Musings

I've been thinking about the Titanic a lot lately. A ship that was believed to be unsinkable, due in part to the watertight bulkheads. A ship that was designed for 32 life rafts, carried only 20, a decision that was driven by aesthetic or money.

Each raft could safely carry 70 passengers. Had all 32 rafts been present, all 2,240 souls on board could have had a chance at survival. Sadly, with only 20 rafts on it's maiden and final voyage, the risk of 840 human lives was deemed worthwhile. After all, the ship was unsinkable.

However, one fatal flaw was glossed over in the pursuit of grandeur. The watertight bulkheads were not quite watertight.

For the past few years, every company I interact with doesn't get the same email address from me. I'm trying to be as plain as possible with this post, but we're going to go on a bit of adventure. So what I'm really trying to say here is, “You should be doing this too and your privacy is important.”

The rest of this article is why it matters to you, but most importantly, what you do matters for everyone.

Growing up, I loved Pokémon. I wanted to live in that world, but it's not possible from a fundamental standpoint because Pokémon are not real.

What if we could live in fictional worlds though? What if they're only fiction because we're just not doing them yet?

My career progression happened in the corporate realm. Job titles are essentially meaningless, especially as they have a tendency to change every few years. Some titles eat others and become bloated jargon, see: full-stack engineer.

For the future, we need everyone's tech literacy to improve if we're going to have a successful Solarspace. I think having a ladder to climb with self-promotions can give us all goals to aspire to. It's up to all of us to make this as easy as possible to progress through.

Random memory just came back from my time at Liberty University.

As students, we were required to be in Class Dress and attend Convocation— basically a church service— every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10am.

RAs were required to take attendance for their halls, but as long as you weren't too late you wouldn't get written up and fined.

I typically took advantage of this and showed up barely late.

I started this blog as a way for me to ween myself off social media. This was my intention from when I started #100DaysToOffload after reading this post by Kev. I'm cutting the 100 days short and quitting Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, starting now.

I'd still love to stay in touch, but directly via phone or email.

I feel somewhat guilty for leaving the church, but I also needed time to heal and it wasn't possible there. A church is not a place for dissenting opinions and beliefs. I'm a witness and a victim to scriptures being used to manipulate families and drive them apart. Having heart to heart and human to human conversations becomes impossible when one party always appeals to authority, the scriptures.

I'm a bastard child and I grew up believing it was my moral imperative to save my dad so that he wouldn't go to hell. You can read my exact thought on this matter from a blog post twelve years ago, when I was spiritually well-endowed. At that point in my life, I went a year listening to only Christian music, fasting regularly, and striving for 100% righteousness.

When you meet someone and you shake hands and make eye contact, there's a human connection. In that moment, in that space and time, there's only two people and no one else.

When you connect to someone on social media, there's Facebook or Twitter in between you.

There's an amount of trust you hand over to them to facilitate your connections. Maybe this is good, maybe this is bad. They serve as a shield to protect you, but they also have their own agenda. I won't speculate beyond that for now, but you do pay for these services with your data and these services know you intimately.