October 24, 2011 archive

Oct 24

5 Years of Using Twitter – Some Thoughts on That Anniversary…

Twitter

It was five years ago today that I started using Twitter as what would come to be known as "@danyork". October 24, 2006. I remember the date purely because "10/24" in the US way of writing dates is an über-geeky number (1 Kilobyte or 210). Yes, I remember things like this.

My recollection is that Chris Brogan sent out invites to a whole bunch of us bright-shiny-object-chasers and we all joined this new service called Twitter. This was before Chris became the rock star that he is today[1] and in a much simpler time when all of us who were exploring this new world of "social media" were reading each other's blogs, listening to each other's podcasts, commenting on each other's content and generally interacting in a community of people seeking to understand where we could take all these technologies and tools. Anyway, Chris invited a bunch of us... my Mac Twitter client tells me Chris was Twitter user #10,202, I was #10,312, Doug Haslam was #10,396 and Jim Long (newmediajim) was #10,496. (Just some of the names I remember from that time.) It was a playground where all of us were trying to figure it all out.

The explosion was to come shortly thereafter.

After all these years, though, I still stand by what I wrote in some posts way back in 2007 and 2008:

A friend asked me on Twitter today: "Is Twitter really worth it, or a distraction?"

I still say that I find value in Twitter pretty much every day.

It has become part and parcel of my daily routine and how I interact with people on the Internet. It has become how I distribute info about content I write. It's how I learn of new things to pay attention to.

I still follow my general policy I laid out back in 2008 about whether or not I follow someone... and I'm still finding new and interesting people that I follow pretty regularly.

I do not though read the main feed very diligently... I may dip in from time to time... but most of my focused reading comes from various searches that I run on keywords of interest. I also use FlipBoard now and then on my iPad to browse when I just want to see what's going on.

It's been fascinating as the boundaries of our lives continue to blur to see who we use Twitter and all of these tools.

We're all collectively engaged in a grand experiment in openness. And brevity. What becomes of it none of us know.

All I can say is that I'm very much looking forward to seeing where Twitter and all of these services go over the next five years!

P.S. And yes, Twitter remains my daily practice with "brevity". Certainly a challenge for a writer like me ;-)

[1] And I mean this in a good way. Chris is a great guy and I'm glad we got to become friends over the years. His path has taken him to some pretty great heights and it's been great to see!

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Oct 24

150 Years Ago Today, the USA Got Wired!

A great article in the San Francisco Examiner today about the completion, 150 years ago today, of the transcontinental telegraph here in the United States:
150 years ago, a primitive Internet united the USA

I think "a primitive Internet" might be a bit of a stretch... but then again I'm one of those network people who think of the "Internet" as a "network of networks"... and this first interconnection was really just creating that initial network!

Nuances aside, it's an enjoyable article to read...

Telegraph

I found this an interesting commentary on the disruption of the communication channels that came before:

Indeed, the Pony Express, which boasted it could deliver a letter from Sacramento to St. Joseph, Mo., in the unheard of time of 10 days when it began operations on April 3, 1860, shut down 19 months later — on the same day the transcontinental telegraph went live.

Though dramatic, that was a short-term effect. "But the longer-term effect was we connected the nation in real time. ...," says Fischer. "For the first time, businesses could do business nationally. The government could communicate nationally in almost real time."

Well worth a read to understand the challenges that went into the first physical infrastructure for what would become "telecommunications".

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Oct 24

The Incredibly Tedious Monotony of Chemotherapy

Cladribine (2-CdA). This poison is going to help me

Today is my wife's second (of four) chemotherapy appointments. She is sitting right now at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at the Cheshire Medical Center here in Keene, NH, with an IV of toxic drugs flowing in to her.

Many friends have contacted us/her wishing her all the best today... hoping it all goes well... relaying that they are thinking/hoping/praying all the best for her.

All of which is VERY much appreciated.

The truth, though, is that today is really not bad.

Today is really just incredibly... well... monotonous.

Boring. Tedious. Whatever word you want to pick.

This has been a fascinating revelation to me who knew nothing about chemotherapy before this all began.

Here is the snapshot of our day...

We arrived at the hospital at 9:30am. A little before 10am we were brought back into the chemo treatment area were she sat down in a comfortable recliner-type chair. A nurse drew some blood samples that were sent off to the lab and then proceeded to get some vital signs and other normal tests... and then we waited for the lab work to come back.

Once the lab results came back fine, they set up the IV with some anti-nausea medicine, some saline, etc, etc, and give that to my wife for a while. There was some other medication my wife had to take an hour before the actual chemotherapy chemicals began, so she had to take that and wait.

Sometime after noon, they administered the first of the two chemicals that make up my wife's "cocktail". It ran for over an hour dripping into her bloodstream through the IV line.

After that was all finished, they hooked up the second of the two chemicals... and that will run for 45 minutes. After that she may be done... I don't quite honestly remember if they did something else. She'll probably be ready to go home somewhere around 2:30 or 3pm.

But this is what "a day of chemotherapy" is like.

Sitting. Waiting. Sitting. Waiting. Sitting. Waiting.

For hours.

They have individual TVs there, of course. And she and I talk now and then. The anti-nausea medication makes her kind of tired, and so many of the patients, her included, take a nap for a bit... or just don't feel overly talkative. Friends have stopped by for a visit, which is a nice distraction. You can get (or bring in) food and drinks. A volunteer came by offering Reiki massage. They have free WiFi so you can use the Internet with your computer (which is what usually I do... sitting there doing work while my wife rests).

But overall it's just a long tedious day of sitting and waiting.

If her experience this time is like the last time - and like what we understand from others in the process - this afternoon/evening she may be a bit tired from the drugs but overall okay. Tomorrow she will probably be fine. Wednesday morning she may be fine.

And then sometime on Wednesday the hell will start.

The chemicals will be doing their deed of killing cells and the body will be reacting. And then will come the pain, the sickness, the fatigue...

... which will pretty much continue straight through the weekend and on into next week...

We're hopeful with some new medication that this time around it won't be quite so severe, but time will tell.

Today, though, is all about the monotony of the injection of the drugs.

Sitting. Waiting.

Sitting. Waiting.

Image credit: drhenkenstein on Flickr

Oct 24

Pondering All The Strange (Chinese?) Accounts Joining My Email Newsletter List…

huh
Has anyone else operating an email mailing list noticed subscriptions pouring in over the past few months from strange email accounts?

I have been amazed - and I can't for the life of me understand WHY this is going on.

For my VERY infrequently issued email newsletter, A View From The Crow's Nest, I've seen probably 50 subscriptions over the last month from email accounts with very bizarre names - both names of email address and also the first and last names of the users. They pretty much all have come from accounts at:

  • hotmail.com
  • tom.com
  • 163.com
  • sohu.com
  • yeah.net

Now, in looking at those sites... outside of hotmail.com, they are all Chinese-language sites.

Did my (English-only!) blogs get on some list for people to read in China?

... and some % of those people decided to actually subscribe to my (again, English-only) email newsletter?

I find this hard to believe, particularly when Google Analytics shows NO increased visitation to any of my sites from China or Chinese-language browsers.

Is something else going on here? The IT security part of my brain was spiked into high paranoia by the patterns in the last names that were entered into the subscription form. The vast majority of these "last names" were either:

  • andeson
  • aifseng
  • billaa
  • John

And the "first names" make no sense as an English name. Here's a screenshot showing some recent subscriptions (with, yes, some info deliberately hidden):

Strangeaddresses

This pattern continues for several more pages.

Now, I have no real knowledge of the Chinese language. Is this perhaps a translation of Chinese characters into Roman letters by the iContact email service I use? i.e. are these perhaps legitimate subscription requests where the info is getting lost in translation?

My first thought before I realized all the sites (sans hotmail.com) were Chinese was that this was spammers subscribing to my newsletter from free email services.

But why?

I couldn't (and still can't) figure that out. What good would it do for a spammer (or other attacker) to subscribe to my email newsletter list?

Or are the subscription records bogus anyway? Are they the byproduct of attackers trying to probe the security of the signup forms? To see if they could exploit a SQL injection attack or something like that?

Or is something more widespread going on? A Google search on "aifseng", for instance, shows that "word" paired with other nonsensical (in English) "words" on a host of other sites.

Did I miss a memo about some security issue going on? Or is this the case where something is getting lost in translation?

Any ideas or info out there?

Image credit: maddercarmine on Flickr

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