Welcome to The blog of whall
Come on in and stay a while… laugh a little. Maybe even think. Read more...
Hi, This is Wayne. This is my site, my stuff, my blog, blahblahblah. The site itself is powered by WordPress and the Scary Little theme. I thought it was cool, and I still do.
We hold these truths to be self-evident
In the same vein, do I need to declare that I’m currently in an unscheduled blog-break? Discuss amongst yourselves the merits of declaring such a state.
btw, I am staying active on twitter and utterz since it’s convenient for me to do while mobile. Just look on the right sidebar for updates.
I will say that I feel I’ve been particularly thoughtful, witty and interesting while on my ‘whallks’ with Luna and Jupiter, which is when I do my uttering.
… but I never know how to express them.
Fortunately, I have Wordle to help me.
The above graphic represents my tweets.
What’s that you say? “What’s a tweet?” A tweet is something I twittered. It’s a short one-liner I presented to the world through twitter. And the above “word cloud” represents all the words I used in all my tweets since I started using it in October 2007. The more common the word, the bigger it’s representation. Common words like the, and, a and wtf are removed for clarity.
Here’s how I did it:
Yeah, I guess I have some kind of twitter-crush on Dave2 (blogography). Whatever. I also see absurdist and snackiepoo and gally, avitable, watchdog, jestertunes, mr_shiny and martymankins. All these people are on twitter and get replies or messages from me. You can join twitter with us and get in on the fun.
This got me thinking - what do my post titles look like? (what do I write about?) What about all my posts? (How do I write about them?) What about the comments? (What do YOU write about?) I didn’t have to wonder long - I just exported my comments, titles and posts from my WordPress blog’s database, did the same massaging and then made myself some graphics.
whall.org post titles Wordle:
whall.org posts Wordle:
whall.org comments Wordle:
I especially like the java interface where you can change the font, layout and color scheme and it renders in real-time. Very slick! Nice job, Jonathan Feinberg!
And the final result? If I mash up all the posts, post titles, comments and tweets? I get a decent summary of my online presence:
Yup. It says it right there - “good blog.”
What do you think of when you see this icon?
Evidently, we’re SUPPOSED to think of a thumbtack marking a spot on a map.
I, on the other hand, think of someone on a drinking binge.
But that’s just me I guess. And for me, this specific someone has a different colored arm than their face, and is probably a distant relative of Pac-Man.
I think I “get” the geotagging concept - you write a blog post, take a picture, tweet or utterz something, and you tag your GPS coordinates to the entry itself so you can map it. Maybe the device you’re using (camera, phone, computer, AI) does it by itself or maybe you add the tag later.
I can see some uses for this - like Twittervision is kind of cool (especially the 3d view), but it’s not literally geotagging. It does get the idea across, however - you can see visually where things happen.
Do you use geotagging?
Ze week, she is gone! Pouf! Where did zshe go?
I had a little bit more geekiness in my posts this past week than I normally do. I’m not apologizing.
Actually, I meant to use some word that meant “twitter update”, but now that I look at it, maybe twitterdate would be some sort of speed dating but via twitter.
I’ve been keeping the twitter stuff alive and I still find it addicting after a full week. I even set up and reserved a twitter account for my employer, because I didn’t want someone else snarfing up our company name as a username. I think twitter usernames will be like domain names, and you need to reserve yours early. I’m glad I got a short name like whall.
I also discovered Twittermaps, where you can use little macros in your tweets to identify where you are physically on the earth. Then the tweets can be in an RSS feed so others can see the tweets that are geographically, close, and/or you can see them on a map with a date and time.
You can use a zip code, a city, latitude and longitude, an address, or whatever. This is cool stuff. I can easily envision a lot more done with this, when the tweets can have GPS data embedded in them from a typical cell phone or twitter client. The above map shows a kind of archive of the tweets in a given area.
Twittervision, by the same folk, is similar but seems to be more of a real-time view of tweets. When you go to twittervision, you can see a 3d-view of the earth, and it spins around and shows you the latest tweet
You can just sit there and watch the world spin around, and see people’s thoughts and actions live.
How long until the first fake suicide threat? Or when tweets are used in a murder investigation? Will such an open medium foster in an air of honesty in the technologically-enabled society?
Courtesy of a Scott Adams blog entry about not being able to keep his joking mouth shut in public, I was able to watch “Faces of Meth”
You can click on various photos of people who have been consumed by meth, and see their before and after pictures. Some of these are pretty eye-opening.
I’d make a pretty good “after picture”.
Don’t go asking me what I was searching for or anything embarrassing like that. Suffice it to say, this is a pretty funny video. I’m a big fan of Thumb Wars and it’s kind of like that.
It’s safe for work. No nudity, despite what the “initial image” looks like below.
I only give you the very best, you know dahlingks.
There’s another update - Wordpress 2.3.1 - I’ll probably load it today UPDATE: I just loaded it.. One of the cool things about 2.3 and later is that it actually notifies you of an update being available when you login.
It also lets you know of plugins that have been updated, and is just very cool all around. Open source stuff has a lot of benefits, like being free, being available to everyone to contribute, and all that, but a lot of times things just stall. Or are hard to use. Or is maintained by a bunch of effete jerks. But in Wordpress land, I’m pleasantly surprised every time something new comes out. The new features are cool. They’re useful. And I haven’t run into any bugs myself, so that means either the coding is spot-on or the testing is adequate.
Did you know that Austin’s bloggers rock?
I set twitter to “track austin” which means it’ll notify me of any “tweets” that contain the word “Austin”. It’s another one of those cool things twitter can do - keep up to date on specific topics, cities, things, people, etc. I choose to get it sent to my AIM client instead of a ton of SMS messages, so it’s pretty passive.
I’ve seen some interesting stuff so far. Here’s a little screenshot of what it looks like from AIM (Trillian)
As you can see from the topmost tweet - one of the items that popped up was a blog entry posting about Austin’s bloggers from a local blogger named Alex Jones. (Note to self: check out twitterwhere… that sounds cool)
The article points to a Wired article about a new report from Scarborough about how Austin leads the pack in terms of percentage of people who read or write blogs. We’re #1! With 15% of residents either writing or commenting on blogs, Austin shows it’s got the technologically-enabled folks. That number really does seem high when I think about it - that’s 1 in 6, right? I would have thought half of that as the maximum to expect, so I’m pleasantly surprised.
I wish the report gave more detail on how many people they surveyed, what the responses were like, what the questions were, etc. I just inherently distrust surveys that don’t disclose EVERYTHING. Anything can be twisted and would rather have the facts so I can twist them myself.
I got an ad email from Thinkgeek about a really cool new shirt
This really cool bad boy actually lights up when a wifi signal is near, and increases in intensity with the signal level. It’s going near the top of my wish list.
It got me thinking about twitter, tho (and I’ve been thinking about it a LOT since joining up and playing with it). I can see GPS-enabled twitter notifications, twitter dating, tweets helping out with disasters (like they are with the sandiego fires right now), people using tweets to help them with their dieting, humor tweets that could be subscription based, and so many other uses for twittering.
And then I thought of a shirt - the coolest shirt EVER. The shirt would be an LCD display that would automatically display the tweets that are geographically near it.
Have you tried twitter yet? Have you thought of some really nifty things you can do with it, or might be done in the future?
Slowly but surely drudging my way into fame by logging yet another in the weekly series.
So far, I can’t see anything bad about this story. I saw it over at A Feast of Crumbs first. I love gravatar and it’ll be nice for things to be faster, cheaper (freeer!) and more open. What’s not to like? I love Akismet already (done by the same folks), so it’s all good!
Today marks my 2nd day trying out twitter. So far, it’s been addictive but I don’t know if I’ll continue. I liked it enough to put a banner in my sidebar, and load Twitterberry on my Blackberry. I see myself using it more as a reminder service and public journal more than group IM or whatever else it could be used as.
I wanted to find another word for “Vague Statements” based on a comment response I was composing. Normally I use thesaurus.com or something, but I didn’t want to find another meaning just for a specific word, but an actual phrase. So I google for “vague statements” and stumble upon a website at NC State University that seems designed to point out student’s flaws in writing, give examples, etc.
I think the title should be changed to “what is wrong with the way this web page was typed?”
An acquaintance of mine commited suicide. Words? I have none.
I’ve played a fair share of online poker (I play in spurts - couple weeks at a time, and then nothing for many many months) and have actually made money at it. This story, however, is a little gut-wrenching…
This youtube video shows a replay of about 8 minutes of play by the employee, indicating there’s no way someone would play like this unless they could see the other people’s hands (ignore that you can see the hands during the replay - that’s how it normally is with the replay - what you’re looking for in the video is how the guy plays and the fact that he keeps winning.)
Quick little 30 second video of halloween dress rehearsals - if you’ve never seen a fake voice-activated halloween pirate prop sing Wizard of Oz, this is your chance.
I don’t blog on Saturdays. But I might start Twittering.
I’d not heard of Twitter ever until I saw it on Blogography. I wasn’t sure what it was about or whatever, but it became much more clear once I signed up. Some use it as a tool to help others keep track of them (stalking, cyberstalking, whatever you call it), but I see it more as a convenient mini-blogging tool and a semi-public diary.
So I’m going to try it. I really like that you can use web, instant messaging, or text (sms) messaging to do little one-liners.
And of course, my brain is already filling up with all the scenarios how this can be horrendously bad in the future, but I’m going to play along for now. Maybe I’ll write up my concerns at some point. Feel free to submit your own concerns as comments here. In my case, I don’t expect anyone to actually be interested in following / tracking / stalking me, but I’m going to like having the time-line diaries because I’m fairly horrible at tracking time myself, so if I can go back and see “walgreens survey on Saturday” I don’t have to keep a real diary!
It’s like having a diary without emotion. And I’m pretty good at hiding emotions since my natal moon is in the 12th house.
So become “a fly on the whall” if you wish. Or add the RSS feed to your feedreader.
PS: how narcissistic will our society become? I hearby coin the term “blogceited”. Oh crap, someone used it already.
