I registered my Facebook account on September 8, 2006, admittedly spurred by the fact that it was developed by a smart young guy at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg. (Ok, so by September 2006 Mark had long dropped out of Harvard! Nonetheless, that old school loyalty worked its magic…)<\/p>\n
I was part of the “Harvard network,” but I wanted to join my<\/em> regional network, too. Well, guess what? It doesn’t exist, according to Facebook. Facebook — Mark?, Mark?, can you hear me?? — thinks that we in Victoria (the capital city of British Columbia) on Vancouver Island (a distinct, separate-from-the-continent geologic fact<\/em> and entity — belong to a network called…”Vancouver, BC.” This is an insult, not to mention a grave, grievous error.<\/p>\n Mark, Mark, Mark: where did we go wrong with you at Harvard, my dear boy?? Sweetie, we realize you’re just a drop-out, but we can overcome this if we work together, ‘k? It’s not too late…<\/p>\n First thing you must do is GET AN ATLAS. Get a map. I believe there’s a nifty application called maps.google.com around. Type in V8V4J4. That’s my postal code (yes, postal code — we don’t zip in Canada, we go quietly postal…). Note the location! Please note that we are a capital city. (Well, not me personally, not even in the majestatis pluralis<\/em>, but “we,” the city of Victoria.) We’re a distinct metropolitan centre, located on a large (very large) island. Our city actually lies below<\/em> the 49th parallel. We’re practically breathing down your neck!<\/p>\n Mark, according to FastCompany<\/a>, you took art history classes! Darling, that’s where you and I have a bond, don’t you see? I took my PhD in art history at Harvard, and you … well, you dropped out of Harvard’s art history classes — but not before having that key epiphany that only a high-pressure art history course can deliver. I quote from FastCompany<\/a>:<\/p>\n …by the end of the first semester, with just two days to go before his art-history final, [Mark Zuckerberg] was in a serious jam: He needed to be able to discuss 500 images from the Augustan period. “This isn’t the kind of thing where you can just go in and figure out how to do it, like calculus or math,” he says, without a trace of irony. “You actually have to learn these things ahead of time.” So he pulled a Tom Sawyer: He built a Web site with one image per page and a place for comments. Then he emailed members of his class and invited them to share their notes, like a study group on cybersteroids. “Within two hours, all the images were populated with notes,” he says. “I did very well in that class. We all did.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ok, now that a bona fide<\/em> WEB ENTREPRENEUR has admitted that art history can be more complex to deal with than math and calculus (which “you can just go in and figure out how to do”), I can die happy.<\/p>\n Maybe.<\/p>\n Maybe, that is, if<\/em> Mark Zuckerberg relents and satisfies<\/em> the demand of nearly 4,200 members who joined Petition for a Victoria BC network<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mark! Mark Zuckerberg! Fellow Harvard art history student! How can you ignore this?<\/p>\n