Saturday, May 31st, 2008
As I’ve mentioned in the past (I think), I’m becoming quite a big fan of Twitter. For those unlucky few who don’t know what Twitter is, it’s basically a social networking site developed to allow its users to update with 140-character-or-less statuses as to what they’re doing or thinking about or something like that. It’s not exactly the most productive site on the Internet, but it is a lot of fun and is good for both networking and just general communication. Lots of people are getting interest in it, and it’s getting a lot of publicity lately. That’s the good. It’s a genius idea and a wonderful service, and I love to use it to communicate with people.
Unfortunately, though, this great service comes with a downside. It’s growing way too fast. Most of the press Twitter has gotten lately has been bad press. I’d link to some of the posts on Twitter’s blog about the downtime, but that’s unnecessary. A simple Google search will pop up tons and tons of results. In fact, they’ve even created a new blog simply for the purpose of getting the word out about their progress in fighting the problems of scalability and overloaded servers.
One other problem I’ve been having lately is with spammers. I’m not sure if there’s a name for a Twitter spammer, but there sure are lots of them. The generally-accepted method of spamming through Twitter is to obnoxiously follow tens of thousands of users (following being the method of seeing what other people post), hoping in return for many of them to return the gesture. Instant popularity. The problem is, it sorta works really well. I’ve even come across a bot titled “AutoFriendAdder” in the last few days. Of course, I quickly blocked the bot, but it proves that this is no secret.
Despite all of this, though, I’m still largely a fan of Twitter and its services. Oh, and if you haven’t signed up, you really should. Once you do that, go to my Twitter page and follow me. I’ll probably go and send a tweet saying that I wrote this post, now, actually…
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
I randomly came across this video on none other than YouTube. I remember the good ol’ days of American Gladiator – I would be interested in seeing these guys go at it though. Enjoy!
American Gladiator Rejects
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
This past summer, I became interested in a girl from Kentucky…(ended up falling in love), but she sent me these “rules” for dating her from her father:
1) If you pull into my driveway and honk you’d better be delivering a package, because you’re sure not picking anything up.
2) You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her, so long as you do not peer at anything below her neck. If you cannot keep your eyes or hands off of my daughter’s body, I will remove them.
3) I am aware that it is considered fashionable for boys of your age to wear their trousers so loosely that they appear to be falling off their hips. Please don’t take this as an insult, but you and all of your friends are complete idiots. Still, I want to be fair and open minded about this issue, so I propose his compromise: You may come to the door with your underwear showing and your pants ten sizes too big, and I will not object. However, in order to ensure that your clothes do not, in fact, come off during the course of your date with my daughter, I will take my electric nail gun and fasten your trousers securely in place to your waist.
(more…)
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
The other day I was Twittering along, minding my own business, when I happened to stumble upon a tweet mentioning the web 2.0-esque social networking site, Wakoopa. I’d never heard of it before (although it’s probably been out forever and everyone else probably knows all about it), but I’ve been recently intrigued by it. The premise is that you download a piece of software which monitors which applications you use and then sends that information to their website for all to view – kinda like a last.fm for applications. It’s interesting because then you get to see what applications your friends are using, look at which applications are popular or growing in popularity, or compare statistics on which applications are most used. Wakoopa gives better reasoning for why you should use it, but those are the best things that I saw about it. Anyway, I’m definitely curious about it. Maybe someday I’ll let you know how I like it after I try it out for a while.
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Earlier today it was announced that CBS purchased CNet for $1.8 billion. Pretty quickly, CNet’s stock went up about 45% and CBS’s dropped a little bit. Already people are speculating what kinds of changes will happen at CNet because of this purchase. I think it’s awfully interesting, not to mention that this is the deal of the century for CNet (as far as money goes). I’m kind of excited to see what will happen, but as we all know these kinds of corporate mergers often mean bad news for the little guy.
A few hours later, Don Reisinger of CNet mentioned on Twitter that Andy Rooney announced he is stepping down. I haven’t seen that confirmed anywhere, and I’m still not sure if Reisinger wasn’t joking since he mentioned in his “tweet” that he’d be a good replacement, but I do think that this would be a pretty big announcement were it to be true. If he’s joking, I’ll feel a little silly for believing it. Keep your eyes peeled.
Edit: Sorta feel like he was joking. Actually, I’m pretty sure he was. I kinda feel dumb, but that’s ok. In other news, Let’sMoveToTheMoon has been acquired by NBC and I’m hosting the Apprentice.