From time to time on Facebook I get suggestions for friends, where I think “How the hell did they know about that person?”, i.e. I do actually know the person, but can’t figure out how Facebook would have been apprised of that.

I’m surely late to the game, but in doing some poking around on the web, I was made to realize that anyone with whom I’ve exchanged email in the past might have run the “search my contacts” feature Facebook has… and their contacts would contain me either because they’d added me or because email programs tend to auto-capture anyone in your From/To/CC lines.

Like any bit of data on the internet, once it’s out there, it stays out there forever and spreads slowly across the universe…

… or at least, that’s the way I feel after a frustrating encounter with tech support. Tech support would certainly not be so problematic if it weren’t for the large numbers of people to be supported, but then of course, there wouldn’t be any money to pay tech support people if there weren’t all the profit potential opened up by economies of scale.

But dammit, I want my shit to work! Ah well, I guess I can just retreat to the fantasy world in my head where things either always work or I have access to all the internals and knowledge to be able to fix ’em myself.

You ever have a situation where there are three independent bug symptoms that are caused by two independent causal paths, where you saw one path and someone else saw another path, so that when you fix the three problems, that person is still seeing all three, and you’re just _sure_ that they are looking at old code, but they’re not?

Man, that’s weird.