You may have noticed that I now post nightly.  You may have also noticed that I’m cheating.  I’ve become a slave to the internets constant need for attention, and my own constant need to let people know what I’m doing, when and how and what I’m listening to as I do it.

Twitter.com: This thing is addictive, especially when you have a cell phone with unlimited texting.  The way I’ve been describing it to people is “like the status updates on the facebook or the myspace, only without the facebook or the myspace”, to which I usually get a blank stare and a “Oh, I see.”

So, you go and set up a Twitter account.  You do this, and then it wants you to tell the world what you’re doing. And you do, in texts of 140 characters or less. And then anybody who is watching the main Twitter stream, may catch that you’re “Surfing the internets for hamster porn” or “Talking to mom on the phone, blah blah blah” or whatever. Or if you’re not a caveman like I was until lately, you can do it from your cell phone.  So now people may see that you’re “having coffee at the muddy cup”, or “In line at the bank” or even “This movie sucks, why did I think that a chihuahua cartoon movie would fill the hole in my soul?”.

If your friends have Twitter accounts as well, you can follow them and they can follow you, so that your status update will post to their twitter page or cell phone should they so choose, and they’ll know where you’re drinking coffee, and can meet you there so that they can tweet “meeting AngryBob for coffee at the muddy cup”.  That’s what a twitter post is called, by the way.  A Tweet.

I sound like I may be mocking this. I assure you, I am.  A little. Because at the same time, I love this.

I’ve added a “Twitter Tools” plugin to my blog here, so that my Tweets can also be followed in the sidebar of my page–seriously, just look to the right of your screen–and so that a digest of my daily tweets will post as a single blog entry at 11:58pm.  That’s where the Two Minutes To Midnight post comes from. But you’ve probably figured that out by now. It also tweets an announcement when I actually post something here, other than the automatic tweet digest. There’s also a Facebook app. that allows you to use your tweets as a status update on your facebook page, which is why it kind of looks like I spend more time on facebook than I actually do.

That brings me to the Blip.

Blip.fm: Blip.fm is just like Twitter, but they don’t care what you’re doing. Just what you’re listening to while you’re doing it.  The setup is pretty much the same as Twitter, but now you’re a ‘DJ’ with a search box that allows you to look up songs by artist or title, preview them and then ‘blip’ them.  You can add 140 characters of text, just like twitter (though some I think get used up by the url link to the song, which is fairly short). It gets posted and your song played on the main blip.fm page, and like twitter, you can follow certain DJ’s and have other DJ’s following you. There’s also a ‘props’ system in place so that you can give and recieve props for amazing muscial choices (or just because you think the DJ’s cute and you don’t give a fuck what he/she plays, not that I would do that. All my props are based on the excellent musical choices that the cute DJ’s play).

To make it even better, it can be linked to your twitter so that when you blip you tweet.  I personally call this a ‘bleet’.  Which is probably what other people call it if they are wise like me. If you don’t want to bleet your blip to those who follow the tweets, you can always start your blip with an ‘!’ which keeps it off the twitter. I have a couple of people who may or may not be following me over their cell phones and may be getting annoyed when I’m blipping heavily, so I do this unless I want to share them with the twitter/facebook crowd. Usually, there’s two at least that I share.  My wake-up call to the internets, and then my lullaby before bed.

I do this bceause I am a nice guy.

Facebook: I’m sorry to all you new-look facebook haters. But the new facebook look/layout is much improved over the old one. Unlike many others, I want to use the facebook to network and socialilze with people I may have forgotten, or at least forgotten why we no longer socialized in the first place.

I don’t want to join your mob. I don’t want to join your pirate ship, I don’t want to take millions of quizes (though I, on occasion, will take one or two).  The old facebook threw all of those requests in your face when you logged on.  It hurt my head.  Now they’re nicely tucked away in a sidebar so that I can peruse them at my liesure, ignore what I want easily and do what seems like fun when I have time. New facebook rules for me. And I don’t even go to myspace anymore unless I remember that a few friends use it to contact me about stuff going on (even though they use facebook too).

And this is what I do when I should be working.

Follow me,

AB

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.: Set up all sorts of Twitter shit.  Tweets post here, can be posted from here and now also update my Facebook status via Twitter.  I can see myself using Twitter a whole lot. Which means daily posting here, since the WordPress plugin ‘TwitterTools’ will post a daily digest of my tweets.

Which may be more interesting than most of the other stuff I post.

.: The phone thing is really going well.  I use it to text Pip at home, as well as Twitter updates.  I’m going to try to set things up so that I can send picture mail from my phone to a post.  But that’s something to fuck with later.

.: Looking for a good handheld unit, preferrably a really, really good one that doesn’t use Windows.  That may be temporarily impossible.  I don’t want a smart phone though.  I’d like to keep the handheld and the cell separate, but use the cell’s ‘bluetooth modem’ capabilities to do the net thing with the handheld.

So, I’m looking for some handheld PC/PDA suggestions.  I’d like something that can be alternately used with a roll-up or small but functional-without-being-tiny-keyboard.  Bluetooth/WiFi – clean internets and word processing important.  Something I can use to cloud-surf from anywhere’s I can get bars on the phone.

.: Time to eat some soup and go for a walk.

.: May be back later with some other things I’m working on.

AB

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.: It is nearly 4am.

.: I went out to my father’s house, to assist in some needed renovations.  I was exhausted like a mother fucker, and Chuck (who came with me, being the more mechanical of we two) was sick with a cold and likewise exhausted.  But assist we did, and came home around an hour and a half ago.  I would have been in bed minutes later, but I have not been on the internets in a proper fashion in what feels like weeks.

It actually may be weeks.

.: I cleared my desk of clutter a few days ago, in order to have a nice working environment in which I could happily work.

This was pointless.

My toys are askew.  There is an empty drinking glass in front of me.  There is a plastic ice-pop wrapper propped up against a book in what seems to be an effort to keep the sweet, sticky red residue from contaminating my desk.  Apparently, my keyboard has joined in the effort, as I find that parts of it are mildly dripped upon with sweet, sticky, red residue.  There is none on the desk, so the book and keyboard are apparently doing a fine job.

I am bitching.  But not bitching. I have had children in the house, and have allowed them into my inner sanctum. I have Maryellen here, and her computer will not link up to the internets no matter how many ice-pops I offer it, so she must use my computer (and is welcome to it).  My daughter comes down to use my computer (or a computer, since she usually uses Chuck’s as it has ‘Windows’ and I run Ubuntu).

Tomorrow, I will clean my desk again.  I will throw away the ‘quarter water’ container that I used as a very occasional ashtray, which is now crammed with cigarettes and nicotine tea.  And I will hang a sign on my desktop which reads:

‘Please keep Mondo’s area clean, as recieving a punch in the colon by a barbed-wire fisted baboon may offend’.

And I will hope that someone smiles and does not take too much offense to that.

.: I pinched my nuts in my zipper.  That hurts more than I remember.  The Dude will inisit it is a lesson to cease going commando.

.: Speaking of The Dude.  He has Facebooked.  I seriously wonder why he would have done this.  Maybe he’ll tell me.

I tried to see him the other day at the B&N.  He had called to see if I wanted to meet him for a cup of coffee, just as my family walked through the door.  I told him I would call him back.  Which I did, to tell him that I didn’t want him to think that I wasn’t going to call, and that I would call him again.

Which I did not.

When things finally settled enough for me to be comfortable with an escape, the phone was tied up and I was out of minutes on my cell.  So I just went over to the B&N.  There was no Dude, so I bought a cup of coffee and went home and thought of how unreliable I must seem to my friend as I drank my coffee.

.: There is a reason I have not added any funds to my cell phone.  I have reached a point again where my usage outweighs my intended usage.  It’s a pain in the ass to find I am out of minutes, and must purchase more.  So I have decided to just sign up with an actual plan.  I will have minutes out the ass.  I will have unlimited text messages and email.  I will have a camera and mp3′s.

And I will pay for it.

And another little hold-out piece of me will die.

.: And here is a picture of me when no little pieces of me were dead.  Thanks to Terrence, who posted it on the Facebook from where I stolded it. I’m the one in the center, in the cammoflauge.

.: And that is how the world is at 4:22 this morning.  Have a good day.

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