Foursquare and Gowalla get on my nerves. I joke around with some of my friends about becoming the mayor of places that nobody could give a shit about, like the warehouse my office resides in, or the electrical distribution center across the street.

Ever since I saw that episode of Criminal Minds where the unsub selected and stalked his victims through facebook (it had some fake name like "lookbook" on the show), I have been very judicious about my status updates.

Oddly, this came up at dinner last night, and L (who used to work at a social media company) told a story about a coworker who was always checking in on foursquare and got a call at the restaurant that she'd checked in at from a complete stranger, asking how she was doing.

I understand the appeal of location services, but I'd rather not make it that easy to stalk me.

There's this guy that smonster and I are friends with on Facebook that we have nicknamed "easiest to assassinate" because he is constantly checking in wherever he goes. Buddy, I don't care where you eat every single meal, and its address, unless I'm a contract killer and I've got your name on a matchbook. In which case, thanks!

I was gonna link to pleaserobme.com but it looks like they've taken most of the site down. (They used to aggregate publically available location information as a way to demonstrate how much data people are putting out there. But I guess they recieved too many complaints.)

I linked to that on Facebook once. So creepy, so true!

I'm clearly out of the loop because I never heard of Foursquare before today, but I assume it's the reason why some of my FB friends seem to update every time they eat a meal out at a restaurant? yeah. Can't imagine doing that.

I know about the Molasses Flood, but not the Waltz Riot. Google is giving me no love.

From Herbert Asbury (Gangs of New York) book about New Orleans. JZ read it and knows the details better but basically there was a large ball held in New Orleans where there were large contingents of French, Spanish and Americans. The French and Spanish groups wound up having a very heated disagreement about which waltzes were appropriate which broke out into a full scale riot that lasted for several hours, destroying the ballroom with many casualties of uppercrust swordfighting etc. The Americans immediately took this opportunity to swoop up all the womenfolk.

Huge-ass rain storm pounding down on the Salt Lake metro area. Tis glorious. Deserts have certainly changed my relationship to life-threatening storms (off to check the flashflood warning area again).

This is mesmerizing: [link]