May 2008 Archives

as the saying goes, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose. well, i'm here to tell you that you can, indeed, pick your friend's nose. if you pierce your nose with an ear piercing gun, and days later wish to remove the clamped-on back from inside your nose, and you have those long fake fingernails, you actually have to have a friend pick your nose.

now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about Twitter. last night, my friend Pete on on Twitter asked me, how do you decide whether to follow someone back? i gave some brief, 140 character responses but honestly my twitter follow policy is much more complicated. right now i'm just going to talk about responding to new follows, since how to find people to follow is a whole 'nother subject. but, if you've been on twitter any amount of time and are active, you're going to get followed, often out of the blue by complete strangers. at first i was leery of this sort of thing, and very conservative about following back (even though i get pangs of 'follow guilt' in which i feel i *should* follow back -- i fought those). then i read a few tweets that gave me a whole different perspective:

I'm just saying, Twitter is serendipity squared - and not reciprocating followers is just... anti-discovery.
Chris Pirillo 08:45 PM April 03, 2008 from im

etiquette on twitter: #1 - this isn't your RSS feed here, so say other things, #2 - talk about things other than your lunch....
Brian Wallace 01:56 AM April 18, 2008 from web
...#3 this isn't your im, use dm's. #4 don't flame/embarrass. #5 respond to @'s and dm's, #6 follow generously, #7 have fun!
Brian Wallace 01:58 AM April 18, 2008 from web

these things got me thinking, and strongly influenced my feelings on following back ... "not reciprocating followers is just ... anti-discovery" and "follow generously" have become my follow motto(s). i go on & on about the rest, in the extended area:

we interrupt the quest for relevance with a bunch of whining:

my dog has issues. issues that cause her to behave in a manner that resembles, for lack of a better word, evil. she has definitely decided that i am not in charge of the household, or the boss of her, and to make every effort to negate my attempts to occupy a more dominant position in the pack.

case in point: we know that dogs can sense human emotion. today i reached a breaking point with my house, where hanging out in the social network scene held no joy because there was just too much disarray around me. so i attacked the problem at a serious problem-attacking level: moving furniture and cleaning behind things. at my age, weight, and level of physical fitness (or lack thereof) this led very quickly to me being bathed in sweat; the level of mess i uncovered led to me feeling desperate and overwhelmed (how did i let it get this way? i'll never be able to get through this & make it right.)

now we know the dog is clearly fully capable of comprehending the rich bouquet of emotional and physical distress that was oozing from my every pore. and when i moved a couple small pieces of furniture that had a bunch of crap scattered underneath, she moved in. i gave her a stern 'no' but she held her ground, head low, protecting her find (bits of broken toy she'd chewed up, hair ties, fragments of plastic wrap). i YELLED at her to move. she scurried to her dog bed. i turned my back and she was right back there snarfling around the debris, which i could not reach at that point unless i climbed over the furniture. this went on until i got the furniture moved back.

evil? no, i don't think the canine brain is capable of actual evil, not like the human brain is. but i know for a fact that my dog sensed my vulnerable state and chose to take full advantage of it. i am afraid that the struggle to dominate me is something she's committed to, i think she considers herself an alpha female and intends to pursue this until she succeeds. and i do not want to spend the next ten years struggling to maintain my position.

i've had dogs all my life, never one like this. no matter how casually i took discipline, they seemed to naturally accept me as the leader. perhaps this is because they were all puppies when i got them? i don't know. but i did not expect this when i adopted this dog and if i had that expectation, would never have gotten her. but now, i am stuck with her, until death do us.

sitting (well, standing, so i can get to the wifi) at duke's ventura, 7:22 pm on sunday evening thinking, hmm, the timestamp is off in my copy of emtee) but anyway. it's time a line was drawn, and if i have to draw the think while eating fish tacos and getting moderately drunk on fat tire ale, well, so be it.

consider it drawn.

notice the rather extensive archives. those stay, they are (for better / worse) part of me & cannot be flushed away like the shit they most likely probably may be.

when i started this i had no idea. matter of fact what this was at that time was an experiment in some newer version of emtee than what i was comfortable running on my old surreally.com blog, and it ended up being this thing. this thing were, as [melly] (link pending) once joked to me in the IM, i could make a one word post and get fifty comments. so i did, and it got ... wait, 13? no, the import process destroyed some of them it was more like 38. anyway there were things going on back in those days in spite of the fact i had no goals, no purpose, no particular reason for being aside from, i was testing a copy of MT and it got out of hand. 1700+ entries 16000+ comments and i gave it all up, then there was even more than that and i gave that up too.

well i'm done giving up stuff in my life and beyond that, i'm done being aimless and messageless and purposeless. at least i seriously hope i am.

so i decided i should have a purpose and some goals and stuff. however at this juncture i have no idea what those are. please stay tuned. please? oh, pretty please...

no really. i am sitting here (it's late i've had beers it was a long stressy day) and for the hell of it typed 'patty melton' into google (because patricia malattia was my best friend from grade school till we grew up got married had babies and she married this guy named jesse melton). and google decides to give me this.

now there's no reason they would have moved to indiana and last i knew of her working it was as a bank teller so this is probably some totally other patty melton. i'm sure.

but it still shook me to my backwards-glancing core, seeing 'estate of'.

i was once engaged to jesse's brother charles. we parted ways. then i went through some shit and i borrowed some money from patty. never did pay her back. would really like to apologize. i'm sure she's ok, somewhere, wherever she is which would not be a grave in indiana right? of course not.

fucking internet.

twitter went down hard this afternoon. not even the adorable error message with the dead bird on it, just ... nothing. it was a rough couple of hours because, at work, twitter is my best connection to the world. i get my news, my politics, my entertainment - and i get it in the tiny twhirl window which i can sneak peek at, whereas whole browser windows are just like begging to get the yelling.

but anyway. it's not the usefulness, or even the fun. it's something beyond that and it's a little odd because, as recently as four months ago, twitter was a thing i'd heard of but not gotten around to. and now, i wonder how i could live without it.

just this morning, when i was indulging in my usual, 'what if i could go back and start my life over, say 1976 but with knowing what i know now' which is how i keep my mind occupied on the drive to work. (sigh) it's a complicated thing in which i try to imagine doing only what i'd need to do to keep the things i don't regret, while changing all the things i do. of course this is even more impossible than just the going back part, but anyway. this morning it hit me -- "shit. what about twitter?" seriously, how would i go back knowing what i know and realizing it would be three decades until twitter?

yeah none of this is rational. basically i'm just flexing my blogging muscles, it's been a few years. i'll get better at this, i promise (translation: if you are here now, please don't go away, it won't always be so awkward).

(sigh)

entries are truncated. files are missing. lots and lots of them. the import process on 1700+ entries and 16000+ comments is buggy at best.

i can't decide whether to get to fixing stuff, or lay on the couch and watch spongebob.

there have been losses. maybe a year or a few of them, but who cares. six abortive imports of an old text file and the placing of this blog inside the backed up file structure, somewhat minimized some of the losses. those losses though. ahh well it contributes to the whole metaphor for life this was intended to be at the outset.

i'm back.