One Hundred Followers on Twitter. But Why?

I now have 100 followers on my Twitter account. I’ve no idea why. I still don’t fully “get” Twitter. I only follow 4 people, and two of them hardly tweet anything. The other two are quite chatty, and I have bother keeping up with everything they put out there.

Some people follow thousands of other Twitterers, which begs the question “How do they keep up?”. The answer must be they don’t. I think they use some filtering stuff so that certain words in Tweets cause those to bubble to the surface. This means that lots of tweets go un-noticed and ignored. That bothers me for two reasons. One is that when I’m having a conversation with someone I think it is bad manners not to listen to what they say. I wouldn’t feel right following someone and then ignoring them. The second reason is that I’d hate for any of my deathless prose to be ignored by anyone else.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the whole thing, but at the moment I kind of regard Twitter as the digital equivalent of standing on top of a bus and shouting things out. And we know what we think of people who do that kind of thing.

Anyhoo, I’m going to keep putting the odd (and I do mean odd) tweet out there. Just as I’ve found that writing a regular blog has vastly improved my writing style (you might disagree) perhaps regular tweeting will improve my “Shouting on a bus” technique.

Treasure Hunt Kit

If you want to have a Tag Treasure Hunt like the one we had at our Mad March Bash you can now download the tag designs and the question and answer sheets from here.

I printed out the tags on my Polaroid Pogo printer and then stuck them around the department, gave the question sheet out and then watched as people whizzed around trying to find the tags and solve the clues. They seemed to have fun.

If you do this though, a note of warning – the glue on the sticky prints seems to get much harder over time. Don’t stick them on any painted surfaces and try to take them off as soon as you can. Otherwise they can be a bit tricky to remove.

Spring is in the Air. And in my Sofa.

A week or so back I sat down rather more heavily than usual and there was a loud twang from underneath me. One of the springs in our Ikea Ektorp sofa had broken. I checked the interweb and apparently this furniture has a lifetime guarantee. Unfortunately this does not cover springs, cushions or covers or anything else likely to break or wear out.  Such is life.

Fortunately the interweb also took me to http://upholsterysupplyman.co.uk/ where I could buy a replacement spring (you need a 23 inch serpentine/zigzag spring for the Ektorp) for only two quid. I got four in case I decide to sit down heavily again, along with a bunch of clips to hold them in place.

The springs arrived yesterday, and so today I had the fun and games of fitting one. Turned out to be quite easy, although what I really want is a staple gun to pin the fabric back onto the frame properly. I’ve used such things in Doom, and they seem to work quite well.

One handyman success a day is usually enough for me, but then, last thing at night I got the “chance to shine” again, when the power shower suddenly became a lot less powerful. And much, much colder. Having just spent the price of a really nice camera (and I mean *really* nice) on replacing big chunks of the water heating system I was less than happy at this point. So it was off with my socks and hello to an evening of standing in the bath swearing while I tried to dismantle chunks of plumbing.

After a while skimming my knuckles and reflecting that it might be time to call in a plumber again I had a kind of breakthrough when the piece I was pulling at came off in my hand. Turns out that something was blocking the hot water inlet filter. Feeling a bit like a chap in CSI I bagged it for further investigation, put the shower back together and it all worked perfectly. I think something must have got left in the replacement heating tank and found its way into the part of the system that would cause me the most bother. There wasn’t enough of the sample to get a DNA trace, but foul play is not suspected at this point. Just dumb bad luck.

After that it was time for a shower and bed, at the end of a slightly shorter but on the whole successful day.

Fantastic Blog Site

Abhinaba Basu is a Microsoft Developer working out of Hyderabad in India. He works on the Compact Framework Team, take excellent photographs and even finds time to paint great pictures.

He has written some great blog posts about how the internals of the Compact Framework and you really should read them. If you have ever wondered how Garbage Collection works he has one of the best explanations I’ve seen. You can find his work blog here.

Blossom

I took this on the walk from the car park to the office. I like working here.