There’s been some concern about recent things I’ve written being public. That is, my mom wrote me an email worrying about how public my rants about work are. To which I promptly responded “geez, Mom, I KNOW!” And then I thought about it, and I guess part two (in which I wonder if software engineering is really the job for me) could be misconstrued.

Some would go back in and delete that paragraph. That’s not my style. First of all, people have already read it; second of all, it’s on the internet, so it’s still there somewhere; third of all, I’m not going to censor myself above and beyond the regular, sensible censorship I already put myself through.

Instead, I’ll clarify, you know, for the sake of my manager who happened to stop in here (hi!) (<–note I didn’t even say hi [my manager’s name], because if you knew my manager and my location, maybe you could find out our organizational structure, or something else confidential, see, I’m not as dumb as I look) : It’s not like I’ll just put in the hours, grumble about work, and then go home and drink to forget it all. For chrissake, I care about what I do. I hope Google knew that about me when they hired me. I’m pretty sure Google wouldn’t have hired me if they didn’t. And I care about the company too, and if I thought I wasn’t doing my job well, I’d fix things until I was. I’m pretty goddamn lucky to be working for a company that I care about (especially considering there are like 4 corporations in the world that I’m pretty sure aren’t evil). And my coworkers are pretty cool.

But I’m not sure if software engineering is the life for me. Who ever is, after a month on the job? Right now, I think it is; I think I’m doing fine, and after I get all acclimated, I’ll be an all-star. If I’m not, that’ll percolate up to the top of my consciousness, and I’ll change things. I just don’t want the rest of my life to fly by me in the meantime.

Anyway, this might be a good time to explain my privacy policy too. I’m pretty outspoken here, which is the beauty of the internet. Maybe you, my friends, do not want to hear my latest thoughts about why Kraft, Perdue, Cargill, and Monsanto are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. If I shout it out here, loud and proud, you can tune in or not. Similarly, maybe you’re halfway across the world but would like to hear the juicy details of everything I do: you can opt in to hearing me. But I do have some guidelines, so here they are, in 7 parts:

- I try not to call people out by full name. If someone searches for “Dan Tasse”, they’ll find this page, which is fine, but if they’re searching for “Joe Bloggs” and my most recent post is “hahaha Joe Bloggs got so drunk last night”, that may not be so good for Joe. (I’m not shy about booze, parties, etc. I don’t party a ridiculous amount, I’m not irresponsible, and it is in fact legal for me to drink. In fact, I even drank before I was 21! Yessir! However, Joe may not share my outspokenness, and his employer may be a fire-and-brimstone stick-in-the-mud, and I don’t want to get Joe fired.)

- Nothing confidential. Duh. Ooh, except here’s the secret of PageRank!

- Nothing about love, dating, relationships. If you’d like to talk about it in person, that’d be great! Manly man though I am, I dig a good conversation about girls and feelings. But I’m not going to livejournal it- I’m not a whiny teenager. (Okay, if you go back in the archives, you may find a couple references, fine. Want to dig through my love life? That’s not creepy at all.)

- Nothing illegal. Big brother is watching you. No, really: I’m as paranoid as anyone about our warrantless-wiretaps patriot-act government.

- Nothing dangerously personally identifiable. It’s okay for you to know that my name is Dan Tasse, I live in Seattle, and I work for Google. Much of this blog might not make any sense without a little bit of context. But I’m not going to tell you where I live, or the fact that I live on the first floor, and I keep the door unlocked, and I have an actual bag full of gold coins with a dollar sign on it.

- Nothing I wouldn’t tell a stranger. My friends will never have to censor their conversations with me because of my blog. I’m not dumb. My friends (also of the facebook generation) understand this.

- Finally, privacy policy part 7, c/o xkcd.