Tweets Are Taking Over My Blog!
- Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 3:32 am
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If you’re a regular reader of my blog (either via my website, Livejournal or Facebook Notes), you’ve surely noticed that I have been posting a daily digest of my tweets for that day. I tried to use a site called LoudTwitter, but despite them claiming it could be made to work with hosted Wordpress, it didn’t do a damn thing. So I tried the digest function in TwitterTools (the Wordpress plugin that I use to push new blog posts to Twitter), which also didn’t do anything. Finally I just made my own system.
I got to learn how to use SimplePie, which is great for parsing RSS and ATOM feeds, something that I don’t have a whole heck of a lot of experience with. I played around with how to display them, and decided that the visual styles that LoudTwitter uses were really nice and simple so I went with that. I then made further tweaks to the script, including making Twitter usernames into links to that users profile, as well as linking hashtags to the Twitter’s search engine. With some much appreciated help from @mrheadrick I learned about the usage of preg_replace(), and got some creative cronjobs going thanks to help from Dan@Surpass.
I’ve become quite interested in the immense power that Twitter possesses as I find more and more great uses for it. There are TONS (literally) of projects that use the Twitter API to make some really fun data sets. One of my favorites is Curse Bird, which was created by @richardhenry. I’ve also found some really neat people to follow on Twitter such as Adam Savage from Mythbusters (@donttrythis) and @woot. I’ve also noticed that when I mention someone or something, they follow me. I was talking about a new show called “One Way Out” on Discovery Channel, and the star of the show started following me. Same thing with the Foo Fighers.
So anyways, I mentioned in my last update that I had my interviews scheduled for Monday the 26th of January at 8am. I woke up at 5am and had a nice breakfast, left an hour early to make sure that I had plenty of time to get downtown, park and make it up to the 7th floor. My initial thoughts regarding how the interviews went were not too good. I had three back-to-back-to-back. The first one went ok, but not great. I didn’t feel that I was concise enough in my answers and felt my answers were hundreds of miles from the questions. The second interview went much better, and my confidence was booming after I was done. My answers flowed much better and I felt like they were received much better by the two people interviewing me. The third interview started out well enough, but it careened out of control quickly. I think it was because I knew two of the three people in the third interview prior to going in, whereas the first two were with people I had never met before. The mood was rather light at first, but it became pretty obvious that they were getting right down to business once the questions started coming out. They hit me with a few curve balls that I was not expecting at all and I had some long pauses to think of something as fast as I could. I started to get really nervous and my mouth got really dry. But I felt like I ended it well and didn’t feel like a complete failure walking out. I headed back to my store and reflected with my boss a little and it made me feel a lot better about the whole thing. I also spoke briefly with a candidate from another store going for the same position and she agreed that she was not expecting some of the questions that came up in the third interview either, which made me feel better about it.
On the following Thursday I had a feedback session with one of the supervisors in the work center I was applying for regarding my interviews. I was told that I had very strong knowledge of the job and I finished highly among the applicants. Unfortunately, there aren’t any openings right now. It’s unclear exactly what happened, as I assume there was an opening and it was either eliminated or filled by someone else. A lot of jobs were recently cut, and I don’t know if this position was involved in those cuts. I talked to my boss after the feedback session and we agreed that the whole process helped me immensely in my development, and no matter what the outcome is I will be better off having gone through the whole process.
Aside from that, I got a pretty nasty 48 hour bug in the early morning hours of the 29th of January. It started with some flu like symptoms including vomiting and fever. I woke up at 5am and threw up, and when I was taking a shower afterwards my hands started to get tingly and numb. I started breathing faster, which made it worse and eventually I started to hyperventilate which caused my whole arms to be numb and I couldn’t move my hands. Mae woke up and started to panic, and called 911. Paramedics came and checked vitals, said it was a panic attack. Took about an hour or so to get feeling back in my hands, and the flu symptoms kept me up most of the day. I didn’t eat anything for two days, and finally started feeling better on Sunday.
Work was fairly routine for the week, and I took the weekend off for my step brother Chris’ going away party. He is being deployed to Iraq for a year, so he got a shindig together at The Bierstube in Red Wing. Lots of beer was consumed, and lots of fun was had by all. Mae and I split the cost of a hotel room with Robert and Micayla so we didn’t have to drive home or try to find Chris’ house in the middle of the night. I also took Sunday off in anticipation of a nasty hangover, which never came about. There’s a fair amount of pictures up on Facebook from myself and Chris’ wife Stephanie.
Now that I’ve bored you with what is surely the longest post I’ve written in some time, I’m gonna finish watching Dirty Jobs and go to bed.
Filed under: life, twitter — Tags: bar, beer, chris, code, friends, life, mae, php, robert, sick, site, twitter, work —