dianaschnuth

Last month, my co-workers discovered Twitter. They didn’t join it — far from it. In fact, they seemed not to grasp the usefulness at all, decrying it as self-serving and stupid, and leaving me to defend it during one of our weekly lunch outings. I think I fared well in Twitter’s defense, as I got some conciliatory nods before the subject veered in another direction.

I can totally see where the Twitter haters are coming from. I really didn’t get it myself until I was more mobile: first with my lame-o pay-as-you-go flip phone (which, unbeknownst to me, couldn’t text to short codes or international numbers, which totally foiled my plan to Twitter our Hawaii vacation last year), and now with my iPhone.

Twitter can be stupid. I’ll grant you that. Depending on how you use it, it can be a tool of complete drivel and juvenile chatter. With a little thought and research, and occasional pruning, it can also be useful, informative, and a much-needed diversion at times. It all depends on who you choose to follow.

As for me, the people I follow tend to fall into categories:

1. Friends and Acquaintances. These are the people who can tweet pretty standard things like “back to work for another monday,” and I’ll continue to follow them, just because. They’ll occasionally tweet a piece of important personal news, and I’ll be glad I was on the front lines to see it and respond (if appropriate). Friends and acquaintances (both IRL and online) comprise about one-third of my flock.
2. Industry Experts. I consider myself a web design hobbyist (I get the occasional word-of-mouth freelance gig), as well as a fairly recent convert to Business Intelligence. Most of the “industry” people I follow are web designers whose work I’ve admired for years, although I do follow a couple of businesses that would count for this category. Industry folks make up maybe one eighth of who I follow.
3. Hobbies and Interests. I try to spread these out; I find that if I follow multiple people who tweet about a particular interest of mine, one or two tend to rise up about the rest, content-wise, and the others get weeded out. Currently, I follow a couple of diet/fitness coaches, some atheists, a local record store, a couple of GTD experts, a nerdcore rapper, a sci-fi author, a couple of bloggers, and Wil Wheaton, among a few others. My varied interests make up something like almost half of the people I follow.

Some people fit into multiple categories, like acquaintances and industry experts, or industry experts and interests, so it’s hard to come up with an exact breakdown of who I follow and why.

You may notice that I don’t have a category specifically for “celebrities,” although that seems to be what the media is latching onto about Twitter lately. I follow some “internet celebrities,” like Heather Armstrong and her husband Jon. I’m sure that Whil Wheaton would fit into the celebrity category, too, although I tend to think of him as a writer who acted in a movie and a TV show I like, and as just a slightly different brand of geek than I am.

Just because someone I know or a company I like has an account on Twitter, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll follow them. This isn’t a popularity contest — not to me, anyway. For the most part, I try to follow people whose tweets are relevant, interesting, thought-provoking, funny, helpful, newsworthy, or any combination of these. Sometimes it’s a LOL-inducing twitpic; other times, it’s a software announcement or links to little-known and under-publicized news stories.

(Next week, my contribution to the Twitterverse will include massive amounts of photos and observations from Japan. Look for it.)

I haven’t quite finished reading Getting Things Done (Note: I’d love to hyperlink to Amazon here, or even italicize the title, but my blog is still not accepting HTML), but I’ve at least started collecting my stuff to do, getting it all in one place, and revisiting the master list on a weekly basis.

Once I master this system, this could seriously help me manage the procrastination problem I’ve had for so long.

The key for me has been this: if it only takes two minutes, and you’re in a place where you can do it now, DO IT NOW. There’s no reason to put it off until later. It’ll take as much energy to write it down and prioritize it as it would have to just go do it already.

Having discrete tasks has also helped me not get pulled off-track as often. As much as I would LOVE to go putz around and figure out WTF is wrong with my blog, there are other things that I know I can actually get done tonight, like spraying for ants or editing a podcast.

I still have a long way to go, and a lot more archived to-do items to dredge out and add to the Someday/Maybe list. (I have a stack of scrap paper and text files and e-mails with to-do items and ideas from over three years ago. I wish I were exaggerating.)

Until I officially reach Inbox Zero, though, at least I’m headed in the right direction.

Back in the mid-to-late-90’s, before cameraphones or affordable digital cameras, if you wanted especially sexy photos of your honey, you had to either know someone who knew someone who had access to photo developing, or you had to know about THAT ONE PLACE in town that would develop and print ANYTHING. (Within reason.)

Or you had to find a Polaroid One-Step at the thrift, which is the route we went. And, boy, the two times we used that Polaroid were fun and sexy at the time, but overexposed and unsexy afterward.

People who came of age even just five years after we did had a completely different experience. These days, kids and young adults have easy access to digital cameras and cell phones that don’t care what kinds of photos you take. I can completely understand why hormonally-charged adolescents and post-adolescents would get off on sending sexy pictures of themselves to their boyfriends.

What’s unfortunate, though, is that the part of the brain that makes decisions and judgments is the last to develop, as I understand it. Doesn’t texting a sexy picture of yourself to your Significant Other sound pretty erotic? Sure it does — until you think one or two steps ahead. I know that there were plenty of times I was guilty of that sort of reasoning — well, not about sexy pictures, but about other things, like words said and notes written and homework ignored and classes skipped.

Is there a solution? Sure. Make sure your children understand the permanence of the internet, and teach them how to think critically and project the consequences of their actions. It’s not a quick and easy fix, like putting a content filter on your internet and TV, but it’s a thorough and responsible solution. I know I can’t really pass judgment, because I don’t have children; but I do know what my mother taught me about sex and responsibility, and what I learned on my own.

If I’d had a digital camera or a cameraphone back in 1997, would we have taken sexy pictures like we did with the Polaroid? I’m not sure we would have, since the novelty wouldn’t really have been there. If we had, though, they might have looked a little less… embarrassing.

Speak when you are angry — and you will make the best speech you’ll ever regret.
—Lawrence Peter

I snapped at my brother-in-law yesterday at Easter. I really should have held my tongue; he had been in a car accident the day before, and was physically and mentally out of sorts. But he made an angry comment to Aaron about how he didn’t want people taking his picture without telling him — which is my M.O. at family gatherings. I’d actually already snapped one of him earlier, thinking his drugged-up state looked kind of cute.

So, I “thanked” him for telling me to my face not to take his picture, instead of telling my husband. He muttered something as I turned away, apparently not for my ears.

The private conversation that Aaron had with him later covered many topics, one of which was my penchant for taking candid photos and posting them online, either on my blog or on Flickr. I honestly hadn’t considered the fact that I don’t have explicit permission from the subjects to post their photos publicly; they’re snapshots of my friends and family. If I’d wanted to publish them in a magazine or use them in my online portfolio, I would certainly ask (and have in the past). But for my blog? For my Flickr?

After I cooled down and considered the implications, it occurred to me that I’ve posted people’s personal information on my blog multiple times. I’ve posted people’s full names along with their photos. While I don’t personally have a problem with posting info about myself online, other people might. (Actually, some people definitely do, even apart from my brother-in-law; one former co-worker from college has specifically asked me not to post her last name, to make her less searchable online for professional reasons.)

So, now I’m on a mission to rectify the situation. I’m going to remove references to people by their full names in all my blog entries; luckily, there aren’t many of those. (I reserve the right to keep full names of people I’m trying to find, in the hopes that they’ll Google themselves and find me.) I’m also going to set any photos of people on Flickr (ones not taken in public or at conventions, anyway) to be viewable by friends and family only, unless they’ve told me they’re OK with having their picture online. So, if you’re a regular reader and you know I have photos of you posted on my Flickr, feel free to speak up in advance one way or the other. Also, if you don’t have a Flickr account, and still want to be able to see pictures of my friends and family, you might want to sign up and friend me (it’s free, after all).

In this era of widespread indexing of information, I suppose we should all be more conscious of how we could potentially be violating others’ rights to privacy. Sorry if I stepped on any toes.

In looking through my e-mail for things I’d meant to blog, but never did, I came across this bit from April of last year:

I’m not much for literal dream interpretation. After some inspection of my own dreams over time, though, I can start to see patterns and themes. Symbolism. Things like that. I can tell what was just thrown into my dreams as a replay of the day’s events, and I can draw parallels between situations in my dreams and situations in real life. I know that certain people that appear in my dreams represent certain aspects of myself.

Lately, I’ve been dreaming about skipping school. Either I really want to skip class and end up just not going to school at all, or I skip class and I didn’t mean to. Sometimes, school is college, and sometimes it’s a weird conglomeration of college and high school.

Yesterday, I posted this dream on Twitter:

Before that, last week, I had a dream that included one of my co-workers. I didn’t write it down, and I didn’t talk about the contents of the dream, so I don’t remember exactly what he was doing in my dream.

As we were standing in line the next day to grab some coffee at Biggby’s, though, I went ahead and told him that he’d been in one of my dreams the previous night. That can be awkward — how do you respond to that? After he blushed and laughed (“I’ve never been in a co-worker’s dream before!”), we ended up having a brief and intriguing conversation about dream interpretation as we waited for our coffee.

He started with, “Do you believe…?”

That kind of opening always evinces the skeptical “hairy eyeball” from me, and this was no exception. Turns out that he wasn’t being quite that open-ended about it, and simply asked what I thought about how the brain reinterprets things in dreams. I made it clear that I don’t believe in clairvoyance or precognition, but that I find it completely possible that the subconscious picks up on clues and signals in our surroundings that we don’t consciously perceive.

Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty sure that the recurring characters in my dreams represent certain aspects of my life. Maybe my co-worker now represents my work life and/or my career in IT.

As for the Japan dream, that one’s easy to interpret.

(BTW, 140 characters was way too short to include all the nuances of the dream. It also included a cashier / counter girl who spoke excellent English and a cash register that doubled as a bun-warmer for sample sandwiches.)