I just bumped into this oddity (via Bryan Ferry – The Official Site.)

Be sure to catch the duet with Aznavour in the audience.

For the first time, we have enough produce to make it worth preserving some for use into winter 
Only a couple of things and not even much of them, but our first ‘surplus’ so quite exciting !
Today I read about how to ‘string’ onions and we now have a couple of amateurish-looking strings hanging in the shed to see what happens. Hopefully, they will dry out a little and keep for a few months and not just fall off the strings or rot where they hang. If they look to be working I may do some more as I have left quite a few of the smaller onions in the bed.
We also have a freezer shelf of runner beans. I decided not to blanch them, just washed and dried them, sliced them up, then a loose freeze ready to bag into portions. We have lots more runners on the way so we will keep eating fresh and freezing spares for the next few weeks I think.
Charlie is getting mini-cukes every few days and we are still enjoying multi-coloured carrots, potatoes, salad and raspberries, even Steve and I managed to snaffle a few rasps yesterday when Charlie was out playing.
I cleared the asparagus beds of weeds yesterday and found 3 separate families of toads ! Lovely little things, very welcome so I tucked them back in and hopefully they will stay and get fat on slugs.

PLEASE TAKE THIS QUIZ: What Do Quizzes Really Know About You? on Facebook.

I don’t use many applications on Facebook – and certainly don’t join in the fun and quiz apps – due to concerns about privacy and data-mining.

I’m not sure how well understood these issues are by most FB users – and it takes some work to read up and understand it all.

This quiz put together by the ACLU really helps you understand just WHAT information you agree to expose (your own AND your FB friends) when you give access to an FB application.

I understand the trade-off between a content/amusement provider (their app) and me (my time, attention, information) – and the concepts behind the data-mining and customer profiling to enable highly targeted advertising -but given that we mostly have no idea who these app providers are – how do we make an informed choice of whether to expose our (and our friends’) data to them?

Bottom line:

• Make sure you understand and carefully set the privacy options in your FB Profile – ref: 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know (note that this is from early in 2009 and there have been changes to the FB privacy options since the – but it’s still a good guide).
• Don’t put sensitive information into your profile: e.g. remove the year from your birthday – better still don’t display it at all and better still don’t fill it in correctly
• Assume that FB apps suppliers are in general sleazy marketeers who want to harvest all your and your friends’ data and don’t trust them unless/until you know for sure they are sound and trustworthy (in most cases it’s not possible to verify this)

Further Thoughts:

Perhaps I am overly sensitive (paranoid!) about this issue (I also reject store “loyalty cards” for similar reasons) – but I get the impression that most FB users have no idea how exposed their own (and their friends’) data/info is on Facebook.

Note: I have quite a lot of personal information (blog entries, tweets, photos, contact details) available on the public Internet. This data/info is available to anyone who cares to look at it – and should someone wish to stalk me they could access it all. I don’t perceive this as a (significant) threat because I don’t think there’s value in doing the work to gather that data. Paradoxically, whilst Facebook “protects” one’s information and only allows access to “your friends” (and itself of course!)  – by exposing this info to “3rd party application developers” companies are able to hoover up and aggregate lots of information about you (and your friends!) and use it to profile and target you.

I’m very interested in others’ comments on this.

• Did you take the ACLU quiz? What did you learn?
• Do you inherently trust FB apps?
  • If not – why do you (continue to) use them?
  • If so – why?
• General comments on the topic
• Should I order a tin foil hat?
• Maybe you agree with Scott McNealy who in 1999 said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Let me know what you think.

**Note: I disabled comments on here (Wrodpress Blog) due to all the comment-spam – comment via Twitter or FB please

I have just installed and am experimenting with TweetDeck.

It seems very impressive – handling multiple accounts and most usefully (for me) allowing the creation of groups to allow you to follow multiple users grouped into categories. It also (apparently) allows access to Facebook accounts too – however the account setup just hangs for me.

It runs on Linux via Adobe Air – which is a bit scary closed/proprietary but probably becoming a “necessary evil” (like Flash)… sigh.

Let’s se if it changes/improves my use of Twitter.

It’s become a bit of a annual ritual each September the 1st to play this still exquisite poem/song from David Sylvian’s 1987 album Secrets Of The Beehive.

Sylvian ~ September

The sun shines high above
The sounds of laughter
The birds swoop down upon
The crosses of old grey churches
We say that we’re in love
While secretly wishing for rain
Sipping coke and playing games

September’s here again
September’s here again

You can listen to it here at youtube (1min 14sec)