midnight in the garden of social media

Google, I've got a beef and I'm not alone. You see, I'm a teaching assistant and when a student e-mails me and I e-mail them back, I'd prefer if you didn't automatically add them to my Gmail chat (thus, I'm assuming, also adding me to theirs). It's not that I dislike the students; we just don't have that type of relationship, and I'm not sure I'm ready to take it to the next level. So I'm forced to manually block students, which always feels a little awkward. Nobody wins.

In fact, this problem you have is so pernicious that I had to immediately disable Google Buzz right after you launched it for this very reason. Oi. I hope Google Buzz becomes one of those pop culture references for bad moves.

All that said, today I got to see the results of teaching in action via this same problem. A student's chat status had said "Damn you, Matlab!" and then after meeting with me it said, "I <3 Matlab." Now, that felt good.

Hmm, now that I think about it I hope that 'Matlab' simply refers to the programming language we're using in class and is not some proxy for something else. I best go block that student.