At 5:17AM 26 years ago I was born.  That is pretty cool in and of itself.  My parents were excited, my grandparents were excited, It sounds like it was a pretty good time.  I certainly can’t remember.  I also can’t remember the fact that when my mother got to bring me home from the hospital on February 14, she was bummed out that my father had to be working.  I do remember things like the day my sister was born because it was the day of my fourth birthday party.  I thought that was inconvenient, but My sister turned out OK!   According to my mother today, I turned out good.

It is kind of fun to wake up in the morning to have it snowing.  I like that about having a winter birthday.  Maybe the fact that I was born in the winter has something to do with how much I enjoy the winter.  It is also fun to wake up and have an inbox full of emails and notifications with birthday wishes.  Normally I am not a big fan of Facebook messages, but the fact that people take the time to send a quick note for a birthday is pretty nice.  When you consider the number of “friends” I have on facebook, the fact that even a few take the time to send a birthday note is kinda cool.

As expected, I talked to most of my family today.  Thankfully, my mother waited until after I woke up to call me.  Unfortunately my sister called first, right after I poured myself a bowl of cereal.  I was going to go back to it after I got off the phone with her, but then my mother called.  Needless to say, that bowl of cereal was a little to soggy to eat after two phone calls.  There are worse things of course, but it was a little sad.  It was nice to talk to my sister, I have talked to her more this week than many months on account of her birthday was on the seventh.

I think the only people I didn’t talk to were my grandparents on my mother’s side.  They are in Israel right now, so that is not surprising, but the email they sent was nice to get.  If nothing else, a birthday is a pretty good excuse to check in with the family!

I had a nice dinner with Ruth, though it left my stomach feeling a little funky.  I think I just had a little to much spicy wings…  In any event, I have been feeling better and better.  After the show tonight I am going out with a couple friends from the theatre for a little celebration, and all in all I think it was a pretty good day.  So, thank you to everyone who sent me birthday wishes, hopefully this is the beginning of another good year!

In general, many of us live pretty public lives nowadays.  Even if you don’t do Twitter or don’t have a blog you probably have a Facebook or a MySpace page or belong to some other online community.  The strange thing is that even if you don’t really do anything online there is still a bunch of information about you out there in cyberspace.  We leave cyber trails without even knowing it.  It can be a little overwhelming to try and manage it all and I would assume that most people my age don’t really think twice about their cyber presence.

What got me thinking about it was the fact that a couple days ago I got an email from Facebook that someone had commented on my status.  Turns out that it was my grandfather who had made the comment using my grandmother’s Facebook account on a status update that I didn’t realize had been posted about my latest blog entry. (how was that for a convoluted sentence?)  Needless to say, I didn’t even know that my grandparents really knew what Facebook was, let alone had an account.

I got on Facebook when it was fairly new, in fact I believe that I had to wait until they had added my school as one that was eligible to sign up from.  I probably used it a lot more at that point in my life compared to know.  While it is not as convoluted as MySpace, Facebook has so much going on now with all the apps and ads and pages and fans and whatnot.  Even if I were to clear out all of the notifications currently sitting in my inbox there, I would probably have hundreds more within a week.  I even block lots of Facebook apps, but every day there are new ones and new invitations.  Most of the time they are from “friends” who I really have had nothing to do with since high school.  Sometimes I wonder what the point really is.

Getting that email and comment, while it did get me to call my grandmother to say hi, was one of the last things that I ever expected to see in my inbox.  They are not totally technologically illiterate, but they are not computer wizzes.  The whole situation was an interesting reminder of how quickly information is disseminated and how far it can get.

I actually find the timing of this rather interesting as Sci-Fi (Sy-Fy now I suppose) just aired the pilot episode of Caprica. For those non-sci-fi people out there, the premise of Caprica, which is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, where a preeminent scientist looses his daughter in a terrorist bombing.  Zoe, the daughter had been working on a digital version of herself based on collecting the information from her digital trail through life.  The concept being that what we are today is a sum of the events that led to today and much of that is traceable given how much of our lives are contained in the digital world.

I hear people say all the time that you have to be careful with what you post online.  While it is true that employers may look at the Facebook and MySpace pages of potential and current employees, how much of your life can you really keep private these days?  How much information do you keep private?  Is it actually possible to live a truly private life? Is there anyone whose name you can type into Google and just not turn up anything?