Tuesday, March 23, 2010

a techie savant moment

so today . . . i have been experimenting with twitter.

as with most things social media related, diandra got me started.

last summer when she and i were visiting my parents, she helped to convince my mom to switch to sprint and buy a palm pre. we spent the rest of the week acclimating her to the new phone. well, technically diandra did the acclimating--for two reasons. first, she already had a palm pre, so she knew how it worked and what it could do. second, i did not. my palm pre did not appear until christmas . . .

but my treo would still do quite a lot. so she got both of us set up with twitter accounts. i used mine while we were on vacation, and diandra was around to help me. then i came home, never to tweet again.

until today.

i've been thinking about it for a few days though. lately, i've been having these random, kind of funny thoughts. but they are short. however, i am pretty good at embellishing, so maybe some of them could have been expanded into blogs--but by the time i sat down to blog them, i couldn't remember what they were . . .

the brain--it is a terrible thing to waste.

i was telling rollie this, and he said, "maybe you should just make a note in your phone. that way when you got ready to blog, you could remember what you were going to write." i thought that was a pretty good idea, so i pulled out my phone and prepared to make a note--only to realize i already had a file on my phone for these random ideas. i had just forgotten.

the brain--you know.

my next thought was that instead of writing it down, i should just record it vocally. my phone will do that, won't it? hmmmm? i am pretty sure it will--i'm just not quite sure how to do it . . . so i shelved the whole idea and decided that if i couldn't remember a thought from the time i had it until i blogged, it probably wasn't worthy of my attention anyway!

and then today while i was sitting at my desk, my fish kept staring at me. i've been worried about my fish on the weekends. every monday i expect that he will be dead from lack of food. i have repeatedly been assured that he will be fine, but still i think he will be belly-up on monday morning. the school secretary feeds him a little extra on friday night, and apparently he will also nibble on the plant roots that share his water, but the weekend seems like such a long time to be without food . . .

yesterday he kept looking at me. i finally fed him a tiny bit more. today he kept looking at me. i thought, "what if he is starving to death? what if i kill my fish because i don't want to feed him enough?" (which is purely selfish, because i just don't want to have to clean his habitat--but that is a story for another blog . . . ) and then i thought "i should tweet this!"

i don't know why i thought about tweeting. maybe i thought someone would read it and give me some insight into fishy thinking. diandra is probably the only one who follows me on twitter though, and she would probably die of shock if i actually tweeted something. but i decided to risk it. i was actually hoping it would show up on facebook. other people's tweets show up on facebook. (why didn't i just post it on facebook, you ask? because i wanted to include a picture to prove the fish was staring at me, and i couldn't figure out how to get the picture onto facebook from my phone. there! are you happy now?!?) i guess i was hoping it might just magically appear, and i needed some answers, so i gave it a try . . .

. . . and i not only tweeted, i tweeted WITH A PICTURE! yes indeed! i figured out how to tweet a picture. i was pretty darn proud of myself! i rarely accomplish any electronic or internet milestone without the help of someone more tech savvy than me. but today i did!

as i thought about it throughout the day (because i did, you know--i thought about it all day and about how smart i was and about what else i could possibly do . . . ) i decided that a tweet is just a tiny blog in 140 characters. the truth is, some thoughts just aren't big enough for a blog, but that doesn't mean that they might not be amusing or entertaining. so i am going to be tweeting more often. i think.

and since you may not all have twitter accounts, i spent some time figuring out how to post my tweets onto my blog. so you don't even have to sign up on twitter to follow me--you can just catch up when you read the blog! isn't that clever? at least, it will be clever if it works like i think it will.

now if i can just figure out how to get my tweets to post on facebook . . .

4 comments:

Diandra Ann said...

:) good job!

Carroll said...

Oh Julie, don't overfeed your fish. Do you remember when Wally had fish tanks? Probably before your time but maybe not. Anyhow, the cardinal rule was, DO NOT FEED THE FISH! So we didn't. We were away and he had the Janitor come into hs office and feed them. Now he had lots of exotic fish at the time. The kindly old gentleman felt sorry for then and fed them extra. We all discovered why DO NOT FEED THE FISH was so important. Kind of like people. Overfed is not good.

Al said...

can u get into facebook?

Jewelielyn said...

al--not yet. my brilliance has faded. i think i am going to need help for that. you will know when it happens though, because my status will change more than once a month! :)