smart computer use?

So, everybody is using Twitter all of the sudden. I like it I guess. It’s fun to see the free-flow of info roll through that site. It’s hard to say whether it’s got long term staying power, but it’ll be fun to see what happens. If people are using it, it worth using!

I read about Google sounding out of touch about Twitter:

Last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented on everything from the economy (which he called “pretty dire”) to Android’s jump from phones to other devices. In other words, stuff you’d probably expect. What came as a surprise was the curveball he threw at everyone’s favorite micro-blogging website, Twitter.

“Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems,” Schmidt said. “In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?” He then went on to call Twitter’s success “wonderful,” but it all sounded a little backhanded.

Yeah, he has a point that I can agree with. It does seem like it might just be a phenomenon. It’s hard for many things these days to have more staying power than email though.

I like it. I’m relatively new to Twitter, but it’s fun. I actually really do like how it’s relatively easy to gets tons of info and links of stuff you are interested in if you follow the right people, that is probably my favorite aspect.

Alright. Here’s a classic tale of computing.

Approximately 38 minutes ago I grabbed the laptop (the one I’m using right now), flipped it open, and thought to myself “hey, I should email that Doom rickroller video to some people right now”. How I came to this thought is a much longer and different story. I’ll leave it for a different time. If you are wondering what a rickroller is, check this out. I found the whole rickroller thing to be pretty amusing.

Back to this story.

I opened up Firefox. All my tabs were reloaded from the night before, including the tab with the Doom rickroller video from youtube. I then opened up gmail and started to compose a message.

Upon hitting ctrl+v to paste the rickroller video link into the message field, Firefox just pretty much froze up. Weird. I waited minute just in case it was a javascript thing or something. No go. I then tried to close Firefox. No go.

This laptop, although dependable and pretty nice, can get kinda flaky when it’s left on and goes in and out of hibernation a lot over an extended period of time. Being the somewhat impatient and reckless computer user that I can be sometimes, I just held down the power button and killed the machine.

Upon restart, the machine crashed and rebooted. I was asked politely by Vista to go into a startup repair mode. Okay. Sounds good. I’ve never seen this before but it sounds like a good idea. I ran startup repair. The machine sat and thought, using a load bar to show me that it was thinking about something. Then it prompted me to run system restore.

No way. I didn’t want to run that. I had just installed Propellerheads Reason 4, and didn’t feel like needing to reinstall Reason if the system restore rolled back too far. I hit Cancel.

Now, you might be thinking I’m an idiot. Truth is, sometimes I just don’t care if my computers crash. I should maybe be more concerned.

I then had to sit and wait for about 20 minutes while my machine completed the startup repair operation. I had no idea how long it was going to take until it ended.

All I wanted to do was email the rickroller video link. That was just too much to ask.

Anyways, after the repair completed and shut down, I started the computer and decided to type this. Good stuff I guess.