It’s Like Realizing That Your Parents Have Sex

Any­one who reads me reg­u­larly knows I love analo­gies. They don’t even need to be that great, and I’ll run them to the ground.

Ear­lier, I was rec­om­mended on #fol­lowfri­day by Jason Eng­lish (Jason blogs for ITKO who makes, as far as I can tell, a great set of test­ing tools) as “biz or bizarre”. Now, I’m feel­ing like I need to have a more pro­fes­sional look-and-feel, so I’m going to write about tech­nol­ogy instead of funny iphone screen­shots and fan­tas­tic women in tech.

Iron­i­cally, doing so brings to mind the way we all felt when we real­ized that our par­ents actu­ally had sex.

It was a dis­turb­ing mix of “Really? I guess they must. I can’t imag­ine them being any good, but good for them!” And, once the thought was there, and you warmed up to it (and grew up) your shrink helped you real­ize that it was per­fectly nor­mal, and they prob­a­bly enjoyed it in their own way. (I can go on with this anal­ogy if you like, just let me know, it’s just I’m about to eat…)

Well, the push by the by the US Gov­ern­ment to make “machine read­able datasets gen­er­ated by the Exec­u­tive Branch of the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment” acces­si­ble, and develop an AWS-like com­mu­nity makes me feel just the same. I guess it makes sense, they’re prob­a­bly not any good but I’m sure they’ll have fun… and in a weird way, I want to watch. Who knows? Maybe in 10 years, my shrink might tell me it’s per­fectly normal?