Some of my friends on Twitter prefer to talk only to people they know or who have proved themselves interesting. Me? I don’t give a fuck who you are. And if someone adds me on Twitter I add ‘em right back. They then have maybe a week’s grace to prove themselves not a fuckwit. Far from a perfect system, it hasn’t stopped me being bored to tears, hit on and occasionally disturbed over the last year*, but it works for me.
So today (if you follow me) you would have seen this:
Following only half a conversation can get a tad frustrating, eh? What George and I were talking about was this:
I’m as much of an Aliens fan as the next guy, but seriously… if you need a working LED ammo counter that counts your ammo usage while blasting in the general direction of imaginary monsters then fair play to you.
*much to my surprise I’ve been using Twitter since November 2006 and have around 170 pages of tweets trailing behind me.
Because I’m an idiot I packed for Istanbul about ten minutes before getting into the car for the airport. I’m pretty good at this by now and as long as I have a laptop and an Internet connection when I travel I’m usually set. Seeing as the fuckwits at AirFrance managed to lose my luggage I’m glad I travel light, but this trip I forgot to load up the laptop properly . This meant that I only had a couple of movies with me and just enough music to get me through a long weekend. What if the terrorists strapped bombs to the UK and pushed it into the side of America while I was away?
My rule normally when travelling is to take enough digital media with me so that I can survive away from home indefinitely. It all worked out in the end. Despite parts of the country flooding while I was away, London survived and I picked up another copy of A Bittersweet Life while I was out there. Some people buy carpets in Istanbul - I buy cool-as-ice Korean revenge movies. This was a nice movie to fly back on as it counterbalanced watching Alain Delon in Un flic on the way out.
All of this is a long winded build up to the fact that this week I bought a new hard drive. This one.
It’s small, sexy and (now) filled with evil. Never again will I travel without a copy of William Shatner’s Kingdom of the Spiders or Special Agent Dale Cooper’s Twin Peaks Tapes or indeed my beloved Telly Savalas album (the ‘music’ that must never be played).
I sleep easier with this knowledge.
I’m still stumbling my way around Facebook and learning mainly by taste. Being added as a vampire, zombie or STD is plain annoying so there’ll be less of that. Watching how smart people use Facebook seems to be the way to go. Take Chris Brogan’s Grasshopper group, for example:
Facebook isn’t just a school toy or “yet another social network.” From what I’m learning, it’s a pretty useful system that can be used very effectively to build a very vibrant network, provide excellent tools (especially with lots of good 3rd party apps), and then provide you the chance to use it to DO SOMETHING.
I believe that Grasshoppers is a great way to prove this. Join the group. Determine what we’re doing and how you can apply yourself to it. And then dig in.
Turn social networking into action.
Thats a jawdropping idea. Especially seeing as so many people seem to use it for nothing more powerful than sharing photos of old school friends ie. a dusty box best left under your fucking bed.
PS
The best thing about moving over to a Mac so far has been Skitch. It’s not just a pleasure to use it’s fun. Here it is in action on my desktop:
Check out their great little video here. The UI takes a little bit of practice, but it’s so refreshing after using Photoshop and PSP for so long. If you need a very cool way to play around with images then this is the app for you. Still in invite-only beta, but with so much happy buzz around the product that I’m hoping that Plasq open it up soon.
I have a couple or three invites left if anyone wants to try it out. Mac only don’t forget…
PS The video gets as much attention as the app. Check out Keith Lang’s blog post of how he put it together here.
This has highly amused just about everyone who knows me for the last few days:
Sigh. I got a Facebook account. It is here. Poke away.
Initially I got very defensive and insisted that a Facebook refusnik like myself had only finally caved in because it was getting impossible to keep up with certain work related tasks without one - this helped sweeten the poison as I could retort that I was getting paid to use Facebook.
Now I’ve got my head around it my thinking has changed. Slightly.
I completely understand why so many people use it and indeed enjoy it. Tellingly I completely understand why so many of my non techy friends are on there. It’s easier than running a blog, you ‘get it’ instantly unlike say Twitter and because it doesn’t do much you’re not going to go scratch your head over it a lot. It picks up the Friend’s Reunited users in one fell swoop and doesn’t charge them a penny.
I still don’t like it. But it has it’s uses.
I’m also trying to learn to love Pownce. I keep comparing it to Twitter and it loses so bad I feel sorry for it. Like a three legged dog. If I try and see it as a way to share stuff with people it shines a little more, though I’m far from making friends with it. But I’m trying…
I have a bunch of Pownce invites by the way. Lemme know if you need one.
