talkingDigital

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You’re on Twitter. You’re on Facebook. You post comments to 10 blogs. You listen to music via Last.fm, Pandora, MySpace Music and Blip.fm. Your photos are on Picasa, Flickr and Photobucket – not to mention the old Fotki and Webshots accounts you setup and forgot about. Truth be told, you jumped into social media headfirst and began splashing around uncontrollably when you realized you couldn’t swim. Read the rest of this entry →

Organizing for America called for volunteers to help with Obama’s visit here in Grand Junction, CO. They held a meeting for those interested in setting up chairs, working the crowd, and some telephone stuff.

Once the meeting began, this form was passed out and it was explained that volunteers would be picked from those who followed the instructions on the form.

For Obama supporters, this assignment was likely an honor, for non-supporters it probably felt more like a hazing to prove your loyalty.

Big Secrets

In about 1985, I checked out a book called Big Secrets by William Poundstone. Actually I can’t remember if that was the book or one of his sequels, but in that book was a list of how to guess Social Security numbers.

Based on that list, I have been telling people for years that Social Security numbers were based on a simple system based on birth date and location. I have been challenged on this several times. Most often, people would tell me that if it were that simple, everyone would know.

Last week all the big tech news sites broke the “news” that Social Security numbers were based on a simple system of birth dates and location.

I felt smarter, but I wish that talkingdigital.org would have broke the news first.

Social Security Numbers Are Easy to Guess — Fox 2009 (706): 1 — ScienceNOW.