Beyond Occident

This is cool. Grab your mobile phone and dial up 202.683.7002 to listen to Andy Carvin talk on NPR about mobile phones and Twitter, among other things. Here’s the tweet.

First off, some may notice that my background header has changed. While I’m really not satisfied with it (the dark background clashes with the header), it will work for now. The background came from an excellent photo from Thomas Hawk, and I added a couple layers of gradients to it. I sort of feel like I ruined the original picture by screwing around with it, but I wanted to make it work better with the blog colors.

I got a Kodak z1275 digital camera for Christmas! It takes HD video (resolution of 1280 × 720) and boy, for a $200 camera, does a darn good job doing it. I’m planning on using it for all the terrific movies that we’ll be making through college. Be on the lookout for the next Julius Incrediblus Stupidus film as we should be starting it in a couple days.

In regards to actually taking pictures, I would describe it as merely average for a point and shoot. I went to Zips, a cheeseburger joint in Cincinnati, with my family a few nights ago, and it was quite the low light setting. I fired up my camera, went into manual mode (unchartered territory for me) and started playing around with things I didn’t understand. My goal was to take a decent picture without any flash. The picture that follows, of my niece, is of ok quality. Definitely would of been better with the flash, but I hate the flash on cameras.

I’m an avid user of the excellent Google Reader app. It compiles all the blogs that I read into one source, aggregating new posts so that I can read them without going from site to site, searching for updates. Currently, I’m subscribed to 25 blogs and over the past month I have read over 1500 posts. Out of those posts, I can pick my favorites and compile them into their own RSS feed: My shared items. Indeed, just look for ‘Michael’s Shared Items’ to the right of this post, and you can start reading some excellent material.

A long time ago I joined Twitter (ok… less than a year, when Twitter was becoming quite the rage) and was terrifically excited to use Twitter as a tool to keep my friends and I connected via cell phones and texting. Alas, Cincinnati Bell (my mobile carrier) is a bully and doesn’t allow you to interact with applications such as Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce, through SMS. Twitter fell by the wayside.

Then, a month or two (or three) ago, my brother-in-law David announced that he was ‘twittering’. Ah, I thought, perhaps I can get on the bandwagon again? Alas, it was not in the cards. But a few days ago, for unknown reasons, I was drawn again to Twitter. I created a new account (complete with a stunning background I painstakingly designed) on Twitter and absolutely fell in love with it.

‘Microblogging’ is what all the cool kids are calling it. Many don’t think it will last for too long because it isn’t a viable business model. There appears to be no advertising that I can see so I assume it’s still running off of VC funding. Mad Dog in the Fog posts about companies creating profiles and littering your feed with info relating to their business. Already several all already on Twitter. Or they could just litter Twitter with ads. That’s dangerous as many update through texting from their cellphones or through 3rd party apps on the computer.

What happens if the money runs out? I dunno, but I hope Twitter finds a way to keep afloat that still preserves what makes it so special. It is sure darn fun to find new ways to spread my digital life to everyone.