What Is It About Twitter?

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There is definitely something about Twitter that just sucks you in. The more I use it, the more I love it. Granted, my time with it is limited – I do not use it at work so most of what I do is over the iPhone or on weekends.

I’ve been really trying to figure out what it is about Twitter that is so attractive to me. I figure if I can figure this out, I will have it figured out for the world (I’m that egotistical). I was discussing it with Tom the Architect the other day, and as I was thinking about it actually think I said something that made sense:

precogs

Watching Twitter is like what I imagine a ‘precog’ from Minority Report would experience. A million voices from all over the world all talking about a moment.

This is the one thing about Twitter that has really drawn me in. Its not blogging – and its not a chat room – its something really different. It’s like listening to the echoes of a moment from millions of people all at once, all answering one question.

This is the way that I think about Twitter, but I’m really interested in what others think about it. What makes it so attractive to you?

WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Painless – Really!

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Yesterday I read that the 2.5 version of WordPress was officially released. The cautious part of me wanted to wait to upgrade, but the totally paranoid and non-lazy part wanted to just get it over with. I had read a few mentions of incompatibility, but I decided to just bite the bullet and upgrade.

I hunkered down at my desk, did database and filesystem backups, downloaded the 2.5 release and untarred to my blog directory. Typed in the URL and — poof — there was the blog. Did smoke testing of all the plugins and they worked – every one of them. I was literally done in about 5 minutes.

I don’t think I’ve had an upgrade that wasn’t painful in some way in a long time. This one was nothing. It just worked.

So anyway, long way to say I’m on WordPress 2.5 now. I was shocked at the ease of the upgrade. Later in the day, I saw all kinds of tweets around other people upgrading and having the same fulfilling sense of surprise when they realized they were done.

Thanks to the WordPress team for another great (and uneventful) release.

Old Hardy Boys Books

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Hardy Boys Books

Photo by rbieber

I think I had this whole set as a kid.

Jonna and I hit a local antique store yesterday to kill some time and sitting on a shelf I saw these. I am pretty sure I had every one of this set when I was a kid and would spend hours reading these books.

Its cool to run into something every once in a while that is such a powerful anchor that it literally takes you back to lying in your bunk bed reading “The Twisted Claw”.

Flattering

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I received this email from a former employee today:

I was reading a book recently, called “The Goal” as I was flying to California. It is about a big turnaround in a manufacturing plant in less than 3 months.

It is a very nicely worded book. The reason I am writing this mail is because there is one character in that book, Jonah – a professor – and he is a management consultant and the kind of questions he asks the main character Alex, the Plant manager are sufficient for him to ‘click’.

It was so interesting and I was smiling whenever Jonah showed up in the book since he reminded me of you, the way you would ask me something when I used to work for you.

If you get a chance do read that book. The book is basically about removing bottlenecks in operations.

Its nice to feel like you made a difference. I would never describe myself as a Jonah, but its nice to know someone would.