Matthew Darby's Blog

Last night a good friend of mine had a surprise birthday party that he may not soon forget. I worked with his girlfriend for the past month plotting and planning this occasion that would bring the majority of his friends together as well as his brother, the preparation seemed to be well worth it.

His birthday is actually on the same day as my mother's birthday and two days before that my sister has her birthday. Because I went home to see my family on the 4th of July and I will be traveling with them to New Hampshire this coming weekend I had decided to stay in town to help put this little gathering together.

Two years ago for my birthday my friends got together to throw a surprise birthday party for me, so I knew at some point I had to return the favor. Two years ago this same friend and I traveled to Florida the week of his birthday except the actual day of his birthday was spent just going out to dinner, basically, a relatively quiet affair. This year however was quite different and I was glad to see everyone who showed up.

To all who played a part in the preparation and execution of the surprise, no matter how big or small your role was, I thank you and the birthday boy and his girlfriend thanks you as well.

For some time now, my pastor has been making comments about potential problems with social websites such as Facebook.com and mySpace.com; being a software engineer at IBM helps to gives him a little creditability in this subject. He discussed the rising issue of online predators who prey on unsuspecting victims and now school and businesses that dig for information on potential candidates for enrollment or jobs. What it is important to remember is that it is not the site themselves that create the danger; instead it is the naive users who willingly put information about themselves that could later damage their character down the line.

For instance, my pastor was easily able to look-up information about several church members who had profiles on myspace.com. Among the few he found, where some very despairingly comments, pictures and phrases on profile pages of members and children of members of the church. It seems that many people, mostly teens and college-age young adults seem to believe that posting such information would only be shared among friends or other users of the site themselves thought of as their peers. Instead, for myspace.com at least, anyone can view the profile and begin making assumptions about a person's character based on what they read of see.

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