So I went to check istwitterdown.com and was surprised to find it well.... down.  I was sent to a directory listing, which gave me access to Ruby file which runs this site (I'm not sure if it'll still be available but here's the link).  If they happen to take it down, here's the code for anybody interested:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby



require 'net/http'

require 'time'

require 'fileutils'

begin

  Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse('http://twitter.com/')).body

  FileUtils.rm 'index.html'

  FileUtils.ln_s 'no.html', 'index.html'

  File.open('log', 'a') do |f|

    f.write "#{Time.now.xmlschema} no\n"

  end

rescue Exception => e

  #fail

  FileUtils.rm 'index.html'

  FileUtils.ln_s 'yes.html', 'index.html'

  File.open('log', 'a') do |f|

    f.write "#{Time.now.xmlschema} yes #{e.class}\n"

  end



end

In technology news; a recent upgrade to a popular gadget has fulfilled all current and future needs of it's users.  When asked to comment, a popular tech website was quoted as saying "Ummm... Thanks!?".  In response to this release bloggers around the world habitually refreshed Slashdot, though nothing had been updated.  Most said they would try again in a few minutes.  Due to lack of blog posts complaining about missing features and speculating about future versions of the aforementioned gadget the economic structure of the internet has quickly crumbled.  TV was unavailable for comment.

I was sort of bored on Saturday and decided to test out Photoshop, Illustrator, and my tablet on my new computer so I scanned in a couple of thing I had sketched up a while ago.  It had been a while since I had done any work with drawings and I forgot how fun it is.  I've gotten much quicker at doing this sort of thing, which is kinda fun.



This is Cybil from the comic F Chords.  Ummm.... it looks like I forgot to finish the handle on the coffee cup.  Oh well.



This is just some girl.  I saw this really cool sketchy style drawing of people in a magazine and wanted to try to emulate that.  It didn't work out too well, but it was something different.  This one turned out looking kind of like a Daria character.  I guess I'm OK with that.

As of late my computing situation has been a bit precarious.  The power source on my desktop (Slimer) started making a pretty funky noise so I've had it off for a while and I've been using my laptop for everything.  This has been alright except that the battery on my MacBook Pro is totally dead.  As soon as I unplug the power cord the machine just dies.  I'm going to take it in to the Apple store this week, a friend of mine said that if your battery had fewer than 300 cycles (which mine does) they will replace it for free.

I hope this works out as I just dropped some coin on all the parts to rebuild my desktop (a project that I have been thinking about for a while).  I finally pulled the trigger on the New Egg wish list that I've been putting together.  I really like my case and I have no real need to replace my optical drive, but everything else could use a good overhaul, so now I've got all new guts coming in the mail!  Here's a quick run down of the specs:

Processor: 3.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo [link]

Memory: 8 GB ( 4 x 2 GB) [link]

Hard Drive: 2 TB (2 x 1 TB) [link]

Graphics Card: Saphire Radeon HD 4870 - 512 MB [link]

(plus a new 550 Watt power supply [link], new mobo [link], and an adapter for my monitor now that my graphics card is dual DVI [link])

Is this overkill?  Maybe, but if I'm upgrading I might as well have some gear that will last me for a little while.  Besides, I like running a lot of stuff at once and saving A LOT of things.   I'm still planning on installing the Windows 7 Release Candidate (and then registering the full copy when DePaul starts offing it to students).

Also I ordered some canned air, which is always fun to play with.

I've backed my stuff up to an external hard drive pretty recently so I should be ready to make the move over as soon as I get the new box assembled.  It will be nice to start fresh and be smart with my file structure.   I think I'm going to use a bunch of the old parts to build a much needed media computer for our living room, too (2 GB of memory, ~500 GB worth of hard drives).  I'm excited for this stuff to show up!  Building a computer is always a fun project.

Ok, I also played in a beer-in-hand volleyball tournament at Sideouts this weekend, which was A BLAST!  I just drank beer and played volleyball all afternoon!  It was amazing.  It reminded me of how much I really like playing volleyball, so I took another look at Chicago rec volleyball leagues.  They will cost $525 for a 6 person team and I think there are slots available for the 6:30 on Wed night co-ed league.  Can we get a team together?

June 1st, 2009|8:41am

A) I'd get at least a 700 watt power supply if you're gonna have two hard drives and that 4870 requires quite a bit of juice.

B) I'm totally in for volley ball. I'd have to reschedule band practices... but I'm ok with that.

Bryan

It seems Chicago has finally given up its campaign for shitty weather and we're finally getting some beautiful sunny days.  I got out for a nice run yesterday (I guess I'm now registered for the Rock n' Roll Half Marathon now...) and then spent a solid amout of time hanging out on our awesome front porch.  This porch sittin' was augmented with some taco pizza.  It was a fine night, indeed.

All this great weather really makes me want to go play in a park and drink beer outside!  Perhaps we should find a good night for exploring the beer gardens of Chicago!

Now on the opposite end of the spectrum, I think I need to rebuild Slimer (my desktop computer) pretty soon.  There's a couple awkward set up issues on it from Windows being installed on a smaller separate drive and the power source has started making some really funny noises.  Also 1/2 a terabyte of hard disk space doesn't seem as spacious as it once did.   I don't want to get rid of the case so I'm just going to buy new guts and do a clean install.  I'm thinking about putting Windows 7 on this, too.  I played with the RC a bit and really liked it.  I'll just install the RC for now and then upgrade to the full release when DePaul starts giving it away to students.  I'll post the specs when I make my order (which should be pretty soon, based on my will power for this sort of thing).  Putting this together will insure that I don't over dose on fresh air over the next few weeks.

I feel like I've been kind of quite about The American Autumn lately, but we've actually got quite a bit of cool stuff going on.  We've been doing really well in that Warped Tour battle of the bands (don't forget to go vote for us EVERYDAY... seriously... click here and go do it now).  We've also booked some studio dates to finish up our EP.  We're going into Red Door (we just can't quite afford to go back to Gravity yet) next Wednesday to demo track 4 songs, then we go in for the real deal in the beginning of June.  It should be A LOT of fun!  I'm really excited to get this EP out, it's been a long time in the making.  I've been talking to this company, Midwest Love, about doing the art for the disk.  He does some really cool work, check out it!  I'm sure we (or more likely, I) will post some stuff from the studio on teh band blog, if people are interested.

Also, you should be listening to MC Frontalot.  Like seriously.

So, is twitter down? Right now, yes.

Anyways, I was looking through some Google Analytics of a site and I happened to come across this little gem while looking at Internet Explorer versions:



Yes, that's right.  Someone was using IE 999.1 to visit the site.  Perhaps in this version IE has decent support for CSS3?  (Yes, I realize this was probably just done with this.  But it's more fun to think that time travelers have been visiting my sites.)

Oh yea! I also launched the design revamp of the Risetime website last week!  It's not a total redesign, but it is a marked improvement over the previous version.  I think it looks pretty sharp.  Enjoy! www.risetime.com

June 7th, 2009|9:46pm

Because this guy seems to be hitting lots of sites my guess is that it is actually just someone naming a bot. I don't think a human would cover so much ground and yet only show up as one user - but then again maybe analytics is really on top of it!

David

Twitter is stupid.  Some uses of it are more stupid than others, but nobody really needs Twitter.  People who don't use Twitter pose pretty valid points when they ask why I use it. It's really not that important for me to tell everybody when I'm drinking cheap beer or my thoughts on cookie dough.  But! When you have a bunch of friends who will post stuff randomly throughout the day, it's fun.  It's a nice passive way of consuming non-crucial bits of information about people's lives.   Some stuff just isn't interesting or important enough to warrant a phone call or an email, but that doesn't mean it's not fun to hear about Emily trouncing Dane in Tetris.

I think a lot of the reason people have such a backlash to a pretty innocuous piece of casual technology is that there is so much buzz about it.  It's obviously kind of stupid, but so many people are talking about it and using it.  Recently it was rumored that Apple wanted to bid as much as $700 million to buy Twitter (nowhere in this article does it mention $700 million, this is just a rumor related to the article).  Twitter has valued itself at $250 million.  The problem is, nobody can figure out a good way to make money from Twitter.  All of its funding comes from venture capital right now.

The problem with the solutions people have come up with to monetize Twitter is that they rely on people paying for Twitter as a service, but this just isn't going to happen.  People don't want to pay to post 140 character dry heaves about their day.  They don't want to pay (or support ads) to read other people's brain dumps.  People like using Twitter but not enough to pay to use it.   It's cool, but it's not crucial.

The (monetize-able) value that Twitter has isn't the service, it's the data.  The random thoughts of your friends or some internet celebrity are pretty worthless, but the random thoughts of millions of people are valuable.  Especially when they are search-able and concise.  Twitter should sell large scale access to its (public) data.  All this is information people are posting publicly anyways, but if Twitter sold access to a usable, parse-able feed of EVERYTHING (that people are willing to post publicly) to ad agencies, political campaigns, academic researches then they would have a product of value.   Yes, they should keep a subset of the feed open to casual developers (maybe the last 6 months or last million tweets or something like that) because there is some cool data visualization and trend stuff that can be developed, but the people who will want/need/use serious valuable data should be willing to pay for it.

Here's the model:  Users (who want to post publicly) provide Twitter with data in exchange for use of a social service that they enjoy.   Twitter manages all this data, processes it, and packages it in a way that is valuable to people who need large amounts of social data in a consumable way.   Twitter maintains its value by staying free to use (and ad free) and makes it's money from organizations that have a genuine need for Twitter and the budget to pay for it.

I feel like this must be something the Twitter big-wigs have considered, because it seems way too obvious to overlook.  I would be really interested to know about the real feasibility of a solution like this.  For now, though, I'm content to be able to yell quietly on the internet in 140 character bursts under the delusion that someone out there actually cares about what I had for lunch.

May 6th, 2009|1:03pm

I know I don't need to tell you to use the built in spell check...
About your actual post though:

I don't think selling twitter information is every going to work. If you make the last 6 months available for free, what's stopping the people who might pay for unlimited access from just storing the data. Then they'd have it all for free anyway.

I think the money with twitter lies within the twitter applications (twhirl, tweetie, etc). I'm actually quite surprised that Apple or even Twitter itself hasn't put out a pay-for application.

Bryan

May 6th, 2009|2:17pm

Ok, well another option for selling data would be selling real time data or better formatted (for large scale work) data or something like that. The idea is that all this data is available anyways (it's all public posts) but Twitter is in a good position to package it in a valuable way.

There might be some revenue to be had from applications, but too many Twitter users are casual users and there are too many good free options already.

Dave

Let me start this post off by saying that I'm very disappointed in everybody I know.  Your closeminded, pants-centric mentality has led you to be a slave to trouser conformity.  Do you think this is what George Washington had in mind when he stuffed the first White House neighbor's mailbox full of fireworks?  I think not.  Shame on all of you.   I did my part. Fault for the recession, swine flu, and Carrot Top are now on your hands.

So yesterday Bryan and I went to a meetup/ride with the Chicago Scooter Club.  It was a blast!  About 10 of us met up at a bar, had a drink, then went on a "Scoot To The Loop" ride.  I think we were quite a spectacle because a lot of people honked and took pictures of it.  It was really fun and the weather was great, a fantastic way to spend a beautiful Saturday.  Here's a post about it on club's website.   I'm going to try to keep up with this and try to go on a few more rides this summer.

Now, we find ourselves in Mustache May.  Bryan has been celebrating most excellently.  Kudos to him.  How are you observing?

So last night I made a little bit of progress in the slow moving task of fleshing out the content on this site.  I finally made the web design page a bit more than just a list of links to sites I've built.  Now there's pictures and a few more words!  I will be adding to this list soon as I've been working on the McHenry County site for work (doing both design and development, which is kind of neat) and Juli and I just had a meeting with the owner of The Subterranean and Beat Kitchen.  We're going to be building those sites soon (Juli will doing the design work and I'll be doing the back end coding nerdary).  It should be a really fun project and the owner seemed like a cool guy.

Man, I feel like I've been either doing a million things at once (work/school/band/research/web development/working out) or just doing absolutely nothing (which mainly results in watching House and eating corndogs).  Maybe I should find a bit of a balance.  I think I need to just go out for a couple beers or hanging out playing board games with people until 2am or have a foosball tournament.

Oooo! Does anyone want to play beach volleyball this summer!?  Coed rec league!?

April 21st, 2009|9:34am

Do you have to be good at volleyball to play?

Mike

April 21st, 2009|9:56am

Nope, not really. Usually the ability to get the ball over the net and a passion for playing the sand is good enough.

Dave

April 21st, 2009|2:09pm

V-Ball @ Sideouts??

Russ

April 22nd, 2009|10:54am

I was thinking in Chicago if I can get enough people together.

Dave

So I was reading the xkcd blag and he was talking about some cool logic/math puzzles. He started compiling a set of them on his wiki and some of them are really fun.   Some of these are the kinds of things that come up in math, probability, calc, physics,  and algorithm theory classes, but are much more fun to play around when you don't have to get them done or show all your work.  Here's a simple one that I thought was pretty clever:

A mother is 21 years older than her child. The mother's age in six years will be exactly five times the child's age in six years. Where is the father?

Check out the list here.  They're pretty fun.

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