Category: Communications

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Quote of the Day

This made me laugh hysterically.

“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.” Robert Wilensky

Thanks to JBB of Lumbering Through Life! As an aside, I disagree with stance that Twitter’s 140 character limit is in place as an etiquette and means of keeping thoughts concise. The 140 character limit is to enable Twitter to send message by SMS and keep the message within a single text message. I believe different people are finding different uses for Twitter. I have chosen not to follow a couple of people because of their topic choices and style. I think Twitter’s will fall into 3 groups: self-promoters and linkers (using Twitter to post URLs to blogs and websites), news/media alerts, and voyeurs/exhibitionists/chatters. The first group, the linkers, will use Twitter to promote traffic to their own sites or sites interest them. The news/media alerts will be a group sharing relevant information that is happening now. The chatters will use Twitter as a replacement or complement to IRC and the instant messengers. Not everyone will enjoy the style of all three groups.

Update: My wife agrees with jbb.

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Twitter is killing my blog!

If you ask me about blogging, I will tell you to pay for your own hosting, buy a domain name, and use WordPress (.org)! My primary reason for this advice is so that you have maximum control and ownership of the content you produce. When you host with Blogger, or even at WordPress.com, you relinquish control of your content to a third party. They might close your account for a violation of terms of service and then you have lost your content or access to your drafts. They might close shop and you also lose your years of hard work.

Getting the balance of posts right for your readers is tough. Post too frequently and your readers will skim or skip (or worse, unsubscribe!) and miss your best posts. Post infrequently and your readers will go away. When Twitter first hit the scene, I didn’t get it. Frankly, I still take issue with Twitter because we are relying on a third party to manage our content but Twitter is addictive! I find myself making those short updates to Twitter while reserving my blog for longer commentary. I used to make one sentence posts to my blog and liter it with frequent updates. Twitter has changed the way I blog. And people have noticed!

Blog early and often! [Jack Lail]

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Presidential Hopefuls and their phones

Everyone knows Rudy uses his phone. Someone needs to teach him some manners. What other presidential hopefuls are using their phones? Twitter is a short messaging service that lets you barrage your friends (and others) with the overly mundane in your life. People have found different uses for Twitter from marketing to exhibitionism (look at me look at me) to making announcements and sharing information on the Internet. Presidential hopefuls have accepted that they can reach a large audience and become closure to the constituents by using (or having their staff use) Twitter.

Democrats

Republicans

Uhhhh

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Twitter Ouch

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /home.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

Additionally, a 502 Bad Gateway error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Growing pains?

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Where are those readers?

Do you like looking at your stats files? Do you often wonder just where all those IP addresses come from? For those that do not know, an ip address uniquely identifies a computer on the Internet. Type an ip address into http://www.ip-adress.com/ (note address is spelled with one d) and it will show you a map with an approximate location of the computer.

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I’m playing an RPG!

Since I work alone, I find peers online. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is my greatest resource. I hang out in a channel on the EFNET servers called #coldfusion. Sometimes I visit the DALNET servers for #coldfusion and FreeNode for corporate support of various software products. I was introduced to IRC in the fall of 1988 shortly after its creation. I thought it wonderful that you could jump into a group of people, ask a question, and quickly have answer or variety of opinions. I still share that thought.

IRC has culture to it. N3wbs (newbies) make the same mistakes and get ridiculed harshly. It is like stepping into a well established ritzy social club and interrupting everyone’s conversations by yelling through the room, "Hey I’m new here! Anyone want to chat?" Good way to be ostracized. Discussion topics are typically organized by channels. #coldfusion is generally used to discussion Adobe’s ColdFusion web application language. A new IRC user typically steps into a channel and immediately says, "Can I ask a question?" which grates on everyone’s nerves because a question is expected. Asking to ask is redundant, unnecessary, and down right annoying. Idling is when a person is in a channel and doing nothing. I idle in #coldfusion almost 24/7. That way I can follow discussions and, like IM, someone can leave me a message and I can get back to them at a later time.

I was invited to join a channel on efnet called #idlerpg. I found this terribly amusing. It is a game! A game you play and win by doing nothing. The goal is to idle in the channel. You are penalized by doing things. If you change your nickname, you lose points (time in this case). It is an RPG so you gain inventory, engage in fights, go on quests, and move up levels. You simply do not do anything to make this happen! A very amusing concept. You can check on my status online. I am currently a level 4 Mad Coder.