Success!
I may have not applied to any schools that were true ‘reaches,’ but three out of three isn’t too shabby – and I can’t really afford the ‘reach’ schools anyways, so I’m pleased.
Chapel Hill, here I come!
I realized earlier today that I now have proof of the direction my life will take for the next four years. In January of eighth grade, four years previous, I had no idea where I was going to go for high school, much less what I wanted to do with my life. If memory serves, I was still caught up in my fantasy of being a marine biologist, and under the belief that any magnet school other than Garner would be fine with me, though I leaned towards Enloe for the sheer fact that every other person at my middle school seemed to be going there.
Now, as a senior at a school that is definitely not Enloe (though I am still pleased not to be at Garner), I still really don’t know what I will wind up doing with my life. I still feel like a small child every time I watch a special on the ocean (the deep seas episode of ‘Planet Earth’ was the coolest thing ever), but I also feel a calling to do something bigger, to somehow involve myself in some effort to change the world, or at least make it a better place to inhabit. Something to do with public policy, perhaps? Public health? Blow off grad school and join the Peace Corps.? Do both?
The future is far too murky to identify the details, but right now I am certain that I will be Chapel Hill when I make those decisions that matter.
The next few months are going to be spent balancing my high school career with figuring out my ‘wants’ for college. Specific goals are a bit too much, but having a vision, some underlying desires to guide my actions may prove to be hugely important.
I want to write more; I want to have the time which allows me to write. I want discussions which leave my brain exhausted and my mind buzzing with new ideas. I want classes which challenge everything I have ever learned; I want challenges that appear impossible at first glance, and then I want to solve said challenges. I want to meet people whose lives, stories, and futures inspire me; in some small way, I want to inspire someone else.
And call me an egotist, or say that I have an inflated sense of self-worth, but I believe I can make these things happen. And in the intermittent, I know where I will be. Go Heels!
Now, a break from introspective soul searching made public.
The importance of knowledge management in the twenty-first century and its many tools is a post for another day, but the key background information to this story is that I recently set up an RSS feed reader via Google Reader, and it is quickly changing my life. Create a reader account, ask me for some blog suggestions, and you too will learn to love technology.
Robert Scoble, of Scobleizer, recently butted heads with Facebook, and the potential fall-out from this could very well affect every single technologically-literate socially-networked person on the planet. Long story short, Scoble, a well known tech industry writer, began running a data-harvesting script through his Facebook account in order to retrieve the contact information for his 5000+ ‘friends’ and move said information to a different network. Facebook perceived this as a threat and locked his account, thus temporarily erasing the presence of one of the biggest names in the tech blog industry.
Everything was gone. Pictures of him? Gone. Videos of him? Gone. He was immediately removed from the friend lists of over five thousand people, all his postings on walls and in groups were wiped clean – looking at Facebook with one minute after his account was locked, no one could tell he had ever even visited the site.
They have since restored his status provided he stops running the program, despite the fact that it was information he had permission to store. Or did he? That is the debate – when you add someone as a friend, and given them access to see your full profile, are you really intending to give them full access to your contact information? Are you really relinquishing your rights to your privacy? Because if one of your ‘friends’ decides to make their own lives easier by exporting what amounts to a massive, all-inclusive address book, an entirely different storage site has access to that information as well. And when that site goes up for sale, all that information will go with it – currently, the social networks of fifteen million users are up for grabs to any corporation with an extra 100-million dollars lying around.
As Judi Sohn of MomAtHome puts it, “It’s a matter of trust.”
Robert Scoble’s Blog: http://scobleizer.com/
A brief summary of the incident: http://facereviews.com/2008/01/03/facebook-bots-disable-robert-scoble
A response to the Scoble incident, which my post essentially paraphrases: http://www.momathome.com/2008/01/scoble_facebook_plaxo_its_a_matter_of_trust_and_fear/
Plaxo, the other company in question: http://www.plaxo.com/about
Plaxo, by the way, is for sale: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/02/plaxos-for-sale/
It’s a wild and wooly world out there, friends.
