For anyone who worries that I’ve disappeared off the face of the earth: I’m still active on Twitter if not here.
Unrelated: Dictionary.app is my favorite thing. I’m amazed I ever passed the GRE. Someone should torture me with flash cards before my vocabulary completely vanishes.
A tidbit from Future of Web Apps: Mullenweg said that, even on their best days, the CNN blogs powered by Wordpress.com get less traffic than the lolcats.
Anyway. Congrats to McCain. He worked hard to get this nomination, and his smile when he announced his arrival at the finish line was adorable. His wife, however, looked like a scary vulture woman.
I am in Miami. First off, I would like to apologize to the citizens of Miami for bringing the cold weather with me. It’s been cold (relatively) and windy since I got here yesterday. Second, I would like to apologize to my readers because the coherency of the following post will likely reflect how exhausted I am.
Last summer, I told my boss that when I was hired, the managing editor promised to send me to a conference somewhere interesting and that I hoped that promise would be fulfilled. And after I found out that Future of Web Apps 2008 was going to be in Miami, I told him that’s where I wanted to go. And given the choice between giving me what I want or listening to me whine until the end of time, he bought the plane tickets and booked the hotel.
And then this morning, when I walked over to the conference center, I discovered the Miami Herald was right across the street from FOWA. And then I emailed the web editor and begged for a tour.
Tomorrow, I get to tour the Wichita Eagle’s parent company’s largest newspaper. Maybe I’ll get to meet Dave Barry.
I’ll spare you all the uber-nerdy scoop from the conference. (Twitter, Digg and Flickr developers discussing how they partition their databases? That’s hot.) But let’s just say I’m enjoying being one of relatively few chicks at a tech convention.
Me: So where do you work?
Him: I work for the Census Bureau, actually.
Me: AWESOME.
Him: Uh, not really.
Me: I’m a data nerd. The Census is like Mecca.
Him: …
Okay, maybe I’m still a social wreck even among a sea of nerds.
Number one reason Twitter rocks: Totally blowing chain-of-command out of the water. A corporate overlord A McClatchy VP and I are Twitter buddies.
I haven’t officially met him. He visited the newspaper once last year, but there are so many rungs on the corporate ladder between us that I wasn’t introduced to him.
When adding a couple of McClatchyites to my twitter “following” list, I added him because as my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, he’s relevant to me. And he seemed like the kind of executive who speaks in, um, actual words rather than execuspeak, so that’s worth watching.
He added me back. And he replies to things I tweet about.
And that makes me feel like in this big, giant, corporate, so-big-that-it-must-be-at-least-a-little-evil media company…I matter. (Sweet!) And that makes me a better employee.
(And after I tweeted “I’d kill for noise-canceling headphones” and received a Tiger Direct package from him a few days later, the rest of the newsroom is thinking about tweeting some death threats, too.)
I got my eyes checked today. The doctor confirmed what I have long suspected: my eyes are freaking awesome.
And then he talked me out of contacts because of something to do with astigmatism and my very low level of correction needed and other things that sounded very convincing.
So I ordered new glasses and told my coworkers that I only wear glasses so that I’ll look nerdy enough that they’ll believe I’m actually good at this computer stuff.
They laughed. They saw through my joke to my true, authentic nerdiness.
So it’s public record that I’ve never been that thrilled with my RAZR. It crapped out once, and I got a warranty replacement. A couple weeks ago, the replacement crapped out and there was no way I was going anywhere near another Motorola.
It didn’t help that my iPod had finally died — not even the complex resuscitation techniques I’d developed could bring it back — a couple of days before that.
I’d been rationalizing what it’d take for me to buy an iPhone since January. Faced with having to get a new phone and a new iPod — no, you see, I need an iPod for drowning-out-annoying-coworkers-when-I’m-on-deadline purposes — well, it made incredible sense to my shiny-thing-loving girlbrain. And my rational brain was able to concede that it wasn’t entirely about the shiny factor.
Aside from the annoyance of every chain coffeeshop charging ridiculous fees for their wifi (and the frequent lack of an independent shop nearby), my iPhone experience has been pure awesome.
And the iPhone-friendly version of Meebo was a lifesaver when I was in London. If you’re the mobile web type, check it out.
I often think of
the sweet gig I could have right
now. Cue the facepalm.
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