Bob Evans wrote in Information Week’s Global CIO Blog an article entitled IBM, Microsoft, And The Myth Of ‘Our Jobs’. [Alas, another dead link pruned.]
Proving once again that there are statistics to support just about anything you’ve got to say.
All posts by Rick
Chrysler’s Problems Hit The Street
I was in an automobile dealership service department yesterday and overheard something I’ve never heard before.
A woman with a Chrysler product needing service was being turned away! Her story, following a good hour of waiting for a diagnosis, unfolded something like this. Chrysler hasn’t been paying their third-party suppliers and so some have stopped, well, supplying. Bummer, but the thing that she needed happened to be affected. There was no stock, nothing available and the prospect of an order being fulfilled was virtually nonexistent.
The service writer went on to advise her to take her plight to Corporate and appeal to them as a wronged customer on the shitty end of the stick, through no fault of her own. It was right about then that the light bulb came on over her head – this was no ordinary conversation. She needed to take notes.
The service writer was sympathetic, gave her specific people and addresses to write to, coached her on what to say, stuff like that. But that doesn’t help her ailing car very much and, after listening to her yap on her phone while she waited for that news, wasn’t what she needed in her life just then.
Some Favorite Windows XP Registry Adjustments
Since I’ve been asked, here are a few of the registry adjustments I make soon after kickstarting an XP system. By no means is this an exhaustive list. No, it’s just the stuff that I consider a minimal start for all systems.
WARNING – Don’t come crying to me if you hose your system beyond belief, because for the uninitiated messing with the Windows registry directly is somewhat akin to performing open-brain surgery. In fact, I’m not going to tell you how to perform edits on the thing, back it up in whole or part or anything like that. You should already know how to do those things. If you don’t, well, please move along, nothing to see here.
With that out of the way, I’ll state what should be obvious. The registry keys mentioned below are each one line. Sometimes embedded spaces will cause wrapping that shouldn’t actually be.
The default responsiveness of the Start menu is designed for effect, not utility. Adjust it to your liking by adjusting the value here:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay
This has a default decimal value of 400. 100 usually does it for me. Â The ever-so-popular TeweakUI utility adjusts this, too, but it’s easy to just do it this way.
If you’ve got enough memory in your system you can pull the Windows kernel into RAM. Absolutely don’t do this if you’ve got less than, oh, 256 MB. Â But who doesn’t have 2 GB or more these days?
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive
Choose one of these values:
1 = disable paging and run kernel from RAM
0 = normal, paged operation
It should be obvious that you want to set it to 1. You’ll need to reboot to make it take effect.
Did you know that NTFS maintains standard 8.3 file names that are compatible with DOS conventions? Those are the ugly looking all-caps things with the tildas and such that you may have seen in a file list every now and again. Creating and maintaining them is an overhead you can live without if you never have a need for this compatibility. Nice that you can easily disable it and keep your MFT a little less cluttered at the same time.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation
0 = enabled
1 = disabled
Set to 1 to gain some file system performance, at the expense of compatibility with that older file system you probably forgot about long ago. You’ll need to reboot to make it take effect.
Oh, and before you ask: no, I’m not sure whether it cleans up existing 8.3 junk or not. I never bothered to check, but I’d suspect not.
Windows XP helps speed its bootup with a prefetch cache, located by default at C:\Windows\Prefetch. Some folks say that every now and again you should delete the contents of that directory, and the system will rebuild it cleanly. I personally wouldn’t bother with that, just let Windows deal with it. But you can control what gets prefetched with this adjustment.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher
0 = disable prefetching
1 = prefetch application launch files
2 = prefetch boot files
3 = prefetch as much as possible
Setting this to 3, of course, is a good idea.
The Disk Cleanup utility doesn’t actually clean up all of your temp files as you might be led to believe. Instead, it checks the last access of these files and if it’s 7 days or less it keeps ’em around. Fortunately you can fix this.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Files\LastAccess
# = number of days of retention
Personally I like 0 days. One good reason is that it’s nice to have the slate as clean as possible when defragmenting. (But if you’ve got an SSD you might want to leave this one be, as small writes exact a serious performance hit.)
Add a Copy To command to Explorer’s context-sensitive menu, where it’s always ready for use.
Just add the following key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Copy To
with a default value of
{C2FBB630-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}
And, while you’re at it, add a Move To command as well. Add this key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Move To
with a default value of
{C2FBB631-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}
Of course, neither of these do anything for system performance but may help your performance.
Family Contact
A week or so ago I got an email message out of the blue from a family member, Pat. She introduced herself, saying she ran across my name on the ‘net when looking for other relatives and found my Dad’s obituary. Let’s see if I’ve got this right: Pat’s mom was my dad’s aunt. So what’s our relationship?? That stuff is always so darned confusing to me.
We’ve swapped a few messages and already I’ve learned more about that side of my family. It’s interesting! I hope we keep this up.
The Netbook Experience
I’ll be doing some traveling this year. Usually I lug my laptop, a several-year-old desktop replacement that serves as my workaday box. With the battery and power brick it’s only, oh, around 15 pounds. That’s fine for moving around the house or even to drive to a client site, but it’s a bit much for more than that. Netbooks are growing in popularity, becoming more functional while getting better with battery life. The solid-state storage modules are durable, too – I could even carry it on the motorcycle!
I checked out a few of ’em before settling on the Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000. The clincher was the keyboard which at some 92% normal size is actually quite usable. So here’s the configuration: Atom processor N270 (1.6 GHz); 1 GB DDR2 RAM; 32 GB SSD; Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950; 10.1 inch SD LED BrightView Infinity display (1024×576) with built-in microphone and webcam; Wireless G / Bluetooth; 6-cell lithium-polymer battery; mini-sleeve for carrying/storage.
I ordered directly from HP and delivery was fast, as usual. The shipping box was well-packed. It took but a couple of minutes to unpack, install the battery, plug in the charger and begin setup. The first thing I noticed was that SSDs are damned slow. Could it have been a mistake to choose a low-capacity SSD over a traditional hard drive? (I’ll come back to that later.) But getting Widows XP setup, activated and updated took hours. Thankfully it required no attention while it went about its business. I left it to its own, came back later and it was done.
Over the next few days my disappointment with performance continued. It looked nice, it was light enough, the keyboard was great, battery life was excellent at around 6 hours, but what good is all that if you can’t get useful work out of the thing?
As it turns out there are many things you can do to speed things up. Memory always helps Windows. The first order of business was to swap a 2 GB stick into the single slot, which took literally 30 seconds. I attacked the Registry, making the myriad tweaks I customarily make. The filesystem adjustments, like disabling 8.3 filenames, proved particularly useful, as did things like moving the kernel into RAM.
I found a process, StacSV.exe, that was consuming CPU and doing lots of I/O. I learned that the purpose of this was to monitor the audio jack to detect if you plug in or remove headphones. This is controlled by the Audio Service so I stopped it, setting it to Manual start. There are three associated registry keys, which do not exist, that were constantly being hit (and not found), so stopping the service quieted that noise down nicely. Here are those three keys:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\STacSV\DependOnService
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\STacSV\DependOnGroup
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\STacSV\DependOnTag
I updated the BIOS from F.10 to F.11 F.
There wasn’t much shovel-ware preinstalled on the box, but it still needed cleanup. (When will they learn?) Anyway, removing Roxio Back On Track was very straightforward. Thanks, but I’ve already got backup strategies in place.
The next was not as easy. MigoMobile Desktop 4 was apparently missing its MSI file and wouldn’t uninstall. However, they ship an installable copy of the software buried in the Program Files directory tree and it was easy to extract the missing MSI file on another machine, copy it back and perform the uninstall without resorting to mucking about with the installer database. I did still need to manually empty out the Program Files folder, delete the Start menu stuff and so on.
Oh, and then there was Microsoft’s dumbed-down productivity stuff. Is that still called Works? Didn’t matter, I removed it, too, without paying much attention.
And now, with an idle process count around 30 (about half what it shipped with!) performance is quite acceptable indeed.
One thing still troubles me, though, to this day. There’s this process called HPQToaster.exe and there’s just no quality information about it anywhere. According to my probes it is active. Because references to it are all over the Registry it looks like a bear to remove. I’ve tried killing the process and preventing it from starting and neither action seems to have any noticeable effect. But WTF is HPQToaster.exe? Does anyone have a definitive answer?
Shifting gears a little, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding SSDs. This might seem obvious, but there’s no need to defragment an SSD. In fact, it even hurts! The flash memory in an SSD has a finite lifetime, and the controller manages wear by spreading use across the array. So even though files may appear (or not) to be contiguous to the OS, there’s really no connection to exactly where in the memory array a file’s parts are stored at any given time. (I’m not sure how this contiguous or not stuff will come into play when resizing a swap file or building a new hiberfil.sys.) There are some security implications, too, as you can’t really erase a file securely by overwriting – the ‘overwrites’ will be done by the controller to different memory locations to manage wear. If you’re concerned about file security – deleted or otherwise – I suppose you must look to encrypting the filesystem in its entirety. Performance-wise, reads are very fast, large writes are pokey by modern hard-drive standards, and the kind of I/O done by application installs and things like Windows Update are abysmally slow. I recommend taking all of that kind of work off automatic and do them manually, when you can manage the time. Seriously, it’s that slow. An Office install and subsequent updates took, for example, a few hours to complete. Thankfully, you can usually start these things and walk away, come back when it’s done. One notable exception is Google’s Chrome browser, whose automatic updates you really can’t conveniently control.
I ran across an excellent article that will teach you an awful lot about the nature of SSDs, their performance and problems, and so on. Get your geek in gear, you’ll need it. About 16,000 words.
For a little more about the performance aspects of netbooks in general, when compared to more capable notebooks, give this post [edit: link died] a quick read.
Do I recommend the HP Mini 1000 netbook? It’s no substitute for your workaday box but used as intended it sure is better than lugging heavier stuff. I find myself using it around the house (connected to one of our internal networks, of course) quite a bit more than I thought I would. And I take it with me places that I never would have considered taking my laptop and actually get some useful work done when I wouldn’t have otherwise. Yes, I’ve even packed it on the bike several times with no ill effects. (Milwaukee Vibrators – er, Harleys – shake conventional hard drives to death in short order. Don’t ask me how I know.) Battery life, even with the increased RAM, is still around 5 hours – very nice. Like cameras, better the device you have with you that gets the job done than the full-featured device you left at home.
So, yes, I do recommend it.
Getting Lucky
Yesterday was a pretty good day. Pam and me rode out to Rahway for their Hot Rods and Harleys event. It was the first one of these that we’d been to. Â What an incredible exhibit of vintage iron! What a trip down memory lane! Â The weather was pretty good, too. 70s, mostly sunny, a fine day for walking around. We caught a bit of a sprinkle on the way out but it passed so quickly that it just didn’t matter.
After a stop for a quick beer, we left Milltown and entered the evening traffic of route 1 south. Accelerating into the left lane I worked my way through the gears rather loudly, smiling to myself, satisfied with the day. Then I saw the squad car under the flyover. It was much too late to do much about it.
I flipped the blinker and decelerated, moving back through the lanes, and left the highway for the Office Depot parking lot. There really isn’t anyplace safe to pull over, and I figured this would likely be a lengthy stop. I killed the motor and Pam and me dismounted, doffing our helmets.
The officer got out of his car and approached. “License and registration, please.”
“Yes, sir.” I pulled my license, handed it over and began sorting through the registration and insurance documents in my wallet, I have several.
“Mr. Plavnicky,” he said, “you’re local. You were doing seventy one in a fifty. You have yourself a nice day.” He handed my license back.
“Thank you, sir!” I said as he returned to his car.
We mounted up and left the parking lot. It could have gone very differently.
I didn’t catch the badge number or name, but if you happen to be reading – yeah, right, like that’s likely – well, thanks for making my day!
The Patron Saint of Motorcyclists
This came up in conversation the other day. There’s a patron saint for most everything you can think of, and for some reason I thought that the bikers’ patron saint was Gabriel, who also looks after messengers.
But no, it’s Columbanus, an Irish saint who lived from 540 AD to 615 AD. Recurring themes in the stories of Columbanus are virtue, women and beer.
There’s much to be found on the Web about Columbanus and, of course, there’s a Wikipedia article.
But near as I can tell there’s no Saint Alphonzo – as in Saint Alphonzo’s Pancake Breakfast, a zippy little number by the late Frank Zappa.
Northeast Motorcycle Expo
To say this was a crappy show would be an understatement! Everything was stacked against success. It had been rescheduled from February and today’s weather was outstanding. There were bigger events this weekend in Pennsylvania as well as Wildwood. Oops. Kevmark really dropped the ball on this one and I’m sure everyone involved lost wads of cash. (This was a stark contrast to last November’s show, where we had a ball.)
Pam and I arrived thirsty from Long Branch. Convention Center parking was easy and there was no line for entry. That should have been a warning sign, but it was late afternoon so we paid it no mind. We paid the gate and Pam chastised me for neglecting to print the discount coupon available online. (We learned later that the gate was the discount price – I guess the ticket seller sympathized, knowing what we were in for.) So we walked in and… whoa! You could have scraped my jaw off the floor! The place was freakin’ empty! We bought a couple of beers and started to walk the aisles.
It was a tough call. Walk slowly to make it last or move quickly to avoid the spammers. Spammers? Yup, dare to saunter and they’d assault you, pitching their “free” vacations or whatever, shoving clipboards with forms into your hands. Y’know, filling out one of those things constitutes a “business relationship” which gives them the right to call you or email you mercilessly (and sell you to others), immune from FTC regulations. We’ve learned to avoid ’em. The number of non-biker vendors, compounded by the emptiness, was just staggering. All I gotta say is if I wanted a ShamWow or a Gutter Helmet I’d have bought one long ago.
We refilled out beers. There were some decent bikes to see. There’s so much detail in an Indian Larry build, say, that you can see it again and again and it just doesn’t get boring. I stopped to talk for a while with a guy from Boss Hoss of Stamford when one of their heavily customized monsters caught my eye. He welcomed a break from the boredom. The paint on this beast was stunning, and the engine – closer than not to twice the displacement of my Ford pickup – would be very respectable in any vehicle, never mind a bike. I had to ask. With over 40K in the build, he said, if it were for sale it’d go for at least 120 large. He invited me to climb on and stand it up. Despite the thousand-pound-plus weight it felt amazingly light and well-balanced. Can you just see me approaching in your rear-view?
And that was that. There’s nothing else to say because, um, it really was that empty. On the way home we stopped at the Brunswick Grove for a couple of beers and some fries. You hear it said all the time: “It’s all about the ride!” Today that was well and truly accurate.
Long Branch H-D Open House
The Saturday just passed was the first day of what I would call great weather for 2009. After a winter like the one we’ve had, there’s only one thing to do – go riding. So Pam and me blew off the gym and headed down to Long Branch Harley-Davidson for their annual open house. As H-D dealerships go, they’re a good bunch of folks and I’ve been known to take my business there even though they’re out of the way.
The local traffic was heavy. Gas prices have dropped to less than half what they were last year so hitting the road isn’t quite the expense it was. But soon we had filled the wallet with cash, tank with 93 octane and left the local roads for the freeway. I settled into an easy cruise, about 65-70 MPH, and stretched my legs, one hand on the throttle and the other on my leg. I usually like to be moving a little bit faster than the prevailing traffic – it’s less stressful to be overtaking traffic than the other way around – but this felt great and I wanted it to last.
Way too soon we were off the freeway and into the local traffic stream in Eatontown, which absolutely sucks in the best of circumstances. There’s this several mile stretch of route 36 between 18 and Broadway that’s full of traffic lights, timed such that you hit each one – several times. It’s always choked with traffic and it can literally take 20 minutes to cover two miles. It’s a moneymaker, too. I’ve never NOT seen police in the area, lights a flashing. We sweated our way through it. I mentally calculated how many degrees I might lose with better fuel management, perhaps an oil cooler, while cursing the EPA.
We parked right outside the dealership and joined the fray. Wow, what a crowd! It was lunchtime so we queued up for a couple of sodas and footlongs while the band played. The guy manning the grill was obviously a graduate of the r.plav school of incineration! Say, wasn’t that one of the parts guys playing bass? I chuckled to myself. The Harley crowd’s an older crowd, mostly aging Boomers. The songs being played were probably written before most of the band members were born!
We wandered the merchandise inside and out, but neither of us found anything to buy. That’s sort of unusual; we usually come away with at least a t-shirt or two. I didn’t feel too bad about it though because the lines to each register were quite long. There was very respectable amount of business being done. You’d hardly think that the economy was in the toilet.
After a while we hit the road again. Our next stop was the Northeast Motorcycle Expo in Somerset. We worked our way back through that stretch of hell – er, route 36 – and got back onto route 18. Again, we took it easy. We’d get to Somerset soon enough.
Drugs
Neuroenhancement, brain boost, mind hacking, or simply drug abuse?
I just read a fascinating article in The New Yorker that really opened my eyes. On the one hand, I’ve been known to quaff a Red Bull or two to get me through a particularly trying meeting (or maybe to get a few more hours out of a good Friday night) but on the other I’ve been known to speak out against our over-medicated society.
Go check this out, I practically guarantee you’ll learn something.
Brain Gain – The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs
by Margaret Talbot
The New Yorker – April 27, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all
Aeron Warranty Service
It took about four years for the seat pan of my Aeron to fail. The threads that make up the mesh of the upholstery of the thing must be engineered for strength that’s just so because once one failed, the rest quickly followed.
Hunting down the dealer I bought it from wasn’t easy. In the four years they’ve  been sold and re-formed and even changed location. But I found ’em and got the process of warranty service started.
And today, fully five weeks after my initial contact, my Aeron’s got a brandy-new seat pan and all’s well with the world. If my ass could smile, it would. My back would join in.
Kudos to HermanMiller for standing behind their products with a twelve-year warranty. Not only did they make good with my worn-out seat pan, they (well, their authorized dealer) also send a person out to my home office to repair it and cart away the packaging material. My cost? Not a nickel.
Which leads me to a question. As great as the Aeron is, the successor is supposed to be even better. The Embody is pricey: around $1,500 to start. I haven’t had the opportunity to try one. Have you? What do you think of it?
BOHICA
They’re at it again. The States State tax authorities, faced with declining sales tax revenue, are about to take another stab at getting Congress to mandate tax collection for online shopping.
I’ve been following this; I’ve got a stake in it because I sell stuff online. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m opposed to the idea. I collect – and pay the state Treasury – sales tax from customers here in New Jersey because my business presence is here. But I simply haven’t got the manpower to keep track of the nuances of 7,000-plus tax authorities in the US alone.
Well, I’m not writing here to complain. What I’d like to do it point you toward a particularly coherent article on ZDNet:
End of tax-free Internet shopping may be near
Revisiting Scan-It
So I’ve used the Scan-It system several times since my initial encounter. By-and-large it is a time saver. I haven’t been audited… yet. But the system is not without its share of problems either.
- Crashing the POS Terminal I was most of the way through the usual ‘finish and pay’ cycle, at the point where one waits for credit card authorization. “Please wait – system processing…” The next thing I should have heard was the audio prompt for my signature. I looked away to set the handbasket aside and parked my motorcycle helmet upside-down next to the scanner/scale plate. It may have touched the plate as it rolled around. At that very instant the screen threw up an error dialogue complaining of an inputoverlaperror – yeah, one word – with a cryptic error code and a single OK button. I summoned the attendant who had never seen that error before. She scanned her ID card and dismissed the dialogue. The POS screen threw at least three error dialogues in rapid succession before clearing to display what appeared to be a ‘ready for the next customer’ display. Hmm, would I mind not having a receipt? Yes, I would mind, actually. So she scanned her ID again and accessed a supervisory function to retrieve my order. It appeared to not have been paid for. While we talked about what to do next – pay again or walk away, the screen suddenly cleared to text mode. It reported it had suffered some kind of fatal error and announced it was shutting down. And it did. The slack-jawed attendant summoned someone from upstairs, a kid in a collar and tie. I described the events that had passed; he had never hear of an ‘inputoverlaperror’ either. So he got on his knees, opened a panel beneath the conveyor (on the customer aisle side), fumbled out a wired keyboard and reached in again to restart… a PC. Running Windows. Win2K. I couldn’t resist making jokes about an unsupported OS as we waited for the boot, him sitting crosslegged in the aisle at my feet, keyboard in his lap. He was unable to retrieve my order. With no receipt and no order to refer to, there was really no choice but to let me take my bag of stuff and leave. (My credit card vendor later confirmed the charge went through, so there were no free groceries that day.) Not sure whether this was the POS or the Scan-It system or the combination of the two. But I’ve used the self-service checkouts countless times over the years and never saw one go tits-up quite like that.
- Free Bread There was a new kind of rye bread on the shelf that day. We picked up a loaf and I scanned it. “Beep!” I glanced at the tiny screen and it looked like it said the price was $0.00. I pulled out my glasses. Yup, there it was, right there at the top of the item list, $0.00. We finished collecting more stuff (which posted their prices correctly) and checked out. Later we inspected the paper receipt which was missing the bread altogether. I think I’ll be buying more of that bread!
- Bad Printing The deli counter apparently had problems with one of its printers, it was printing labels that the scanner ignored. When I moved from meat to cheese a different printer was used, so the cheese scanned fine. At the checkout, that scanner wouldn’t see the bad labels either, so I called to some nearby suits who apparently had nothing better to do. One of them summoned an attendant who scanned their ID and keyed the labels in directly, using a screen that regular customers don’t see. He told the suits – all three had come over to share in the fun – that the last 20 or so deli orders had been that way. No wonder I didn’t see him around: he was busy with someone else’s override.
I’m not complaining. Even with the problems I’d say I’m still pretty far ahead, time-wise (plus one loaf of rye bread). But I’d be interested in seeing the ‘shrinkage’ numbers before and after installing the system.
Benefit Run
Today was the benefit run for David Wilson, a Hillsborough, NJ police veteran and motorcyclist, now battling leukemia. Cancer sucks.
The weather turned out to be fantastic and the turnout nothing short of amazing. Judging from the staff comments, the number of bikes that showed up far exceeded expectations. Staging and parking were, well, chaotic. We arrived to stage at Hillsborough Volunteer Fire Company #2 literally minutes before scheduled departure, registered and entered the queue. It’s not my favorite position, way in back. Last out is last in, and that makes for long lines later for food and beer.
I heard that about 1,500 bikes were expected. I think there were quite a bit more than that. From a rider’s perspective, these group rides are considerably more perilous than ordinary traffic. The riders around you are often strangers, their skills unknown. You’re riding in close formation, sometimes on unfamiliar routes, and situational change occurs constantly at speed. You’re looking out not only for yourself but for those around you. There’s simply no room for mistakes.
We were fortunate, those around us proved competent. Well, there was one bagger nearby that had trouble keeping his position; I guess he was into his music too much. I quickly adapted to giving him plenty of room. It was a short ride, maybe 35-40 miles through the rolling Sourland Mountain area. (They call it a mountain but hey, this is New Jersey – there ain’t no real mountains here!)
These events usually follow a pattern. You register, stage, ride, return, then eat and drink to live music. This was no exception. The roast pig was delicious, the beer flowed freely and the weather was perfect. I saw the colors of more clubs than I could count, a heavy representation of law enforcement and related public service clubs. Â (There was a distinct lack of 1%ers, conspicuous by their absence.) Everyone was smiling and laughing and having a great time.
This winter’s been one of the worst in a several years, not much snow but bitter cold. Finally, way too many days after the calendar says, it felt like spring had finally arrived!
I heard that David, having been hospitalized in New York for chemotherapy, had been discharged to rest at home nearby. It’d be nice if he had been able to see the turnout. If not, I hope he at least heard the thunder of thousands of bikes. Here’s to your recovery, David!
Ed. March 6: A newspaper article today that David did indeed make it to the event. The link I had placed here expired after a time and has been removed.
Twitter Report
It’s been about a month since I dipped my toe in the Twittery waters and I still don’t quite know what to make of it. Statistics tell me that traffic to my personal Web properties has increased rather dramatically. That’s a good thing, right?
I should mention that I quickly learned that there’s little/no restriction on creating new IDs, and it’s very useful to do that in order to experiment with stuff. It’s nice that they allow you delete your ID, too, so if you play that way it’s just nice to clean up when you’re done. That dopey ID you made for testing might be the one someone else is seeking.
So let’s take a look at few Twittery things I’ve noticed, shall we?
Tools Twitter’s API is lots of fun to play with. There’s so much you can do with it and zillions of folks are hard at work trying to figure out how their pet hack can bring them fame, fortune and, yes, money. I’m not at all crazy about the hosted tools that need you to enter your credentials before they’ll function. It’s a trust thing. (Test IDs can come in handy here.)
Advertising Like everywhere else on the Web, everybody’s trying to sell you something. The current worldwide economic climate has spawned a kind of desperation that’s driven some to every imaginable online get-rich-quick scheme. And Twitter’s incredible popularity and growth attracts ’em like poop attracts flies. In fact, there are more Twitter users expounding on how to make money with Twitter than you can shake the proverbial stick at!
Loneliness There’s an air of sadness, loneliness, melancholy. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s definitely there.
Celebrity Lots of celebrities of all levels are on Twitter. Some are even personable and cool. You’ve really gotta take it with a grain of salt, however. Who’s real? Sure, it’s uncool to impersonate, but uncool isn’t a crime. Who’s got staffers writing for them? Who’s just there for shameless self-promotion?
Risk Many tweets include URLs, and most of them have been shrunk to fit the 140-character space using one of the many URL-shortening services. Unless you take steps to preview – and it seems like nobody does – you just don’t know where you’ll end up. And that can be double-plus-ungood. You really need good client-side defenses – you just know you’re gonna end up clicking that link.
Twitter reminds me alot of the CB craze back in the ’70s (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth). This time around, though, you get the fickle tides of Internet trendiness instead of an 11-year sunspot cycle to interrupt the fun. (Internet trendiness is not unlike that surging feeling in your stomach as your Scrambler car changes direction, or the wave pool at Typhoon Lagoon on a hot Wednesday afternoon.) Technically, there’s nothing really new here; all of the technology behind Twitter has been around for quite a while. Doesn’t matter, its popularity is on fire now, and the big question is how it’ll make money. I’m not going to speculate.
I’ll leave you with this cartoon. It’s silly, but it also pretty much sums it up.