Personal news, commentary and ramblings
While chatting with my old friend, Rob, I noticed he was typing a weird character combo.
While chatting with my old friend, Rob, I noticed he was typing a weird character combo. So I asked him about it:
Rob uses Apple’s default chat client, iChat. It supports AIM and Facebook.
I use an open source chat client called Adium. It has support for almost every chat service but evidently doesn’t know how to give the thumbs up.
“Are TMBG really playing at Jackie’s work?”
| Graham (3:36): | http://www.arcadetown.com/beeboxing/gameonline.asp |
| play it | |
| it is fun | |
| Me (3:42): | how do you tell how much damage there is? |
| Graham (3:42): | The yellow bar |
| turns red when hit | |
| Me (3:43): | I see |
| Me (3:49): | that’s a good game |
| Graham (3:55): | course it is |
| Me (3:56): | the quiz that went with it was stupid |
| Graham (3:56): | uh huh |
| Me (3:56): | asked for my address & phone number! |
| Graham (3:57): | i know the nerve of people |
| Graham (4:04): | http://www.eyezmaze.com/ |
| play every game on there | |
| Me (4:05): | send it to me tonight |
| I can’t play games much at work | |
| Graham (4:06): | oh |
Yesterday, part of my IM conversation with Tina went like this:
Me: what?
Me: mouse?
Tina: yep
Tina: wrapped up in a towel
Tina: waiting for you to come home and throw it away
Me: we should set traps again
Tina: at first i thought it was a toy
Tina: then i saw blood
Tina: then i screamed
Tina: and threw a towel over it
Me: haha
I was able to guess the answer easily because this is the second we have found this year. The first we took from one of the kittens more than a week ago after they had eaten the guts out of it.
After I got home last night, I went into the bathroom and grabbed the towel in question. I took it out into the garage and put it into the garbage can, which is conveniently full to the top. I unwrapped the folds and found a positively live mouse looking at me inquisitively. There was no sign of blood and the little fellow look quite healthy. I quickly refolded the towel and went back into the house. “That mouse is still alive,” I whispered to Tina. The range of emotions that passed over her face was pretty amusing.
I found a plastic container in the recycling and dumped a little baking soda in it and returned to the garage with the intent of gassing the critter. I put the container on the floor and began to unfold the towel to dump the mouse into the container. Unfortunately, he landed right next to the container and took off under the car. Baby, who just happened to be in the garage with me at that moment, immediately pursued the new toy under the car. I assumed that he would emerge with mouse in mouth, but I was wrong. Soon he was digging around behind some shelves where his brother joined him, but they never caught the bugger.
When Graham got wind of the situation, he refused to go to bed. We eventually talked him into it, but I think that the presence of his nightly companion reassured him that he would be safe from any rogue rodents that might trespass into his bedroom.
Rory spent most of the evening camped in front of the stove intently looking underneath it. Since that was a prime spot for catching mice last year, I’ll put a couple of traps under there tonight as well as one by the cat food and one under the dishwasher.
It’s difficult to describe what Twitter does because it lacks a close analog in the “real” world.
The term social networking gets bandied about a bit too often these days. Most internet veterans probably cringe at the mention of websites like FaceBook or MySpace, two of the pioneers of the genre. Although it’s likely that those sites are so disregarded amongst the professional class of internet users simply because they consider such sites to be “beneath them,” most of these users simply cannot find a legitimate use for social networking.
Personally, I belong to MySpace and FaceBook purely because my friends and family have chosen those sites as their point of contact to keep me (and others) apprised of what is going on in their lives. Since I’ve long used this website (rynosoft.com) for updating everyone on what goes on in my life, I obviously don’t need any other website to do so. Consequently, social networking websites have always been a strictly one-way affair for me. Until Rob introduced me to Twitter last year.
It’s difficult to describe what Twitter does because it lacks a close analog in the “real” world. And so there was a period of time after I signed up that I really didn’t “get” what it was all about. I pestered Rob via instant message asking, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this thing?” Do what it says: answer the question “What are you doing?”
Previous to Twitter, I was prone to changing my AIM status to reflect what I might be doing at work or perhaps to make a private joke to those that had me in their buddy list. Twitter provides a better outlet for that instinct and has been described by many as “micro-blogging”. Although that’s a fair description, I think it may discourage those who are not interested in or are intimidated by the prospect of blogging. Most bloggers have a theme or specific subject matter that they tend to write about, but the only theme for most Twitterers is the triviality of day-to-day life.
Don’t let that description deceive you, though. Life is mostly made up of a series of trivial events which, when taken together, provide a bigger picture. When you have access to occasional blow-by-blow descriptions, you become more involved in someone’s life in a very immediate way. Sometimes I’ll just passively digest these tidbits as they pass by while other times my curiosity will be piqued and I’ll seek more information via email and/or instant message. The end result is that Twitter brings people closer together even though physical distance may separate you.
You may have noticed the addition of a Twitter status on the right side of this blog several months ago. Twitter provides the web code necessary to display your most recent “tweet” (Twitter’s term for a single entry), so it’s very easy to share your Twitter status on web pages and blogs. Twitter also has SMS (i.e. text message) and instant message features which let you tweet even when you don’t have a web browser in front of you. For example, if you’re at a concert you might like to share that your favorite song had just been performed. Since I don’t have a mobile phone, that’s not a feature that I use.
More information on Twitter:
