Tag Archives: twitter

Attention span

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Ran across this interesting video the other day, thanks to YouTube recommendations. Tl;dr version, internet-addicted humans have (possibly) screwed their attention spans, thanks to unrestricted access to the internet.

I’m not sure. I’m pretty reliant on the internet for my social support structure, and use it to (try to) help others, with what I can.

I’ve not really found that my attention span has seriously been diminished via the internet, though I certainly do find myself checking twitter more than I probably should. I read an interesting study/article which I can’t find right now that posited that humans are designed to always seek out new information, since it’s valuable to the clan. Found yourself whiling a few hours away on Wikipedia? Same article mentioned twitter as a source of potential endless new things, leading to it’s potential addictive nature.  Whilst looking for it, I did find this more modern article, which discusses why twitter’s addictive, and how missing empathy feedback loops might be being impacting twitter’s troll problem. An article to think on another day.

Personally, I try to read everything everyone I follow on twitter writes, which means I have to be particularly strict about who I follow. To be honest, there’s plenty of voices on twitter I’d love to read more from, but who just tweet too damn much for me to be able to keep up. I’ll end this ramble with just a few interesting people on twitter;

  • @swiftonsecurity — Computer security, microfiction
  • @jimrossingol — Game development, rt’s interesting left leaning politics
  • @dannilion — Sufferer of a particularly nasty disease leaving Danni bedbound

Another day, another post (18)

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Today, I, tweaked a domain name, helped talk a customer into upgrading, changed a few passwords, advised a user on a script I helped write, to add apache vhost, user, email, mysql db & user to a server and closed a few support tickets. Oh, and talked to a customer who is leaving. Fun fun.

Note to self, when cutting up chillies, loose the seeds.

Fun tweets today (sorry if you follow me on twitter!)

  • Dear customer. Please don’t complain that we’re rubbish, when you break your own email clients! We can’t control your computers! :/
  • Thank you psudo-random password generator. No, I’m not going to send this to a female customer: hei9deer
  • Pens! Why do they randomly appear on my desk? I swear, I only had one at the start of the week, now I have 3 :/ (Apparently I’m stealing them from James and Paul. Bonus points to whomever can explain how they flew over the atlantic from James’s desk 😉 )

Feats of Tweet

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The old twitchhiker, the guy who got half-way around the world in 30 days (i.e. all the way to new zealand), just through people providing help on twitter for free, has started a new project. He’s called it “feats of tweet”. It looks like it could be quite impressive, and powerful. Here’s a brazenly stolen snippet from his sites FAQ:

What is a Feat of Tweet?

A Feat of Tweet is a goal, ambition, target or wish realised through the goodwill of the Twitter community.

Whose wishes and goals are we trying to fulfill? Yours. They may be personal in nature, or charitable. It may take the actions of dozens, even hundreds of tweeps to achieve a feat… or it it may take just one.

Continues here: http://featsoftweet.com/feats/faq/

They’re just getting started now, the website is still under construction! If you’re interested, you can find the site here: http://featsoftweet.com and the twitter feed here: http://twitter.com/FeatsofTweet. Right now, they want as many followers as possible, before the project goes active, so the first few feats have a good chance of getting off the ground 🙂

Day 4 – Falling back to the meta-referance

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Last night I posted on twitter that I was struggling to find stuff to post about. jkblacker (Not bassets, sorry Josh!) suggested that I post about how I’m finding it hard to find stuff to post about… so here it is 😉

Not exactly the most spectacular day 4, especially since I’ve got 26 left to go, but we’ll see what happens.

Parts for my new computer started arriving today. I’d hoped that it would all arrive, but unfortunately not. So, right now I’ve got RAM, the PSU, Motherboard, CPU cooler and a copy of Windows. (Yes, I know, horrible, but I’m building a gaming machine, wine isn’t there yet, and Linux hasn’t reached critical mass 🙁 )

Sporadically over the past week or so, I’ve been trying to use search and replace in vi/vim. Finally got it drummed into my head! Here’s the syntax for single item search and replace:

:%s/OLDSTRING/NEWSTRING/

If you want to replace every item in a document, then add “g” to the very end. “g” in this context means “greedy” – i.e. replace everything. (Thanks JPE – I did learn it after all!)

This is the same sort of syntax as usable in the command line tool “sed”. For example, if you wanted to replace a space in a file with a comma, then you’d do:

sed 's/ /,/g' oldfile > newfile

I’m sure there’s a better way to specify that syntax… please feel free to comment 🙂