Controlling my identity, Calling a Spade a Spade
I may have made a few posts about my remote job search and career goals, but overall this is a personal website, not a business website. I don’t give this website out to employers but if they find it they find it.
My linkedin profile is my business website.
The problem in white collar business is always weak links.
It’s the HR person who finds the reason not to hire you.
It’s the person who blames other people for his own mistake.
Get rid of the weak links and I’ll prosper in an analytical job in the office. All I need is a chain of coworkers who do not actively mess me up and let me perform to my high level. I am not one to mingle too much with customers (although I do a little bit), but I can analyze data very well.
I’m not just a programmer, I”m also an analyst and this is not a business website. It’s a personal website and I just happen to be discussing business.
In the days of canned software, it’s not wise to pursue a career where you’re only coding and not also analyzing and interpreting the data.
In small companies programmers tend to also be analysts. I am confident that my analytical skills can continue to be useful to businesses even if I do not write code.
It is tempting to look back in life, but the tail wind always pushes you forward. You simply turn your neck and still get pushed forward. You have to use the tail wind and just set your sights to the front. However, I want people who truly liked me as a friend to continue their own forward movement. I feel like we are at the end of an era where people are growing into a new life from an old life. What I am trying to do is bring people across the barrier so that our friendships are preserved but our heads are not turned backwards.
I’ve been debating putting my foot down and telling lancaster county probation that living in lancaster just doesn’t work and it’s the cause of the mental health problems. I don’t want to be here and I’m stuck here.
One of the things that has held me back is the potential that some people I know online could become closer to me – at least as friends – if I don’t move to Philly since we’re originally from Lancaster.
But at this length of time I’m starting to conclude that it’s all an illusion, there’s no desire to break through the internet profiles, so I should just do what I’m doing because our relationship is internet based only. Internet only relationships can be maintained anywhere. And the problem is if facebook declines we’ll lose that part of connection as well.
This is the truth. If I’m forced to make a quick decision about geographical relocation, nobody who hasn’t met me in person and only traded profiles with me over the internet would stop me. If you wanted to hold me back from moving to a certain place you’d be reaching out to me and telling me not to in person.
What my “friends” have to decide is this. If our relationship is going to be mainly telephone and internet, it doesn’t really matter if I leave Lancaster and Philly is still pretty close. If we’re actually going to hang out in person, then where I move would matter.
I have no person, male or female, who hangs around me enough in person, that if there was an impending move to philly I would break it off for them.
Basically, by not hanging out with me in person, you’re telling me “it doesn’t matter where you go we’ll still have the internet and/or or phones.”
I’ve already gotten over the group thing where people hang out with popular class mates and it annoys me. I’m looking at people as individuals.
I’m good with having remote located friends but understand that if my friends don’t do anything they’ll stay that way.
The only reason I called out certain geographical areas was for shock value to people who have never seen bad neighborhoods. They don’t know what a bad neighborhood is like. I was living in LItitz Pa at the time. Former class mates just haven’t seen broad enough horizons. That was all it was about.
With a new phone, I’m just never calling out neighborhoods again. There is a chance people can reverse lookup your name from your phone over time and misunderstandings can happen. People who accessed my facebook from the old phone, reverse looking it up, should now get what happened.
Never think that because you don’t give people your name, that they won’t use your phone to find your facebook. That’s what I’m learning. And even if you shut off phone verification on facebook, it could show up on google in a few years.
I also believed the phone got tapped. It was an old model, which could be tapped. Weird people showed up getting hints on my behaviors. The phone shut itself off in response to a post.
Note: I did not upload any original photos of any neighborhoods, I merely posted links.
I thought facebook was something I could rely on to entertain myself for my whole life. I never thought it would have fallen off this far this early. It’s not like athletics. It’s typing on a keyboard and using a phone.
BUT. There is a silver lining. The decline has been over the last 5 years and we’ve been at rock bottom for a year. It can’t get any worse than it is now. There is no further path down. And I didn’t commit suicide.
With a redesign and more open policy to connect new people, perhaps there can be a modest come back although I think the peak will be a lower peak. It needs to transform into a “meet new people” website but Zuckerberg is against that because of the Metaverse.
Zuckerberg just doesn’t get it showing your life offline to online has been maxed out people are looking to expand now and move into new territory by cross pollinating different social networks. You can only keep it real so many times. People want to meet new people.
I have plenty of reasons I could live in the past and I know not to live in the past.
We’re too far out of school to still glorify class mates. Especially those of us who had no friends.
The main reason I don’t add people on instagram is I don’t want to make the same mistake I made on facebook, where I added and accepted a bunch of people, but later on those people complained too much so I lost access to the central feed.
The other reason is that photos to me are mainly humor. They’re not really modeling. They’re humor.
But I’m open to slowly and carefully adding people but I don’t want building my instagram list to become an obsession.
I have this habit of mining through the lists of other people to see who is following them, but that’s just for fun. Kind of like “look who follows who.” But I don’t indulge the habit frequently or spend much time doing it.
edit: At first instagram made no sense to me, but it’s making more sense to me. People don’t want a virtual reality tour with a metaverse they just want a place to host their photos.
But what doesn’t make sense to me is people who are real serious about who is on their list and who isn’t. It says nothing about being a friend.
I also needed to solve the text post issue before I solved the photo issue. Because photos aren’t my main thing.
There are some posts where I am seeking exposure. They’re placed in big subreddits and written using tactics that are designed to get that exposure.
However, there are other posts where all I’m doing is adding something to decorate the user feed. Comments or posts that aren’t particularly positioned to grow still allow me to do that. You can even just post to your own user feed.
On another note, having a wordpress/reddit combo, I can use wordpress to write posts in drafts and then move them to reddit and I have wordpress set to not save too many copies because I don’t like unnecessary drafts in the database.
I did post some trollish things. But the key is that the problem I exposed is a really big problem.
I exposed Mark Zuckerberg as a like/engagement/analytic totalitarian who is obsessed with designing everything around his central feed and the behaviors of class mates.
Because what should have happened is I should have lost some people. I should have absorbed. But then I should have gained other people. Getting similar traffic, but not from the same people.
But I exposed Zuckerberg’s artificial ways of giving popular class mates traffic. The posts about school shooters, serial killers and communism exposed how your facebook profile really isn’t your profile he’s all about the feed and the class mates. It’s my knowledge of web design and ability to write well, cross post and screen shot that also contributed to my ability to expose this.
Seeing the mobile app, Instagram (his other platform), hearing his sister talk in person. Seeing how traffic went down during covid when it should have gone up. Making points about the actual web design. I really put the case together strongly.