My contrib. copies of Ténèbres 2010 arrived. And, upon eagerly opening the lovely volume to my story, I discovered that my French is so far gone as to be pushing up the daisies. Sigh. Well, it’s not like it was all that healthy to begin with.
In a totally unrelated segue, I’ve discovered the virtues of Twitter! Yeah, I’ve had a Twitter account for ages, but it always seemed a cumbersome, clunky networking tool until this year when I started heavily incorporating the Daily Dragon‘s Twitter feed into this year’s Dragon*Con update notification schedule, discovering in the process why I’d always found it clunky. Twitter is really not optimized for a web browser interface; it’s optimized, ideal even, for a mobile, i.e., smartphone, interface.
And this year, I have a Droid.
Total geeky efficiency is being able to dash through the bowels of the Hyatt and pimp the charity auction while getting direct messages from my staff. I have become a convert to the 140-characters-or-fewer mode of information dissemination.
Although, granted, there were a few technical issues that almost sent me twitching into a corner:
- The second OTA Android 2.2 upgrade with Flash 10.1 support (FRG22D) came the Saturday morning of Dragon*Con weekend to my Droid. With unthinking eagerness, I hit the “update now” button, only belatedly realizing as I watched the Motorola “M” glowing for what seemed like forever during the reboot sequence that I probably should have waited until after Dragon*Con to run it, since if I happened to be one of the few-but-extant that ended up with a bricked phone from it, I would be totally and completely screwed. And it’s not like I needed Flash that weekend or anything*.
- The update did not brick my phone (I cannot describe the feeling of utter relief I experienced when the glowing red eye finally came up), but it did kill my beta Swype install. I remembered—after several futile and increasingly frustrated swype-type attempts—that the first Froyo update also killed Swype and required me to reinstall it. Cue the second round of breath-holding-rapid-heartbeat-OMG-what-will-I-do-if-it-crashes? as I reinstalled Swype (which says something about how much I love and rely on Swype these days). My first download/reinstall attempt actually failed. But then I deinstalled a couple apps to free up some memory and sent a few fervent prayers to the gods of tech to be merciful, and the second reinstall worked. Huge bucket-loads of *whew*.
- I then came down to Daily Dragon headquarters to discover that the Twitter OAuth upgrade had rolled out, subsequently taking out the WordPress plugins I was using for both the Daily Dragon and the Film Festival websites to automagically tweet updates. And cue the third round of frantic troubleshooting and breath-holding. Fortunately, the documentation for the upgrade was pretty straightforward so that even while sleep-deprived and panicky, I could sort it out.
Even after all that manic, red-eyed frenzy and fear, I still lubs my Droid and continue to be appreciative of the merits of Twitter. Course, now I’m on the hunt for the perfect desktop social networking client. So far, Tweetdeck and Seesmic are in the lead, but I’m dissatisfied with both of them. And what’s with none of them being able to incorporate LJ?
I’m also wanting to take on a WordPress guru for my Daily Dragon staff. I need someone who can do updates and maintenance on the fly so that I can have one less hamster to fling during the convention.
Any PHP/WordPress developers out there interested? I do WordPress web design on the side and was a professional coder for over a decade, so I’m looking for someone with more than user-level skills, someone who has experience digging into PHP and who understands fundamental WordPress functions, like how the Loop works.
*As it turns out, the Flash app isn’t coded to be stored on the SD card, and I am already scrounging for space on my Droid. So after installing it, trying it out, and figuring it wasn’t worth 10 honking MB of internal storage space, I de-installed it.
