What twitter is and isn't

It seems like twitter is everywhere these days. Every time I turn on the news, they are talking about twitter. After being asked several times by friends and family, what all the fuss over twitter is, I finally decided to write this short explanation of what twitter is and what it isn't.

twitter is a place for anybody to put up useful information they think like-minded individuals would appreciate. It is not a place to put status updates because do you honestly care that your niece is eating cheerios right now? twitter is very much like the wall posts on Facebook except not as personal.

On Facebook, you have friends who have to be approved before you can see their posts and they see yours. This works great for personal relationships where you can see if someone had a bad day or got a horrible haircut. Then you can comment on these posts and have discussions amongst your social circle.

That is not twitter.

twitter is like the friends news feed from Facebook except for non-personal relationships. Curious what's going on behind the scenes of your favorite tv show? Follow their twitter. Want to know what's going on up to the minute with your favorite sports team? Follow their twitter. Want to know about the latest items on sale at Amazon.com? Follow their twitter.

The problem with twitter is that most people join up and post the same way they post on Facebook. I know because I was guilty of this assumption when I first joined too. There is a difference between micro-blogging (twitter and Facebook) and status updates (Facebook).

The next issue everyone has is the inability to comment on specific twitter posts. I'd say this is probably twitter's greatest feature (or lack there of). Remember that twitter is to follow the thoughts and news of individuals we do not have personal relationships with. These short posts do not need to be defaced with the opinions of hundreds of people bringing down the original weight of the post. For real content that should be discussed, then a regular blog posting is still the best way to go.

Facebook and twitter are very different beasts that aim to bring information about people you care about to your attention. Facebook has copied the non-personal news items with the ability to become a "fan" of a person, place, or thing and follow their posts but personally I like the separation. I check Facebook to see what my friends and family are up to and I check twitter to see what is new in the world outside that social circle.

If there is some interest in actually learning twitter, I'll follow up with a post about how the somewhat confusing syntax of twitter works.

Armor Mounts = Monoprice + $$$

Don't even bother buying a mount from armormounts.com (which I will not link here because I don't want them to get any additional traffic) because they are the exact same mounts you can buy at monoprice.com except they are over twice as much. I'm a little pissed because they came recommended on Tekzilla so I thought they'd be good. I had to wait four days before the thing even shipped and when it get it get here, it was in a Monoprice box! They didn't even bother to try and hide the fact that they sold me a $26 dollar mount for $80. The only consolation that I got was they gave me a "free" HDMI cable that I could have added to my order for $4 more!

Sad Times

Today is a sad day for me. It's officially the day that I abandon Gentoo as a viable desktop solution. I still love it very much for the ability to have a powerful and customizable source based linux but I'm tired of fucking with everything. I'm getting to the point in my life that I don't want to spend 3 hours fiddling with config files and checking internet howtos to get the sound card to work. I just want it to work. So I wiped my Gentoo partition and installed Ubuntu. So long and I'm sorry to see you go but my home server will still be running Gentoo for as long as it is maintained by the Gentoo devs.

Jobs and Moving

I recently found out that my favorite video game company (still in existence) is hiring for a Linux system administrator. That may not sound like a wonderful job to most people but even just being in that environment would be amazing.

So I brushed up my resume and then decided not to do anything with it. I figured, if I didn't send it in, I wouldn't be disappointed anyways. Plus, with the housing market like it is and the mass joblessness, now isn't a good time to be moving around and becoming the new guy at some company because they are usually the first to go, right? So I did nothing.

Then as this week rolled on, it started eating at me. I have been wanting to move out of SC for a little while now and I've always wanted to work in a video game company. This seemed like a great fit (if it worked). I wrestled back and forth on the idea. The good: video games, linux, California (a lot of ppl like it, they can't all be wrong, right?). The bad: moving, selling a house, buying a house, California.

Well, whatever. The point of this post is that I finally did it. I sent in my resume and fell into the trap of feeling really exciting about something. I even looked up cost-of-living differences and house prices. Why? I dunno, dreams are hard to ignore even when you know it won't happen. Then I get a response (automated of course) and it says something about the large volume of applicants and how they can't respond to everyone and my heart sank again.

I wish I had never found out about this stupid job. I was completely content with my shitty job.

Two more books I read this millenium.

I recently did my annual cleaning of my office and realized I didn't have enough space on my shelves for all the books I've accumulated recently. So I made two piles in front of the shelves. One with books that I had read and just need to find a place to put and the other a pile that I have not got around to reading yet. As you might could imagine the unread pile is quite larger than the the other. Quite possibly three times as large just judging by glancing over there from where I'm sitting.

So I've decided to start going through this pile as part of a new year's resolution (one that I had intended to write a post about and it never got past the draft stage, sorry). Anyways, here are two books I have completed so far. And one doesn't even have pictures!


The Fart Party by Julia Wertz

This book of comics follows a year in the life of the author living in San Fran with her boyfriend and a string of shitty jobs. I love this book because it's completely true to life. It does not have to exaggerate life to make me laugh, instead it just shows it from an angle that most of us don't see it from.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

I recently rode from D.C. to SC with my cousin and she had Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book on her iPod. Although I was trying to sleep most of the way (long long day) home, I kept finding myself intrigued by the mixture of fact and anecdotes used by Gladwell to express some startling ideas about success and the way we measure it. Well since I have a small obsession with starting things at the beginning (I know these books are in no way related like that, just bear with me), I decided to start with his first book instead of Outliers (the most recent).

Anyways, this book was just as amazing and startling. The amount of research that has gone into this book is startling. Gladwell did an amazing job of taking a large amount of data and putting it into a wonderfully easy book to read. I wish I had more time to explain this book but this is definately a recommended book from me.

And yes, I already bought his other two books and they are on the unread pile. Unfortunately, this book caused one book to move to the read and two books to spawn on the unread ultimately not really helping the cause but still worth it.

Books I Read This Millenia

I recently read Penny Arcade's first book Attack of the Bacon Robots. It is the entire first year of Penny Arcade's existence as a web comic. Eight years before it was the biggest web comic talking about video games, it was just two guys writing about the many problems with and the love of video games. This is all the comics you could find if you started at the beginning of the PA archive except Tycho went back and wrote wonderfully witty and often laugh out loud comments on each strip. It's really funny to see the hindsight comments on their (sometimes absurb) predictions on gaming trends actually happening today.

Every comic is written in the over-the-top style that Gabe draws the strip with exceptional depth in every panel's dialog. I really enjoyed this book and plan to purchase the rest in the series after the holiday season. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves video games.

PS. Thanks Dad for this one. Sorry it took me a couple years to finally get around to reading it.

Astonishing

I just finished reading the Astonishing X-Men series written by Joss Whedon and illustrated by John Cassaday. I used to say I would love to see a movie/book/story that didn't have a happy ending. I was wrong. I am very saddened by the finale of this story. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the story through and through but now I'm just depressed because I had taken a liking to the character whom pays the ultimate sacrifice in the end.

Old

I must be getting old because I bought a book today at lunch and for the first time ever, I am just wishing it would be 4 so I could go home and read.

What have I become?