Daniel Sato

Rumor on the street is, early next week reporters, photographers and videographers will all be giving the much talked about iPhone 4S. A few weeks ago, the photographers had a staff meeting to discuss the impending changes. I was unable to attend, but this is how I imagine it went for some …

It is interesting who jumps on board with the latest gadget and who remains skeptical. Some staffers that you would never expect to be on board couldn’t be happier, while others who seemingly pride themselves on how hard they work want nothing to do with it. Hopefully, they will all find some use for it, be it for video, as a scanner, or even if it is just as a mobile hotspot.

One of the things I have learned since I began this blog in 2005 is the importance of maintaining and managing my online identity. It is easy enough to throw up a landing page with a few jquery galleries and a contact section and call it a day. The problem is, stopping there means not knowing what others are saying about you and, more importantly, who might be pretending to be you.

Granted, this all sounds silly and somewhat vain. I mean, who can’t take some criticism? But I am talking about more serious issues. Back in 2006, after I came back from a trip to Nepal, a thread was started on the Lightstalkers forums that insinuated that a friend and I were abusing children during our stay in the country. Worse yet, some people on the forum were willing to believe these posts. It was not until my friend responded to these allegations with detailed accounts of our travels in Nepal, as well as links to our ongoing struggles with the person we believed responsible for the thread, that it was put to rest. Around the same time, a few blogs popped up featuring my image that spoke highly of the same person who created the false forum posts.

The problem is that with the anonymity that the Web provides, it is easy for one man to pose as many, creating false profiles and then providing those profiles with affirmation through comments and replies from other false profiles.

Four years, one fake Facebook page and a few fake blogs later, and I stumble across this gem:

Finding an old post about my time in Nepal as well as a profile picture and my Chips Quinn photo was easy enough, but why would he create the page using a post in which I did not speak highly of his Nepali program? He also changed any reference to my friend Rene and calls her my girlfriend.

To discredit me of course! Who is going to believe the word of a man who is now shooting adult movies and documentaries with my now (fake) girlfriend Rene Edde (the link goes to a porn site)? I literally laughed at loud at this point.

And of course, the icing on the cake, the post label:

Label: My girlfriend Rene Edde. Because who doesn’t categorize their posts based on their fake girlfriends?

Clip of the recently aired piece on the Santa Anita racetrack, which served as an assembly center for Japanese American internees during World War II.

As a child, I never really thought much of the crafts my grandmother would make. A frog out of a few rocks, a face out of dried leaves and acorns or an umbrella out of cigarette packages … It wasn’t until I saw an exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum showcasing crafts made in internment camps that I realized where she had learned to make these things and why she used the materials that she did and it definitely gave me a greater appreciation for that art and the subsequent art forms that she practiced once out of camp.

A similar exhibit is currently at the Smithsonian American Art Museum until January 30, 2011.