Lame April Fools!

Today is April Fools day (like you didn’t already know!). In the recent years this day of the year is usually when a lot of lame April Fools pranks are played out across the Internet and blogs. This is getting so old and lame that its irritating, let alone humorous.

This sentiment is shared by others who are tired of the crap being passed off as April Fools day pranks. We need something really good and funny. Not the same prank rehashed year after year. Come on. It’s the Internet which has so many talented funny people creating loads of good stuff. Let them get more coverage than those listed above!

Update: Another one from Gmail

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and maybe grow a thicker skin at that..

It all started over the weekend - a bitching match going on at Techmeme started apparently by Louis Gray who replied to Duncan Riley’s post on Techcrunch. The comment by Louis Gray

TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley checked in with a quasi-analytic comment this morning

prompted a response from Duncan Riley where he calls Loius Gray a cunt and a wanker. Duncan Riley also says in his post

Notice the put down with “quasi-analytic,” lets not fight on ideas, lets denigrate the messenger.

And on his response, Duncan Riley does exactly that. He describes Louis Gray as

I say A-List somewhat lightly, because the guy who’s come after me is someone who’s called Louis Gray. I’ve been blogging a bloody long time and for a lot of that time I’ve been reporting on the movers and shakers in blogging, and until a couple of months ago I’d never heard of this guy. His about page is as useful as tits on a bull: he does PR for a Silicon Valley technology company and found blogging in 2006. He’s talked about now at the same level as Calacanis, Scoble and Arrington, and yet he’s reached the lofty heights of 735 subscribers in Feedburner; probably more than this humble blog but this isn’t my main outlet.

Which is the opening of his post linked to above.

I found this quite ridiculous and hypocritical of him and said so through a comment on his post (Ah, Duncan was kind enough to delete the comment but I happen to have a copy of it reproduced below)

You say that Louis Gray attacked the messenger? What have you done?
With this idiotic post you have done exactly that.

Practice what you preach hypocrite

To this, Duncan responds in a classic teenage fashion (after deleting the comment). He emailed me with this:

Seriously, fuck off.

Well, that is the background so far.
What are you Duncan? An A-lister? You think you are so great that you can try and thrash anyone and if someone calls you out, you go down to teenage expletives. Grow up dude.
If you cannot take comments and disagreement, then get off the blogosphere. You are being a jerk and behaving like a child.
And Duncan, don’t denigrate the messenger, discuss the idea. Oh, you already do not follow what you yourself write. Mea culpa

A very good analysis if also provided by Matthew Ingram.

I’ve started to use Twitter increasingly and find it to be a great tool. I joined Twitter when it was quite young, a couple of months after it launched but never used it much (my tweetstats graph) but have started using it more often in the past couple of months.

The main point of Twitter is the conversations it fosters as well as meeting new people. The advantages of Twitter over other forms of communication? Short 140 character messages and the ability to follow someone’s “tweets” without them having to follow you, which in my opinion is a good system.

But it is also flawed. As I stated, Twitter is the new medium for quick conversation outside of email, IM etc. Now the web-interface of Twitter is designed such that if someone posts a tweet to you, it comes in your replies tab but not in your message timeline. For those who have many followers, friends on Twitter, they will get a lot of @replies so can easily miss this.

And this has been a frustration. Many times I have tweeted someone but received no reply. No I guess it because they missed my tweet (and assume that they are not ignoring me ) . I think is fundamentally due to the design of twitter. There should be a way for the recipient to know that someone tried to contact him/her. Not necessarily in their normal timeline but somehow, distinguish that someone who is not on their friends list said something to them. In this manner, twhirl/snitter etc are much better because they show all @replies to the twitterer.

Anyway, I have also come to decide that I will only start following me those who follow me. (with a few exceptions of course ) If I follow someone and it is not reciprocated in a few days (a week or two maybe) I will un-follow. I think it is just a matter of courtesy if s/he feels that we can, at some point share a good conversation.

My twitter profile is here. Add me if you want to follow me there

A very interesting web/flowchart of the data flow and gathering when you publish a blog post. Though the depiction is mainly for hosted blogs (wordpress.com, blogspot etc) it remains true for self-hosted blogs too.

The entire flow chart is from the social interaction perspective of readers, marketers, spam scrapers etc reading your content and the chain reaction it starts.

Just like the chain reaction I am starting with this

This IS reality and not an MMORPG. Keep the rivalry to the game please.

Thank you

Well the MacBook Air has been released by Apple. I think it is a beautiful machine but the specifications of the system sucks. And it’s freaking expensive. I know I wont be getting it anytime

However, I came across an awesome pic which does a feature comparison of the MacBook Air to one of the most popular computers in the history of computing. No surprises that the Air comes out on top. I will let you decide for yourself though

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided to change my theme and put in a new theme. This is a clean, white theme with lot of free space and fluid layout. Graphics are minimal which should make the blog load faster.

Things will likely break and I’ll fix them as I come across them

Update: The theme breaks the blog big time because it is designed for Wordpress 2.3 while I am running a previous version and don’t plan to upgrade to 2.3.. Sigh. I’ll have to look for another theme now

Update 2: I managed to get a working theme which looks pretty decent. Though I did like another but that had the same problem as above. Sigh. This will have to do unless the other theme’s author feels benevolent and modifies his theme to make it backward compatible

My blog feels neglected. And not without reason. I’ve barely posted recently. Though there has been a lot to write.

A combination of work, mental imbalance and guilt of not working on my applications has kept me away from typing out anything. Also, I want to make a lot more private posts to put my thoughts into words, but only for myself.

The blog itself is also neglected since the theme is fairly old and I’ve not changed it for a while. No idea if any of my plugins have been updated nor have I upgraded wordpress itself (though  this is partly because I am thinking of moving over to Habari. If only Habari were a little more stable. But I digress)
But the guilt of my apps does not let me. Once the apps are done….