As previously mentioned, I had trouble getting my head around the concept of Twitter. While I’m still of the same general opinion (Do I really need to know you’re craving anchovies?), I’ve since come around a bit.

While I don’t contribute much (although I suppose I’ve been ramping up as of late), I find it extremely interesting to follow what others send out into the ether. There’s certainly a fair share of boring stuff to sift through, but the gems tend to be quite interesting (for instance, watching John Gruber collecting info before posting to Daring Fireball). It appears as though I can count on one hand the number of people I actually know on Twitter (most of whom don’t seem to be using it as of late), so there’s a vaguely voyeuristic feeling of following the people I don’t personally know. Curiously, of those, the most prolific are in the web design and Mac development crowds.

On a side note, it seems as though there’s a bit of a waning of interest in online personas among the people I personally know (exception: LinkedIn). Methinks it might be just another effect of getting older. All the social networking sites that promised so much ~4 years ago (Friendster, Orkut, etc.) haven’t delivered a compelling reason to stay active on them - from my demographic’s point of view, I suppose, as Brazil seemingly has taken over Orkut. (Disclosure: I’ve deleted my Orkut account out of frustration from getting friend requests in Portuguese and I’m not sure why I haven’t done the same with Friendster, other than “out of sight, out of mind”.) The second wave, MySpace and Facebook, don’t offer much of a compelling argument to join for me - they’re overcrowded with the generation after my own and still don’t deliver a compelling selling point. I remain perplexed when people older than me by at least a decade have official representation on MySpace (1970’s-era rockstars who probably exist in a void of ignorance on behalf of the general membership).

Personal blogs have been withering on the vine as well (yes - I freely point out my own). I know my own reasoning had everything to do with shrinking free time, not out of disinterest. I’ve since purchased a new domain and have ideas for facelifting this blog before moving it to the new domain. I’ve started the 365 project (despite it being on hiatus currently) and continue to come across things that I’d like to share.

I guess where I’m meandering off to with this post is that I do want to follow through on my original plans, but I think I’ll probably augment it with Twitter - I haven’t raided the WordPress plug-ins lately, but I would certainly guess there’s one that will pipe your “tweets” straight to your blog (this will kill the “Random Bits” category of this blog due to the redundancy). I’ve got some free time on my hands now, so I’m hoping to press forward with these changes soon. Stay tuned!

Well, that was a disaster - tried updating the WP install, but it just went sideways somehow. Dealing with the actual WP update was fine (although tedious going back and forth), but ripping out the database and reinstalling from last Sunday’s backup was a real pain. Fortunately, I managed to undo everything from the update and got back to square one with only one comment casualty. Not sure when I’m going to try this again…

I know what you must be thinking (well, if you’re actually reading this) - is this blog dead? I’m happy to say “no”. It may be severely neglected, but it’s certainly not dead. Fact of the matter is, a lot of stuff has come up in the meantime that’s gotten in the way of sitting down to write a post… all sorts of weirdness in at work (and the stuff that usually consequently comes out of that), getting ready for my wedding, then actually getting married, then Honeymoon Phase 1, then trying to get back into the swing of things. Next thing you know, the holidays are upon us and where does that leave everything?

Enough with the excuses. I haven’t been much for resolutions since childhood (when resolutions didn’t really amount to much anyway), but I am planning on getting some things rolling along on a couple of fronts - writing on this blog included. I can’t say that I’ll be as verbose as I once was, but I will be making a more concerted effort to post something on a regular basis.

Sorry for the sporadic updates without much content - I’ve been working on the wedding blog! It’s been a royal pain, but it seems to be running pretty well now. Originally it was a question of implementation - I wanted to keep the blog on my domain instead of doing a cookie-cutter thing on the myriad of websites out there. I checked out a bunch of stuff, but nothing seemed to want to cooperate. In the end, I went with another WP installation.

OK, step 2 with my fiddling is mostly done. The upgrade to 2.0.5 still has a few issues (notice that “Eyes On…” and “Random Bits” sections are on vacation currently. Still working on what I want to get done, so hang tight…

As you can see, my blog now looks like your standard WordPress installation, I’m up to something. For now, it was just updating from 1.5 to 2.0.5. More is coming…

Heck, where have I been? Many apologies for being MIA for so long. A lot has been going on - trips to LA and Montreal for work, a couple of snowboarding trips to Tahoe being big time-eaters. I’ve been meaning on doing a number of posts during this down-time, but for whatever reason, I kept getting distracted. Needless to say, that while a good number of folks were nice enough to send in their thoughts to help with the redesign of this blog - I just haven’t had the time to get to that (not sure when that’s going to be, but it’s definitely on the list!).

It’s almost comical how things have gotten in the way - for instance, I really wanted to write about seeing Philip Glass perform “Koyaanisqatsi” in the Davies Symphony Hall, but leaving for Montreal the next morning and not having ‘net access for the vast majority of the time while up there (despite having forked out an additional fee to Sprint to make sure that I’d be covered up there) put a damper on that one. But now that I find myself with a little bit of time before heading to the ‘Store, at least I can fill you guys in on that.

OK, even I have to admit that it’s starting to look like a “self-help” blog around here (or, a critic thereof). Kind of an interesting coincidence, especially when tripping across the following two blog articles (postings? entries? anyone?) on self-branding and logo design. While the latter post’s author’s focus on Christianity might take you by surprise (and you folks know that I’m the last person to be linking to a deeply religious site), it doesn’t change the fact that his tips are good (not to mention the logo he created is well-designed given the requirements) and both articles are well worth the read.

So we’ve discussed in the past different ways to branch out the online representation of yourself & your interests - usually with results somewhere between “complete success” and “utter failure” (with some ending up on the latter end and very few on the former). Sometimes, companies (or individuals) will come up with an interesting idea that in some way spawns off the original lofty goals these experiments. For instance, Flickr.

With all the blogging, Friendstering (or, if you’re in the know, Orkuting) and other online exhibitionistic tendencies, people seem to be drawn to coming up with new ways of representing themselves. And for those non-Bobcats who read this blog (all two of you): Just when you think you’ve seen it all, Sean manages to point me to yet another way: iTunes Signature Maker.

I had some issues but came up with an interesting mix all the same:

OK, as I sit here waiting to meet up with a friend, I’m checking my email and posting to my blog. Nerdvana doesn’t get much better than this…

So needless to say, the Treo thing is working out better than anticipated. Now if I could only get the email app to automagically download, I’ll be stoked and not reminiscing my old Blackberry at all!

So this weekend was kind of interesting… Not only did I finally upgrade to a Treo 650 yesterday (I’m actually posting this using Mo:Blog on the Treo as a test), but I just ordered a new PowerBook today to boot. It’s been an expensive weekend…

So I just found out that The Piton, a blog run by a bunch of outdoor industry people, has just posted its last. Given my experiences working in the industry and knowing how unbelievably uncommunicative it is, I’m pretty disappointed that I just found out about it when it closes its proverbial doors.

That said, they’re not taking it down, just choosing to not post new content. Among the sundry things I’ve found on it, there’s a link to a cool little site dedicated to wilderness survival skills called Tracker Trail. The specific item they linked to was an article detailing how to start a fire using nothing but a Coke can and a chocolate bar. Pretty interesting reading.

Brent has pointed to an interesting new little technology that’s being proposed called Neutrino, mentioning that he plans on supporting it in an upcoming release of NetNewsWire. Neutrino is one feed (a la RSS) that points back to everything an individual sends out into the ether: their blog, a Flickr account, whatever. The idea is that you subscribe to the person, as opposed to having hunt down disparate parts that they happen to put out there. Having been a fan of email forwarding services since my Bates days (Got enough of your ISP? No problem - just change the settings with your email forwarder to forward your email to your new ISP email!), I’m really intrigued to see this happen.

Of course, I just have just this blog, so it’s not like I have a huge need for something to package the different things together. Speaking of which, I’m still having a hard time wrapping my mind around why Flickr is such a boon. I used to use the original online photo services Ofoto (erm, before Kodak bought them and renamed them Kodak EasyShare Gallery - the latter of which I just discovered) and Shutterfly, but have long since abandoned them. I know it has its fans - Sean, Jess & Basil, for instance. I mean, I get that it’s a place to display your photos, but unless you’re using a restrictive blogging service, you can do that on your own site anyways. Heck, if you have iPhoto, it gets even easier. From what I can tell, the unique feature would be the Notes & Tags feature which looks admittedly very cool. I dunno - am I missing something here?

Of course, I suppose I should just sign up and try it out since it’s free…

So I’ve been pretty oblivious the few days to a dust-up about Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame “implementing” a link farm on the WordPress website (hat-tip to Scot for cluing me in). It’s a pretty crazy story that got crazier by the minute given the fact that Matt was incommunicado in Italy. While I’m seeing plenty of hysteria (now that I started looking for it), not much is pointing to Matt’s response and explanation.

I thought it was worth posting this only to throw another pointer on the Internets to Matt’s post. He screwed up, admits it and removed the farm. Not only will I continue to use WP, but I’ll be kicking a little dough their way.