Giza aka Douglas Muth's LiveJournal

Pretty much what the subject says. I called AT&T around 10 AM this morning, gave them my temp phone number, main phone number, and Verizon account number, and they started the porting process. The rep then said, and I quote, "Verizon said that the porting will be complete by 10:19 AM". Not 10:20, but 10:19. These people are detail-oriented! :-P

Sure enough, at 10:19, I got this text message:



Yes, the background is what you think it is. :-P

I also picked up this battery pack the other day:



It's handy, because I can keep my phone (or iPod) charged while I'm traveling. Since using the net via 3G on the iPhone eats up the battery, this has proven to be a good investment. The battery pack may be small, but since it's one giant battery (as opposed to a fraction of the iPhone's value being a battery), I estimate I can get about 3 iPhone charges out of this. Not bad!


I've been really into Twitter lately. Moreso than LiveJournal, in fact. One of the reasons why I have been all over Twitter is because the clients for reading it are all stream-oriented. But that, it makes it very easy to go through a large number of Tweets, and I can click on a specific Tweet for more info about its author. LiveJournal really needs something like that.

So, does anybody know if any such software exists? No, an RSS reader probably won't cut it. The ones I've used so far require you to click on a link to read any part of an LJ entry, and wouldn't scale too well past 1,000 entries. (I'll hit that in a month) I'd probably need software that was written just with LJ in mind.

I've gotten quite into the Twitter thing lately. I'm following close to 100 people, someone of whom I know, some of whom I think are interesting. It's not unlike LiveJournal, except that the messages are smaller and the time to ramp up your number of followers (and people you follow) is much shorter.

One of the people I follow on Twitter is Vint Cerf. For those whom the name does not ring a bell, Vint is best known as the father of the Internet. No, really. Among his other accomplishments, he is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol suite. Those two protocols form the backbone of the Internet as we know of. If you load a webpage, send an email, or receive an IM message, you just made use of TCP/IP. The protocol is quite robust and has aged as newer technologies such as the web and Instant Messaging made use of it.

That being said, I noticed some really strange messages coming from Vint Cerf's Twitter feed over the last day or so (http://twitter.com/cerf):



As of this writing, there have been over 45 such messages, which are all variants of what's above. Most of those links (ab)use the site tinyurl.com and will cause you to end up on the site baysearch.net, which appears to be a website that searches eBay. (Yeah, I think their site looks like crap too)

Of course, I think I need to step back and ask what may be an obvious question: is that account really owned by Vint Cerf? I do not know the gentleman personally, nor do I know anyone else who knows him. While this account appears to be legitimate, there is also the possibility that it could have been an attempt to impersonate him, gather loads of Twitter followers, and then spam them with ads.

If there's a lesson to be learned from this incident, it is this: Trust, but Verify.

Maybe what Twitter and other online services need to introduce is some sort of "web of trust" system, not unlike what PGP, GnuPG, and others use. If you know someone's identity because you know them in real life, you could mark their account as "certified". Then, if someone else wanted to trust you to "verify" someone else's identity, they could do so. Who you trust (and if you trust the people they trust) is up to you.

Ironically, despite being the Father of the Internet, I could not find a working email for Vint Cerf. I'm sure he would get LOTS of email, so I can understand if he didn't publish it. Does make it harder to get in touch with him, though...

Just updated the layout of my LiveJournal. I decided that I wanted to integrate my Twitter page as well have a tag cloud displayed on my LJ. I finally found the Smooth Sailing template which did both.

How does the new layout work for folks? Any problems or issues? It seems to work okay in FireFox and MSIE so far.

Speaking of Twitter, I just got into that a short awhile ago. It's like a blog, but all messages are short, 140 characters or less. It's more like "mini-blogging", really. There are a few neat ways in which it can be used:

1) Post new "tweets" via SMS or IM.

2) Receive "tweets" of people you are following via SMS or IM.


One very real way I plan on using this is at future furry conventions. Folks who are interested in meeting up with me at the con can "follow" me in twitter in advance. When I arrive on site, I can send an SMS message to Twitter that reads, "Arrived at the con. Sitting in the lobby." or similar. This in return gets sent straight to peoples' cellphones. It's a little more convenient than calling up or SMS folks individually. In fact, it's sorta like... a real-time LiveJournal, isn't it?

Other Twitters worth following:

twitter_status - Twitter status announcements

franklinpolice - A police department with their own twitter. Includes regular arrest statistics. :-)

insults - Get insults sent to you several times a day. It's like Center City Philadelphia brought straight to your cellphone!


Happy tweeting--er, twittering!