Our Geek Life

*gasp The dreaded UNfollow

Posted by shegeek on 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. Continue Reading

W00T! Microsoft’s New iPhone

Posted by shegeek on August 18th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

This is so awesome I can’t even see straight!  I <3 Microsoft!

The Day that Twitter Died

Posted by shegeek on 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. Continue Reading