I would really love to know how Facebook decides who to drop into the “People You May Know” slide show.  I do know a bunch of them — but anyone could deduce that once they see that we have 20 people in common.  A bunch I definitely don’t know, though I may have once liked a comment they left on a mutual friend’s wall.  And the vast majority are people I don’t know.  At all.

Interestingly, there are two people I’ve been waiting for Facebook to offer me; people from childhood that I know are on Facebook.  Why not just get it over with and friend them?  Because I’m more interested in seeing whether Facebook finds the connection than I have with re-connecting with them in the first place.  Your move, Facebook.

Anyway, Gizmodo had a strange story about the algorithm surfacing an unknown relative (a great aunt) for the author.  Unknown is truly the best way to describe it.  They had no one in common on Facebook, and the great aunt had married into the family.  But when the author reached out to the person because of the woman’s last name, it turned out that they were (somewhat) closely related.

The author writes,

Now, when I look at my friend recommendations, I’m unnerved not just by seeing the names of the people I know offline, but by all the seeming strangers on the list. How many of them are truly strangers, I wonder—and how many are connected to me in ways I’m unaware of. They are not people I know, but are they people I should know?

That’s how I feel looking at the list.  The ones I know?  I totally know why they’re there.  The ones where we have something in common like we once worked in the same place or we have mutual friends or we live in the same town?  They don’t make me wonder.  It’s the ones where we have nothing in common, no mutual friends, no shared spaces…

…What does Facebook know that I don’t know?

Have you ever gotten a creepy connection like the one in the article?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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There was a cute story in the news this past weekend about a little girl who wrote the Queen because she wanted a pet swan and she thought the Queen owned all the swans.

I showed it to the ChickieNob because she writes a blog about royal news, but she was royally miffed.  I think it secretly had something to do with the fact that she never got her pet clam, but the rest of it was because the ChickieNob sent a letter to the queen and got no response.  She did not want to hear about a little girl who got a letter from Buckingham Palace when she had been checking the mailbox for weeks since sending her own at the beginning of the summer.

When she first wrote the letter, we explained to her that it was highly unlikely that she would receive a letter back, though the ChickieNob couldn’t fathom how the Queen wouldn’t respond once she saw the evidence of the ChickieNob’s deep and abiding love.  We told her it was worth writing, but you need to send these sorts of things without any expectation of an answer.

Have you ever received a response from a public figure?

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The ChickieNob and I went for back-to-school haircuts yesterday, pretty much our least favourite thing to do so we always leave it until last minute.  This is it: the end of summer suck.  I hate it when the kids go back to school, and I feel like I have been tottering on the edge of tears all week.

This year is even worse because we’re starting after Labour Day but ending at the same time.  In order to do that, they needed to shave all the professional days and holidays off the calendar.  So we have very few breaks between now and next June.  Just a few scattered days and the threat that the county will cancel parts of spring break if we need to use snow days.

I love routine; I am such a creature of habit.  So it makes no sense why I get so down in these last few days before life returns to “normal.”  But I do.  I’m down.  I am really sad that school is starting.  I’ll be fine by the end of the week.  Once it’s done, it’s done.  But these last few days of summer make me feel like curling up into a ball.

No Roundup today because we’re on Platform 9 3/4, waiting for the Hogwarts Express.  Yes, the books and life have finally aligned: the epilogue for book 7 is set on September 1, 2017.

I was emotional reading that epilogue ( and not just because the series was over) because if my kids had gotten their owls, we would have been standing on the platform in our robes, waiting to enter our third year at Hogwarts.  There was something about knowing that fixed point in time, having a date in hand, that made that book magic feel solid, like something you could actually visit and witness.

So that’s where I am today.  I’m mentally on that Platform, hanging out with all the other Potter-lovers.  Hoping that magic is real, and not really willing to consider that it isn’t.

I brought four books to the beach: three new ones and one that I knew I liked because I’d already read it a few times.  I started the first book and was about 40 pages in when I decided that I didn’t like it as much as or more than the book I knew that I liked.  So I tossed it aside and started re-reading the same book for the tenth time.  I still found tiny details I missed the first few reading or made connections that I didn’t make the first go-arounds.  It was very enjoyable.

Josh almost never re-reads books.  He points out that there are too many books in his to-read pile, and he doesn’t want to move backwards and read something again, even if he enjoyed it the first time.  I, on the other hand, love re-reading books.  I know it will be a good experience because I already enjoyed the book the first time (or the tenth time), and I usually have a different experience with the book each time I pick it up.

It fits our personalities.  On the explore/exploit continuum, Josh is an explorer and I am an exploiter.  He likes experiencing new things.  I like delving deeply into the familiar.

It’s not that I don’t read new books.  80% of my yearly reading time is spent on new books.  But when the stakes are high — like having the most enjoyable beach trip possible — I want to be sure that I’ll enjoy the book.  Hence the re-read.

Do you enjoy re-reading books or do you usually want to move on to something new?