Sigh. I suppose it's normal that my first post in a few weeks here would be about Facebook.

So, some dude set up a mischievous fake Facebook profile for some other dude in London, and ended up having to pay £22,000 in damages for libel and breach of privacy.

A businessman whose personal details were "laid bare" in fake entries on the Facebook social networking website has won a libel case at the High Court.

Mathew Firsht was awarded £22,000 in damages against an old school friend, Grant Raphael, who created the profile.

I'm not exactly sure how much £22,000 equals in real money, but I think the conversion process in my head puts it hovering somewhere near a gazillion dollars.

Why is this semi somewhat passingly important?

Today, I eased my way back into my regular diet after spending 3 weeks in the U.S. eating, well, well... Ethiopian in Washington DC (obviously), and Mexifornian in SF. Not to mention all the munchies you get when, you know, you're in California.

Dude, did you know that Mike and Ikes cost, like less than a buck a box over there? They're like $3+ here! They are the food of the Gods, who must be benevolent, all-knowing, gentle Gods if they share their Mike and Ike - Bursting with Fruit Juice Flavor® - with us.

There were other memorable moments, like when I had a craving for In-N-Out Burger, Carl's Jr and Jack-In-The-Box - all at the same time, which was fortunate since they are all on the same street corner down from my cousin's house. In between that and my family's incomparable Iraqi food, I got a little sluggish.

May 21st is UNESCO World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.

Wednesday night Tonight! in the Viger Atrium of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec - one of the nicest lecture rooms I've seen so far in the city - I'll be giving a short lecture on the use of technology in the context of culture, knowledge and dialog.

I'll demo three videos as well, two of which are mine and another from the participants of Convergentes.

My talk runs from about 7:15pm until 8:00pm, though I'm also participating in a round table about "Issues of Identity" and "Cultural diversity and building bridges between cultures" from 6:00pm to 7:00pm.

Then from 8:00pm until 8:45pm we'll be treated to a sure-to-be-awesome multilingual spoken word performance hosted by my good friend Elizabeth Robert featuring Endre Farkas, Pauline Michel, Judith Munira Avinger, Alejandro Saravia and Dwayne Morgan.

BAnQ Auditorium
Centre d’Archives de Montréal
535 Viger Street East, Montréal

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Photographs are funny things. They tell us things that videos can't. I like the theory that at any single moment, there are an infinite number of possible next moments - the one that we move into is dependent on a multitude of factors, the most important of which is (I'm hoping) our own decision-making process, and that of all living things around us. It's the Butterfly Effect on steroids - the ultimate existentialist question for me.

Are there really an infinite number of realities, every moment multiplied by another infinite number of choices?

Doing some cleanup on one of my servers earlier today, I came across this photo; which was my 'corporate photo' for most of the time I ran The Strict Machine Foundation, which I had established over 5 years ago:

My hair was a longer, my glasses were hipsterer, my body frame was narrower, my swagger was haughtier and my sweaters were turtlenecker. In other words, I was your typical Mac user. Other than that, I don't really look all that different today.

Long before they got busy making their Guitar Heroes and their Rock Bands, Harmonix was already busy making innovative games based around music. I have fond memories of spending late nights - when I had work the next day - at my ex-girlfriend's house on her brother's Playstation 2 playing Frequency, almost 6 years ago, getting high and trying to beat each other's score on "Control Your Body" (which also introduced me to the New Wave band Freezepop).

[12:17:33] Steven: I think i may have slightly hurt my back at the gym last night.
[12:17:43] mir: uh oh Steven...
[12:17:59] … you are going to need a bed on wheels to get around soon.
[12:18:08] Steven: Just a bit sore, not a pull or a disk or anything.
[12:18:20] … Bed on wheels? No, I want a jetpack.
[12:18:30] mir: Well they only give jetpacks to the able bodied.
[12:18:35] … sooo
[12:18:46] Steven: That's discrimination.

Sometimes, you have lots you want to say, but no real way to say it. I'm not going to go into detail about 'why I haven't been writing as much lately'; I'll leave stuff that to the sensitive egos who think that the world stops when they're not blogging.

My work, meanwhile, is as interesting and as challenging as ever. I can't remember the last time I didn't like what I was doing, and the folks I'm working with are all people that I would also consider to be good friends. On the other hand, things are coming in faster than they're going out, and the to-do list keeps getting thicker no matter how fast I manage to thin it out. I have a couple of important tasks to finish that I should've done a couple months ago, and that's not a great feeling at all.

Nobody blogs about what they want to; this medium is not conducive to that. We all write about everything through the prism of how we want to be perceived. It's too easy to be misleading or dishonest about our intentions; there's no real reason to be straightforward about ourselves and our thoughts. I've met SUV owners who blog passionately about the environment, Apple users who act like experts about open source issues, Net Neutrality advocates who call Facebook a (gasp!) 'platform for social change', and other blatant examples of sheer lack of integrity. It's what I like to call "opinion roulette"; everyone has what they think is a 'winning' opinion and keeps throwing it out onto the table, until they get some kind of acknowledgement that their entire hypothetical construct is not completely retarded, or until they're intellectually bankrupt and just STFU.

The house usually wins.

This is pretty long overdue, but I've finally put up a calendar section in the sidebar for my upcoming talks, events and conferences.

While I'm not yet quite hipster enough to post something like this, I've been enjoying the opportunity to discuss work-related topics with people other than techies and web gurus. It's far more gratifying to talk about policy, ethics and technology to students and community leaders than to people who already have a narrowly-defined view of the subject matter (academics / developers / UI folk).

I still have lots to add, but the next couple of upcoming publics events / appearances are listed here.

Tonight, I'm giving a small informal talk at University of the Streets. It's at the Atwater library (1200 Atwater).

From here:

There were some eye-opening moments during the talk, like when Zuckerberg addressed the issue of Beacon, Facebook's advertising platform that launched to much controversy when media outlets decried it as an invasion of privacy. "We probably got a little ahead of ourselves," Zuckerberg admitted.

He talked about Yahoo's bid for Facebook, confirming publicly for the first time the $1 billion offer price. Zuckerberg also touched on Microsoft's investment in his company and fielded questions about the site's application platform.

Zuckerberg largely stuck to the same script throughout the interview, repeating the same phrases multiple times and falling back on platitudes -- often to comical effect.

Just a quick note to let y'all know that I'll be speaking on CBC's Daybreak tomorrow (Thursday) morning at about 7:40 AM.

It's at 88.5 on the FM dial for those of you who don't know. You can also listen live online on the Daybreak website if you're not local.

I'll be talking about Internet policy, privacy, and - you guessed it - Facebook.