these pictures are amazing: Tormenta eléctrica en erupción del volcán Chaitén

i wonder if our world looked something like this as it was being formed.

via wired science.

poor The Duffbert. he's having some issues with his application. for some reason he's man enough (or crazy enough) to admit them publicly!

i was going to log a comment over there, and when i went to the page, i got this:



i dunno, but i think i'm smelling some Worst Practices karma here. ;-)

i did finally get to the page, but i'm afraid to post a comment there. i don't want to add any more problems to duffy's list today. heh. so... instead i'll just say it here:

the truth is we ALL have crappy code floating around here and there. it could happen to anyone. i've brought down servers before too. i mean crashed them. game over. crashed a few notes clients too, man i could probably write an anarchists cookbook for lotus notes if i wanted to, with the mistakes i've made over the years. my apps are pretty solid most of the time these days, but only because of my past mistakes.

hang in there brother. you'll figure it out eventually. it's probably one particular bit of nastiness, and not all the redundant (or whatever) snippets of not-exactly-ready-for-the-red-carpet code.

bedhead #2. kinda hard to see in twitter, i had to zoom in. so, to get the full effect...

things that i like about twitter:

1. twhirl

2. meeting new people

3. ppl who might be too timid to blog, might not be afraid to twitter, so i think there are some new voices popping up. maybe?

4. a big reason why blogging is cool: it's easy to blog. it's easier to twitter.

5. conversations feel very natural on twitter

6. there is an excitement about twitter right now that you can feel that is similar to what it was like when i started blogging. it's got "new car smell". at least to me, since i've only been really engaged with it in the past few weeks.

7. going back to #5, it isn't just "what am i doing right now". it really is a conversation. you don't see that until you start to follow lots of other folks. if all you are doing is broadcasting and not following, you are missing out. that said, it IS a distraction. one i definitely have to turn off for long periods of the day if i want to get anything done.

did i mention twhirl? yes, i did! you can't beat it if you are twittering from a computer.

some things about twitter seem to fly in the face of intuition. for instance, "any one 140 character string can certainly be taken out of context". this is certainly true (and i'm glad i don't have to give a flying monkey about that), because of the fact that twitter IS an ongoing conversation. whenever you follow a new voice, you are potentially wading into several conversations you didn't know anything about. and if you wanted to pull something out of context, say for the generation of FUD or whatever. twitter could be a good source for that.

twitter is one of those things where you just have to do it to get it. the model is fascinating. one of those things where you think, why didn't someone think of this years ago? even though certain things about the model seem counter intuitive, it still just makes hella sense.

"There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts..."

my communication "model" is surprised. i haven't been surprised by anything since i got my head around the blogosphere.

today is the day you admit you are extraordinary.

maybe you are the person with the secret super power you've never owned up to. you never admitted it to yourself, because being "extraordinary" would seem somehow, haughty or presumptive. "who do i think i am?" you might have asked yourself. or "what would they think?"

maybe you've been buried under the hum drum, lost in the avalanche of rush hour traffic and mortgage payments. crushed under piles of laundry and stacks of bowls and dishes. adrift in a sea of term papers.

there are a lot of ways to become an amnesiac.

no more of that. now is the moment when you realize you can no longer hide from what you are.

your super power might be what you are the most ashamed of. it may have caused you endless grief. it might be the thing you'd never dare let out of that closet. the one with the five locks on it, and ten layers of paint, and the silent alarm. you may have to go at it with a pick axe, for days or months or years, to get it open, depending on how deeply it is buried underneath your defenses.

you've only been hiding from yourself.

so... get that closet door open. peer into the depths of your gift. put your face to its face. gaze into its eyes, learn the contours of its cheeks, watch the way it breathes.

start asking the dumb questions, the "how do i get started?" kinds of questions. the world is open and wide and longs for you to take your place in it.

everyone together now, out loud: today is the day i admit i am extraordinary.