Twitter is actually quite awesome. For me, it’s the middle between IRC, MSN and text messaging. You can see it as public texting: say you want to go out, well you can tweet that and other twitterers read it and they can decide to join you. For me that works great, in a number of cases it even made sure I was aware of plans for going out early enough (I live far away from Amsterdam, I require a few hours notice for such things). So it’s texting, but then free and with multiple recipients. Mostly, that is what it does for me.
But there are a number of drawbacks, which I care about in various degrees. Let’s name some of them.
There’s a reason why a tweet is only 140 characters long. If you need to tell a story that’s over 140 characters, it doesn’t belong in a tweet. This is a statement I’ve heard all over, so I think I can cautiously say that it’s a general consensus. Some people decide to tweet three or more times about the same subject though, or they literally break their tweet with a ‘…’ and continue it after ‘…’ in the next tweet. To those people I’d like to say: get a blog.
Twitter is not quite MSN. That is, you can send each other @replies, but only direct messages are private. It doesn’t happen very often, but I sometimes catch an MSN-like conversation on Twitter. It makes me feel like some sort of intruder and that’s a ridiculous notion since these people choose to let the world see their conversation, but still. I can’t put a stop to it other than to unfollow them. I’ve considered it numerous times for some, but what about the stuff I do want to see? It’s a tough decision, and in the end I always choose to keep the users and view the useless tweets anyway. I’m curious and I like to see the rest of their scribbles, so what can I do. If Twitter sported an option that hides @replies for specific users to other users from my list, that would solve a big part of this issue.
And then there are the endless complaints. I have refrained from commenting on people’s Twitter behaviour up to the writing of this post, because how they use Twitter is their own choice, and if I’m really that annoyed about it, it’s up to me to unfollow/block them. However, others don’t seem to treat me that way. I’ve been completely bashed over retweeting a tweet with which you could win a prize. It’s spam, they argue, and spam is evil. I think there’s little difference between this and your average ad, but hey, sure, whatever. I can see their point, and even though I think it’s their responsibility to unfollow me if they’re bothered by it, I can adapt. No more spam it is.
But what I really don’t appreciate is getting bashed over posting something about my day. Getting into a long discussion because I posted one tweet was not what I imagined Twitter was going to do for me. The most agonising part of it is, people tell me I should unfollow them if I’m that annoyed, but those same people badger me about my tweets and they still follow me. As an added effect it makes me walk on eggshells, I hardly tweet anymore.
Then why haven’t I quit Twitter? Because I like the idea of knowing when people are going out, and sometimes I see/hear something funny I’d like to share. And of course, curiosity. And maybe I can win a prize! Oh no wait…
So it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything really interesting (unless you count puppets made of paper as interesting), it’s time for a little update.
I still work at IBM, but this time I went freelance. Marjolein Tamis Translations is my one-woman company, and it’s thriving well already. I almost have enough resources to leave and get myself a place. While it was originally the plan to move somewhere near my friend Bram, he’s made different plans since that time, so I don’t need to take that into account anymore. Basically I’ll move to an affordable place closer to Amsterdam, or if I can just even slightly pull it off, in Amsterdam.
I quit my weekly speech therapy-sessions, which were actually turning into simple chat sessions, during which I spoke fluently enough to make me wonder why I was still there. In general my speech is better than ever (with of course the occasional off-day, but I’ll never lose those), and I still visit the group once a month to keep in touch. I am actually really proud of myself for making such enormous progress here! I watched a tape of myself during my first therapy session, and I didn’t even remember stuttering that much. I’ve come a long way :)
No, my thesis is STILL not done. I’ve started to keep up where I am on this site, mainly for my own reference but also so people can see what I’m doing. I got tired of all the questions. Anyhow, I intend to finish it before the graduation point at the end of January. This is a bigger pile of work than I’ve ever seen at once during my study, and thus I’m very slow and reluctant at making a start. I have two teachers guiding me now though and I have an actual corpus to work with, which I will refine this week. When I finish this, I’m going to treat myself with a holiday.
Soon I’ll post some progress reports on that thesis, and a new column for stotteren.nl.
I really liked how Sam & Max turned out in cubeecraft, so when I noticed this one I just had to make it too. Darth Vader, including helmet and light sabre!
I finished this quite a while ago but I thought I’d still post it here: my cute knitted dice bag. Thanks to Faragon I was able to start right away, since she gave me wool and the pattern for it. I think I knitted the pattern a bit tight but it’s not a disaster really. All part of the learning process :)
Sinds een tijdje geleden mag ik mijzelf columniste noemen voor de website stotteren.nl, zie hier voor mijn tweede column. Gewoon doorlezen is natuurlijk ook een optie.
Gewonnen!
Laatst las ik over een bijzonder spel, simpelweg ‘het spel’ genoemd. Als je dit spel speelt, heb je het meteen verloren. Je wint ‘het spel’ namelijk zolang je er niet aan denkt. Zodra iemand je erover vertelt, heb je verloren. Er wordt verder niet bij verteld of je ook meerdere spelletjes kunt spelen en wanneer die dan starten (zodra je er niet meer aan denkt?). De ultieme winnaar zal er nooit iets over horen, ik zal nog vele malen verliezen. En tja, het spijt me, jullie hebben allemaal verloren.
Zo kan stotteren ook voelen.
Van de week was ik lekker tegen een vriend van me aan het praten, en ik kan kleppen hoor, het is een van mijn grootste hobby’s (en dat wil toch wat zeggen, vind ik). Zegt ‘ie halverwege het gesprek tegen me “joh, je hebt al de hele tijd niet gestotterd!”. O ja, helemaal vergeten… ik stotter.
Soms ervaar ik zo’n geweldige periode. Een half uurtje, een paar uur, soms een halve dag. Dan ben ik even geen stotteraar, dan ben ik even een vloeiend sprekende persoon. Maar helaas, ik realiseer me pas dat ik aan het winnen was als iets of iemand me eraan herinnert dat ik kan verliezen. Met stotteren kun je echter ook ‘winnen’ als je er wel aan denkt. Je doorbreekt je verwachting dat je gaat stotteren, en dan kun je niet meer zeggen dat je echt een stotteraar bent. Je stottert alleen af en toe. Als er helemaal geen spel is, wat valt er dan te verliezen?
The other day I was clicking around on the interwebs, and found cubeecraft.com. You can download a pattern for a cubic version of your favourite character, print it out (on thicker paper), cut all the lines and then put it together, no glue or tape required. Yesterday I decided to try it out with two of my favourite characters: Sam & Max. It takes about half an hour to an hour per character and the directions for putting it together are quite self-explanatory.
Yes, I realise I have no life right now. This will change, as I’ve set up my own freelance business and my first job starts in June. Glee! ^_^
Up until a few days ago, when I made my last post, I thought I had a very nice theme worked out for my blog. The only issue was, posts kept loading really slowly, as if they were waiting for something. I didn’t know enough about it to figure out what could cause it, but Habbie did and he found that the issue was embedded in my theme. Apparently it queried the site xpstatz.com for some reason, most likely for malware purposes. Since my theme came from a non-official themes site (I can’t even remember which one), the malicious code was probably embedded in the theme by the creators of that website and then distributed. I would never have found out if the queried site, 2.xpstatz.com, hadn’t been down all day. So just to be safe I figured I should get and edit a different theme, from the official Wordpress site. Who knows what else is embedded in the other one…
Recently, my mother opened her hobby shop. One day before opening she got an offer from someone at Pixelhobby, and she decided to sell it along with the stuff she’d already stocked. Pixelhobby now accounts for a large part of her profits.
But what is it? Well, remember Ministeck? Pixelhobby works the other way around: you have a piece of plastic with pins on it, and you push little square pieces of plastic with holes in them over the pins. Where Ministeck had pieces with 2 or more pins (think tetris blocks), Pixelhobby only has pieces with 1 hole. When I looked at this for the first time I had one association with it that wouldn’t leave my mind: oldskool gaming! Therefore I decided to go with one of my favourite games from when I was young, which is Mario 3. This is the result ^_^
Edit: I’ll give a more detailed description of how it was made. First I got the picture off the internet. Then I used a program called Pixelhobby Designer to make it into a pixelated picture (it’s downloadable from their site, Windows-only afaik). I bought the colours and the plastic boards I needed, as was detailed by the pattern I printed out. Then I put a plastic board on the pattern, which looks like this, and I filled in the squares, circles, triangles and crosses with the four corresponding colours. After that, I put the board on the next pattern. It takes ages and you have to be careful not to mess it up, but it’s worth the effort :)
I’ve wanted a tattoo since forever (well, I think I was 16 when I got the idea) and I’ve known it was going to be this one for the past two years. I always imagined I should have it tattooed when my life is coming together, becoming calmer. It seemed right to think so since a tree is stable, grows steadily and roots deeply. I thought I should ‘root’ first in my life. This might not happen though. Somehow I thrive best in a life that has at least a touch of chaos in it, and I can’t imagine ever really achieving a perfectly quiet life. I’d definitely hate that. My roots lie in the fact that I know who I am and what I want. So the picture was hanging next to my screen and I decided not to wait any longer. I have a tree tattooed on my back!
My mind and my iPhone are in the nineties, and it’s spring time. This is where it’s taking me…
I can’t believe we were into that kind of sunglasses back then, although I can imagine this video would still do well today. The nineties are very underrated in that sense. In a related mood (imo), check Darude – Sandstorm.
