Dear twitter friends…
Dear twitter friends I have deleted my main account due to tired I am with twitter and it’s poor performance. I am in other places. I’ll catch you there.
This morning, August 15 2008, Blog Action Day has launched. In the next two months we hope to encourage thousands of bloggers, podcasters and videocasters to learn about poverty, and on October 15, take action.
Anohther blog action day is coming up. How will you be active this time around?
A few days ago I noticed that twitter was tweeting their programs as they were on in German and this looked like a good idea. I commented it was a shame that they didn’t have the same in French. Within a few days it’s there. This morning I saw Arte’s tweet for one program and so I’m watching a guy play some Chopin on the Piano.
I spend quite a bit of time watching the twitter stream so if someone gives me their program details, as an opt in then there’s a good chance that I will tune into the program on the spare of the moment.
If I had intended to watch the program at 2038 in three days time I would have forgottten about it. As things are that’s what’s playing on the right side of my screen now.
Yesterday I was climbing 5C comfortably and consistently for the first time. I often climb 5a, 5b and sometimes attempt 6a and 5c. Yesterday I skipped the easy grades and went straight for the 5C+. I expected it to be hard and I expected to struggle. I expect strength and fear of falling to be issues but they were not.
I believe that three factors contributed to this. The first of these is that last time I went climbing I was also bouldering. I believe that bouldering got me to work different muscle groups and that these muscle groups were primed for use when lead climbing.
The second factor that helped is that I noticed that the door frames in the building where I live have tiny ledges that I can grip and pull on laterally. By making this lateral effort I was strengthening my grip for tiny holds. I was using the strength I developed on holds that I would not otherwise have trusted. Amusingly it seems to have worked.
The third and most important factor is that I took a one week break from climbing. In this time my body had the time to recover and so did my mind. It had the opportunity to absorb what it had learned and desaturate from the previous climbs. In effect I arrived to the wall with a clean slate (no pun intended).
I love to go climbing because it is a wonderful form of escapism from all of the stress of adult life. It provides you with a workout and with an opportunity to clear your mind. Some would describe it as a form of meditation. As a former diver I would call it desaturation. You have the opportunity to live in and enjoy a moment with no past and no future. That’s why people love these sports. It can be summarised to one phrase. Well being. Yesterday’s successful climbs contributed to mine.
Tonight I went to the cinema and saw two films at a cinema that has turned half a century old. The most interesting of those event is a 1930s film with a live performance by a jazz band touring switzerland with that film. I also saw an Avant premiere for a film that was quite interesting. It was a different subject matter than other films I’ve seen.
I’ll write more and include links to videos once some of the video material I shot is processed.
If I had a perfect laptop it would be shaped just like the N97 but larger. I’m saying this because of how much I love having a keyboard and a touchscreen in such a small package. Now imagine if laptops did away with all that wasted space at the bottom, where the trackpad goes.
Back to the matter at hand. The N97 is a great little device that can survive about a day with my use before needing a charge. What I like is the duality of control between a keyboard when you slide it from under the display, and the touch interface for those that like that. What makes this touch interface particularly interesting is that it’s designed for mobile phone users with a lot of experience with text messaging. It’s the standard number and key configuration that we’ve grown accustomed to over the past decade.
There were some issues with stability, crashes display not working all the time and memory issues but those have been patched.
Laptop backups are an integral part of my daily routine. I backup to the cloud with crashplan as well as to an external hard drive. I also back up files as they are every few days or weeks so that if a drive fails I have at least one or two backups. In some cases I have more backups.
Recently I was backing up the files from my most recent mac book pro because I noticed that the mouse was starting to fail every so often. When this happened on other mac book laptops it meant that the battery was starting to fail and to inflate. The battery was in a critical state so I expected it to fail and to take it to the apple store. I created a login just so that the Apple Maintenance team could fix it without having to log in to my main profile.
A few days ago I took this machine to Geneva to collaborate on a project. We didn’t work much so I left the computer in a room, out of view and where I expected very little people traffic. After half an hour or so I decided to go and recover my laptop bag. When I arrived I saw the flask next to it. When I lifted the laptop bag it felt stupidly light. I checked the bag and the tables around. No sign of the laptop. The machine I had backed up just minutes before going to Geneva was stolen. I reported it to the location where I was and within fourty minutes I reported it to the police.
I am really happy with the Swiss Police. Within fourty minutes the crime is reported and you can get on with preparing insurance details. A few years ago when I was mugged I was told to “come back tomorrow.”
I have been going to conferences, events, universities, schools and offices with my laptops for close to 20 years without a single theft. It’s ironic that it was stolen from a place where I have seen dozens of laptops unattended over the weeks. I should have left it in a room with a lot of people.
For another perspective and point of view: Benefits of Unlimited Cloud Backup for SMBs
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Thought it was a joke but you really did it!
Impressive somehow…
I was on twitter for two years with an average tweet rate of 72.6 per day. And from one day to the next it no longer exists. Too many superficial people on the site. It was time for me to move on. I am using a secondary account but twitter is going to be a far smaller part of my life. So small that I will only go to check on twitter when I have replies or a new follow.
It's like that relationship you see going nowhere. It was time to break up. I made sure there was no going back and I'm happy for that.
I thought it was a joke at first as well, but I did see this coming.
Sounds like you've been pretty frustrated with Twitter lately. I followed your secondary account, but won't be offended if you don't follow back 😉
Best wishes,
Mark
It's no joke, I did delete that account. I have a backup of my last 3800 tweets on that account and thousands more are backed up on various portions of the web, either through tweetbackup, greader or others.
One of the reasons for my frustration has been how people speak and profess their knowledge of social networks yet are to conventional to actually use them to their full potential.
As a result I am still on twitter, but with a far reduced presence.
🙁 My nights aren't the same without your tweets. I understand your thoughts completely though. How many of your followers ever bothered to subscribe to this feed? [raises hand]
I thought I was better at using the social nets to their full potential, but Twitter and other places have exposed me to so many of them, that I use a lot, but none to full potential, something I will try to address in the coming weeks and months.
I'll be trying to keep up with you elsewhere now, keep us updated on the Twitterless life. 🙂
~Shawn K (@thattalldude)
I still tweet but just warza, rather than warzabidul as a twitter name and I am still following you from that account. Those who were following me, in large part were friends. Too many of them took too long to aknowledge my tweets so they were devalued.
Now it's a new twitter account and friendfeed. On friendfeed I'm one of the two hundred most active users of the site at the moment.
Follow my new twitter account.