The New York Times yesterday published a story about how Facebook shared user data with select corporate partners, including contact lists and private messages.
Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users’ messages, and other tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Sony access to data on users’ friends, according to hundreds of internal documents obtained by the paper and interviews with dozens of “former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners.”
I looked on my phone and was surprised that I hadn’t already deleted the app (I never use it) but finally did so this afternoon.
I spent most (well, almost all) of a rainy Sunday at the dinner table grading final products for UMBC, which always takes longer than I think it will. I got all but two finished by 11:30 but by then my brain and my typing fingers were toast. I got the remainder finished by 9:30 this morning, which is a huge relief. There’s just one student’s work files I can’t review for stupid technical reasons, but other than that everything is done and ready to submit.
On Saturday I spent most of the day pulling toe moulding off the walls in the den, the office, and the dining room in order to caulk the gap between the bottom of the kickplate and the floor. When we had the energy audit in January it looked like we were losing a lot of heat at the bottom of the floors, so this looked like an easy way to seal things up. First I did the den, which always feels colder than the rest of the house, and I can definitely feel a difference around the door and perimeter of the room. The office is still a question mark because I have to pull the giant heavy file cabinet away from the east wall to seal up that edge, but I found a section right under my desk where there was a 1/2″ gap letting cold air flow right in. The dining room is also up in the air because of the stupid janky front window that we haven’t replaced yet.
I’m going to follow up with a couple of the bedrooms upstairs, starting with Finley’s, during the Christmas break, and see if I can make more of an immediate impact.
I’m a little rough around the edges this morning; I was out last night with a bunch of work friends saying farewell to a couple of coworkers and didn’t get home until midnight. We walked a few blocks away from the office and sat around a fire pit at a place called the Wundergarten, an outdoor beer garden surrounded by gleaming new highrise buildings in the H street district.
Leaving WRI are two friends who predated me by a year or two; I’m still shocked by the fact that I’ve been at WRI for over five years now. We warmed ourselves around the fire and told stories, and the second beer I had knocked me on my ass: some kind of seasonal winter beer that tasted more like whiskey and which someone told me was around 10% ABV.
I miscalculated the schedule and missed the 9PM train, which meant I had to hang around Union Station until the 10:40, the last one headed north. I picked up a Shake Shack burger and fries and listened to podcasts until it was time to board.
Petapixel has a short article on how to modify a TLR camera (my Yashica, for example) to focus more easily, using nothing more than some rubber bands, aluminum foil, and a ruler. Plus, it’s set up as a visual picture guide instead of a 15-minute video that I can’t be bothered to sit through.
There was some concern that the third season of The Grand Tour was going to be its last, but apparently Clarkson & Co. are signed on for seasons beyond, and even better, they’re ditching the tent! This means there’ll be more specials like the Botswana, Vietnam, and Namibia trips, which are an order of magnitude more entertaining.
The Number Ones is a daily recap of hit singles from the beginning of the Billboard 100 in 1959. It’s an interesting mix of songs with a lot of good background, and there’s usually a couple of alternate versions that are worth a listen.
We had dinner and drinks with the parents of one of Finn’s friends on Friday night, leaving the girls with her older sister. Taking full advantage of the situation, we adults hit a restaurant downtown and ordered cocktails and generally had a fantastic time having adult conversations. Among many different topics, we talked about firewood, and they mentioned they had five chainsaws, and did I want one of them? Sure, I said, I’ll take a chainsaw if it allows me to chop up the four huge rounds we’ve had sitting in front of our woodpile since the trees came down. We stopped in for a last cocktail and R. found my present in his basement. It’s a Makita DCS 430, manufactured somewhere around 10 years ago, with a 16″ bar. It’s in excellent shape, but needs a fuel system flush and some new chain oil. I’ll look it over sometime in the next couple of weekends and see if I can get it running, and maybe I can clean up the backyard over the Christmas break if I’m lucky.
Saturday Finn and I were up and out early to head over the bridge for a Dickens of a Christmas, a holiday-flavored festival in Chestertown. We met up with Karean and Zachary at Brian’s house and the six of us rode over the bridge into town to see the sights. The festival isn’t as sprawling as the Harry Potter event they put on in the fall, but it’s still a blast, and everyone there commits to the era-specific details: the number of people walking around in tophats and bustle dresses and greatcoats almost outnumbered us normal people. We wandered the streets, playing games, snacking on food, and looking at the exhibits. As always it was great to hang out with friends, and we stayed out as long as we could in the cold before packing it in.
Sunday I slept in to recover from the previous two days while the girls went to church. In the afternoon we drove in to Baltimore to fulfill our advent calendar activity: ice skating in the Inner Harbor. There’s a wonderful rink built right between the two buildings that’s perfect for an afternoon skate, and it was just warm enough to be comfortable (well, that and the bike tights I was wearing under my jeans). Finn and I did a bunch of laps around the rink and I tried to get her to learn the proper way to skate. When we’d had our fill of that, we exchanged our skates and walked down the pier to the Christmas Village, a German-themed market set up right on the water. We’d been told the latkes were good, and that there was a big tent where we could get warm, and there were, and it was, and it was good. We strolled through the market and got some excellent German beer and a bunch of latkes and listened to a live band playing. By 4:30 we were ready to call it a day, and headed back home to get warm in our own house.
A few years ago, I used to visit a site called Bring a Trailer every day. When it first started, it would feature one project car per post, generally in some state of disrepair (hence the name of the site). Their comment section was the real draw, because many of the frequent commenters were subject matter experts–there were Alfa Romeo guys, Porsche guys, Mopar guys, and so on. This was an insanely valuable font of information for car geeks like me. Over the years they grew to feature more and more exotic vehicles and built a paid auction system into the site, so that it became less about project vehicles and more about selling turnkey air-cooled Porsches and restomodded Land Rovers. I stopped visiting when the ratio of paid listings dwarfed the unpaid and switched to another site called Barn Finds. This site was what Bring a Trailer was in the early days, and the comments were, again, the best part of the site. Cars, trucks, motorcycles, the occasional plane–they have it all.
Last week they decided to put up a paywall, probably to deal with the cost of increased bandwith. Free blogs can often be a victim of their own success; there are many I’ve been reading for years who have either switched to a paid model or simply closed up shop, either from financial necessity or boredom. I’m sympathetic to the need to keep things paying for themselves, but I don’t recall ever seeing advance notice from the site owners–I used to hit the site once, maybe twice daily–so it came as a shock when the paywall went up. When their new fee is averaged out over a year, $100 is pennies a day, but at first glance it feels pretty steep. Like many of the other paid services I’ve been reconsidering (we have been without cable for 4 months) time will tell whether I miss it or not.
