Someone is proud of his accomplishments… dad too 😉

After several years of being glued to FB 24/7, partly a function of how great the platform is and partly a function of how much of my professional life centered around Facebook, I have moved slightly on.

I admire Facebook the company. They managed to figure out how to monetize human connections without selling cables.They enabled me to reconnect with friends and family that might otherwise have been utterly lost. They enabled the creation of gaming genres that the experts shat on and now make more money for game creators than ever before.

And I admire many many of the employees at Facebook that have done incredible things at an infrastructure level that are fundamentally disrupting how applications get built.

Facebook is a great company. And the Facebook product is a great product.

I also have to admit to myself that the Facebook platform is a media platform. Like any media platform it exploits human emotions to keep me connected. And the purveyors of content on the platform are keen to exploit human emotions to get me to click.

And the content provides are really good at it.

And I find myself, as I create content that I want to surface on FB, to be dragged into this war of emotions. Where everything has to become more and more sensationalized… Heck even this post is suffering from the same kind of sensationalized emotions that I accuse others of using.

And it doesn’t have to be that way. If I was smart enough to tell FB how to solve this I would, but I am not. And I expect that Facebook will figure out a solution to that problem. They are that smart.

But I, for my own reasons, need my emotional space. And that means dialing down my FB interactions just a little bit.

There is no way I am going off FB, that’s stupid. Facebook is the way I share information with many friends, where I learn about important life events and I sometimes connect with people I lost. And they are so important in that part of my life that I can’t imagine a post Facebook life.

And because of that I expect Facebook to remain an important part of the internet and the world and my weekly existence.

But that doesn’t mean I have to use Facebook 24×7.

It means I can use it less.

And I will 🙂

So what is the new social media? I have an email address, kostadis@gmail.com, feel free to use it. I have several blogs. feel free to comment and read. I use twitter for both sports and tech.  And you can still post on Facebook, I’ll still see your stuff just not as quickly.

Peleton has been smashed to pieces…

And the pink polka dot jersey and the yellow jersey are sprinting to the finish after a batale royal

[originally posted on FB after win over Mexico. But because this might be too upsetting for some folks on FB, and they might as a result not see my post, decided to post on my blog]

As a long suffering admirer of Dutch football, this was a fine switch. Not winning a world cup in 1974 because of the Kaiser – no other team could have stopped Total Football, in 1978 because of the incomparable Cruyff’s decision to not play an Argentinian side that would not be denied, in the 1990’s the great Dutch team of Van Basten and Gullit and Rijkard denied by a style of soccer that permitted thuggery, violence and willful attempts to injure great player and last world cup denied by an imbecile of a coach who let the Spaniards dictate play and Robben missing a key goal late in the game.

The penalty was weak, but man this team deserves a little bit of luck.

This being the Dutch, of course, they will lose 2-1 to the Brazilians in the final. Because they have a history of doing that.

Real skype chat with my cousins:

[6/29/14, 2:50:03 PM] kostadis roussos: four more minutes
[6/29/14, 2:50:15 PM] kostadis roussos: ante dana let’s break some hearts
[6/29/14, 2:50:43 PM] kostadis roussos: WE BROKE SOME HEARTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The IMF has paid the ref’s to overlook a hand ball, give us an extra player, and finally we put one in…

Since I work in the USA, where Soccer does not bring the country to a stand still, watching today’s game of Greece vs Cote D’Ivoire was impossible. And because this is the USA, no one knows that the world cup is on.

While Greece was leading 1-0, and about to secure it’s spot in the knockout round for the first time ever, I was super-happy. We’re having a meeting about something very contentious and I have a very happy face.  Then all of a sudden, I look at my phone and slam it down very loudly and curse.  Everyone was taken aback. Worried that something horrible came in email. Given Juniper’s IOP’s you could imagine what they thought.

When I explained that it was Greece getting tied, they were relieved and confused. A few minutes later, a good friend sent me an SMS saying we won, and I was jumping up and down and cheering, this time they weren’t frightened but confused. They were even more confused when I got up, picked up my phone to talk to a buddy about a the game, instead of staying in the contentious meeting.

This reminds me of an IBM ad from the 1990’s, where there is this Italian wedding. The father is visibly unhappy and sad during the wedding. You think he’s really unhappy about who his daughter is getting married to.  And it’s confusing as to what is going on. Then at the very end of the wedding as the married couple drives off, he is visibly happy. We look at his phone, and see that Italy just scored and is up 2-1.

I have been mocking that ad for 20 years. Today I was that ad.

Spain world cup gear cheap