Conspiracy Theory

I sure miss Jack Bauer. That was some great conspiracy theory television. In order to share a calendar from Outlook to Hotmail or Google, there seems to be a requirement that it be made public or searchable. Welcome to the brave new world of the ubiquitous network.

Truly, I am not so concerned that "Big Brother" might want to have an interest in my schedule ... nothing to hide here, although it is not much of a stretch that some spook could turn on my laptop's camera if he were really clever and had nefarious purposes. What's the worst that could happen? Hmm, maybe I shouldn't go there.

What brought Jack Bauer to mind was the odd thing about how my Hotmail Calendar now works beautifully today, while my Google Calendar and Gog Tasks mysteriously became disabled inside Outlook, after I blogged about it and commented on a message board. While I was able to turn the Gog Task Add-in back on, so that my Outlook Tasks sync, whereas Hotmail, for some dumb reason hasn't stolen Remember the Milk's idea the way Google did, my Outlook seems to suddenly be missing some key components. Shocker, I have no way of syncing my schedule for the week that I inputted into Outlook to Google Calendar.

Considering the Calendar may be the "killer app," maybe my Jack Bauer connection isn't so far fetched ...

A few weeks ago, I was subbing in a 6th grade class and had to lead a discussion on the first chapter of A Wrinkle in Time. To avoid embarrassment, I read the forward, the back cover, and the chapter during independent reading periods and while students were at specials. It was fun using the character from Family Guy to clear up a misconception about the odd five year old who sounded nothing like a five year old.

A few days later, I dug up an old copy which I had never read and polished it off in a sitting. In this classic, the villain is a character called IT, which is a huge brain that controls an entire world. On some level, in describing IT, the author anticipated the shift to the cloud away from the desktop, and some of the more frightening aspects associated with the increasing intrusion of technology increasing into everyday life.