June 2008

How I Use Twitter, pt 2

Back in November of 2007 I wrote a post about how I use Twitter. It’s been 8 months since then and partially because of how my travel schedule has impacted my usage, partially because of changes to some features that Twitter as been messing with, and partially because of a recent increase in comments from people I’ve never met complaining that I wasn’t following them, I thought it was time to update the post.

In general I still use Twitter for the same basic functions I did before:

  1. Keep up to date on the lives of a few close friends.
  2. Keep up to date on the activities of friends in the same city as me, potentially leading to IRL meet ups.
  3. Have conversations.

That’s it, and in that order of importance. I certainly understand that not everyone uses Twitter for the same reasons or in the same fashion and I don’t assume people will use it the same way I do, and all I ask is that people don’t assume I use it the same way they do. The biggest issue is that Twitter fills a very specific need for me, one that no other service has been able to fill as well, and I’m not rushing to give that up by changing how I use it. As I stated back in November, in order for me to actually be able to do the things I’ve listed above, I have to be very conservative with who I follow. That is, I have to follow my close friends, my friends in the same cities I’m in, and the people I’m having conversations with.  The truth is for some reason there are a bunch of people following me who I’ve never met, and while I’m flattered that they care what I have to say (or not say as is more often the case) if I followed every single person who followed me my view of Twitter would be completely filled with people I didn’t know talking about things I’m not involved with and I’d miss the things by the people I do know and those talking about things I am involved with. Feel free to draw parallels to the UK filming every single inch of public space with CCTV cameras which creates such a backlog that they can never effectively use any of it. Point is I don’t want to give up the primary thing I use Twitter for just to prevent awkward social situations.  This is the same situation I was in before, but I want to also spend a moment or two talking about how things have changed since then.

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Old Stuff: Disaster!

Back in July of 2002 Morgen and I drank a lot of coffee and write up a few ideas for movies that we thought would rock. I realized they are too awesome to be so buried in my archives, so I’m reposting them here. The third one we wrote was for Disaster! (original link), and that is this:

Christopher Walken as Mayor of LA
Charlize Theron as the newscaster
Tommy Lee Jones as volcano dude
Don Cheadle as the genius

Treatment:
The movie opens with some family at a picnic in a park and they are all happy and it’s sunny. The kids are playing Frisbee or something like that and the parents are laughing about something that is probably not really that funny when all of a sudden some wind kicks up and it starts blowing stuff in the people’s faces, like this one dude gets a plate of coleslaw right up the nose, then it’s all dark and they look up and are all “damn, that looks like a tornado, but this is Los Angeles and we don’t have those here so I wonder what it could…AAAHHHHH!!” and the thing that totally looked like a tornado spins by and totally makes their picnic look like a Kansas trailer park.

Next thing you know it’s all over the news. It turns out it really was a tornado which is really freaking people out, and oh yeah there was this thing about a 7.0 earthquake in Taiwan, but who cares about that and they go right back into this crazy tornado thing. Well people are running around all tornado and self important when all the sudden everything starts shaking. This one dude out on the street is like “AHHHH ANOTHER TORNADO RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!” And this other lady is like “Tornado? this is LA, we don’t have tornado.” and the dude is like “DIDN’T YOU SEE THE NEWS?? AHHHH!” and She’s like “I Know an Earthquake when I feel one” And the dude is all “EARTHQUA..? Oh yeah..” And they happen to be outside of one of those stores with all the TVs in the windows with the news that are in all the movies but never really exist. The News girl is all “FUCKING SHIT!!!! That wasn’t just some small earthquake you just felt, it was the ripple thing from a 19.7 Earthquake that just happened in Asia. Or…what used to be Asia, the place is history!”

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Old Stuff: The A-Team Movie

Back in May of 2002 Morgen and I drank a lot of coffee and write up a few ideas for movies that we thought would rock. I realized they are too awesome to be so buried in my archives, so I’m reposting them here. The first one we wrote was for The A-Team Movie (original link), and that is this:

Starring:
Vin Diesel as Mr. T as Sergeant Bosco “B.A.” Baracus
Jim Carry as Captain H.M. “Howling Mad” Murdock
Ben Affleck (or any stupid pretty guy) as Lieutenant Templeton “Face” Peck
Christopher Walkin or Clint Eastwood or Al Pacino or Patrick Stewart or
Leslie Nielsen as Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith (The Old Dude)

Charlize Theron as the helpless hot single woman in distress
Nicole Kidman as the helpless hot single sister of the hot single woman in
distress

James Gandolfini as Colonel Decker…the dude who is trying to capture the
A Team and give them their comeuppance.

Ice Cube as the head terrorist bad guy
That chick from Girl Fight as his right hand man/lady who betrays him
Snoop Dogg as the out-for-himself-anything-for-a-buck streetwise pimp
Flea as the idiot cop.

If Christopher Walkin isn’t cast as “The Old Dude” Then he will be cast in
some other role because he rocks so hard.

Treatment:
The movie opens and this scientist smarty pants dude is making a new kind of bomb for the government and he’s the only one who knows what it can do…or is he? So these mercenaries (or terrorists to keep it timely) find out about this new bomb and kidnap the dude and his hot single helpless sister is left all alone and she’s scared and she’s like “oh no, what should I do?” and she calls the idiot cops and they’re like “we can’t help you, but maybe I didn’t just give you this card,” and she takes the card and she’s like “this card? But you just give it to me,” and the idiot cop is like, “I said MAYBE I didn’t give it to you,” so she’s like “you did though…see, here it is” and she shows him the card and he’s like “Dude!, that’s the number of some dudes who can help you,” and she’s all “oh, I’m into that…so I just call them then?” and then she calls and leaves a desperate message that while she’s leaving it the screen fades out but the message keeps going and then fades up into “The Old Dude” listening to it and going “yeah we can help.”

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Help me ID this bike?

Please help ID this frame

I recently picked up this unknown brand bike frame and am trying to figure out what the heck it is. The seller knew nothing about it other than it’s chrome, has an Itallian threaded bottom bracket, an integrated headset, and has “+GF+” stamped on the BB.

Please help ID this frame

It’s a track frame and I’m planning to build it up but I’m really curious where it came from. I’ve posted a few more detail photos on flickr and was able to find this thread on Bikeforums (thanks Mikey!) and this company seems to be connected somehow, but those are still pretty weak leads. Any ideas?

Please help ID this frame

City blogging and comments, thoughts from barcampseattle

Why city blogging sucks and other wonderful things. That was the title of Dylan‘s talk at this weekend’s BarCampSeattle. Dylan of course writes for Seattle Metblogs and I’ve gotten to know him a little bit over the last month while I’ve been back and forth to the city. Josh and Beth were also in the audience and chimed in from time to time. As you might suspect this was one of my favorite sessions of the weekend if only because the topic is something I think about on a regular basis. Daily, hourly even. Here’s a few pics I took if you want to check them out for some reference.

The talk started off with a few topics that city bloggers are well aware of, and people who don’t write city blogs might not be – how local is too local, or what isn’t local enough (city, neighborhood, block, bedroom), and what are people really coming to the sites to read? In Seattle the number one most read post, by a long shot, is one about horsesex. No, really. I wish I was joking but it’s the truth. People on the internet are weird. And while this initially started off talking about the bloggers, it wasn’t too long before the topic shifted to readers, and specifically commenters. This is where things got really interesting I think, and yes even more interesting than horsesex.

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