Behold, for I am now a Bachelor of Science! Well, maybe not officially (don't have my certificate yet), but I handed in my thesis (I'm doing some last revisions, then I'll publish it here), did my defense and got my grade. The bad news is that being a Bachelor of Science doesn't actually give you any super powers. But apparently search engines do...

...which leads me right to topic number one of today's article: privacy. So I have a new neighbor which is great because my old neighbors were really annoying. They were a couple and all they would ever do was fight. That went on for like a year and now they're gone! Thank Zeus! My new neighbor so far has been very pleasant. But here's the thing: she put her full name on her nameplate and it's a relatively rare name, too. So obviously I had to look her up on <generic search engine>. After all, she might have been a known terrorist or even worse, an animal rights activist. Fortunately, she is nothing of the kind. In fact, she's a cheerleader and cheerleaders I have nothing against. Actually her being a cheerleader could turn out to be annoying, should she ever have to borrow something from me ("Could I borrow some S - A - L - T? What do I want? SALT!").

But not only do I know that she's a cheerleader, I also know her date of birth, her occupation, the name and date of birth of her brother, her hobbies, her favorite movie and tons of other incriminating stuff. When I read all that, I thought: what has this world come to? I didn't have to dig for all that information, it was just there for everyone to see. If I had been really interested in finding out more about her, I could've cross-referenced some of the social networking sites she is registered with and I might have gotten a pretty complete picture of her social life on top of what I had already found out. I didn't dig deeper, because I already felt like a creep for looking her up in the first place. But isn't this crazy? Twenty years ago, there would've been no (legal) way for me to find out any of that stuff and today, we open ourselves up completely without thinking twice. I can think of all sorts of different ways of how I could abuse that information. Most simply, I could just mindfuck her ("What do you do for a living? Wait, let me take a guess. You're a ...", "Sweet mother of Jesus, how did you know?".) Also, if I had the hots for her, I could just play it "Groundhog Day" ("What kind of movies do you like? I like ...", "Really? Me too. Wow, we have so much in common".) I can't say I fully understand the implications of this yet, but what I can say is that it scares the hell out of me. Do we really want to open ourselves up like that to anyone who knows our name?

And now for something completely different. So my hard drive died last week which wasn't overly dramatic because I have backups (and it died with a warning) and I have since replaced it with a shiny new 500 gig Samsung drive. Of course I had to reinstall Windows and all software which is always great fun, but since I'm done with my thesis now it's not like I had something better to do. So when I bought the new drive, I went to a local store that I had also bought most of the components of my current PC from. There, I got to experience the worst customer service ever. Seriously, they could have hit me in the face with a baseball bat and it would've been better than what actually happened. The store works like this: you walk up to a counter, there's a clerk on the other side, you tell him what you want and he gets it for you. Because this is Germany, there's usually a perfect queue in front of each counter, but not this time. This time, both clerks were busy with one customer each, but apart from that, I was the only one in the store. "Great, I'll be back home in an instant" I thought to myself. I couldn't have been more wrong. One of the customers was buying parts for what looked like at least three computers. "Oh well, I'll just go to the other counter" I thought, until I realized that the guy buying the piles of computer parts was standing in the "quick checkout" line. Since I'm a farily uncomplicated person, this didn't really bother me. After all, there was only one person in the line before me. Unfortunately, that person turned out to be an asshole. For one, he leaned against the counter in such a way that his ass would stick out, revealing his butt crack. Secondly, he wanted to buy a DVD drive and it had to be white. That alone wouldn't be an unreasonable request, but he claimed that he had run into problems with all his DVD drives in the past and therefore he hated every DVD drive manufacturer in existence (hint: if you have problems with different drives, it's not the drives, it's you).

The whole discussion went like this: "Well, there are only two manufacturers that make white DVD drives, Samsung and LG". "Samsung makes terrible drives and I heard bad things about LG." "Seriously? We have the least number of returns with Samsung drives". "Oh yeah? Had nothing but trouble with them." "So what about LG?" "Aren't they kinda loud?" "They're definitely louder than the Samsung drives." "I want quiet." "Again, you have to choose between Samsung and LG. There are no other options." "Hmm, what about Liteon?" "They don't come in white" "It's got to be white" "Then Samsung or LG it is." "I've had nothing but trouble with Samsung." "I'm sorry to hear that, but they tend to be very reliable." "At least five of my friends have had serious trouble with Samsung drives." "You want an LG then?" "I dunno. There's really no alternative?" "You can always get a white blind for your drive, but we don't sell those." "Sounds good. So what kind of non-white drive do you recommend?" "Seriously, I've never had any problems with Samsung." "I'm not buying a Samsung." It goes on. After waiting for about half an hour, I left the store and went to another store just up the road where I was served instantly. On my way back home, I passed by the fist store again and I shit you not, they were still serving the same two customers. But now, there were like 15 other customers waiting in line. If I wasn't such a mild tempered person, I probably would've gone berserk just then. Now I sincerely hope they go out of business and as for butt-crack-boy: if he has to go to a computer store to have a conversation, I don't think he needs any additional punishment.

In other news: since the profanity has gotten a little out ouf hand lately, I'm now labeling all blog posts that contain adult language as "Explicit". Users of the iTunes music store should feel right at home.