Why do I Twitter?

http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays

That site is awesome. Seriously, go read it, and then come back.

...

Done? Good. Great stuff, right? But in and of itself, not a reason to go around stalking following people on Twitter.

Since 2001, I've been frequenting The Ozone Asylum forum on and off. On there, Jive started a thread on this in 2008, and I went ahead and signed up. But other than some tweets from Bugimus (@bugimus) on what he had planned for the weekend, there wasn't really much there to interest me. (Not that Bugs wasn't having interesting weekends back then. :) )

Fast forward to earlier this week, and someone mentions @shitmydadsays to me. So I read it, and I damn near died laughing. My endorphin hazed brain then hit on something profound, at least for me.

Twitter is really just a way to listen to interesting people. But the beauty of it is that you get to decide what's interesting.

I read Daring Fireball almost religiously, and I think I'd John Gruber would be a pretty interesting guy in real life. So I follow his Twitter stream. Simple as that.

When I'm browsing the internet, and I come across an interesting blog post where the author has a Twitter, I'll follow him for a few days. If I don't like his stream, I unfollow. Again, pretty simple.

But then, some of my friends on Facebook use it like broadcast SMS. "Hey, let's do pizza tonite. Meet at Pizza Hut."

Twitter in Plain English is good, but is a bit narrow in scope. Then again, it's hard to explain twitter to someone who doesn't already know what it is.

So, here's a quick way to get started. Sign up, find some people that interest you and start following. Don't be afraid to reply to their posts. I know a guy who tweeted Mariah Carey for a year just to get a response.

If you're from the South Pacific, it's a great way to connect with islanders from all over the world. Search for the hash tag #teampoly and start following people on there.

Short version:

1. Follow a bunch of people
2. Reply to the one's you find interesting
3. There is no step 3

Enjoy.

$500 For An Ethernet Cable?!

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/13/500-ethernet-cable-a.html

This is highway robbery and is aimed at naïve audiophiles. There is nothing here that a regular run of Cat6 won't do. Even the product description is bullshit:

"...signal directional markings are are provided for optimum signal transfer..."

George R. R. Martin Is Hardly A Slacker

John Scalzi writes on Whatever:

"During those years the unsocialized were snarling at Martin for being lazy or procrastinating or indolent or whatever, he wrote about as many words for novels as I had. By this superficial but easy-to-quantify metric, on the novel front he was as productive as I was, and most people seem to agree that I’ve been pretty productive these last six years. I just spread my words around five novels while he poured all of his into one."

A Small Observation Regarding Words And Releases 

I'll admit, I was one of those people who bitched about Martin taking six years to write a book, and Scalzi's analysis proves that I was wrong.

I think the main complaint is that the books are so good that's a bit of a letdown when you get to the end and there's so much story left to tell. The last book is no exception.

The chapters jump around between the different characters, and at the end of every chapter you're a little annoyed at reading about a different character. However, halfway through that chapter you're so engrossed in the character that by the end you get annoyed when it switches back or switches to another. And yet, I loved every minute of it.

Get the book. Read it. Seriously.



(Full disclosure: buy it from the link above and I get a few cents. Yay me.)

Getting USB-to-Serial Console Cable To Work In Lion

Instructions here:

http://reg88.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-get-pl2303-usb-to-serial-driver.html

All sizes | How to use the Home Button | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

How to use the Home Button | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Great infographic.

via ignorethecode

Easily Generate Hex Passwords

From Terminal:

openssl rand -base64 8 | md5 | head -c8;echo


Or use ping:


ping -c1 google.com | md5 | head -c8;echo


Via http://osxdaily.com/2011/05/10/generate-random-passwords-command-line/

Father and Son: STS-1 and STS-135

Father and Son: STS-1 and STS-135, originally uploaded by arockalypse.

Amazing photo.