Latest Posts
Twitter’s Propensity for One Liners
I’ve recently begun using twitter on a more consistent basis. I sometimes find it difficult to attract new followers that aren’t spam bots trying to sell me porn. I recently started trying to understand what I need to do to get new followers. I find that most of the people I follow own some company or service that I’m interested in. I don’t have a company or service to attract followers, so I decided evaluate how I make friends in the real world.
Usually I tend to make friends by offering comical insight or odd perspectives on topics of interest. I provide a view of a situation that might warrant some attention. Sometimes this involves rather lengthy debate, but sometimes all it takes is a series of one liners that create interesting juxtaposition. Interestingly enough Twitter caters to these one liners quite nicely. The character limit imposed by twitter prevents the lengthy debate style conversations I might prefer to have. It instead forces me to simply add my two cents worth to a conversation. But cming up with 40 or 50 one liners a day can be quite difficult.
One liners don’t enter my mind very easily. It takes some work, and sometimes some knowledge of the people your presenting them to. You need to understand your audience to pick up on things they’ll find funny or witty. The problem with twitter is that the view of any one persons life only comes via the same short snippets I’m trying to make an impact with. And because the birds I follow are usually organised around undustry not character similarity, it’s hard to find one liners that don’t alienate some while appealing to others. I’ve been taking shots in the dark on a one off basis hoping someone might find me humourous/insightful to moderate success. I’ve also been toying with a the option of just not caring how many followers I have. Resigning myself to this option (at least for now) seems a little bit like quitting. Whatevs!
Cheers,
Tarandon
Social Activity
For some reason I’ve become engaged once again in the social media tools the internet provides. This very post represents the first since early February here at Tarandon.ca.
It’s interesting to try and identify why the internet today seems more apt to meet my needs as a user than it was 5 months ago. Maybe it’s just the summer time, and the renewed energy that comes with warm weather but I think life in general just seems to be going at a better pace than it has in the past.
Whatever the reason, I plan on keeping things moving forward. Just updated the whole backend of this bitch and now I’m ready to take it all on.
Now, off to investigate cheap bicycles in Toronto.
Cheers,
Tarandon
The Capacity for Greatness
Some people have it, some people don’t. I don’t know what differentiates the two. But I do know what’s missing in my life that prevents that capacity from being realised.
I lack a basic sense of inspiration.
I get frustrated with the obstacles far to easily.
I get really frustrated with the fake it till you make it types, slowing me down because I have to explain everything to them.
I get tired at the uphill battle and the falling rocks and the stolen ideas and misplaced credit that continuously keeps me from realising the greatness I know I’m capable of.
I’m tired of the lying and the backstabbing stupidity of the corporate agenda. I’m infuriated by the incompetence of the enabled, who enable the incompetent to fail repeatedly; and they do so by using that failure to justify the need for their incompetence.
I realise that as I ramble the pronouns get muddied and my lack of an ability to communicate that which burns me so sharply makes my soul ache all the more. Inspiration cannot thrive in this environment.
The parade of the uninspired masquerading in and out the revolving door of this disfunctional business unit brings a cold and icy wind that chills my flame and saps the strength of my inner awesome.
A George divided against itself cannot stand.
When the worlds collide, change will follow.
Bumptop Beta
I got invited to the Bumptop Beta last week and I have to say my initial impressions weren’t the greatest.
When I first heard of this concept by Anand Agarawala, I was really excited at the potential of this new desktop environment. He was even invited to TED to display his thesis project to the greatest minds on the planet. But what I downloaded and what he displayed were two very different interfaces.
In the TED talks the user was able to resize the icons in an analog fashion, they were able to make the icons rigid or free moving, they were able to make shelves out of icons and stack other icons on top of them, but this was not the experience I was able to get from BumpTop Beta.
While the animation of BumpTop icon resizing was smooth, the ability to re size was incremental and lacked the limitless feeling demonstrated at TED. The icons also did not spin as freely as the ones in the demonstration, they more or less conformed to a grid with provided wiggle room to create the illusion of clutter. It was possible to post pictures to the wall of the BumpTop environment but was not able to create the ‘shelves’ that were included in the demo. When editing notes or prompted dialogue boxes like an outlook alert, the left edge of my BumpTop overlay became transparent exposing the windows desktop. This is likely because widescreen support has not been fully implemented. The list of grievances is long at this stage in the game but I’m still confident the BumpTop team will be able to pull it off.
I had my misgivings about the interface, but keep in mind this is just a Beta. It really is worth while playing around with if you can get an invite, but in the end its just an overlay for your desktop and really doesn’t help you all that much if your desktop is pristine like mine (no icons to be seen here). Everything created, copied or deleted only affects your desktop right now, but I hope this could eventually become a replacement for explorer in general. Every file folder being its own room and its contents interactive icons.
Cheers,
Tarandon
Google: New Favicon?
I just noticed this today. If it is new, I like. If not, I still like.
Cheers,
Tarandon
Update: Looks like it’s not new, the folks over at Blogoscoped noticed this too!
2011 Ride to Conquer Cancer
I'm riding in 200km from Toronto to Niagara in June 2011. Donate so I can reach my goal of raising $2500 to help Conquer Cancer!
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