Twitter!

I just noticed in an old post that I mentioned joining Twitter.  It's interesting how much that has changed.  We had the Arab Spring since then, which Twitter got a lot of credit for helping with keeping communication lines open. Twitter itself had a large IPO, and me personally, just a few months ago I actually had an offer made to buy my Twitter account.

There's an odd monetization of ownership of things that you sorta do and sorta don't own, things like Twitter accounts.  A big story in the land of technology that recently happened was how a highly valuble Twitter account, @N, was blackmailed from it's original owner, due to social engineering. That story ended happily, but it feels like people lost context of what to me, was the real problem, which is that the whole thing happened because of a social engineering hack done elsewhere.

Half a decade later

Decade. 10 years. Not there yet, but it's been half of one. Whenever you can use a block of time that has a word for it, that makes it longer. Incidentally, that word has the same base of the word "decimate", which it's become en vogue lately to point out that decimate originally means to reduce by a 10th, as opposed to our modern usage of it. English majors seem to despise that English is a living language and changes over time. Anyway, it's been close to 5 years since I've posted.  Blogging was all rage then, still.  It's a useful tool now, and for various reasons I think that it has a lot to offer anyone who does it.

So, I once again am trying to blog, mostly because I think writing is a good thing to do, and I'd like to develop my own voice and style. So I will try to largely focus on my adventures in working in IT, a job that I've moved into by choice, away from being a professional programmer. I'm big on analogies, and my analogy for this one is that I'd rather be a mechanic working on the car, then the engineer designing it.

Of course, talking about IT to some extent feels a little thin, when given context in the world. Right now Ukraine appears to be on the verge of a war with Russia, as Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be attempting to invade under the claim of protecting Russian citizens. We can only hope that this won't lead to a war of some sort, although right now that seems like a pretty high probability outcome. We all hope that's not what happens though.

G1 part 2/vacation

An extremely long time since I have posted. This is an intersting post because I am doing it from my g1. There has been a major update since thenn which is making it more functional. Quite a bit so, in fact, thought the lack of Exchange support is still problematic. It has become acceptable in most other areas though.. anyway, I am on vacation, helping Tree move his motorcycles to Arizona. I am also using it as an oppurtunity to see how well cell phone tech has merged with wirless to create a more connected life. So far its nott too bad, though not perfect. Gps integration needs more work, plus tmobiles limited 3g deployment makes things worse then they should be. This is kind of a pain to create an entry this way, so I am stoppng for now.

G1

Another year, another phone. 2 years actually. T-Mobile seems to have transitioned to mainly 2 year contracts to subsidize their phones. I've moved up to the G1, the first Google phone. It's written to death on the net, I don't have any insights to share. No, that's not quite right, I do have an insight. InvisibleSHIELD, while a nice product, is a bitch to put on. And if it's not on just right, you get these little tiny pockets around the edges that collect schmutz, and start peeling back. It's annoying. An expensive first try. I can't decide if I should try and bitch at InvisibleSHIELD to replace it for me or not. On the one hand, I probably didn't quite get it right. On the other hand, their are NO FREAKING DIRECTIONS. Sure, there's a video on the website...it tells you how to put the nice flat rectangle on the nice flat surface. There's not really any hints on how to put the bizarre shaped cut on to the curved corner surfaces though. You are all on your own there. Which means you'll probably so something wrong the first time. I've got myself riled up, I'll email them.

Anyway, this is the intro post, I'm going to see if blogging from my phone is any better. Blogging has returned I think mostly to what it was before, a modern day version of a diary. I think it'll suit me well for now. There's still the access problem. I put information and things I want to remember here, but if it's not at my finger tips, not well indexed and searchable, it's not that helpful. We still need something else.

The Jester asked me the other day that if brain augmentation through technology were possible, would I do it, and of course I would, no hesitation.

Ok, world of G1(with the badly applied InivisbleSHIELD) here I come. I hope.

No critical mass

So it's interesting. I've got flickr going from my cell phone, I've got twitter going from my cell phone. I can post to the blog, twitter, or flickr, all from my cell. But there still is some critical mass piece missing. There's not this nice transition or merging of their functionalities, especially where there is overlap. It still feels like forcing things together.

I liken this to the difference between separate database, spreadsheet, and word processing programs that can share information and work together and the Microsoft Office suite. There's still some thing missing which makes it feel like a nice integrated experience.

I think that digsby is trying to accomplish some of that. This also reminds me of long time back when Apple had these object oriented content pieces would combine to form Voltron or something equally impressive. It was called OpenDoc. Looked really nifty in the demos, never seemed to go anywhere.

I suspect that there is still some magic piece missing in the seemless integration and interfacing to related data and content that is produced in fundamentally different ways. Too much context switching maybe? If you consider how you would present a document, say using a Word doc as a container with embedded Excel charts, video, and other items, it feels still very clumsy. Individual apps interact well with people, but the products of those apps merged(dare I say 'mashups') together doesn't interact as a whole very well even if they make something pretty looking.

murder/mystery party

i'm at a murder/mystery party. I'm not participating, but I may try to figure it out, tho I have already missed a bunch of the bios

You twit!

I've joined Twitter! Strangely appealing. Sounds really not that useful when you read about it, but has some odd appeal when actually using it. It might be that they've hidden images of the hypno-toad on the website. I'm not sure.