Tick tock, tick tock.  Waiting. Anticipating.  As luck would have it there was some “Oh Gosh, It’s Wednesday and It’s Been Quiet So Let’s Create Some Drama” going on early in the evening.  As a result I had to wait until all was quiet and the drama queens were tuckered out before I could open the box. <insert crabby face>

But then it was time.

There are five custom painted unique dunny bots.  In the pictures below you can see the details added by TrentonMStudios, including the individual dog tags and various battle wounds.  This was by far the coolest dunny gift to date.

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I came home today to the most horrifying voicemail. I have to share it because I cannot believe that any company thinks this is the right type of image to put out there. I wasn’t sure whether I should pour acid in my ears or shoot the telephone.

GameStop Game Reminder

One has to feel relieved knowing that the old cheerleader home can now get part time work for its residents.

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There’s no such thing as giraffes!

Giraffes are from outer space

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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.

If that description fits you – first – wow. I might want to meet you – just for research purposes – under some very secure circumstances.  Second, unfollowing you is not a judgment of you, your lifestyle or your value as a human being.

The people I follow add value to my Twitstream for professional and personal reasons.  They are peers, mentors, role models, industry leaders, amusing and engaging people I just can’t live without.  Most of the people I follow also follow me and I converse with them on a regular basis. Of the handful who are not following me, I have conversations with some of them on occasion.  All of these folks I follow so that I can glean knowledge and understanding from their expertise and experience.  It’s a priceless opportunity that I feel very fortunate to enjoy.

My twitter-style?  I do discuss some technical geeky things in my stream, but for the most part, Twitter is a way for me to make real connections, forge and extend relationships, and contribute to a wonderful microuniverse of my own design.  This means a good bit of my “conversation” is personal, odd commentary on what I see or what I’m doing.  I act as a resource or a commentator when asked.  Interactive. That’s me.

There are also a number of folks I don’t know who follow me.  I’m not sure why they follow me.  Some folks are more voyeuristic.  Or they are snooping for scandals.  <LOL>  If I am not following someone and they engage me – I do interact.  Once I get to know someone I will follow them if we share the daily things that add to my stream.  Again, this isn’t a judgment.  I still read other streams of folks who follow me that I don’t follow. I just don’t do it daily.

Be true to YOU

The fact that I am goofy, geeky, and for some a bit too chatty or offbeat has occasionally led to some folks unfollowing me.  I’m a flibberty gibbet and I get that some folks like it a bit quieter or perhaps don’t want to hear about #geeklove.  It’s all good, yo!  I still converse with those folks.  They just don’t see my occasionally pneumatic post frenzies.

As I mentioned before I don’t obsess about it, but sometimes I notice.  Like today.

Twitter is being a bad little beastie with OAUTH and API issue galore.  The frequency and duration of the pain we all feel has increased signficantly since The Day That Twitter Died.  There have been all sorts of odd happenings including changes in message counts and follower counts, delays in tweet updates in the public stream and the ever-disappearing trending topics (that aren’t actually true trends since Twitter has filters on them but that’s a whole ‘nutha can ‘o tabacky!)

Today Twitter was PMSing again and behaving quite frightfully at times.  As a result I was on the lookout for oddities.   After noticing a random decrease of 4 followers I went on a quest for information.  Nothing.  Hmm. Curiosity peaked as I continued on my journey to discover who unfollowed me.  It turned out that there may have been some suspicious accounts removed, but there was one…one unfollower…who was a real person.

** GASP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH NOES!!!!

I may have to cry now because I am diminished by this injurious action! < /sarcasm>

Yes, I’m being silly.  I’m working on a 2 day sleep-deficit and I’m giddy.  But in all seriousness, this  unfollow caught me by surprise. It’s someone I really like, enjoy conversing with when he is in a tweeting mood, and not only did he unfollow me, he unfollowed @g33kguy!

I thought about it for a bit and grumbled to myself as I tried to figure out what egregious Twitter-Crime was committed by us that necessitated the removal of us from his Twitstream.  After wishing the pox on him (I jest) I thought, you know, we probably annoy the crap out of him.  Or we offended him.  Or, he only followed us in the first place because we goaded him into it (also in jest at the time).  I just wish he would have said, “Hey y’all yammer to much” or “Hey all this talk about love makes me heave” or “You guys aren’t worth my time”.  I totally respect that level of honesty and find it disheartening and frustrating when I don’t know why.  < /nosewrinkle>

Since I know you’ll ask – yes I have dropped off a few streams without explanation.  One posted such offensive content that I was concerned about hitting the filters at the office or having my kids walk up behind me and see it.   Another did something that designers and developers do not tolerate – they lifted an idea from us and used it as their own.  It’s not that the idea was unique.  It’s that there was never a conversation about, “Hey, I know this is your thing, but I’m thinking I’d like to do the same thing. Are we cool?”  My answer would have been 100% yes.  It’s the sneaky crappy way it was handled that chapped me enough to say FINISH!!! (inside joke).  Other than a smattering of unfollows, I love my community noisy, busy and full of color!  So bring on the tweets!

WHEW!!

If you’re still with me after this verbose ignivomous monstrosity, thanks for reading.  No really, thank you!  Hopefully I entertained you a bit or distracted you.  Oohh…shiny ball!

The point of all these letters and squiggles is to make you think by asking you one question comprised of 22 words: Do you follow to increase your count or do you follow because the individual you are following adds value to your Twitstream?

Until next time, chew on that!  I’m out.

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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.

Did you write the Book of Tweets,
And do you have faith in the geek l33ts,
If the Twitterati tells you so?
Do you believe in Twitter polls,
Can Twitter save your mortal soul,
And can you teach me how to tweet real slow?

Well, I know that you’re addicted now
`cause I saw you tweetin all over town.
Your iPhone was a blaze.
Man, I love that touch interface.
I was a lonely twitter n00b punk
With a flip phone & my network sucked,
But I knew I was out of luck
The day that Twitter died.

I started singin,
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.

Now for 3 hours we’ve been on our own
And dust grows thick on ev’ry smartphone
But that’s not how it used to be.
When Kawasaki tweeted for the restless mobs,
With a phone he borrowed from Steve Jobs
In a tweet that came from you and me.

Oh, and while Bill Gates was looking down,
Eric Schmidt stole his geeky crown.
Tweetchat was adjourned;
No tweet trend was returned.
And while Scoble read a book on quarks,
The tweeple gathered in the park,
And we texted dirges in the dark
The day that Twitter died.

We were singing,
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.

The chaos caused by hack attacks
The ‘Net was now most surely doomed
YouTube played a funeral tune.
We sent email and launched IM,
To bemoan the most certain end
Of every tweet we’d ever sent

While the hackers kept up their attacks
The world wide geeks were working fast
We tried to tweet once more
Oh but all we got was a 504.
cuz when we tried to give them our appeal
Those bastards still refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day that Twitter died?

We started singing,
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.

Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A twitteration lost in interwebz space
With no time left to start again.
So come on: Ev be nimble, Biz be quick!
Ev and Biz sat on a javascript
Cuz scripting is a hacker’s only friend.

Oh, and as I watched them highjack ev’ry page
My tweets were steeped in a snarky rage.
No geek born in hell
Could break that hacker’s spell.
And as DDOS morphed into the night
Ruining Twitter’s website
I saw the Hacker laughing with delight
The day that Twitter died

He was singing,
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.

I met a geek who tweeted the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just surfed on down the road.
I went down to the Apple store
Where I’d learned of Twitter years before,
But the man there said that Twitter wouldn’t load.

And in the streets: the lolcats screamed,
The spambots cried, and the bloggers dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The Twit Apps all were broken.
And the geeks that I admire most:
Jobs and Schmidt and our Twitter Hosts
They caught the last train for the coast
The day that Twitter died.

And they were singing,
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..

They were singing,
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.

Note to original thought thieves: I have proof that I wrote this. Don’t make me send my cousins after you.  Or the law.  kthxbai.

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Between day jobs, the business, the kids and everything in between, we’re like a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest – making it happen, but not sure how.  But don’t worry your geeky little heads. Our lives are overflowing with geeky goodness even if we aren’t posting about it.

I feel a tremendous amount of guilt…okay, a smidge…for not writing more frequently.  We are in the middle of moving to a slightly different business model, rebranding some things and rearranging our priorities. That takes a lot out of any geek because it requires a tremendous amount of organization, planning and foresight.  Being the poster child for adult ADD doesn’t help either.  Shiny ball….

In an effort to keep you entertained for at least the next 90 seconds, I am including the video below. It speaks so clearly to my experiences lately regarding shortcuts, a rush to complete tasks without proper planning, execution without trying to break the concept, etc.   And it’s funny as hayull.  Enjoy!

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