I can think of probably fifteen different things to blog about tonight, but only about two sentences for each.  I suppose, therefore, that you’ll have to pardon any disjointedness that may follow, dear reader.

Remember last Wednesday’s post?  The Weekly Writing Assignment (#1)?  Well check out who happens to be one of this week’s finalists:  none other than our very own (and very favorite) naked redhead.  I am speaking, of course, of THE Naked Redhead.  Here’s the link.  I think it’s quite an excellent piece.  And quite apropos, given TNR’s relationships niche.

Daniel has posted five or six other finalists, all of which I think are pretty darned good.  Three hundred words was a pain in the ass for me, but it seems that everyone else was able to do it easily and eloquently.  Ah, curse my damned loquaciousness.  (Note the clever euphemism for “verbose”.)  I think TNR’s is the best of the lot, but I suppose my prejudices lean towards hot chicks with red hair and no clothes.  All (attempted) cheekiness aside, I have to say that TNR’s piece definitely elicited an emotional response from me – which is, arguably, the only true purpose of any art.

Switching gears:

I’m pretty sure I’ve found my future netbook:  the Asus Eee PC 1005HA.  Now I just have to figure out how to pay for it.  Please note the “Donations” button up yonder and to the right (hey – the famous Jon Barker of the UK donated just this week).  I suppose that’s as good an excuse as any to spend a bit of time cleaning up my finances.  Overall, things are in pretty good shape; they’re just all over the place.  I’ll probably just wait until my paycheck hits at the end of the month (which, thankfully, is Friday) – if only to be on the safe side. 

The other (relatively major) purchase I’m researching is a portable GPS unit for hiking.  I don’t really need one to tell me where I am on the map, but I’d like to give my family some peace of mind while I’m off on my solo treks.  I’ve also seen said GPS units do some pretty cool things as far as tracking one’s hike goes.  I emailed my buddy Ralph Bressler over at CatskillHiker.com to ask his opinion, and he suggested I check out the Garmin GPSMap 60 line.  Ralph uses the Magellan eXplorist 400-something and has put together some rockin’ good web pages therewith.  Here’s a good example.  I highly recommend Ralph’s site for anyone thinking about hiking the Catskills.  Kudos to Scott for finding Ralph’s site.

So yeah, that’s about it for tonight.  I made it in to work on time (8:30) this morning, and I’m hoping to continue the streak for the rest of the week.  For all you #starwars twitterers out there, get ready for a new “must follow” list – hopefully to be posted in time for this upcoming #followfriday.  It won’t be as extensive as the previous list, but it’ll include the core members of the community.  DM @DarthTraya or @cadeskywalker if you think you’re core enough to be included – they’re heavily involved in the compilation process.

I’m taking the day off from work today.  It feels good.  I think I’m going to do fuck-all nothing.  I have appointments at 8 (AM – ugh), 2, and 3:30, for an oil change, haircut, and a tune-up for my meat suit, respectively.  In between, I might go shopping for some incense.  Most likely, though, I’ll just sit around in the sun and read.

Maybe I’ll just say effit and buy a netbook too.  I’ve been eyeballing them for a while and the conclusion to which I’ve come is that it doesn’t matter all that much which one I get.  As long as I’m comfortable with the keyboard and it has a wi-fi built in, I really don’t think I’m savvy enough to know the difference among the other features.

Sure the new Acer model that’s supposed to be coming out in August looks nice – dual boot, windows and google’s Chrome OS, but that’s bound to be wicked expensive.  I figure I can get what I need for about four Franklins.

I’ll be mailing off my tally sheet to the Catskill 3500 Club, and probably my notice to the Adirondack 46ers that I’d like to join their club as well.  That’s going to be tough – some of those mountains are 4 hours away.

Check out my Peakbagger page if you’re interested in seeing the mountains I’ve climbed so far.  Here’s the front-runners list for the 3500 Club peaks as well – notice it says “Complete!” next to my name.  Pretty sweet. 

I gotta tell you, dear reader, I’m a pretty happy camper overall.  Things have been good lately.  I’m sure that a big part of that is that I’ve been hiking lately.  I need the exercise – it levels out my brain chemistry.

So, apologies for the short post, but I’m beat and need to get up earlier than I do on a work-day.

Question for you, dear reader:  When I include links in these posts, they’re set up to open in a different window.  Is that cool or a pain in the ass?  Would you prefer that I set the links to open in the same window (you’ll jump from my page to wherever the link goes – not a separate tab, though)?

Oh, and before I forget (again) to put together an entire post, please click

HERE

and vote for @theMaraJade in this contest (click the + in her avatar).  It’ll piss the trekkies off.  I’ve been voting for @GeneralVeers and @Wilhuff_Tarkin as well, because they’re good tweeps too.

If there comes a time when your cyber-friends need assistance such as this, dear reader, please do not hesitate to call on me.  This may not be the most popular blog on the net, but my readers are loyal and active.  They’ll help you out when you need it.

Thank you – for past good deeds, and in anticipation of future ones.

Hi Carrie!  Heheee – I’m going to blog to and about you for a bit.  ;-)

My friend Carrie Cleaver posted an interesting comment to Sunday’s post that hit the nail on the head as far as some of my thoughts of and at ReUnion went.  Carrie and I follow each other on Twitter; her blog is called Mindspeak.  Check it out.  I dig the way she structures her thoughts, both in 140 character segements and longer.  She’s a reader and a writer and fun to converse with.  Sometimes she listens to Slayer when she blogs, and sometimes her avatar is Betty Page; my kind of girl.

If you’re too lazy to click the link and read her comment, here it is:

So many of us think the same, and aren’t even aware of it. I bet half the people there at that gathering were thinking the same thing. Blogging from Blackberry. Darn, now I’m going to have to think on getting one. =)

Like I said, right on the money, Carrie. 

I was very comfortable in my interactions with the active brotherhood of the fraternity – they aren’t all that much different from the guys I pledged with and lived with during my years at Union.  Conversation was easy and the silences weren’t awkward.  I’d never met any of them before, but felt as though I’d lived with them for the past couple of years. 

Going down to the “young alumni” reception, however, was a different story.  I can be outgoing or reserved in those situations.  In the case of this past Saturday, I’d already bumped into enough of my old classmates that I really didn’t feel like recounting the highlights of the last ten years in a breath over and over again.  I was already kind of emotionally tapped out.  Plus, I hadn’t really eaten much of my dinner – I was too busy talking to Goloboy and Lauren and giggling at the kids’ antics.  Thomas had me pretty well trained – he’d screech for something across the table, I’d hand it to him, he’d throw it on the floor, and I’d pick it up and give it back to him.  And repeat.  I should probably give some thought to being more unpredictable.  It was really something to see his little smile when the world worked out the way he thought it would, though.

Anyway, I had told Goloboy I’d meet him at the function, and he was really the only one I had any interest in catching up with.  As Carrie said, I was very cognizant of the fact that everybody else at the cocktail hour was probably having similar thoughts to mine – how much money does he/she make?  is his/her spouse hot?  do they have kids?  et cetera.  If I were feeling outgoing or bubbly, I’d be bopping around, all hail-fellow-well-met and making little self-deprecating jokes to lighten the mood and get people more comfortable with themselves.  But I wasn’t really feeling that way at that point in the evening.  I just felt like watching, and hoping that maybe my facial hair or something would keep people from recognizing me right off the bat.

The other thing that led to my reserved feeling was that I’m not the same person I was back in college.  I don’t do all the crazy shite I used to anymore – and that’s what people remember.  Or, at least, that’s what I expect them to remember.  And that expectation was borne out a couple of times during the day – for example, when Zandman asked if he could see the scar from where I stitched up my hand.  I bit back the temptation to show him the other scars where actual doctors had done the stitching.  Ha! – my thumbprint on my right hand is forever uneven because a certain African pediatrician named Ofodile working the emergency room shift in DC general was too nervous to line the print back up.  Or maybe it’s because I talked to him the whole time and wouldn’t let him concentrate.  Fun story, but not really the impression I’m looking to convey at this point.

So thanks for pointing out that everybody else at the function was probably having the same thoughts I was, Carrie.  It was something I was definitely thinking about, and would have blogged, but just didn’t get around to because it was so late when I put the post together.

Oh, and I dig my bby.

And that’s it, dear reader.  If you didn’t click on the link to Carrie’s blog way back up there, here it is again.  Check her out.  Pretty interesting stuff.  Leave a comment, tell her I sent you – it’s like eGraffiti.

One of my favorite people to follow on Twitter is @absolutspacegrl.  She’s a rocket scientist – literally.

She works for NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston TX and tweets about what’s going on at NASA.  And unlike most “famous” people on Twitter, she’s engaging.  By which I mean it’s possible to have an actual conversation with her.  She talks to her followers and answers their questions – anyone from moms with kids who want to know about rocket ships to hardcore amateur astronomers with technical questions. 

Like most kids, I thought NASA was the coolest thing when I was young.  To think that people actually got into rocket ships and went to the moon was incredible.  There was a time when I wanted to be an astronaut, just like everybody else.  I read all kinds of stuff about NASA and spaceflight.  It’s no secret that I’m a huge sci-fi buff.  I wouldn’t be such an avid reader of science fiction if it weren’t for learning about NASA as a kid.  As I got older, though, sci-fi took over my reading schedule because it was so much more interesting to read about than NASA in the newspapers.

Following @absolutspacegrl on Twitter has rekindled my interest in what our country actually does with all that money that goes into the space program.  As a Future Billionare of America, I can say that I plan strong support for NASA later on down the road.  Though my pocketbook isn’t currently available to support NASA, my voice is.  I’ve met some really cool people on Twitter, strictly because we find @absolutspacegrl‘s tweets interesting.

When the shuttle Atlantis lifted off on its mission to service the Hubble Telescope and the biggest outlets on the internet froze up, @absolutspacegrl‘s tweets kept us all in the loop.

The thing I admire most about @absolutspacegrl is that she loves her job.  She’s on Twitter because she wants to tell the world how cool NASA is and how much she enjoys working there.  I dig my job, sure; I even have a Twitter account set up for work-related stuff.  But I don’t tweet on that account nearly as much as @absolutspacegrl tweets on hers.  She lives and breathes spaceflight, and I think that’s wicked cool.

If you’re on Twitter, I highly recommend following @absolutspacegrl, whether or not you’re into stuff that deals with space.  She’s a great person and always deserving of every #followfriday she gets.

You can also check out some of the mentions of her here.

PS: #saveabsolutspacegrl

I’m not so sure that I’m psyched for this to be a short week.  Yes I am.

This was definitely a good weekend.  I got the rest I needed.  I was talking to my friend Mike this evening and said that I’m hoping my motivation hasn’t completely disappeared – that I’ll be able to jump back into work with both feet.  I have a lot to do in the next four days – especially Tuesday.  A 10PM conference call with Taiwan makes for a long day, especially when I’ll be the star of the call.  I have some general outlines for a report that I have to put together, discussing this year’s project in light of last year’s.  Given all the things I have to do for this year’s projects, spending time re-analyzing last year’s project feels like a real waste of time.  I’d rather be working on things coming down the pike than reminiscing about what’s past. 

But it’s not my job to whine about reasons; my job is to get the report done and kick ass on the con call.  Not a problem.

Mike said with a good amount of surety that he doesn’t think I’ll have a problem getting right back down to business when I walk in the door at work on Tuesday.  And Mike knows me pretty well.  I don’t think I will either, but I’ve been struggling with that whole self-doubt thing ever since I dredged up my Psychic Encounter in Sedona last week.

I can still see the pain in the psychic’s face when she said (multiple times) “so much self-doubt”.  I guess it’s more the memory of that than anything else – it’s kind of echoing in my head.  Especially when I’m – duh – doubting myself.  I’m either doing it more lately or I’m noticing it more. 

I’m trying to get away from doubting myself – I really thought I’d gotten past it, but maybe I can chalk this up to a character defect that I’ll never truly get away from – part of my karma. 

Though I’m trying to get away from it, I don’t want to do it in the way I normally would: puffing up my ego with bullshit affirmations.  Lying to myself that I’m right all the time.  The best thing I’ve been able to come up with so far is to ask questions of those around me when I’m feeling doubtful about my thoughts and/or contemplated actions.  Keep things out in the open – bad ideas die when they hit the fresh air.

It’s a tough balance, though, especially when it comes to work.  Besides the fact that I work for a consulting firm and we’re supposed to know what we’re talking about, I’m also trying to move up in said consulting firm.  It sure ain’t the jungle, but that doesn’t mean I can afford to display meekness or weakness.

Anyway, enough whining for now.  I’m off to bed to get up at a decent hour – I’ll kick more ass if I’m at work early.

On a side note, a funny thing happened after I published my psychic encounter post on Friday night:  fifteen minutes after the post was published, I received an email notification from Twitter “ED (TedsSpiritGuide) is now following your updates on Twitter.”  When I checked the URL (twitter.com/TedsSpiritGuide), I got the “this page doesn’t exist” notification.  I got a kick out of it.  When my posts are published, the link is also auto-tweeted on Twitter.

I checked my stats plugin, but the only info it displayed was an IP address in Laguna Beach CA (which is where the server is located, not the person).  Anyway, it turned out to be my buddy Matt Helmick (@IntegralHack) effing with me.  We shared a good laugh over Facebook (he’s in Walla Walla WA). 

Write a Link Post

Day #7 in Darren Rowse’s “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” event, and I’m already behind.  Jeez, this is a lot like school.  Back then I was trying to balance too many things at once – I guess some things never change.  I know you haven’t seen Day #4 yet – that’s because it’s “Analyze a Top Blog in Your Niche“, and I still haven’t figured out what my niche is.  By analogy, that task is kind of like saying “explain your conception of god”.  Dang. 

I’ve decided to link to Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist blog.  Scroll down and scan to the right and you’ll see it’s been added to my blogroll.

Here’s why I decided to link to Chris’s blog (don’t watch this at work):

 
Study: Children Exposed To Pornography May Expect Sex To Be Enjoyable

While I thought the main topic of discussion in the video was funny, I can see how some people wouldn’t get it.  If you’re one of those people, maybe this is the time to delete my RSS feed and start following someone else’s blog. 

I was particularly impressed with the discussion at the end of the video regarding the post-homicide disposal of prostitute corpses.  I think the newscasters make some excellent points about how it’s not as easy as the movies make it out to be, but I also feel the need to point out that practice makes perfect.  Like anything else, body-disposal is at first a daunting proposition and seems to take forever.  I can assure you, dear reader, that after a few (albeit nerve-racking) tries, this task becomes as routine as brushing one’s teeth or shaving.  Once a modicum of efficiencey is achieved, one can then even begin to add a bit of “flair” to the task and it becomes thoroughly enjoyable.

I found Chris’s blog on Twitter.  Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) follows about 27 people, and Chris (@nerdist) is one of them.  I dig the layout of Chris’s blog – it’s simple and to-the-point.  I’d like to do something similar – if I ever finally manage to sit down and code myself a new theme.

Who knows if Chris will link back to my blog, but I left him a comment with the URL for this post and I’ll hit him up on Twitter as well (probably Al, too, since I’m following him as well).  I also friended him on Facebook.  I’ll grab Chris’s RSS feed when I get to work tomorrow and follow his posts for a bit.  I haven’t read through much of his blog, so I may decide that it sucks later on.  Two things I was particularly impressed with were that many of his post-titles looked interesting and that the first post I saw caught my attention.

Chris, if you’re reading this (and got this far), what say you hook a blog-brother up with a couple of tweets and maybe a link-back?  Thx, bro.

What the hell?  Chris, if you’re reading this, please also check out the “Support” heading in the right-hand sidebar – maybe hook a blog-brother up with some PayPal love, too?

The title means Day #3 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.  As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m participating in this event sponsored by ProBlogger Darren Rowse.  Today’s task is to promote a blog post.

In many ways, I’m still a newbie blogger.  Even so, I’ve definitely jumped in with both feet.  I joined Twitter for the specific reason of promoting my blog, and some of my friends on Facebook are getting so tired of seeing http://QuixoticJedi.com in my status updates that I’ve resorted to using tinyurl.com as a kind of indirect-marketing tool. 

I’ve created profiles on several other sites as well - I have a free blog on Blogger that I update every once in a while, but use primarily to push readers here to The Quixotic Jedi.  I’ve joined Digg, del.ic.io.us, Technorati, and several other social-media-type sites in an effort to get my URL out there in the public eye.

To promote yesterday’s post, I blasted the URL all over Twitter and started conversations with a few of those on my list that seemed most active- specifically to ask whether I’d missed anyone while compiling my list.  There were a few characters that I missed, and I promptly added them and alerted all parties that the list was updated.  I also used the Twitter hashtag #starwars in a few of my tweets to make sure that they could be picked up on the public timeline.  This went over well, I think.  My hits for the day were sky-high.

Special thanks to

admiraldaala / Admiral Daala

for her help, suggestions, and RTs (re-tweets).

And to

theMaraJade / Mara Jade

for having such a hot background.  I couldn’t stop thinking about her character all day.

I definitely got good feedback from the Star Wars Geek community – and from some SWG groupies, as well.  I tried to be as fast as possible with my responses, even though I was having trouble getting my @replies on Twitter for most of the day (and I have a day job, so I had to do some of the work for which they pay me).

Other marketing tools I used were:

• Posting ads on craigslist.org in the San Francisco Bay Area under the “rants/raves” heading.  I posted both Star Wars Characters You Can Follow on Twitter and Death to eHarmony(another relatively popular post).    My stats plugin counted 37 and 18 incoming hits, respectively, from these links.  The CL suggestion was by my friend and fellow blogger The $@BS.
• Tweeting directly to @GeekTyrant and sending a link-baiting email to the site‘s admin.  @GeekTyrant has about 9,000 followers on Twitter (by contrast, I have 535 as of the time of this post.
• I also googled “Star Wars Twitter” to see if anyone else had compiled a similar list – no one had.  Aside from links directly to the various characters, there were surprisingly few blogs or other websites that related specifically to these keywords.  I found a couple of blogs and posted the URLs to my site and yesterday’s post in comments to other relevant posts.

I think the biggest thing I got out of Darren’s tutorial today was that I really shouldn’t be looking to market every single post I write (especially since I post every day).  Rather, I should pick a few of the better posts (such as Star Wars Characters You Can Follow on Twitter and Death to eHarmony) and market them.  I found that those links were enough to get people to look at my site; once they were there, they looked at other posts as well.

Yesterday was my best day ever.  I have a steady following of about 40 readers – I usually see between 30 and 60 hits per day.  By 1PM EST, I had over 100 hits (my previous best day was 125 hits); this was just after the CL ads were posted.  By 5:30PM I had 175 hits, and half an hour later I was at 341 hits.  This was due to Twitter RTs from @admiraldaala, @theMaraJade, @dayofthejedi and @GeneralVeers and the tweet by @GeekTyrant.  When my WordPress Stats plugin cut off (around 7PM), I had 589 hits and have had 201 additional hits since then.

Again, many thanks to the Twitter Star Wars community!

• Done blogging. Tomorrow’s post should be fun. http://QuixoticJedi.com and http://ilovevodka.wordpress.com – a social experiment. #
• How well can you get to know someone from information available on the internet? http://QuixoticJedi.com, http://ilovevodka.wordpress.com #
• @Nenad Screw your avatar. I like your personality. I might pick a different adjective than “sparkling”, though. #
• @theclimbergirl Hey baby, what’s your sign? in reply to theclimbergirl #
• @Nenad lol – I get your point. I thought “hardcore dork” was pretty cool. #
• Love you, Chuck. RT @Nenad RT @chucknorris_: There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Chuck Norris allows to live. #
• I’ve been waiting for this one: RT @cognitatic @niceguyted ted are you menstrual? [No, just hyper-aware of the world around me. I <3 Gaia.] #
• Duh. I counted 96%, wtf. RT @TechCrunch [News] Facebook Poll: 94% Of Users Don’t Like Redesign http://twurl.nl/f3a345 #
• Twitterers losing tweets: @IntegralHack, @thecorplibrary…anyone else? I’m not worried, mine are all crap anyway. #
• @thecorplibrary As far as I can tell, all my tweets are still there. Huh. Good to know you didn’t lose anything. in reply to thecorplibrary #
• @corplibrary @IntegralHack My DMs have been in/out all day; getting them much earlier via regular email. @ replies have been the same. #
• LMAO you guys are too much…RT @Durgamaa @yogadork Who says? An Ayurvedic vaidya? I think not… #
• @IntegralHack I feel ya, dog. I’m going to get back to doing some work-related work. in reply to IntegralHack #
• @Glammy_ RT @Andrew303 Finally someone is making hoodies out of blowup dolls http://is.gd/o5h5 (1 part unsafe for work, 9 parts plain weird) #
• Dig it. “Daily Gratitude Blog” RT @BlissfullyTeal The value of life…http://tinyurl.com/dcztzx #
• Home from the diner and Mini dealership – $30 for a little piece of metal?! Definitely not blogging about THAT. I pick up the kayak on Sat. #
• @IntegralHack @yogadork I tweeted this morning about being sensitive to the lunar cycles. I got the same “are you menstrual” question. #
• @yogadork lol – no, my feelings were hurt :-( ok, now I’m lmao – actually, I tried to explain my hyper-sensitivity in 140 chars #
• @IntegralHack Yeah, nice to know I’m not the only one. If I get any more “sensitive”, I’ll be effin psychic. #
• @Digital_Buddha Yo Helaine! Great to see you in this forum. Plenty of cool stuff going on – if you can find it. ;-) in reply to Digital_Buddha #

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WWRBD:  What Would Ron Burgundy Do?

I know what you’re thinking: 

Yes, I have a nickname for my penis.  It’s called The Octagon.  But I’ve nicknamed my testes as well:  my left one is James Westfall and my right one is Dr. Kenneth Noisewater.  You ladies play your cards right, you just might get to meet the whole gang.

No, I didn’t copy and paste that from imdb – I’ve got it memorized.  And no, I haven’t found a situation in which that works for anything but a few (nervous) laughs.

I think my dad is reading this right now.  Hi dad, I turned out ok.  Please don’t enter “my oedipus complex” into the search bar. 

“Dance Yoga”

So tonight I’ll be heading to the Moving Energy Dance Party With Live Music! at Peaceful Yoga in Franklin Lakes, NJ.  My friend Anna invited me earlier this week and I’m psyched.  My first thought was that I’d be balancing my chakras in the back of the room with one foot against the wall, trying to look chill and mildly interested.  Then Anna explained that there’ll be an instructor there, well, instructing us.  It’s much easier for me to take direction and concentrate on what I’m doing in yoga class than to try to figure out whether I look cool or not.  To the point of looking cool, though:  whatever does one wear to such an event?

Here’s the description, in case you didn’t want to click the link above:

“This is the Moving Energy experience that you have been waiting for… a joyful and liberating yoga-inspired movement class with a live band! We will move through the 7 energy centers called chakras from the earth to the heavens. This powerful workshop is energetic and fun as well as profound and sacred.”

A Few Words of Thanks

Thank you, Sabrina, for your most excellent feedback yesterday.  I will incorporate your suggestions into my blogging style.  And I will try to read more Hemingway.  That means, dear readers, fewer run-ons and more short, declarative sentences.  I will not, however, attempt to be “laconic”.  I don’t care what the effin dictionary says the definition is, I don’t like the sound of the word.  It reminds me too much of lethargic.  Instead, I will attempt to be succinct and maybe even terse sometimes.  And no, I don’t own a thesaurus.  That’s all brain-pan, baby.

And, per Sabrina‘s suggestion, I will be checking out “Tapping” in the near future.  If you click the link and watch the video, you’ll probably beat me to it, so let me know what you think.

In all seriousness, though:  thank you Sabrina for your other feedback as regards those matters of which we spoke pertaining to and touching upon the heart.  Mine, specifically.  As I said in our conversation, I appreciate your objective opinion and rationality.  You reinforced just the right thoughts and discouraged well the wrong ones.  And yes, dear reader, Sabrina was blessed with two X chromosomes.  And no, dear reader, this is not just me plugging Sabrina‘s blog, this is me thanking a friend.  You can tweet Sabrina here.

Twitter Update

Interesting bits I’ve found in my Twittering:

• fxxxmylife:  as of the date of this post, 10,240 followers, 0 following, 677 updates.  And effin hi-larious tweets.  Did I mention that this person is not following anybody?
• Sheamus:  Sheamus Bennett, originator of Twittercism and generally a very polite guy.  See yesterday’s post.
• MrTweet:  Twitter stats, suggestions for friends, recommendations and other cool stuff.

And, In Other News:

I’m wondering if anybody can point me in the right direction of the story of Raphael and the perfect circle.  My remembrance of it is as follows:

Raphael (as in Santi, the artist, not the teenage mutant ninja turtle – and shame on you if that was your first thought – that’s at least a 3 Hail Mary offense) went to the king to apply for an artist gig.  Lots of other artists were applying and they all had their artistic resumes and things to show the king.  When Raphael’s turn in line came, the king said “WTF kid?  What’d you bring to show me you’re a decent artist?”  Raphael replied by asking the king for a piece of paper and something with which to draw.  One of the lowlies brought him a piece of paper and a pencil and Raphael drew a circle.  The king was all “WTF” again, ready to have Raphael thrown in the dungeon for being such an arrogant prick and playing a joke on the king.  Raphael calmly explained to the king that the circle he had just drawn (freehand, mind you) was perfect.  At this point, the king got really pissed and told Raphael (loudly, and in front of the whole court, obviously) that if the circle wasn’t perfect, it was “off with your head” – even though the king was a dude.  Raphael nodded calmly and said he understood.  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not prove that the circle Raphael had just drawn wasn’t perfect (because it was).  And they used compasses and everything.

Raphael got the gig. 

I really want to say it was for that fancy set of doors he did, but I don’t remember. 

So does this ring a bell for anyone?  C’mon, help a brother out:  email me QuixoticJedi[at]gmail[dot]com if you’ve heard this one and have a decent reference.

I joined Twitter a couple of days ago (you can follow me at http://Twitter.com/niceguyted) and have been trying to figure it out in the little bit of spare time I have that’s not devoted to work, The Quixotic Jedi, and other stuff.  A few minutes of Google searching yielded some pretty crappy results – I had to dig a bit deeper than I expected to really find some good stuff about how Twitter works and what the dos and don’ts are.  There are a few links between my reviews below that you can check out, but I’ll give you the rubies I found in Google’s mountain of rocks first:

Twittercism – it’s a blog all about Twitter.  And it’s brand-new.  Twitter itself is probably around a year old, and most of what I found at the top of the Google heap is old – a drawback to Google (and the subject for an entirely different post), because the sites I found first have been clicked the most.

Rubies

I subscribed to the RSS feed for Twittercism, and I suggest you do, too – if you have an interest in keeping up.  Way to pick a niche, Sheamus!

All the information I would want to disseminate to you, dear readers, about Twitter can be found in three parts:  Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

If click those links and read that content, you’re pretty much home free.  If you want to keep reading, great.

Rocks

The only friend-finding search engine I’ve found for Twitter that seems to be of any use at all is Twubble.   It searches for common people being followed among the people you’re following – e.g. “Jimmy and Johnny both follow Lance Armstrong, Robin Williams and CNN News”  Not much good for those of us just starting out – it needs data to crunch and if you’re not following anyone, twubble has nothing with which to work.  I found this here, which has a decent survey of Twitter friend-finding engines – though I didn’t find any of the other sites listed very useful: 

• TwitterLocal searches for other users by geographic location (you have to download TwitterLocal Air, though – it seems a bit too involved for my beginner tastes).
• TwitterWho uses Twitter’s people search (which was apparently down when I tried it) – I don’ think this is very useful – it’s searching for email addresses and people’s names:  in the age of usernames and cyber-egos, these unique identifiers aren’t the same as those we use in real life.
• Twits Like Me is idiotic:  it searches for people with a similar username to yours.  No matches for niceguyted “You’re just too unique!”  I feel gross that my site now contains a link to it.
• TwitDir seems like a great idea – search for the topmost followed twitterers, etc – but the site was down when I checked it.

Another post I found with a Twitter friend-finder survey was this one here. 

• Twitter Packs wiki - seems to still be realtively young, content hasn’t become unwieldy (yet, but it has the potential to do so very quickly – not much of an organizational structure), last updated 1 week, 5 days ago (not good for a wiki), organizes into groups of subjects/topics called “packs” e.g. topic, interest, location, etc.
•  Tweetscan – dead link?  wouldn’t load for me; again, another old post (04/2008).

My regular Google search also turned up TwitterTroll – “real time Twitter search engine” – very slow, received errors when I searched for “philosophy” and “da vinci” – not up to speed yet.

Nothing of interest via the Google Blog Search tool.  Surprising?

Meatloaf

The conclusion?  Twitter itself is still new enough that the follow-up technology doesn’t have much with which to work, so it just can’t be that good.  The best way to find friends on Twitter is already built-in to Twitter itself:  follow the people from your address book that are already on Twitter, and invite those in your address book that aren’t.  And mooch off your friends. 

There’s also a “Suggested Users” tab on Twitter’s “Find People” menu – not a bad place to start either.

I signed up the day before yesterday and only pulled a couple of friends from my gmail contacts list.  I found one or two others because I’ve heard them mention their “tweets” before and started following them. 

As I mentioned earlier, I just subscribed to the RSS Feed for Twittercism – a blog all about Twitter.  There’s also an interesting post on Twittercism about TweetDeck, which caught my interest because I’ve seen it mentioned in a few places (e.g. THE $@BS).

My next step:  follow everyone that my friends are following (for a little while at least), then use Twubble to narrow down the commonalities (which will probably be big-time news engines like CNN or zines like Boing Boing), then comb through and get rid of the stuff I’m not interested in.  I’ll need to spend some time following a shit-ton of people to actually figure out what interests me and what doesn’t.

I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks also to my friend Sabrina for her informative post about Twitter etiquitte, which you can view here.