What To Do When Twitter Is Down

CNet’s Webware site has a post about What to do when Twitter is down - as it has been for the last couple of days.  There was a time when this wasn’t an issue – after all, Twitter used to be down more than it was up.  Can’t remember the last time I saw that stupid whale.  Good riddance.

But if Twitter does go down, it’s not the end of the freaking world.  If you *have* to find out the very latest information, try Google News.  Try FriendFeed.  Hell, try calling someone on the phone and asking them what’s new.  A long, long time ago, I went through what I thought was an addiction to IRC.  When I was online, I was in IRC.  Simple as that.  Then, one day, I woke up, and it just got boring.  I walked away.

That was about 16 years ago.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Twitter is much more valuable as a resource than IRC could hope to be in a thousand years.  But it’s not the be-all and end-all as a source of up-to-date information.  There are other ways to get your fix.  No, they’re not as immediate.  Yes, you might need to do a little digging to find it.  No, you probably won’t find Oprah, or Ashton Kutcher, or Jason Calacanis’ dogs hanging out there.  So what?

Will the world end if you don’t know something *right fucking now*?  Probably not.  And if it will, chances are you aren’t getting that information from Twitter anyway.

Go outside, into the Big Blue Room and see what you can find out.  Then come back later and tweet about it.  OK?

You Still Here?

Wow….pretty close to *3 years* since I last posted here.  Checked the stats and the site did actually have some traffic in the last week.  Bloody amazing, if you ask me.

I thought it was pretty funny that the last time I posted here I was just getting ready to install RC1 of Vista, and now we’re looking forward to the release of Windows 7.  How things change.

To be honest, I’d forgotten all about this blog, and why I created it.  But now I’m back, and I’ve got what I hope is some interesting stuff to say.  Whether it’s about life in Vancouver, the tech world, Twitter (which didn’t even exist when I last posted) or whatever.

It’s good to be back.  It’s even better that there’s still some people here.  Thanks for sticking it out.

Rolling Out Vista RC1 this weekend

Microsoft has finally opened the gates again for those who didn’t get into the Vista release program back in June, now allowing you to download and obtain a product key for Vista RC1. I downloaded the DVD ISO the other day and just today got the product code. I’ll be installing it most likely this weekend and will definitely be posting updates on progress.

HP: What the hell happened?

Lord knows that there’s been enough commentary on the whole HP scandal lately, but, what fun would it be if I couldn’t add my own two cents? If you haven’t heard of what happened, here’s a brief rundown as I understood it:

Chairwoman Patricia Dunn freaked after a number of leaks turned up on CNet’s website that she figured could only have come from someone on HP’s board. So, she hired a private firm to try and figure out who was leaking the information. Their solution? A little pretexting.

In effect, pretexting works like this. An investigator would contact your phone / mobile provider, claiming to be you and either ask for copies of past phone records, or setup an account allowing them to get the records online. Once they have this information, it may be a simple matter of finding out who leaked the info from the boardroom to the press.

Now, because they didn’t know who was leaking, they did this to the entire board (actually, it’s more likely that they stopped when they found what they were looking for). Now, I’m sorry, but if someone claims to be me, and obtains information about me from a service provider of any kind, as far as I’m concerned, that constitutes fraud. When one of the board members found out, he resigned in disgust. Why the rest of the board didn’t is beyond me.

What needs to happen here? Patricia Dunn, HP’s chair, should be fired. Immediately. It’s a no brainer. If I did something like this at my job I would expect to be fired immediately upon discovery.

It’s as simple as that.

Firefox: Customizing the way it looks

Lifehacker has an excellent post on customizing Firefox, and making it more personal, by modifying the userChrome.css file. Not as hard as it sounds, really. Generally it’s a matter of finding the file and pasting any pre-configured changes in to the file. I’ve included the ones that I’ve used on my home machine, all fully commented, so that you can tell what they’ll actually do.

/* Customizations added from LifeHacker article on modifying chrome.css. Some stuff added from Mozilla Tips and Tricks site */

/* Add a keyword when adding a bookmark */
#keywordRow { display: -moz-grid-line !important; }

/* Remove Stop button when there's nothing to Stop */
#stop-button[disabled="true"] { display: none; }

/* Remove Back button when there's nothing to go Back to */
#back-button[disabled="true"] { display: none; }

/* Remove Forward button when there's nothing to go Forward to */
#forward-button[disabled="true"] { display: none; }

/* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar */
#bookmarks-ptf {display:block}
#bookmarks-ptf toolbarseparator { display:inline }

/* Make inactive tabs hardly visible */
#content tab:not([selected="true"]) {
-moz-opacity: 0.5 !important; }

/* Hide the Go menu */
menu[label="Go"] {
display: none !important; }

/* Hide read mail from Tools Menus */
menuitem[label="Read Mail (0 new)"] { display: none; }
menuitem[label="Read Mail (0 new)"] + menuseparator { display: none; }
menuitem[label="New Message..."] { display: none; }
menuitem[label="New Message..."] + menuseparator { display: none; }

/* Remove Web Search from Tools Menu */
menuitem[label="Web Search"] { display: none; }
menuitem[label="Web Search"] + menuseparator { display: none; }

/*
* For more examples see http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html
*/

Any others that you’ve installed on your machine and wouldn’t mind sharing?

Windows Live Writer

Just finished downloading Windows Live Writer and thought that I would give it a spin. From what I can tell it’s going to take a little getting used to, as I’m used to the excellent Performancing extension for Firefox.

As usual, I’ll try it out for about 7 days and then see if it’s something that I’d be willing to keep on my machine.

Update: It crapped out, giving me an error saying that it couldn’t find the page to post to.  So this is being posted with PFF.  I’ll try and investigate this a bit more in the morning.

New Phone

A few months ago, my Nokia 3100b phone cracked it’s display somehow. It seemed to continue working, so I figured I’d just forego using the phonebook, and keep using it until it died, and then I’d get a new phone. Until last week, when my wife dropped it and killed it.
So on Saturday I went out and picked up a Samsung SGH-X497 which is a very nice upgrade from the Nokia. I wanted a camera phone, but couldn’t justify spending another $100 for a VGA camera when I can use my Pentax Optio 30.
I’ve only had it for a couple of days, but have been impressed by it so far. When I’ve used it for a little longer I’ll post an update on my findings.

Technorati Tags: Samsung, SGH-X497, Mobile

Hello world

Okay, so this is the first post in what I’m intending to be a wildly popular blog about geek life in Vancouver. Uh, yeah. Actually, I’d be happy if someone else stumbled across it and actually subscribed to the feed. Oh well. On with the posts…