Oscars, Wordle, and Facebook Privacy

Just a few links and a few thoughts:

I doubt I’ll be watching the Oscars live this year due to a work meeting, and my thoughts are Wall-E should take home Best Animated Feature and it would be cool to see Andrew Stanton get Best Original Screenplay. I hope Mickey Rourke snatches up Best Actor for his work in The Wrestler, and Danny Boyle and Slumdog Millionaire deserve their Best Director and Best Picture nods. I haven’t seen everything that’s up this year, but those are my most hopeful award results. Has anyone seen Milk so they can dispute my hopes for Rourke?

The Gaurdian’s got a fun-and-pointless interactive Oscar widget about winner statistics for you to waste a few minutes with today. It’s little web widgets like this that make me consider how neat it is, but how it’s ultimately it doesn’t elevate to much more than “neat” and I wonder how much time and effort went into it as a project. Then I think about my own creative work and wonder if anyone else will find it simply “neat” and I get sad and become a lot more forgiving to the little web widget.

For people like me who are fans of the Oscars and Wordle, the Guardian also has a “neat” trivia game to determine the givers of Oscar acceptance speeches based on their Wordles. I did a quick search and realized this is my first mention of Wordle on this blog, which is quite an oversight on my part because it’s really “neat.” I did one for my thesis last spring; I’ll have to post it for all to see here.

A few interesting articles are surfacing regarding the recent change in Facebook’s privacy settings, including this summary at MSNBC and this brilliant step-by-step how-to for those looking to make their info as private as possible at AllFacebook.com. Just when I think my Facebook profile is relatively private the way I want it, turns out there are plenty of features I’m not taking advantage of (and plenty of issues which are beyond my control). Same for you?

-nm

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