Monthly Archives: April 2008

Accident Aftermath

April 27, 2008 – 11:02 pm

I was just heading over to the grocery store and came upon the scene of a single car accident within seconds of when it happened.

Two joggers who had witnessed the crash were running over from the other side of the street, and waved at me - asking me to call 911. I did so, and got a busy signal. I kept trying as I pulled over and got out of the car, and never sucessfully connected. Luckily someone in a house nearby shouted over the wall that they had reached 911, so I gave up that part.

As I approached the car, it was a wreck, and I was prepared to see the worst. The car had knocked out a bus stop pole as well as a no parking sign pole, with the sign having been flung off the pole and far down the sidewalk. A large tree had stopped the car, embedding itself / slicing through the passenger side of the front of the car, from the headlight up to and partially through the windshield, leaving the car basically halfway wrapped around the tree. The driver’s side headlight had ejected itself out of its “socket” (sorry not a car person) and into the middle of the street.

There was oil and other fluid spilling everywhere from beneath the car; there were odd smells, but no distinct smell of fuel and the car was no longer running. Getting a little closer I could see that the airbags had deployed and could hear the driver (a young girl) crying. She then started flailing a bit and pushing the airbag out of the way, and was moving around quite a bit, which I figured was a surprisingly good sign.

I asked her if she was OK and she answered “yes”. Her voice was still weepy, but I could tell at this point that she seemed a bit more scared than hurt. Then her hand pops up to her head, holding her phone - turns out she had dialed 911 herself as well and had gotten through. She started talking to them a bit, and then reached over, opened her door, and stumbled out of the car. A woman who had come out from a nearby house helped her stumble over to a curb and sit down, but amazingly she seemed to be able to walk somewhat on her own (kind of) for at least that short distance.

Looking at the absolutely demolished state of the vehicle, I considered her relative well being (at least based on outward signs) to be nothing short of a miracle.

Pretty crazy night. On a lighter note, if anyone’s interested, I actually have another story of an encounter I had with a single car accident a long time ago in a far away land, with a bit more humourous slant to it. Let me know if anyone’s interested in hearing that one.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Tagged | Comments (5)

How to use Twitter + Track

April 23, 2008 – 8:25 pm

OK, so this will obviously actually be about how I use Twitter, and certainly not a prescriptive set of instructions outlining the “one true way” to use the service(s), but you’ve got to admit that this title is a bit more attention grabbing - and Twitter is all about attention, after all. ;-)

Anyway, here’s the basic outline of the way I’ve got things set up to meet my needs for regular Twitter usage:

  • For the people I follow and from whom I want to read everything, I have them set with IM device updates on, so that their messages flow into the jabber gateway (acessed via Google Talk - the web client, not locally installed).
  • Then (in GTalk / jabber), I “track” things like my name and randomly add and remove other subject-based words and phrases to track, depending on what I’m interested in at the moment.
  • Since I’m usually not connected via IM for most of the day, the above two steps result in an e-mail message in my inbox periodically with an easy to read summary of everything that would have come in on Google Talk, had I been logged in.
  • For everything else (people I’m not including in the above method - whether I’m “following” them or not), I add the RSS feed of their Twitter account to folder/tag in Google Reader that I just let pile up, and read it whenever I  feel like it, and clean it up without reading if it gets too big. I might investigate further subdividing (or cross-filing) these into various folders/tags to make it easier to sort through depending on what I’m interested in seeing at any given moment.

And that’s about it. My usage patterns have changed over time, even since I so recently began using it, and I’m sure they’ll continue to change as I go. So far, I’ve found that the above techniques allow me to fairly easily throttle the flood of incoming information into something manageable that I can digest, and also that I can tweak at any given time to give more or less content.

There’s a lot more to say about Twitter itself, ranging from the technical to the sociological / philosophical, and I’m realizing as I write this that I haven’t really mentioned it much before here on the blog. I’m thinking maybe I won’t, since I think it might be a mistake to try to wrap it in very hard-lined boundaries this early in its evolution as a platform. While I’m certainly not turning into a raging Twitter evangelist, I certainly was once very skeptical about it and am now realizing how vastly better / more disruptive it is than any of the other up-and-coming social network platforms (Facebook, Pownce, etc.).

So, if you haven’t already, check it out and find out how it works best for you. If you give it some time, you might grow to appreciate it (even and especially the character limit constraints). You can follow me using the link at the top left of this page.

As a teaser, Twitter, along with my other various content sources, will shortly take a more prominent role here on my blog. It’s something that I’ve been planning for a long time, but only recently started working on. More to come…

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Does growth matter?

April 10, 2008 – 8:08 pm

Just saw this piece on Techcrunch regarding the relative stability of del.icio.us, and it raises an interesting question:

Does every product or service always have to “grow” in order to be considered successful? And why?

I think it may be primarily an influence of the stock market investment model that drives a lot of tech companies, but is that the only way to measure things?

Del.icio.us is a good example of a service that has always done what it does well, and (unless I’m missing something) is still just as useful today as it was when it came out. The drive to “improve” by adding features just for the sake of showing progress is not always wise, especially for a simple system with a clearly defined scope like this one.

There has been a lot of talk about the 2.0 version, but I’ve never really read any of it, or cared about the delays, because the current version works just fine for me.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Tagged , | Comments (3)