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No available server to handle this request
Thank goodness Twitter went down. And it’s not even a Fail Whale this time.
Now stop liveblogging yourself, and get back to work.
Tag Archives: twitter
OH NOES, It's the Ice Cream Cone!
I can chill.
I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.
Twitter "Following" Ordering: The Secret Of The 6 x 6
For every user’s page on Twitter, you’ll notice a 6 x 6 area of profile images of the people they are following. Here’s mine:
Just in case if you ever wanted in what order they’re in, here’s a page on Twitter’s GetSatisfaction page on this same topic. It’s based on when the user signed up.
But this is when I started to think… maybe people will start selling and buying earlier-signed up accounts in an effort to increase visibility. I mean, Calacanis attempted to buy a slot on the “Suggested Users” list for $250K. (I can’t help but associate this kind of “shadiness” with the buying and selling of WoW accounts.)
This is only made easier by how easy it is to change your name on Twitter (a feature which, I think, ends up making me think more about online user accounts in general).
Just as a little easter egg, to find out when a specific user joined Twitter on Twitter itself, you can use the “whois” command after you’re logged in. Try it.
whois joshkim
And that ends today’s tidbit on Twitter.
Power Outage On UIUC Campus
I was at Siebel Center today, hacking at some Rails code, when the entire building lost power.
And there goes the power at Siebel. Someone really doesn’t want me to get work done. (Link)
Little did I know, this was actually happening all over campus. I went around to take a few pictures on my iPhone. Yes, these are not very great pictures, but you get the point. I was going to post a map to go with these pictures, but UIUC’s site is down. Silly lack of offsite backups…
Right outside of my apartment, you can see that Siebel center (left) has some emergency lighting, while NCSA (right), where I work, has completely lost power.
The parking structure north of Siebel was barely lit.
Driving around for a bit, I noticed that Grainger was also without power.
I drove around the engineering quad.
Tennis courts. No lighting at all.
On Wright Street, looking towards Grainger.
It looked like the businesses on Green were okay.
But the the rest of Green street going towards campus…
MechE buildling? I think.
Yeah, that’s the Union.
I really need a camcorder or a camera or something. Blah.
Realization
I got on Twinkle, an iPhone Twitter application that pulls tweets based on location, when I lost power while working at Siebel, and really couldn’t find all too many people chirping about what happened. I really don’t pay attention to local news either, other than knowing the weather forecasts, and so I was pretty much in the dark (wee! pun!) for a little while.
The realization was this: that this desire to stay on top of the blogosphere is moving into local news. I want to know if the bands I love are coming to play. I want to know if a power outage takes out (maybe) the entire campus. I want to know if a nuclear launch was detected near the Engineering Quad.
Of course, Twitter can definitely power this, but as with almost all social networking tools, its power to inform is directly proportional to the number of people using it… and frankly, there aren’t too many of us.
CHANGELOG: The Ads
The Moneys
Ads are back. This can only mean a good thing, because that means I’m making a conscientious effort to actually write something that’s of value.
I’m currently messing with three different sources for making a bit of money on the side with the blog:
- Google Adsense: One ad per single.php, for more focused targetting
- Amazon Affiliates: Omakase, for now. I may want to make the JKStore a big more accessible soon.
- Text-Link-Ads: Not sure how this works just yet.
Online Identity
Finally added more interaction with Twitter. Not sure if people were really wanting it, but I kinda wanted to do this for a long while.
I ended up just putting up links to Flickr and Twitter under /etc/ for now. I would like to lifestream like I did before, but I don’t know if that’ll actually be useful… or maybe a project I’m working on will obviate that anyway. And plus, I suck at this server admin stuff: I tried for a few minutes the lifestream wordpress plugin (which seems amazing), and I almost had a heart attack that the server was going to go down again.
Posting Schedule
I have this general feeling that I’m going to do more personal posts during the weekends, and more interesting and relevant posts during the weekday. I kinda want to make sure that I post something really beefy on Sunday night, kind of as a weekly deadline for something in-depth.
Don’t hold me to any of this. This is just me thinking out loud like I normally do. (And, as some will notice, I won’t be linking this on a tweet.)
Look/Feel
Back to the redness. Oh, how I’ve missed you.
Started adding new tabs to the navigation. Not sure exactly what’ll end up here.
Blah blah blah
I’m hungry. Working on the blog for 4 hours straight is pretty fun, but very draining.
I Post When Twitter Is Down…
I guess Twitter should start being more down, then.
Here’s what I was going to tweet, but instead, I’m going to blog it in some length.
I’ll be hopefully moving out of my apartment at the end of this month to move in with Mr. Derek for the time being.
I need a day to sit back and do all the accounting for the stuff I’ve been selling in the past year. Accounting FTW!
I think I’m blogging as if I’m tweeting. Uh oh.
Left 4 Dead is coming today, although I should wait until tomorrow? Who’s our fourth, @alexargo and @jsyi?
Confluence, please get back to me about this ridiculous “Recently Updated” bug.
Yesterday was packed with stuff I had to do. Today seems to be just the same. Argh.
Rails is too much fun. It’s a breath of fresh air. Javascript is equally fun, if not more surprisingly awesome.
Why Somebody (Me?) Needs To Write A Better Twitterific
It’s been an OK application: A free application with a bit of ads strewn about. I can handle that… but there comes a time when one has to turn to the Pipes and start shouting complaints.
Welcome to my blog.
I do think that the $15 is a bit steep for an application like this, and since there was a free version, I was okay with it. But I’m fed up with it. I feel like writing my own Twitter client and undercut Iconfactory. Too bad I have very little knowledge in the ways of the Objective-C/Cocoa-fu. I guess it’s a good project to do while messing with the language/framework.
Anyway, I haven’t seen a Twitterific update in ages (Looks like it’s going to be about nine months), for one thing, which makes me feel like the people at Icon Factory aren’t really looking to beef this up (although they did release an iPhone version recently).
A few things I still don’t like about Twitterific:
Growl issues: I have the Twitterific window selected, and yet it still growls at me. Why? This seems like a very easy issue to fix… and we’re inching into month NINE without an update to this bug. I’m certain this isn’t just me, because I’ve seen it on… at least 4 Macs. (The 4 macs I’m talking about are the one’s that I’ve owned this year… My name is Josh Kim, and I’m an Apple-holic. But that’s a whole other blog post.)
Copying URLs and shortening them. I think we’re at the point where we assume that the feature for shortening URLs is built into the Twitter client of choice. I’ve used a couple in the past (Twhirl and TweetDeck come to mind…). There has to be a better UI for this type of action… maybe when I copy and paste a link, don’t count that as a part of the character limit, but have a second stage where you confirm your post.
Actually, that second stage would be awesome in reducing spelling errors and silly things that happen with a trigger happy Twitterer like myself. Not only that and the url shortening, we’d be able to input data on location and images that we’d want to associate with the Tweet.
Okay, Mr. Idea-but-no-action-man… get to it. Sigh.
Twitter Makes Me Not Want To Blog As Much
I’m pretty serious. Most of the good stuff gets written via 140 characters (+20 more if you’re sneaky). It’s become a sort of a link blog and a tracker for my away messages.
Twitter has become linked to Facebook and IM. At one point, it was connected to this blog, to the dismay of many. That was very interesting to see unfold. It showed me how people consume my content, and how I should be retrofitting myself to fit their needs.
For example, with Facebook. I have very little need for Facebook, and so I don’t really log in anymore. But most of those people that I have “friended” don’t have Twitter. So, I grace them with my Tweets as my status. I’m sure it may seem like pure lifespam, but I don’t know of any other way that they’d be able to pick up on my happenings.
A revelation occurred this week, but I don’t really want to share it just yet. You might see it in a medium other than just text, but don’t get your hopes up just yet. I’m still messing around with the loveliness that is the Internet.
And with that, goodnight world.
Inching Towards Completion
Almost done with fixing the feeds. I don’t know what’s wrong with it right now.FEEDS WORK. HUZZAH.- Deleted ALL Twitter Posts. I’ll be advertising my twitter account more, however. I need to bring back the streaming tweets somewhere on the blog.
- NearlyFreeSpeech issue with .htaccess. Not sure what it is, but WordPress seems to be unable to write it or something. Probably a strict permissions setting.
Tomorrow. More work tomorrow. One day, I’ll get to work on some projects… one day…
Unless Fable 2 stands in the way.
The Lack Of Hair
It’s definitely a weird feeling.
It feels cold because of the draftiness up on the top of my dome, and yet, when the sun is shining, I feel a lot warmer.
I keep throwing my head to the left, thinking that I still have hair to control in this manner. I try to go into a cough over the shoulder just to seem like I’m not completely losing it.
When I get an itch, I scratch my head as hard as if I still had a deep layer of hair separating me from the target and the rest of the world. And it hurts when I do this.
I’m having a hard time getting this sucker to be actually smooth. There’s quite a stubble all over the place, which is making my beanie wearing experience… a very annoying one.
In response to Nathan, sleeping on the pillow yesterday night was pretty different.
I haven’t had too many surprise reactions to the baldness yet. I had someone start to giggle as they saw me, which I thought was hilarious. Some stand in amazement of the astonishing difference in the density of hair.
I’m liking it though. One less thing to worry about (except for the shaving part… must get rid of the stubs). Definitely don’t have to use shampoo or conditioner. Finally have an excuse to wear a beanie or a hat everywhere (hooray for accessorizing… and actually, not really an excuse, but the ability to wear a head covering without first taming the beast that used to be my hair).
And, I look awesome. I really do need to start telling people that I’m going to be a monk. In the Temple… of Awesome.
That ends my initial thoughts on my hairlessness.
If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you would have seen some tweets that were used in the making of this post. I feel like that’s exactly one of the many ways I should be using Twitter: a place to just start forming ideas, not only by just my tweets, but also from talking with others on Twitter.