First, Aaron McGruder ends The Boondocks. Then Lynn Johnston puts For Better or For Worse on hiatus. And now Bill Amend is converting FoxTrot to a Sunday-only strip. Argh!

Normally I don’t remember my dreams, but this one was intense. I got on a subway car with a few other friends, and the sign that had the route number also said “no conductor.” I wondered why. Then as the subway started, it suddenly plunged down a huge ramp and then did corkscrews. This part of the subway was a roller coaster!

Maybe they should do this in real life. In the San Jose area, public transit is pretty slow, so they should at least make it entertaining…

I’ve struggled with finding the right balance of descriptiveness and privacy in my Flickr photos account. Up to now, I’ve almost completely avoided displaying people’s names, because I think it’s a little creepy to be able to go to someone’s photos, and search for someone else to see what they’ve been doing. On the other hand, I ended up with vague, somewhat tortured names like “Wedding in Palos Verdes” or “Entertaining visitors to the Bay Area.”

So I’m going to start using people’s first names in some circumstances. For example, “Entertaining visitors to the Bay Area” is now “Matt and Laurel’s visit”. It makes more sense to me and to those who know them, and those who don’t know them don’t care anyway. I’m still not using last names, nor am I tagging photos with people’s names.

I’m curious to see how people’s privacy expectations online will evolve. They’re generally willing to put up a lot of information without much thought as to who can see it. For example, at CSCW I saw a talk by Cliff Lampe, a Michigan State professor, who said he announced to his class that he had read all of their Facebook profiles, and that you could see each student mentally going through what they had put in their profiles and their resulting grimaces.