Recently in love my computer Category

i would like to begin by commending the Plurk team for creating something so absolutely delightfully addictive. don't want to seem greedy, but there are some features that some of us would really love to see implemented.

for an insightful review, please see @msaleem's post on RWW. what i'd like to talk about now, are the hopes expressed by some avid plurkers this evening, right here. to wit:

Problem: if you have a large group of active friends and you hit the "mark all as read" link, within seconds, the notification will inform you that you have dozens or hundreds more unread comments. every comment on every thread of everyone you follow can get to be a lot of comments really quickly.

Suggested Solution: thread-level filtering, idea based in a suggestion by @GeekMommy, and expanded upon in tonights Plurk discussion: "a checkbox in front of the avatar on the thread that would be checked by default but could be unchecked to ingnore the thread" (per @kdfrawg), and then further updates in that thread would not register as new comments.  alternatively, make it opt-in only, with the default to not follow. i can see how this would be helpful in very complex timelines.

Problem: arbitrary selection of verbs. sure, you can freestyle it, but then you lose the bright coloring and some of the fun.

Solution: custom verbs, or "smart verbs". as @codyrobert said, "yes! but the color is the important thing. I want to say: codyrobert laughs about.... but laughs **needs** to be in a neon yellow".  @sorenj "wishes for plurk to remember the verbs I use for later".  this could be accomplished if we are able to create, and assign a color to our own personal verb, perhaps like this :myverb: (mycolor).  and if you really want to Plurk this up, make it a special treat you earn with that elusive Karma.

personally i would also like to be able to find friends using my twitter and/or digg friends list.

ok well so far this is what I've got, please feel free to jump in with more suggestions and let's hope this comes to the attention of the Plurktocracy, who in their benevolent goodness have granted us this awesome playground.

and if you want to join Plurk please use this link thank you.

i cannot stop plurking. i fully intend to give a detailed report on the how, the what, the why, and the wheeee! but for the moment i feel the need to return to the plurkiverse, which would be my new favorite place.

come. play.

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:

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)

(below only works on obscure versions of win media, sorry)

i also write poems when california burns

we burn what sustains us & i would link you to fuel but it's not finished
yet

i have this thing with fire

i'm sitting on the porch, typing this, because 802.11b wireless? they're giving the shit away. i mean literally. well almost literally, but pretty much, literally.

the internet's getting easier to face each & every day.

this is the first time i've even *seen* the internet in close to two weeks (i think) i lost track.

i'm not even really back yet but ... cable is *way* fast.

ok i have stuff to go do i'm still working up to where i can deal with the email. i haven't even looked yet. hold me i'm scared.

i know there is much catching up. right now it is a little too much.

i should write i should post i should blog dammit blog but what would i say if i did? i am unwilling to try & explain my life at this point (it would only confuse me) (or you, if there are any you's left who still come here) and i'm sure i have other things to say however this $2.50 per hour internet thang is seriously impeding the flow of whatever those other things might be. composing offline just isn't the same, there is something in the connection itself that is a conduit for the expression of any inspiration i may have on hand; disconnected, it seeks other outlets. it's revived my long-dormant semi-obsessive tendency to frequent the stationery aisles, impulsively purchasing more spiral notebooks & cool pens than i possibly need. i have also been up to my elbows in glitterpolish & crazy glue & discarded things, to the extent that the finished products are less decorative than they are an infestation of sparkly crap covering every flat surface everywhere.

another thing i can't seem to do offline, is code. i can download code with the intention to modify it & upload later, but when the modem clicks off, so does the part of my brain that had those great ideas for those cool modifications. i am perfectly capable of doing some pretty extensive shit with code & having it right the first time, it's not like the old days of testing wild guesses, all elebendy kabillion of 'em, before i had a working finished product, so i don't really *need* to be online like i did then. well, at least not for that reason. but i do, apparently, need to be online.

there are parts of my brain that are conditioned to work on a computer that is actively switching packets in the background. i can get as far as the first impulse to look something up, & it's over. i might not need the answer to continue, but the sheer fact of not being able to have that answer till i log back on ... ADD ... look! a shiny thing!

weeks. it will be a few more weeks, two-ish, until this business with the offlineness is resolved. until then, i am ... somewhere between a holding pattern, and a test pattern. i am something filling in spacetime until the real something happens.

& if & when the apocalypse comes, and i survive, you will find me holed up in an abandoned ISP with a case of red bull & a generator, working diligently day & night to get the connections back running. and i know others who are of the same mindset. i comfort myself with this, whenever i am forced to face the depth breadth & extent of my need. there are worse things to be dependent on, than a blast-proof packet switching network that connects me to a mind-bogglingly vast array of things. even if some of those things are parts of my self.

god i love the internet.

copied out of a text file of one of my notepad blogging adventures. have uploaded some cool pictures have many many many more in store for when i can be more online. which is to say not yet.

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right before i fell offline, i went a little nuts. i imported both kdblog databases and added some entries manually from the old surreally dreamlog. i tried to export my old blogger archives but the FTP kept failing and ... i haven't given up. i'm not sure why not, but i haven't. so. i had all this content and i wanted to manage it in an obsessive and totally superfluous fashion. i installed this MT plugin that generates yearly calendars and one that groups archive lists by year, making the date headers links to the calendars. i changed the archiving filenames so that they now publish to directories by month and year, placing the monthly archives as the index file in the month folders. if you go to dotlizard.com/2002/ you see the calendar. if you go to dotlizard.com/2002/03 yo see the monthly archive. since the entry title now determines the filename, i placed meta http refresh tags in all the old kdblog archives to forward directly to the page on dotlizard. i did the same thing with all my old archives here, so links will always go the same place. i completely redid the next/previous entry by category navigation. i had abandoned the weekly archiving, but i have now rewritten the PHP and it does list the weeklies in spelled out ordinal numbers, one through one hundred twenty nine at this point. it lives in a page preserved from the old bug design. i also installed the 'on this day' plugin and so the archives include links to entries from prior years.

i stopped myself before i adapted the six kdblog skins to work with these templates.

i had so much fun.

this covers the period from when i fell offline to ... who really knows. everything is relative, right? so. it's stuff i typed in a notepad window ... because.

i am currently AOLing at a cost of $2.50 per hour and sometimes my 'u' key doesn't work. um. is it my imagination or does aol 9.0 kind of not suck? it's possible it doesn't suck.

hold me i'm scared.

notepad blogging follows. but before you go there, might want to behold the madness. a song like no other song. inspiring comments like no other song by such a large margin.
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wow. the things you discover when there is no internet and there you are, disconnected, bereft of any bandwidth whatsoever, and i mean wtf? so anyway. wow.