Our Geek Life

Would you like a side of rude with that 503?

Posted by shegeek at October 8th, 2009 | No Comments »

Another day, another crappy user experience on Twitter.  Sadly, failures have become de rigueur which leads me to longing for another option.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m still having a love affair with Twitter, but the bloom is off the rose.  The new car smell has faded. The moon has lost its honey.

Gone are the gut-wrenching, mind-bending panic attacks.  I am so thoroughly geek that I have previously mourned the outages.  Lately my attitude has undergone serious degradation, sinking from the once experienced OMGWTF to a more apathetic status of Meh.

Although I am rather cavalier about the outages, I still use these times of Twitter-exia to come up with new ways to poke fun at Twitter and those of us who use it.  What fun is a ridiculously obsessive self-absorbed addiction if you can’t humiliate yourself and others like you when given ample opportunity to do so?

Can I get an Amen?

During one recent outage I looked over at my amazingly geeky other half and said, “I have the perfect alternative to that idiotic Fail Whale.”   I proceeded to explain what I believe to be a new and greatly improved Twitter Failure Mascot – one with less sweet and more meat – less happy and more snappy – a snark among snarks wrapped in the familiar net of doom and gloom.

Yes, my friends, the goofy and somehow happy-to-be-a-failure Fail Whale has been replaced by his snarkier cousin, Fail Seaman.  I believe that there is an animated version in the future, complete with Twitter related snarky commentary.

Categories: Twitter
Tags: FAIL, Fail Seaman, Fail Whale, Geek Humor, Social Networking, Twitter

*gasp The dreaded UNfollow

Posted by shegeek at August 20th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Do you view following as a commitment and unfollowing like a broken promise — or worse — a divorce?  Do you watch your follower count and immediately unfollow anyone who has unfollowed you as if to say, “AHA! You don’t deserve to have me as a follower when you don’t follow me!”

What does following mean to you?

 

Most of us have had it happen.  Someone you converse with on a regular or fairly regular basis – you might even consider this person a friend – stops following you.  Maybe you tried to send a DM and couldn’t.  Or maybe you’re obsessive-compulsive frantic and oh-so-devastated over the loss of even one spam or pr0n bot follower and endlessly review your follower count, your follow-to-followed ratio and your follower growth metrics.

One…One Thousand…One Meellyun? Meh.

 

I don’t fret over my follower count.  I routinely clear out spammers and other questionable accounts as well as unfollow random tweeps whose conversations I really don’t want associated with me.   I’m sure that’s snobbish to some.  I’m not a Twitter Saint by any means.  But if you’re tweeting about how much pipe you laid last weekend while you were drinking like an Amish junior college freshman, straight off the farm and very curious about life in the big city, pretty much, there’s not a commonality there that I want to explore. (more…)

Categories: Social Networking
Tags: Networking, OMG, Social Networking, social skills, Twitter, WTF

The Day that Twitter Died

Posted by shegeek at August 11th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

What do geeks do when their Twitterverse implodes?

 

It’s no longer breaking news that there was a series of DDOS attacks on the internet last week.  I didn’t notice it so much on Facebook because (1) I’m not on there as much and (2) Facebook often seems slow and bloated to me.  But my beloved Twitter? Oh yes, I knew it was dead.

So what did I do?  Like any good geek I panicked, I cried, I moaned, I wailed.  I paced the floor aimlessly, babbling to myself about the end of the world as we know it, the TRUE Twit-pocalypse was upon us, dontchaknow…  (Do I need to insert sarcasm tags to avoid the sarchasm I think may ensue from those unfamiliar with my wit?)

At any rate, at one point I sang to myself, “The day that Twitter…died.”  <insert eyebrow raise and pondering face>

I make up a lot of song parodies, but rarely write them down (bad geek).  This time I did.  Many thanks to @MadBrad, @lwcavallucci and @Daily_Pinch for encouraging me to publish this.  Brad – I know you said to YouTube this, but I am video challenged.  There is always another parody in my back pocket, so maybe the next time.

So with many apologies to Don McLean, below is the work product of my Twitterless time:

The Day that Twitter Died

 

A long, long time ago…
I can still remember
How that tweeting used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those tweeple dance
And maybe they’d be happy for a while.

But August made me cry a river
With every Tweet I tried to deliver.
Bad news from the TweetDeck;
I couldn’t type one more peck.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about the twidowed site,
But something touched me deep inside
The day that Twitter died.

So bye-bye, Twittter access denied.
No more TweetChat no more TwitPics
The Twitterverse has now died
Them good ol geeks were mourning the API
Singin this’ll be the day that I die.
This’ll be the day that I die. (more…)

Categories: Twitter
Tags: Creativity, Geek Humor, OMG, Twitter, Viral, WTF