout, or the option of $19.2 million per year for the next 26 years.

So what would you do if you won?

I’d take the yearly payout. $19.2M, even accounting for a chunk taken by taxes, is a lot of money to a late-twenty-something middle class schmuck like me. And honestly, I really don’t think my basic lifestyle preferences would change all that much. Realistically, this is what I’d do.

• Obviously, step one is to find a good lawyer to protect me and my new fortune from ne’er-do-wells. Also, hire someone to punch me anytime I used a word like ne’er-do-wells. Question: what type of lawyer protects you from lawyers?
• Next step is to quit my job immediately. Nothing personal against the people I work with, but $19.2 million a year is a significant raise, one my employer isn’t likely to match in the near future.
• Buy a new car. I’ve currently got a 2004 Pontiac Vibe, which I bought used three years ago and still love, but let’s face it. It’s no car for a new millionaire. Though, I wouldn’t go all out and buy myself a fleet of Porsches – I’d most likely just upgrade to a new SUV.
• Buy a house. A modest house, somewhere in a nicer climate than Wisconsin’s. Maybe two stories plus a basement, a pool, etc. No 78-room Egyptian granite-floored mansion with three stables and a guest house. Obviously I’d get some upgrades, like super-bandwidth internet access, biometric-based access, JARVIS A.I., a shark-filled moat, and so on. Nothing fancy.
• Let’s say $3 million per year would be given away. Help out various charities like water.org, fund a few academic scholarships, (important note: academic scholarships, not “oh you’re good at sports so you get a free ride to college” scholarships), set up some scientific research grants.
• New wardrobe. No more shopping off the racks at Target and Kohl’s for me, though I’m not about to step up to wearing luxury Italian suits any time soon.
• And most of the above also goes for “upgrading” my immediate family’s lives. No mooching allowed, but I’m not going to be a complete Scrooge.
• Invest. Find a good investment firm to build and manage a portfolio so that my holdings grow beyond just the lottery payout.
• Hire @ashedryden to handle the disposal of my dishes. My solid diamond dishes rimmed with 24-Karat gold.
• Bodily upgrades. Some dental work for that perfect smile, LASIK surgery for perfect vision, forearm-mounted pulse laser and Adamantium-reinforced skeleton… just the basics.
• Enjoy myself. Do all the things I never had a chance to do for lack of time or money. Try some expensive foods. See the world. No more concern for using up precious vacation days to do that cross-country road trip or backpacking across Europe.

Really that last one is the big one for me. Yes, money changes people, and I have no illusions that I’d stick exactly to my current lifestyle, but I honestly believe my basic preferences would stay intact – I don’t like overly flashy things, or buying expensive stuff just for the sake of having it.

Photo by Pacdog