Twitterpated

Many years ago, people were only aware of the population with which they came into direct contact. If a family member or friend moved away, you only found out what they were up to if you ran into them at a later date. Communications has come a long way since then, moving from the pony express and telegrams to more modern telephones, text messaging, and email. In the last few years, social networking sites such as myspace and facebook have taken “keeping in touch” to a whole new level. It is now possible to stay on top of the lives of hundreds of people whom you have no interest in hearing about. In fact, it is now difficult to separate the information that you are actually interested in from the garbage from some guy that you barely knew in high school. And yet, modern society’s attention deficit disorder continues to accelerate. Those familiar to facebook know about status updates, where you can essentially tell your facebook friends what you are doing right now. There is now a new web service called twitter, which allows users to enter small (140 characters or less) blurbs about their daily lives. Many of those who use the service twit dozens of times each day, providing incredible amounts of useless info to people who have nothing better to do.



Jarom had heard about twitter, but ignored it, much as he did facebook, studying, and doing household chores, until he realized that all of these things could be good if done in moderation. Last week he read a news story about Charlie Villanueva of the Toronto Raptors. Apparently he snuck away from the team to grab his cell phone and twit during halftime of a game against the Celtics. Here’s the twit - "In da locker room, snuck to post my twitt. We're playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up." While Villanueva’s grammar and judgment can be questioned by his message and the fact that he did it at halftime of an NBA game, it did garner Jarom’s attention, and he decided to go ahead and create an account. Now he can be alerted if Shaq goes to the bathroom, or if Mark Cuban needs a new pair of pants. It should be a great addition to his life.

Happy St. Patrick's Day. Like those people need another reason to drink.

Another great addition to the Winn’s life this week was a new office chair for the computer. Since their marriage, we have simply been using one of the chairs from the kitchen table. These are not very comfortable and look a little silly. So for St. Patrick’s Day Alixa got to pick out a new, comfortable, swivel chair that can rock back and forth. It has been great. Jarom has been able to use it to check the status of his NCAA tournament bracket, which has done poorly, as it does every year. Skiffington is currently leading this blog’s pool, with 510 points. Nancy is bringing up the rear with 110. It seems she did not quite grasp the meaning of the seeds, and as a result haphazardly selected winners with no apparent logic at all. She now has exactly zero teams still alive on her bracket. But I admire her for trying. In fact, that she was able to create an ESPN username and successfully enter herself into the competition is a remarkable achievement, and one that should be applauded. So I applaud you, Nancy.



Also, Annie came up with a name for my game that I like better than the last one. It will now be known as “Are You Smarter Than A Ball Python”, and the winner will be listed after each post.