Tag Twitter

This question gets asked by a lot of people “ooh! Windows7 or Vista! What should I do?!?”

I won’t be the one to make that decision for you.  Infact, I’ll make it harder for you :)

In the season and the spirit of giving, and finally getting around to doing this (I’ve planned to do this for awhile) I’m giving away to a random and wanting participant one or more of the following!

I’ve had these sitting on my bookshelf for some time, and have been meaning to give them away! Will you get them? Do you want them? If you’re located in Chicago-land I could definitely drop them off, but if you’re in Egypt, Italy, Russia or Mumbai I’ll gladly ship them to you.

		Retail	Amazon
	Windows Vista Resource Kit Windows Vista Administrator’s Pocket Consultant Windows Vista Ultimate	$59.99 $29.99 $399.95	$36.55 $18.27 $224.99
		$485.93	$279.81
	Your Cost:		$0.00!

What’s the catch?

I encourage you in the spirit of giving to tell your friends and your friends-friends.  I get my hands on stuff like this all the time and when I don’t give it away at events while talking to people about Technology, It ends up back on my shelf ready for me to give away!

Please do comment on this, comment on here, retweet this on Twitter as well! :)

The more people who are interested and involved, the happily I’ll be that this is going to a good home(s).  (I only have one of each of these at the moment, but if the interest is there, I have a whole closet of other goods, software included!)

Please comment! Please retweet, Digg, Stumblr, etc. Add me @cxi on Twitter too! (Only comments on the blog count though! :))

Every comment, link back, blog post, twitter follow, retweet, digg, etc will give you an entry into the drawing!

Thanks and a happy thanksgiving and other festiveness to all!

(All those certification bound, be sure to check out the Free Testing Archive for free Certs!)

This is a terror event like no other, one which has been prolonged by the use of technology, adhoc and otherwise.    A call out from the users of the service Twitter requested on #mumbai that the Live Media Coverage being broadcast by news networks such as NDTV and CNN-IBN may have made the situation ‘worse’ than ‘better’ by not only letting those “on the street” know what is going on, but also informing those on the inside in the form of Terrorists.

So this situation almost on the flipside.   The Broadcast media apparently making the situation worse (Not to be outdone by a major network broadcasting on-air the room number of a hostage) and the AdHoc (Twittersphere) using this opportunity to spread information that is beneficial to all of those involved.

Such notable ones as:

• The number of tweets about people heading to hospitals to donate blood is astonishing!
• @aadisht: #mumbai Holy Family Hospital has enough blood; please donate elsewhere if you do.
• rockzapper: #mumbai NDTV still showing commando movements. Doesn’t it get it? This can cause a grim situation for police.
• @blogdiva: more numbers to call re Mumbai crisis : US helpline 888-407-4747 Brazilian help line 9820686143 (C) CNN IBN FA 1-613-996-8885
• blogdiva: if you are in Mumbai and want to donate blood, call 922 222 1947 and tell them you want to donate. They’ll get back to you when someone
• CXI Our hearts go out to those suffering in Mumbai, as well as my friends and associations out there being personally impacted.

Never before in history have people had access to so much information, so real time, and so fast and available.  Some may feel that Twitter may be a hindrance to situations going on, however the spread of information by good people wanting to help has never been so prevalent as their ability to reach out and help, especially when times called for it most.

This is hard on everyone, and no one feels it so much as those in Mumbai and with friends and family who live there.  Our hearts are out to you, and may this catastrophe be resolved with no more innocent deaths or bloodshed.

Tomorrow won’t be known as Thanksgiving, but Thanksliving for those who can survive this horrific time and be stronger for it, in light of desperate and terrible situations.

Be safe, and be well.

Anyone who’s been using Tweet Deck has also been using Adobe Air!

Well, there are a number of enhancements introduced in both of them! A MUST upgrade, hands down, no question about it!

Tweet Deck:

There are a number of new details introduced in v0.20b, and you can go here to check them out, but some of the ones I’ve particularly noticed and enjoy!

Response times are amazing! If I post a tweet, it appears immediately instead of getting cached to eventually deliver.  Running at speeds equal to being “On Web”

You notice that little “[+]” over there? That serves two-fold benefits!

First of all, it lets you add people to groups, so you can structure and order things easier inside of Tweet Deck Groups! And second of all, if there is no [+] What you have there is someone who is following you, but you are not following.  This plays out very useful in the Replies column trying to decide if someone you are talking to is someone you are following or not!

Love the new “Remaining API” section, which lets you know how close you are to exceeding your API calls for the hour and effectively being stuck with “Rate limit reached”

You will notice that the little scroll bar at the bottom which let you specify the period of time, with which your tweets will be displayed is gone.  Yes, it is gone, though with these new advancements and speed, it may not be needed anymore!

Be careful though, if you have a preferred URL shortener, it will reset it to the default!

Adobe Air:

Finally! Adobe Air will use your default browser instead of an alternate Browser!

What does this mean for you? It means if you chose FireFox, or Chrome to be your default browser, it will use FF or Chrome, instead of forcing it to IE.   I’ll have to test this on my Mac still to see if it forces open every link clicked as a new Browser entirely, but it should continue to open as new tabs in your existing browser in your preferred browser! Thanks Adobe!

So, go upgrade! You’ll be glad that you upgraded both Adobe Air and Tweet Deck!

And feel free to add me @cxi on Twitter! I wish I could say I’d add you back immediately, but I still have a case open with Twitter support, preventing me from being able to add new people!

Today, Twitter offered an explanation of the Deletions issues a number of Twitter users have been experiencing: Updates on deletions

Status deletion has been re-enabled.

User restoration has also been re-enabled.

User deletion remains off as it still represents a significant problem for the stability of the service. In the past several months, we’ve had to turn off user deletion many times in order to keep things running smoothly. Each time we turned it back on, we’d hoped we had sufficiently patched the existing system to prevent it from being a problem.

We’ve now concluded that the user deletion system needs to be rewritten and we’ve started that effort. Until we finish, user deletion will remain off. There’s a number of places throughout the site where we will need to message this better. We’ll be making those changes as well.

Certainly, this is a concerning issue, only one of which plagues the frequent twitter users in the tweetosphere.   Without any knowledge of exactly how they’re handling the routines for handling user deletion, aging, and load experienced on the system I could only offer the briefest of a question of how it is being addressed with suggestions.

We’ll see if the Tweetosphere continues to suffer from Performance issues such as this, and the frequent Site Outages experienced throughout the week.  Always raising the question and concern of have they properly accounted for the scale of this volume and the user communities peaks and valleys for system load.

I’ll keep my eye on it, but here is your word from the Twitter itself! @cxi – Christopher Kusek

The other day on Twitter, ABC7 was looking for Feedback in the form of Tweets on our take on the Economic Bail out – Well, my voice was heard! (Well, my tweet was posted and read! ;))

So, for the whole of the twittersphere – Here is my little few moments and 140 characters or less on economic bailouts! (I come in at about 1:07 seconds)

@abc7 Govt modifying the bailout plan to take real action will be beneficial so long as it is not used to line pockets.

Thanks to all of you out in the twitterland, and you can certainly find me here on twitter

You can find the original link to this on ABC7’s website!