Have you ever just wanted to stop what you’re doing, get up, walk out the door and just keep walking? I know I have. I’m not sure if that’s how it went for Hakim Maloum, but last year with just $217 in his pocket he left Union Square, New York, and began walking.

In his series, ‘Interviews 50 cents,’ NPR’s Alex Chadwick happened to meet Hakim Maloum on Venice Beach Boardwalk, Los Angeles, as the Algerian born resident of New Jersey had just come to the end of an epic walk across America. It was a journey of some 3300 miles that had taken the 31 year old five months and thirteen days to complete.

“I just packed a backpack and put it on my back.” Said Maloum who described himself as 45 pounds overweight at the time he left the east coast bound for the west coast. He had rules too. “I couldn’t ask for any help, including asking for food, water, money, nothing.” He explained, adding that he could ask for water if he hadn’t had any for two hours.

He wasn’t sponsored and didn’t have an organisation behind him, he was just a guy who decided to walk across the United States and rely simply on the kindness of strangers, eating meals with strangers, and staying in the homes of people he had only just met.

“It’s really amazing. The story is not about me but about the American people and how much help I got from them.” He told Alex Chadwick. “I knew people would help. I just didn’t know this magnitude.” He continued.

It wasn’t easy of course, walking across the entire stretch of the United States wouldn’t be. Along the way he was almost electrocuted by lightning in Texas, lost a brand new pair of shoes in knee-deep mud, got shot at by a some guy with a BB gun, and had a bottle of beer thrown at him. However, on his journey he experienced the magic of kindness. People he didn’t know gave him drinks, made him food, washed his clothes and gave him places to sleep.

He eventually arrived in California where he told Susan Derby, of the LA Times, that he hoped to get a job and maybe stay around for a couple of months to explore the place. After that he had no plans.

“If you really want to get up and do something you really could.” He told Alex Chadwick as they sat across a small table from one another that afternoon on Venice Beach Boardwalk. “Everything else is just excuses.”

There seems to be no information about what Hakim is doing now. Maybe he spent a few weeks checking out Los Angeles and now he’s walking back to New Jersey? Whatever he’s doing I hope and suspect he’s following his heart, after all, as he said “Everything else is just excuses.”

—

Hakim Maloum’s very long walk
Q&A with Hakim Maloum
Good magazine on ‘The Walk’
Well dressed wisdom
Crazy in love
Married five times

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t care that you just “played an amazing game of TextTwist” or that you “took the ‘IQ test’ quiz and the result is: Very Good!” I am not the least bit interested to know what hippy name you have, or that you “took the ‘What is your ministry calling?’ quiz and the result is: Missions and Outreach.” I could have been quite happy not knowing that you just joined the ‘Global Water Balloon Fight’ and that you “really want a KFC” and I didn’t need to know that you’re “on the bus feeling tired.” In short, I no longer want to be your facebook friend.

Facebook is more than five years old now and I’ve had an account since about 2006. At first it was slow moving, using it was like walking into a nightclub so early that nobody is at the bar let alone on the dance floor. Eventually though, I began to accumulate friends, quickly amassing an impressive list of people I knew, kind of knew, had met a few times, knew by association, or had met at a party – once. Some were friends, but most were just virtual connections whom I added in my enthusiasm then didn’t have the heart to delete later.

I don’t really understand where facebook is supposed to fit into my life. Once I had exchanged a few messages with distant friends, checked out pictures of old ex-girlfriends to see how fat they had become, and taken a few of the dumb quizzes sent to me by people on my friends list, I was left wondering ‘Now what?”

So called ‘friend requests’ were coming in thick and fast. Names I had to strain to recall were wanting to add me to their ‘friends’ without so much as a “How are you?” or a “What have you been up to lately?” I would closely examine their profile pictures, squinting at their eyes as if this might sharpen my recollection.

Eventually my account (and my email) was filling up with alerts telling me that this person had just done this thing, or that thing, taken this quiz or joined that group, installed this application or become friends with some other random person. Status updates would tell me that someone who never speaks to me in real life was having a great afternoon, or that another person was “cleaning their house”, or that someone else was “at the hairdressers.” Pretty quickly I found myself wondering why the heck I needed to know this crap?

I decided that I didn’t need to be up to speed with the daily drudge of some old squeeze from back when Bon Jovi were singing about Bed’s of Roses. I didn’t need to get up-to-the-moment updates of rush hour traffic in Chelmsford, or the benign rants of a clearly depressed ‘friend’ who was having issues with her “fuckhead of a boyfriend” (whom I had never met). It seemed pretty clear to me that the time had come for a facebook ‘friend cull’, and with that I began systematically ‘de-friending’ people.

At first I felt bad, like I was being disrespectful or something. De-friending someone on facebook seems like the social equivalent of telling someone their baby is ugly. But after the initial opportunity to catch up with someone from way back and spend a few minutes curiously peering into their lives like some government CCTV operator, how else was I to gracefully exit the exchange?

Fortunately most of the promiscuous ‘friend whores’ (people with more than two or three hundred people on their friends list) didn’t notice I had ditched them. A couple did, and one or two people even got upset about it, saying more to me in a message expressing their annoyance than they had said to me in the entire time we had been enjoying our new found digital friendship. I did my best to explain it was nothing personal, and for the most part I think people were okay with it.

And that’s just it, Facebook is nothing personal. It’s an endless precession of worthless crap spewing onto the world wide web like effluents from a burst pipe. Yes I know, some people like it because they can keep up with their friends, but if the site were to be switched off tomorrow, how many of those people would make a real world effort to continue sharing crap with one another?

Of course, coming from me this might all seem like a contradiction. As a blogger I am a person who spends a significant amount of my time sharing what some might regard as “worthless crap.” Indeed, one of my friends remarked that blogging was “stupid” and “simply pointless.” She decried that bloggers were “stupid people who wanted to make themselves feel better by writing stuff on the internet.” Oddly enough, my blog hating friend has since become an active facebook user with a long list of friends. She probably gives no thought to the fact that when she makes a facebook status update she does so with much the same motivation as the average blogger.

I’m not the first person to tire of the witless rubbish that swamps my facebook account, but as a web professional myself it’s hard to see where the site is going. Several (real) friends of mine have commented that they like facebook because of the pictures, but if it hopes to cash in on the value of its astounding number of users then it needs to do so sooner rather than later; people can only add so many friends, or do so many pointless quizzes. If facebook doesn’t find a place of real value soon the fickle people of the digital world will leave the site for something new as quickly as they deserted the likes of Xanga and myspace.

I might not have been an altogether early adopter of the site, but I’m going to be an early deserter. My friends know who they are, we email, we talk on the phone, we visit one another. They know that just because I don’t care about their facebook status, that doesn’t mean I don’t care about them.

It was fun for a while, but I’ll be closing my facebook account this week.

—

Facebook is bad for the brain
Judge rules that facebook friends aren’t friends
Facebook’s growing problem
Adbusters : Quit facebook
Quitting facebook gets easier
What to do when old photos of you appear on Facebook
Why I don’t get facebook
Get your face on my comments!
Share on Facebook

Welcome to ‘Say Anything Friday!’ Your chance to say whatever the heck you want. Tell a story, write an open letter, blurt out your favorite fizzy word, or just head-bang the keyboard because that’s all you’ve got at the end of another long week. Whatever you feel like saying, just come right out and say it!

Here’s how it works:

Whatever is on your mind you just write it here as a comment. Let rip! Have a moan about something or sing from the rooftops (or comment-tops at least) about that great thing you’re all excited about at the moment. Whatever it is you get to just get to say it here.

There are no limits to what you write, how long your comment is, the subject, or the amount of cuss words you use. It’s an open space where you can go crazy.

So go ahead… say something!

Here’s a challenge for you. Switch your favorite music player to the ‘random’ or ’shuffle’ mode then reveal the first ten random tunes your player picks. Don’t try and be cool by omitting the embarrassing ‘big hair’ rock ballads or cheesy pop you have! Just do it once and leave the result in the comments.

I currently have 6884 songs on my iPod which amounts to nearly twenty one and a half days of music. So with such an extensive selection to pick from I’m nervous that iTunes could really show me up here… but here goes!

1. Low Sun – Chicane
2. Bullet Proof… I Wish I Was – Radiohead
3. The Sun Rising – Beloved
4. America, Fuck Yeah – Team America
5. Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own – U2
6. Untitled 6 – Sigur Rós
7. Always The Last To Know – Del Amitri
8. Don’t Mess With My Man – Booty Luv
9. Smells like Teen Spirit – Nirvana
10. Seven Colours (After the rain comes the sun) – Lost Witness

Phew, I think I escaped pretty much unscathed there. I was worried that Paula Abdul, of 5 Star might have appeared then I would have felt obliged to explain there presence in my music collection.

So, what are you random 10 tunes?

—

What’s your signature sound?
Forgiven but not forgotten
I’m glad I was there
U who?

A five minute video that will make you think, or just use up five minutes of your day.

“You never know what you’re history is going to be like until long after you’re gone.”

Former president Bush said that back in 2006, and doesn’t it feel great to call him former President Bush. You kind of get the feeling that the entire world has breathed a collective sigh of relief now that Bush is gone. Lets just hope that the damage he has done is repairable.

I watched President Obama’s Inauguration along with millions across the world. He’s got a tough road ahead of him. His country, and indeed the world is in something of a shambles at the moment. I’m not suggesting he can fix it all, but you would have to admit that the President of the United States is uniquely placed to exert a great deal of influence. I for one feel better that there is now a man of considerable intellect in charge of the USA, rather than some trigger happy pseudo Texan.

So as we say goodbye to George ‘Dubya’ Bush, it seems only fitting that we send him off by looking back on some of the wisdom he shared with us.

“Will the highways on the internets become more few?”

“It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.”

“Most imports are from outside of the country”

“Security is the essential roadblock to achieving the road map to peace.”

“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

“They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program.”

“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”

“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.”

And finally, showing what a true Statesman he was, I especially love the question he put to the Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso in November, 2001. “Do you have blacks too?”

Oh how we’ll miss insightful gems like that.

—

[Video] The best of the Bushisms
[Video] President Bush on his regrets and mistakes
[Video] 8 years in 8 minutes
[Video] Playboy TV launch ‘No More Bush’ month
The Complete Bushisms compiled by Jacob Weisberg
Shoe thrown at President Bush
Hair removal company say “Goodbye Bush” in cheeky ad
Veet say Goodbye Bush