Programming Happy Birthdays
It was my birthday this week. Nothing grand, really. I view it simply as the next iteration in this cosmic for-loop of life. A minor deal to some; others post it on their blogs because they crave attention. We really give it as much significance as we want to give to it.
But it is a wonderful time. Your inbox floods with email messages from Facebook and you feel all warm and fuzzy inside because someone out there truly cares for your delicate soul. Yet you overlook the fact that most of them were merely reminded of your birthday from a right-aligned sidebar on Facebook.
Something that I’ve found fascinating are the birthday emails you receive from schools, banks, forums or other websites of which you have memberships to. You think to yourself, “aw, how nice of Corporation X for remembering!” Your impressions of the company grows fonder.
But when a server sends the email, it really has no concept of what a birthday is, at least not in the sense that we have. To us, it is a significant time of the year. To the robots, it is merely an entry in their database. The server runs an algorithm and the machine forwards a birthday message to you. The server has no emotional conception of what a birthday is, yet it can run a function that sends birthday messages to make you smile, thereby controlling your emotions.
And that is how you program happy birthdays.
