Twittering away
I discovered TweetDeck yesterday. The design is ridiculously productive, yet the web keyword feature can easily suck away hours of your life. I watched the iPhone feed and started firing off helpful replies incessantly. The outcome is another handful of Twitter followers. It’s a fantastic tool to find Twitter users with similar interests. It’s not bad for local connections, but Twinkle is still the king in that respect.
I also came across two moderately funny web items today. The first is Where is Bob? It’s supposedly the tale of a absentee IT manager. It’s likely a viral marketing campaign of some sort as the writing is a bit too good and the stories are just slightly outlandish. It’s still worth looking at for a laugh.
The second is a Hulu video of a short comedy called The Line. It’s about a group of crazy fanboys that sit in a line 11 days before some sci-fi movie opens. There are a couple guys from SNL in the mix. Jason Sudeikis is particularly funny as the movie theater operator.
I’ve been listening to Chopin all day for some reason. Dead Polish piano players seem to increase my productivity on the writing front.
A lazy Saturday
I took Chris Brogan’s advice today and beefed up my LinkedIn page a bit. I added a bit of a summary and linked out to the RSS feed on this blog. I also wrote a recommendation for a fellow writer. I’ve really started to notice an increase in networking lately and I’m attributing it to LinkedIn, especially after adding so many contacts.
I’m happy with the blog design for now. I keep tweaking it every day just a little bit, so expect to see small changes. I’m also looking to add something new to the sidebar, but I’m trying to figure out what I should toss in there. I’m really digging the minimalistic look right now, but I’m still missing something.
I also completed a quick video preview of Friend Book for the iPhone this afternoon. It’s not out on the App Store on iTunes yet and it’s certainly worth checking out when it hits the digital streets. Click the picture to the left or the Youtube link at the top of the page to watch the 3 minute preview.
Braid and Bees
Just wanted to give a quick shout-out to the makers of Braid. The art direction is utterly amazing as you can see above. A couple drawbacks are that it’s too short and costs too much ($15) on XBLA. It would have been priced appropriately at $10.
I did the freak-out dance today in public when a bee landed on my arm outside a local coffee joint. It’s not the manliest of movements. It’s like the spider web freak-out dance but with more frantic running. I stepped on a bee when I was about seven and I’ve been deathly afraid of them ever since.
Delightful Apathy
I saw a man pushing a baby stroller with a toddler down the road today with his left hand and carrying a running weed trimmer in his right hand. He was either nuts or some sort of Nanny / Landscaper hybrid. Crazy or not, I drove away blissfully indifferent of the Cabbage Patch Kidnapper.
I tend to embrace my apathy. It’s especially fun to invoke during conversations. I’ve noticed that people automatically assume that you are of a differing opinion when clamming up; political and religious conversations in particular. For instance some liberal co-workers at my previous job thought I was a staunch conservative; all from adopting an apathetic stance. Truthfully I’m probably somewhere in the middle, but I don’t see the point in talking about something that I’d have to pretend I had the ability to change.
That’s the real beauty of apathy. I don’t have to lie to myself about how much I should care about matters of supposed importance. I get to focus on stuff that’s important to my little egocentric mind instead; work and play perhaps. Everything else gets deleted from my brain after conversations end. But on to more social topics…
I added a LinkedIn profile recently for networking purposes. Seeing how my previous jobs weren’t exactly tech-related, I couldn’t beef up my contact list. I strapped on my creativity hat and sent a mass-mailing to VGT contacts about adding me. It will help me keep track of their job-hopping movements anyway. I got about 60% to add me. Not too shabby!
I also got in on the Ping.fm beta finally. For those that don’t know, Ping.fm allows you to send the same status up to mutliple accounts. For instance, I have it setup to send my status update to Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn. It works with tons of other services as well (FriendFeed, Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger, WordPress, Pownce, etc…). I have a beta code if anyone wants to sign up.
Writing or Sleeping, so many choices.
I’ve may have fallen into a Mobius Strip of writing endlessly until it’s time to sleep again. I’m content to repeat that cycle over and over while my bank account gleefully greets the array of dead presidents being added every day. The lucrative lifestyle makes me want to move again, perhaps up north for a few months.
I’ve been receiving an inordinate amount of Facebook friend requests lately; many from complete strangers. No matter how many times I passively hit Ignore, they keep firing pleas at me. Facebook desperately needs to add more options for my possible response. Speaking of Facebook, the new look absolutely stinks. It’s slow to load and I have to browse those stupid tabs to read someone’s page.
I’ve been playing around with the Flip Mino for a week now. The video and sound quality is really excellent for the size of the camera. It’s about the height of my iPhone, but skinnier in width. I wish I had the camera when my sister and I filmed our Rock Band session a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately Mikey and Gerbil broke up after our three day World Tour in Rome, London and Paris.
Twinkle Addiction
Here is a quick preview of my most recent Twitter application addiction. It’s a GPS aware app for the iPhone.
My Favorite Free iPhone Apps
I picked up my 3G iPhone last Friday. The consumer madness was in full swing at the AT&T store. They had 40 iPhones in stock and about 60 people in line. I snagged the 8 gig model and spent the rest of the day checking out the applications on iPhone. Here are some of my favorites:
Shazam: This music app is great for people who are clueless to the names of songs and artists. It can listen to any song playing on the radio or over a loudspeaker and identify it through the iPhone’s microphone. You can mark the song for download on iTunes, watch any Youtube related video about it or send a link of the song to your friends.
Box Office: This simple app takes your GPS location and finds all the movies / theaters in the area. It offers the Rotten Tomato rating for every movie and can be organized by rating or title. Most importantly, it offers fast access to the showtimes in all the nearby theaters.
NetNewsWire: This is the fastest way to read RSS feeds on the iPhone. I can rummage through posts on 15 sites when I wake up in about 10 minutes. Just be careful to keep up with the feeds otherwise there will be a huge number posted on the icon all day.
AOL Radio: Turns the iPhone into a radio with 200 stations of music. You can bookmark stations and mark songs for download on iTunes later. The sound quality is extremely good for a web based radio. Pandora is also pretty good for specific artist preferences.
Tap Tap Revenge: It’s Guitar Hero for the iPhone. It’s only 3 buttons and four songs, but there are four levels of difficulty and the possibility of downloadable songs in the future. You can also shake the iPhone to hit the right beats instead of tapping the screen. Lots of fun and it’s free!
Graffitio: This app uses the GPS to figure out where you are and looks for nearby restaurants, bars, stores, parks, events, etc. The apps creates persistent online graffiti walls for you to write notes about the business. You can also read notes from people who have been there before.
A Smattering of Blurbs
- Still up in the air about the 3G iPhone and it’s only a few days away. It’s going to raise my phone bill another $30 a month. I really don’t mind that much, but I have plenty of wi-fi access for net browsing. Maybe I’ll try canceling the 3G data plan after I sign up. I will get 150 more texts messages though; yet I’ve never broken 40 in an entire month.
- I’ve been looking at apartment sublets in Chicago lately and feel like moving there for a couple months or two. I picked up a part time gig at Mahalo recently writing guides and it’s fairly lucrative for the amount of “work” I have to put into it. Anyway, I’m weighing my options while stockpiling money like Scrooge McDuck. Maybe it would be cool try some sort of urban nomading for a while; limited to cities without the need for a car.
- I’m not going to E3 this year. I have the press pass ready to go, but flights were ridiculously expensive this year. It was going to cost me something in the range of $1,200 for airfare, hotel, various expenditures. Boooooo!
- I totally want a Flip Mino so I can start cranking out some Vlogs. I played with one at Best Buy and just loved it. The video quality isn’t HD, but the quality is darn good. My Canon digital camera shoots average video, but the microphone just plan sucks. Plus the Mino takes about an hour of video.
- And if my sister is reading this, the answer to your last question is SHIRTS! I’m completely dependent on your fashion sense and survive from Christmas to late July on whatever clothing items I receive from you.