Twitter and Me – My Trip ‘Round The Twitterverse

(Twitter icon bird set, created by Mirjami Manninen, can be downloaded here)

It’s been about a month now that I’ve been using the Twitter social-networking platform and I have to admit, it’s been an interesting study of how human communication is evolving through our interaction and usage of new software communication platforms. Now to be truthful, I’ve been wary of starting up a Twitter account because like anyone else viewing it from the outside, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Indeed, the most common question posed when someone hears you’re “on Twitter” is what exactly is Twitter. The most common explanations are that Twitter is a “micro-blogging platform” due to its restricting entries to no more than 140 characters or that’s it’s just another social networking outlet to stay in touch with a group of friends/acquaintances. Although my experience with Twitter is still new and thus, rather limited, I think this other definition sums up Twitter best – Twitter is whatever you make it out to be. Confused enough? Well, let me share my own experience with this platform to shed some light on this.Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

Social-Networking Sites MySpace and Facebook – It’s Time For Some Change

In my previous entry, I wrote about the ongoing tactic used by social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to remove pictures of mothers breastfeeding their children as they deemed them to be “offensive” and/or “pornographic” in nature. Indeed, the blogosphere has been ablaze with posts either expressing outrage at this continued discrimination against women or worse, people trying to rationalize that images of breastfeeding mothers would be as appropriate as seeing pictures of people going to the bathroom as both are ‘natural acts’ (how’s that for a mature, rational thought process – trying to connect providing sustenance to a baby with the process of excretion). Now I’ve already made my position on this clear in my last post, but as I inferred near the end of that entry, there is another related issue arising from this that bears some examination for further discussion and debate.   Click to continue reading the rest of this entry

Windows Update KB951748 – Surprise! Microsoft Drops The Ball Again

This morning started off pretty much like every morning with part of my routine involving logging onto the internet to review emails and the latest news. But today, my computer decided we weren’t going to do that as it insisted there was no connection available to the Net. Naturally, I tested my connection and checked the network cabling and so forth. But nothing seemed amiss. Apparently my computer had decided it was tired of driving on the information superhighway. No bother – well, not a big bother I should say – as I simply set myself up at another terminal to work on today, and making a mental note to poke around more on the other one to figure out what’s wrong with it.

But as luck would have it, a clue flashed on the screen of this alternate terminal of what might be wrong with my computer. Windows Update was advising me that I had new updates to install on this terminal. New updates . . . . . hmm, I remembered installing updates yesterday on the other computer and that was the only modification made to it. So, I checked to see what exactly these updates were and one of them was Click to continue reading the rest of this entry