I found my Uncle on Facebook.

Sounds pretty mundane, run of the mill right? Many of your family members are on Facebook, I’m sure. To grasp this, let me back up for about oh, 50 some odd years.

My grandma went down to Saint Petersburg as a young woman, I’m not sure why but I know she ended up working at a local business. There she met a man. They conceived my father. The man then went…somewhere. My dad was born and never knew his father or who he was.

Fast forward to 1997, as my grandmother knew her days were getting short. She told my dad the circumstances of how she and his father met and also his fathers name. My grandmother passed away shortly thereafter.

Fast forward again to 2005 or so. I started becoming extremely interested in my family tree and history. I asked my dad what he knew of his father and he told me his fathers name, as told by his mother. I immediately did a search on Ancestry.com for the name. No matches. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I hadn’t known my grandfather for 25 years and it wasn’t that big deal a that I couldn’t find him. I assumed either my grandmother remembered the name incorrectly or my grandfather didn’t tell her his full name.

Fast forward again to 2010. I had my dad do the the Big Spit (23andMe test) and he’s got many Relative Finder matches. His paternal haplogroup is one of great interest to several people in said haplogroup. These results reinvigorated my interest in trying to find my paternal grandfather. Once again, I turned to Ancestry.com. Once again, nothing. This time though, I decided to be a bit more persistent.

Let’s rewind to 2005 again for a moment. The internet was still all about search and finding information useful to you. Facebook was still private. MySpace was being purchased by NewsCorp and was still for music artists and teenagers, for the most part. Friendster had a brief explosion of interest and use but was fizzling out. In 2005, the concept of  social networking just hadn’t yet reached the masses.

Things have changed here  in 2010. Facebook has just reached 500 million users and I can easily strike up a conversation with both my future mother-in-law (hi Lynne!) and my dad on the site if I so desired. Social networking is not just an idea a few sites are toying around with, it has permeated the internet.

Message #1 and what I thought was the most promising.

That was my thought process when I decided to take a pretty drastic (for me anyway) step on June 12, 2010; I searched for every person with the last name Anderson (of course this is not the real name) on Facebook and emailed anyone that looked to be any parts of African-American. The first person I emailed was also the first person to respond and he was who I thought I was going to get the best response from. I mean, he looks like my dad looked 20 years ago albeit a little shorter.

I sent him a message and got a response that I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, he knew a David Anderson! On the other hand? This David  was from Georgia and everything my grandmother told my had to do with a David from New Jersey. I decided to wait for other responses before chasing down his since it seemed unlikely to be a match.

I’d also sent a message to a person also named David Anderson. He didn’t have a profile picture (well he did but it wasn’t of himself, it was an inanimate object) but I decided to take the chance that he may be related in some way. He responded to my message with the following: “Lol ha Yeah i know him very well, thats my dad call me 555-555-5555″

"That's my dad. Call me..."

Pause.

What? Wait what? This guy is my uncle?! But…he’s younger than me!  Composing myself, I asked more questions and eventually called. We compared details about his dad and my Dad’s dad. Lived in New Jersey? Yep. Lived in Florida? Yep. Born around the same time? Yep. Throughout the conversation, I was the one providing details and he was the one corroborating so my guard was up. Maybe he just responded positively to mess with me. Then he added his aunt (my great-aunt) into the mix. She was as skeptical as I was. Wouldn’t you be? Who just randomly pops up out of the blue like “Hey! I’m your brothers 30 year old grand-daughter! Holla!”  She and I spoke on the phone and told me she’d talk to her brother about the situation.

She was true to her word. The next day, she called me back. She spoke to her brother. He remembered my grandmother. He’d like me to call him.

…

No way. I was still in disbelief and shock. I took down his number and never called. I did speak to the other David again and while we were talking, he put me on hold. When he came back, his dad, my supposed grandfather was on the phone. A month later I still shake my head at this. I talked to this man who we thought to be my grandfather but I was still skeptical. I asked him how he knew and met my grandmother and he called her his girlfriend. Said they worked together in Saint Pete. Said where they worked in Saint Pete. Highly interesting because I had no idea what my grandmother did down there. Once we got off the phone with him, I called my dad. Asked him what my grandmother did in St. Pete. He confirmed what the man on the phone said. The man who was supposed to be my grandfather. The man who is my grandfather.

Still on the phone with my dad, I asked him if he was sitting down. He was, watching some show on the Discovery channel. I asked him if he’d like to know his fathers phone number. The line was silent for what felt like 5 minutes but probably was only 30 seconds or so. He said yes. I asked him if he was shocked, he said yes. I gave him his fathers number.

The next day, I called my dad back and asked if he’d called his dad. Yes, he said, but they were going to have talk again later. Talk they did. 3 weekends ago, my dad went to meet his father for the first time. At the same time, he met the rest of his family at their family reunion. 3 days ago, he and his younger (by 25 years) brother had lunch.

My dad now knows his dad. Sorry if this is a bit dramatic. I’m all weepy-eyed as I type this because it still floors me. I can’t even begin to imagine how my dad feels right now.

All because of  a search on Facebook.

The internet is a powerful tool. We truly live in the information age and it is remarkable, yet only in its infancy.

Truly remarkable.

Hi Dad!

P.S. The person in message #1 is actually related. The real last name (no, not Anderson) turns out to be fairly uncommon. Also? Hate finding typos where my fingers skipped over a word because my brain was moving too fast. I do that a lot, as evidenced by the typos in the messages in the images above and likely in this blog post.

P.P.S. Thoughts expressed in this post are mine alone and not my employers, blah blah, etc etc.

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Since moving to the Bay Area, I’ve relied on Sonic.net for internet. Sonic, a small local ISP,  has the most intelligent and competent Customer Support team I’ve ever worked with. Seriously. The best.

Unfortunately, Sonic.net provides DSL service that rides over AT&T’s crappy lines. When I first signed up for their service, I didn’t mind as I was paying their “introductory price” (about $55/mo) for the service. At that price point, it was affordable and I didn’t mind the slow spees. Recently, my “introductory pricing” was up and I started paying ~$80/mo for service, once you factor in the money I’m paying AT&T for basic phone service. Not so affordable, that.

I decided a couple weeks ago that if I was going to be paying ~$70/mo for internet, it’s going to be fast so I started the process of getting Comcast High Speed Internet. Here’s what I’ve experienced so far.

The Good:

Speedy.

See that? That’s FAST. Mind you, I was coming from 6/epicslow DSL so the speediness may be old hat to you, dear readers. I bought my own modem (more on that later) so that I could get the DOCSIS 3.0 speeds that are available in San Jose. DOCSIS is the standard for passing data over cable lines and DOCSIS 3.0 adds some sort of magic (I know not the magic, you can look it up if you care) that makes things go fast. I like speed. I taught Ricky Bobby how to go fast. True story.

The Bad:

The process of getting  Comcast HIS was not easy. First, this is not something you can install yourself if you don’t have Comcast cable.  An installer has to come and connect up things outside then make sure the connection is working inside. I called to have the installer come on a Saturday between 9am and 11am. He showed up at 11:45am.  Not cool.

Customer service is crap. Seriously. One guy I talked to sounded like he was sitting at home answering my call and would not stop trying to upsell me. To the CSAs out there? No means no.

The Ugly:

So the Ugly? Really. Fricking. Ugly. First of all, I figured with my newly discovered speed, I would hop on Halo and perform some quick pwnage. Pwnage did not reveal itself as I suffered all kinds of crazy lag during gameplay. I spent a solid 15 minutes trying to figure out what was going on until it dawned on me;  traffic shaping. The cost of doing business with a giant ISP is that they do all kinds of dumb shit.  Like traffic shaping. Support Net Neutrality folks. What was odd about this is that I was able to download a >1GB iso (mythbuntu) from usenet pretty fricking quickly.

Still ugly on par with traffic shaping but something that didn’t personally affect me is that Comcast rents its cable modems. Mind you, plenty of ISPs do this but that doesn’t make it any less dirty. Even more offensive is that Comcast is raising the rental rates for their modems. Yes, $60/yr for renting what is probably a used and outdated modem. Yes, the same $60/yr that you could spend to buy a brand new Comcast approved cable modem and have money left over. Do you see Comcast advertising that option to folks? No you sure don’t. Never fear, dear readers, I am here to save you from being screwed by Comcast and their rental fees. Below you will find some Comcast approved cable modems available for purchase from Amazon. For the sake of transparency, you should know that I will get some paltry sum of money if you purchase using the links found here. Don’t worry, it won’t make me rich. People viewing this in a feed reader may need to use this link to see the modems (assuming you cared).

So that’s it readers. I’m now Comcastic or however you want to call it. I still have my Sonic.net DSL turned on for the time being (I’ll turn it off right before I’m supposed to get the next bill) and am trying to think of clever things to do with that connection. I’m thinking I’ll put an open wireless network on it and redirect all traffic to this blog, unless you all have other ideas.

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As I was just perusing Amazon.com, I noticed something new. Yep, that is the ability to search only for items that are Prime eligible. I don’t know when this appeared but it had to be recently as I’m a frequent Amazon shopper (thank you Prime).

There are numerous sites out there that have tried to allow people to search for Prime items on Amazon but most of them were clunky and and returned poor results. Amazon was clearly listening to its users with this addition.

Looking at URL’s, I found that the variable that controls the Prime search is “%2Cp_76%3A1″. I can’t form my own URLs with it (yet) as it has to be formatted just so. However, I have come up with my favorite Prime Search links to get you started:

• All Prime Eligible Toys & Games
• All Prime Eligible Toys and Games under $10 (I call this the Auntie Special since I can rack up gifts for cheap!)
• DVD Collection Builder (All Prime Eligible DVD’s rated 4 stars and up)
• The Motherlode (All Prime Eligible Items on Amazon.com)
• Nerdvana (All Prime Eligible Books in the Computers & Internet category)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some shopping to do. Thank you Amazon, for your contribution to the  stimulation of the economy.

Dave Winer just made a post about whoisi.com, singing its praises and awesomeness.

I checked out the site. Cute, another follow this person aggregator. Searched for my “EricaJoy” (if I learned anything at Google, it is branding) and found nothing. Went through the steps to add myself (for uh testing purposes) by adding the site I own (heh, you’re reading it) and waited for the magic.

Nothing happened.

I clicked the “Add another site button” and waited for more magic.

Still none.

I then screamed at my computer (I do that, don’t you?) and closed the site.

What was the cause of my frustration? The fact that here is Yet Another Social Aggregator that wants me to add info into it instead of being smart and finding my info that I’ve already put on the internet eleventyhundred times.

>>>WEB THINGY DEVELOPERS READ ME<<<*

The Social Graph API is your friend. It is my friend. It is smart, charming, sexy, and the life of any party. Other API’s are jealous of it. Here’s what it does:

With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.

Oh ho, what was that? Did that little block quote just say it can use the public connections I’ve already created on other sites to help figure out  “who is I” (see what I did there)?

Let’s see what the social graph API knows about me:

I’ll be damned, look at that. Based off one URL, 6 of my other identities have been discovered.

Lets make like some hypothetically very well done site has used this API and presented me with these 6 sites saying something to the effect of “Hey thanks for adding ericabaker.com, these look like they might be you too. Are they?” to which I respond “Why yes they are, thank you for asking,” by clicking on every single one of them to add to the data about me. Now the site knows that These Sites Are EricaJoy’s and can do another API query to find even more sites that belong to me.

Oh snap. Look at all my identities out there for some smart web site to associate with me. Where is my Staples easy button when I need to press it?

Executive Summary:

I am lazy. Use the Social Graph API instead of asking me over and over and fricking over again where all my profiles are.

*Sorry, that was obnoxious. But effective, no?

As a Time Warner Cable subscriber, I was a more than a little pissed when I read this story by Karl at DSLReports. In summary, someone from TWC leaked a memo detailing TWC’s plans to charge people that use a lot of bandwidth more money. Here is the bit that annoyed me the most:

The introduction of Consumption Based Billing will enable TWC to charge customer based upon usage, impacting only 5% of subscribers who utilize over half of the total network bandwidth.

Oh I see. Because I’m a heavy bandwidth user, I get to pay more. Because I frequently buy missed TV shows on iTunes, I get to pay more. Because I stream my music online, I get to pay more. Because I’ll download the latest version of my preferred Linux distro, I get to pay more. In short, because I know how to use the internet effectively, Time Warner gets to charge me more money.

Is it conspiracy theorist of me to think this is a ploy to save old business models? Remember this is Time Warner Cable, who’s parent company (Time Warner) is also the parent company to New Line Cinemas, Warner Brothers, and HBO. In TWC executhink, making it more expensive for you to download content (legal or not) will send you back to the “old ways” where their business model is safe. If you pay extra to download content, they still get paid like a fat cat. Of course you can always leave Time Warner cable, oh wait, you can’t if they have a monopoly on your area.

If you’re not a “heavy bandwidth user” you might think to yourself, well you deserve to pay more, you’re using more! I’d like to remind you that in a short time, you too will become a “heavy bandwidth user.” When you start using the new iTunes movie rental feature or when you download a movie from Netflix. The next time you buy an album online because you really don’t need an actual CD. When new and interesting TV shows can only be found online because the cable companies don’t want to pay writers, remember that you will pay for the privilege of enjoying them.

Save the Internet.

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