Tuesday, November 18, 2008

You are news

I made a post on twitter.com awhile back stating:

"I love Twitter because it has you guys :-) Its my local news, cup of tech, cup of politics, quart of comedy, and a sprinkling of addiction" Source: http://twitter.com/tankilo/status/992850990

@jonnyangry Replied: "@tankilo whats the local new twitter SN?" Source: http://twitter.com/jonnyangry/status/993588735

I hadn't meant that there was a news organization with journalists reporting what people are doing locally or what people are thinking locally, I meant that I read what you guys report on what you are doing and thinking, to me that's news.

I'd love a situation where a large number of my neighbors, coworkers, and people who work close to me, were active on twitter. It would bring me one step closer to recreating the "small town" feel of "everyone knows everyone" that I grew up with.

The rest of this article is skippable.

My internet connection went down sometime around midnight on November 16th 2008. Since I was just surfing along it's very likely it's just an outage and nothing wrong with my system. The last time this happened I was on the phone with Cox, and they said "nope, no outage, we can't communicate with your modem, try disconnecting all your TV's and going straight to the modem, that still didn't work? You are going to need some high quality cable then, we will schedule a technician visit to your home." The next morning the internet works fine, I hook my TV's back up, and everything else, and it still works fine. So I have to call back and cancel the technician visit the next day. So a fail on their part, obviously there was some sort of outage but the technician on the phone didn't have the info and so he had me do the normal troubleshooting steps.
November 16th around midnight, the internet goes out again.
I posted "Cox internet went down. Makes it hard to research WotLK DVD install problems for my relative. They upgraded account & can't play" http://twitter.com/tankilo/status/1009262892
About 2 hours later "@tankilo Mine was down too, I wonder how widespread it was. Where are you located? I'm at 7th Street and Greenway" http://twitter.com/PHLAK/status/1009314652
Then that morning someone who lived close to me tweeted "OMG the internet isn't working. Someone save me." http://twitter.com/kissmecait/status/1009737695
It was already pretty late at night so I went to bed and read these messages in the morning, and to me that was good to hear because it confirmed "an outage" and nothing I needed to change about my own system. This was even "news I could use" since now I wouldn't spend hours messing around with my own equipment.

Edit: I'd say this probably improves your outlook on life as well. Try consuming a little less of the "news" and listen to a few more people on twitter. If you don't want to follow anymore people, just use http://search.twitter.com/ and lookup your town, apartment complex, shopping center nearby, office building, name of your company, etc.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah, we had that outage here, too. It really sucked, because we couldn't do our work. I hate outages.

Danthol said...

Moar posts plz! KTHXBAI.