Prosecutors said Kim Stokes … claimed to be a single mother who was separated from her husband, but pictures and statements on Facebook revealed the couple were still together, The Sun reported Wednesday.

“I’ve been with my hubby for 16 years and we are still very much in love,” Stokes wrote in her Facebook “About Me” section.

From: Benefits violation discovered on Facebook

What’s that? You share ALL your information publicly and openly* on facebook? I can’t see the harm in that at all. I mean, who would actually be paying any attention at all?

Except maybe Big Brother.

*Don’t ask me – after all, I’m just paranoid.

Sometimes the punctuation is the most important thing.

I dunno – it might be an urban legend, but I remember someone telling me that if you eat lots of pineapple, it improves that…

I know! Shocking isn’t it?

Oh, I have all sorts of technical knowledge of how cameras work and how images are captured, and I know most of the terms like “bokeh” and “circle of confusion” and so on… I can give you a rough idea whether a picture will actually turn out right just by looking at the light and the camera settings. I can make an educated estimate of just how much aperture you will need to achieve the depth of field you want if I am standing beside you while you are taking your picture…

But that isn’t what I am talking about.

I consider being a photographer to be the ultimate melding of being a technician and an artist. Someone who knows every detail of how a camera works and how to use their darkroom (digital darkroom software or chemical darkroom) might be able to make an adequate capture of the basic image of a place or person. Someone who has a great eye but no technical knowledge at all probably can’t translate what they see into an image. You HAVE to have good, generous helpings of both, in my opinion.

And I’m artistically retarded.

I really am. I have no idea what I am doing when it comes to art. I don’t know what is good and what isn’t. And no one ever tells me. Because people say nothing at all to me about most of my pictures, I assume they are applying the “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing…” rule. People always say we are our own worst critic. I am sure that’s true… but for me it is more than just true. I feel like I can’t discern a good picture from a bad one if I took it. I work very hard at pretending I am looking at pictures taken by someone else, but I can’t do it. I don’t feel like ANYTHING I photograph turns out right. I feel like I am going through the motions, pretending I see the art in things when I really have no clue. I see it, I photograph it, I hope someone likes it – and then no one says anything when I post it online. And then, all I feel is hollow, like some kind of great pretender who is only fooling himself when he says “I’m a photographer.”

Who knows where it stems from. Probably, in all seriousness, it comes from the fact that NOTHING I ever did – EVER – was good enough when I was growing up. I kid you not – I got straight ‘A’s in grade 6. All academics like math, English, geography and so on were marked with letter grades. All the other things, like Phys-Ed and so on, were assigned simply numbers based on “effort”. 1 – outstanding, 2 – excellent, 3 – good, 4 – average, 5 – poor. In gym class, I got a 3. EVERYONE in the class got a 3, though, except one kid who got a 2. So, I brought home 3 report cards when I was 11 years old, with straight ‘A’s, but a “3″ in gym like everyone else got. Guess what was said? Nothing about the letter grades. Not a damn thing. I got grilled and punished for getting a 3 in gym. Around the same time, they had wanted to take me out of “regular” school and send me to the gifted school and jump me into grade 8. My mother, who had skipped ahead a grade and hated it, decided that because SHE didn’t like it because she “lost all her friends” that I wouldn’t like it and I wasn’t allowed to.

After that, I just gave up on school. In grade fucking six. Oh I graduated from Grade 13, honour roll, all that stuff, but I just stopped trying, because it no longer mattered what I did.

And that’s how I feel now. I don’t feel it about everything in life, I don’t think. I mean, it’d be nice to get an “Attaboy” for being the midwife who caught my own children when they were born at home, but really – it seems no one cares about that except me and the childrens’ mother. My contribution was nothing but bookends for the 9-month process of birthing a baby. I’ve done lots of things that give me personal satisfaction that I don’t see much point in sharing with people.

But photography – well, that’s my “me putting myself out there” activity, my “please approve of what I have done” request. It’s my one thing left that I might be able to make some kind of income from, if anyone ever showed the slightest interest in my images. My physical limitations mean I can’t do a lot of things, but the open-ended nature of taking pictures – and the fact that it is something that’ll “keep” if I can’t finish all the processing right away – means it suits my lack of endurance issues just fine.

I just have no idea if I am doing anything which aesthetically pleases anyone. I’ve been on Flickr, and the compliments are non-existent. I’ve been on dA, and the only way you get feedback there is if you stand on top of a pile of other people’s pictures you’ve put a +Fav and hope some of them come and look at YOUR shots and respond in kind. And then there was EyeFetch, a site which had a numeric ratings system that I thought would suit my needs just fine – except, it turns out, a particular clique of people there are too busy trying to game the rating system to win themselves awards than to actually be fair about rating images objectively. Facebook? Forget it, half the people on there have no idea how it works and never comment on anything, so I don’t hear that someone liked a picture until it gets back to me through the wife, when she says “So and so wrote me a private message and said they liked your picture.” All I can think when she says that is, yeah, sure they did. They didn’t say it in PUBLIC though, did they?

So, that’s it. Every one of the pictures you have seen on here, every one that might have been on Facebook or anywhere else… I’m just guessing. I’m hoping someone will like it. I’m hoping it might make someone smile, or feel something, that it might evoke an emotional response of some kind. I’m hoping they’ll tell me it did. And they rarely do.

That’s why I feel like an artistic retard. Call it low self-esteem. Call it a fragile ego. Call it stupid, or call it justified. I have no confidence or belief in my “work”, I just enjoy the “doing” of it. The truth is, when I am offering someone technical guidance about photography, I’m just hoping they can take that information and make better use of it than I do. Because, in my own view, I’m just not doing it right.

(Name Removed to protect the Stupid) (Simcoe Composite School) wrote at 11:23pm yesterday

Here’s an idea to think about. If some sort of law was made saying that buy (sic), 2010, everybody in the world either has to get an electric car or GO GREEN and change their Gas engine to run on canola oil. This way nobody needs to worry about gas prices, am I right?? Now obviously I can see that that is thinking BIG. But just think about all the other things that have happened by regular everyday people. Like people on facebook for example. And with electric cars or running on Canola Oil we won’t have to worry about people idling their cars all the time. So that would possibly slow done (sic) our arch nemesis known as GLOBAL WARMING!!!! Its (sic) our future and we should do something about it if we wanna live to watch our grandchildren grow up. We need more people in this group to (sic). Everybody send out invites. (: We need to stop this gas bullshit because if someone doesn’t we would eventually be looking gas prices as high as 2 dollars. Maybe higher and that would really suck!!!

The Angry PolarBear wrote in response at 1:08am

Brilliant (unnamed moron)! Cause, Canola Oil only costs about $2 a litre which would solve the problem of $1.20/litre gasoline and $1.30/litre diesel! Oh, and of course, Canola Oil does not in fact BURN, it only emits magical gases like butterfly farts in defiance of all physical laws of the planet. You wouldn’t expect something BURNED in a COMBUSTION engine to make CO2 or anything.

And we won’t even worry about how using all the farmland to grow Canola beans for oil to run engines will disrupt the food supply, because we can spin the butterfly farts into manna noodles and honey and solve the hunger crisis at the same time! YAY!

Way to think BIG! Only you forgot the THINK part!

Seriously?

This is what our schools produce nowadays?

REALLY? WTF!?!

Thanks, Al Gore!

I gave up too easy and let myself be convinced to return to Facebook.

I STILL dislike it. I STILL don’t trust it. I still think it is a sinking, insecure ship rife with privacy problems. But, sadly, it seems no one would like to keep in touch by other means.

Just  be advised I will NOT be using Facebook as my primary mode of contact, nor will I be installing any app until I have thoroughly vetted it.

If you want to talk to me, the best way is STILL through ICQ. It has both a downloadable client and a web-based version of chat, and can do voice and video and everything else.

Facebook STILL sucks.  I just suck more.

Go to Pownce.com and sign up for an account. Then you can come and find me as a friend. Or send me a message with your email (see contact page) and I will invite you to Pownce.

My Pownce page is here, but unless you are one of my Pownce friends, you can’t see much of anything.

I am sure you are saying WTF is Pownce… so I’ll tell you. Pownce is like a bunch of different web things rolled into one. It is a little bit of Facebook, a little bit of message board, a little bit of blog, and a little bit of instant messenger. It lets you post your pictures, videos, links or whatever to show them to your friends, or just a small group of friends, or everyone in the world. It doesn’t matter what it is. You post something on Pownce, direct it to who you want it to go to or to the whole world, and they can see it, download it, look at it, comment on it, rate it and talk about it with everyone else who can see it.

Come on people, you should know I am not a faddy kind of person, I don’t pull out every little thing going and jump on board. For example, I was dragged onto Facebook kicking and screaming, and I have left it as soon as it started to get crazy popular.

Pownce is a really good way to be able to keep in touch and share pics, media and links with anyone you want to share them with. Go, sign up!

I removed my Facebook account today. Or, as Facebook calls it “deactivated” it. I don’t know if it will be permanent but I am leaning that way. If you want to reach me in the meantime, try this.

Why oh why would I remove myself from the “trendiest” fad going? Well, I had completely ignored Facebook and MySpace when they came online… I always felt they were just vectors for being pestered by spammers and people I really didn’t want contact with. But last summer I broke down and signed up when I saw the wife making contact with many people she knew from school, and in a pang of nostalgia decided I would like to talk to some of those friends too. It annoyed the crap out of my from the start. Too many people would make contact, talk a little, get caught up and then vanish never to talk to me again. Just when I thought I was renewing old friendships I found out that what I was doing was simply touching base and then moving on again. That wasn’t MY intent, but apparently that’s all Facebook is to other people. Strike One.

Last night I pulled out ICQ again, a program I have not had installed on my PC since I rebuilt it into my upgraded package last year. I had it installed for a while before that as well without using it. On ICQ I found an old friend from way back in the BBS days who is also on Facebook and talked to him on ICQ. Rarely have we said much on Facebook but we chatted for some time on ICQ.

This really got me thinking: from the beginning of my online experiences, all the way back to my BBS in the 80s, I liked chatting and message boards. I was never a huge fan of many of the other aspects… as I transitioned from local dialup BBSes, to larger networked BBSes, to MSN Beta when it was in development, to dial-up Internet, the one common denominator was using it to talk to people. When I made the leap from MSN to Internet Direct in Toronto, I went through chat programs like shit through a goose sometimes. I was always on IRC with mIRC and pIRCh, or Telnetting into other chats. I tried out PowWow, but not many friends were on PowWow… I moved on to ICQ. My original ICQ number was a 6-digit number, but I lost my password and ended up with my current number (2773221) when I made a new account (new numbers are 9-digit numbers). I tried and LOATHED AOL IM… experimented with Yahoo!Pager (which has become Yahoo Messenger) and MSN Messenger (now Windows Live! Messenger) as they came into existence. If I was connected to the Internet, I was on ICQ and IRC, it was a given. If I wasn’t there, I was nowhere near the computer.

Over the last few weeks – ok, make that months – this has been what is going through my head:

• People treat Facebook like it is chat, at times… but it really isn’t. The messages are more like emails, and I would not bother to send 20 2-line emails back and forth to someone using Thunderbird or Gmail, so WHY would I do it on there? Too many messages just go unanswered altogether. This irritates the heck out of me.
• The platform was/is also inherently unstable. I can’t tell you how many times we have thought something was wrong with our internet connection because Facebook was dead, only to quickly discover it was just Facebook that was dead.
• It appears to be specifically designed to harvest information from you. That’s fine, if the information is ONLY available to Facebook so others can find you. But – as I will elaborate on below – that seems to not be the case…
• Facebook Applications, or rather application SPAM, sucks. If someone wants you to use their application, then they should make a useful application to appeal to you. There are many that are useful and fun – stuff like Dogbook and the like lets you extend Facebook to share information with your friends. But now, there is an epidemic of SPAMications – some stupid quiz that REQUIRES you to send invites to all your friends is NOT useful and fun. 99% of the Quiz apps are just quizzes you can do on the web any time you want to, repackaged to try and force you to bug the SHIT out of your friends. For every app that lets you find Wii friends, there are 100 that are basically virii, designed to replicate themselves as much as possible. Reporting them does no good.
• My privacy is important to me. I have been online for 20+ years in various environments, and on the Intarwebs for 13 years. In all that time, I have RARELY used my real name for any purpose. I have had some VERY bad experiences with online acquaintances, and by bad I mean DANGEROUS. I keep myself safe by not sharing my name, my address, my phone number or any other personal information with ANYONE other than someone I am doing business with or someone I trust. Yet, in order for Facebook to work, I must use my real name or there just is not any point to being there. I justified that it was all right since there are millions of people with the same name, and I had total control over who could see anything more about me. I have now learned that, in spite of my high-privacy settings, this is not the case.

So… I was never really happy with it, not from the first moment I was there. Strike Two.

The wife yapped at me today when I told her I had disabled my account. She was furious that I had not warned her that I was going to do it. If I had my druthers, I’d remove her account and my daughter’s as well. Because, in the last few days, I have had experiences which are what I would call “the last straw”.

First, I found that some of my ‘Facebook Friends’ had just vanished, without a word. To me, this meant that it wasn’t all that important to them that I was in touch, defeating the purpose of having my personal info on a site to allow me to get in touch with old friends.

Then, for no apparent reason, when I needed it, Facebook failed me AGAIN – I needed to send a message to someone who I had on Facebook, and my account was “offline for maintenance”. People who know me know that one thing that is sure to cost you something is if you aren’t there when I need you. My policy is, if you aren’t there when I need you, then don’t bother being around when I don’t need you.

Next, a person I thought I was very close to simply disregarded several Facebook messages – and began posting status messages making statements to the effect that they were going to take down their Facebook profile. It wasn’t that she said it one time – she had recently repeatedly suggested she “didn’t have time” for Facebook and was going to get rid of it. Since a primary reason for keeping Facebook all this time was to keep in touch with her, it was yet another nail in the coffin.

Finally – I began getting SPAM. I have a very low SPAM tolerance level. I come from the online days when SPAM didn’t exist. When it happened on the scene in the mid-90s, I reported every individual message I received to the owner of mail server at the IP address that was used to send it. By 1999, this became utterly impossible. I introduced filters and blocks to my internet world and hoped nothing important would get mis-flagged and lost. I get rare “OCCUPANT” type SPAM messages but never anything that could identify me specifically.

Until last week.

Last week, I began getting SPAM addressed to me. To my REAL name, and my email address, directed right into my home and bypassing all filters and blocks. The information in the SPAM belies the source quite clearly.

It comes via the one website where I use my real name. The one website where I am supposed to have my privacy protected from anyone I do not explicitly authorize to contact me. The one website which does not SHOW my email address, but does use it to maintain contact with me and inform me of “updates” from my account.

It came via Facebook.

Strike Three.

Right now, though, I thought it was amusing to read a quote from a news release from ACTRA (for those of you who don’t know, that is the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists), expressing their “outrage” over the delay of the bill after Minister Jim Prentice found himself deluged with questions and complaints about his new legislation.

The entire article is here. But, the most significant quote which I found amusing was the opening line:

“The government’s about-face decision to abandon the scheduled introduction of new Copyright legislation is a detriment to Canada’s artists, and a hijacking of the policy process by a vocal minority.”

A vocal minority.

That’s what the voters in this country are, according to the “industry”.

The last I checked, ACTRA had 21000 members – and it doesn’t take much searching to find that their membership is far from unanimous in supporting the ACTRA position. Disregarding ANY other people who are concerned about this, we can look at the facebook group “Fair Copyright for Canada” and make a comparison. The group has 25588 members as of this writing.

Taking the facebook group and ACTRA’s membership numbers alone, there are more people in favour of avoiding the USA-DMCA-like billl than supporting it.

So – doesn’t that mean that effectively ACTRA is nothing more than a vocal minority smaller than the very same group they claim is not making a valid claim because they are a minority?

Hmmm!

Let’s see – a small number of corporations extremely concerned about profits being cut because they refuse to update their obsolete distribution systems, vs. some percentage of the 22812683 (yes that’s 22 million) registered Canadian voters. There are 2 million Canadian facebook members. 25000+ have joined that single group, representing a minimum of 1.3% of the Canadian membership of facebook expressing their concern by joining just that one single group. Lets make some comparisons:

• 1.3% of voters would be 296565 people.
• 10% of voters would be 2281268 people.

Do I even need to point out how many Canadian VOTERS it would be if more than 10% of people oppose a DMCA-style bill? What if it is 15%? 20%? 40%? 49%? All of these are a MINORITY who I am almost certain could be quite vocal.

We have a government running the country that represents perhaps a third of the voters in this country at most. Aren’t they nothing more than a vocal minority which has achieved power?

Sorry, CRIA and ACTRA – you aren’t going to sneak this one by with your deep pockets and backroom deals. Your outrage over the bill being held back demonstrates your absolute contempt for your customers, and I think its about time you get some comeuppance.

Anyone else?