Month: January 2011

Reading: The Story of the Malakand Field Force by Winston Churchill

Reading: The Story of the Malakand Field Force by Winston Churchill

The story of a young Winston Churchill in 1897 fighting fanatical tribal warriors in modern day Pakistan–see his chilling description of what we hear all too often in today’s news:

Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword–the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men–stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism.
Wikipedia 

I haven’t read this book yet, but came across of a reference to it in my current team read at the office (The Mission, The Men and Me, more about that in a future post) and was delighted to find the free Kindle edition of the eBook on Project Gutenberg. I believe this is the hardcover edition depicted by the cover image above.

Donuts & Creepy Facebook Ads

Earlier today I visited a popular news website and did something I almost never do. I clicked an ad. Now, it happened to be a enticing photo of some glazed donuts and mentioned the name of the town I lived in–apparently a potent combination:

Clicking the ad spawned a new window that brought me to the following page:

And there I noticed several of my Facebook friends embedded in the bottom of the ad. That was strange, I wasn’t in Facebook. I didn’t come from Facebook. In fact, I didn’t even have Facebook open in the background.

I forgot all about donuts. I went over to facebook.com which dutifully landed me straight on my “news” feed, indicating that I had remained logged in from a prior visit. When I logged out and reloaded the ad, sure enough, the my friends had vanished:

I don’t know about you, but that seemed a little creepy. As an astute colleague at work pointed out, this is a case where they let you know–imagine when they don’t! Now I’ve scoured the maze of Facebook account and privacy settings and couldn’t come up with a way to turn this off.

So, my lesson learned is to log out of Facebook (assuming I don’t just delete my account), don’t do business with whatever “livingsocial” is, and most importantly… stay away from donuts!