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Switch-A-Bit: upload to flickr and send to twitter.

I don’t have anything against TwitPic (or any other of those mobile photo to twitter apps), but I already use flickr to store my photos. If I use TwitPic, I’ll have to re-upload my photo to flickr or just lose out. With all the social networks, your intellectual property can get spread out and lost, so I like to keep flickr as a basecamp for all my photos.

However, Flickr doesn’t allow me to directly tweet pictures. Though I have streamlined the process of blogging from my phone using email-to-flickr, I wanted a way to tweet my snaps without having to send anything twice, and without using another photo hosting service. And by god I think I found it. Enter Switch-A-Bit.

Switch-A-Bit is a switchboard/router/thing-of-magic for your social networking needs. Sign up and connect it to your accounts, and switch-a-bit monitors your activity, routing content back and forth along the channels you set up.

Switch-A-Bit lets you set trigger words to activate the channels preventing you from overloading your social networks with a lot of useless data, like what happens with the inadvertent blog spammers on twitter. For example, on my flickr-to-twitter channel, when I’m posting from my phone, I append (#snap) to my post. It uploads to flickr then on to my blog, like normal. Switch-A-Bit catches the “#snap” and posts a tweet with a link to my photo.

Switch-A-Bit is as simple to set up as dragging and dropping. In fact, I was a little confused at first that it was working because there wasn’t a lot of set up or even options. Links are processed for twitter by a new sister service called bit.ly. As the service progresses (its still in beta), You can be sure to see a bunch more social network added. Right now they offer connections to blogger, facebook, flick, jaiku, tumblr, twitter, and your wordpress blog.

Switch-A-Bit

Daily Drag Queen Affirmations

I think I inadvertently became a Nikol fanboy… which is cool, cause Nikol is like the Molly Wood of sex ed. Anyways Nikol, I’ll do you one better.

For twice the price of a sexual favor (that would be $20), you can get access to 365 quips and quotes of affirmation, performed by various drag queens. Simply visit dailydragqueenaffirmations.com and sign up.

Daily Drag Queen Affirmations is a great way to start your day. Each morning you receive an email that links you to that day’s video. The video contains a man, dressed up like a woman, giving you praise or an uplifting thought that will hopefully brighten your day.

(It’s like those little page-a-day calendars except fiercer and we don’t kill trees.)

• Created by Start With A Laugh Productions

Scranto’s Video Test

John bought himself a new digital camera, and sent me this video to show the quality of the recording. I twittered about it, only to have the bears demand viewing rights as well. So here it is, coupled with a testdrive of the new Sprout online flash widget creator.

Twitter, In Plain English.

I have two types of friends: those that twitter, and those that don’t. The ones that don’t are aware of my mini blog, the right hand stream of thoughts and dirty replies that runs down my sidebar. However, very few get the concept and when I try to explain it to them; it oft comes out as too technical and geeky. They can’t see the worth and the value I get from knowing what my friends are doing across the web.

Perhaps this could help. CommonCraft, the Plain English folk, made a video explaining what twitter is, how to use it, and why we love it. check it out.

The biggest step is the first one.

Unless you catch my twitter, I’ve been somewhat silent about John on my blog, and partly its because I wasn’t thrilled to get the reaction. See, I’ve spent the last couple of years in Buffalo being the cruelest gaming asshole ever. I’ve dated a few guys, broken a few too many hearts, and pissed off a whole bunch of people. I’ve come to the conclusion that I no longer wish to continue this trend; it seems to get in the way of me finding real happiness. To go from player to lover, deceptor to devoted, is as easy as flipping a switch.  However, proving that that switch to people is a lot harder. Thus, the second part of my conclusion is that I no longer care how people will perceive my sincerity on this because I only have to prove myself to one person, and i quite like it this way.

I’ve fallen quite deeply for this redheaded bear named John. John lives in Maryland. I most recently spent President’s day weekend with John, and we seemed to have fallen in love. I’m a firm believer that if you care for someone, then you make sacrifices and take chances that you wouldn’t normally do for anyone else. The risk of failure is only high when you hesitate, and is most surely 100% when you don’t take the risk at all.

The mechanicals of our relationship are very intersesting, merging social technology and cross-culture immersion to make up for the physical gap between us.  A uniquely funded travel budget may be in the future, and beyond that is too early to tell. All I can say is this dude completes me in every way I could ever have possibly imagined and to pass this by based on something as stupid as distance would make me a fool.

Oh, and he twitters…

[Click above for the Maryland Trip Flickr Set]

UPDATES: Dreamhost and the “Billing Issue”

The Twitterverse exploded this morning with Dreamhost customers freaking out about high charges, account suspensions, and overdrawn bank accounts. Currently, the DH panel is unavailable, as well as an increased load on all hosted sited. What the hell happened?

• “Last night, this guy ran a standard billing cycle to clean up stragglers from 2007. Unfortunately, the biller was ran for 2008 (December 31st, 2008 to be exact). This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking the havoc that we are so sorry you had to be put through.”

I’m on MediaTemple for my personal endeavors, but we use Dreamhost as a hosting solution for WNYMedia.net. Not only do we pay out of our ass for service, but support is simply shit. There is no way to contact them except for a shoddy threaded support panel, and the company number will answer with a message to tell you to visit dreamhost.com.

I think this was the last straw for a lot of folk who are sick of dealing with Dreamhost. We’d have moved months ago if it wasn’t for the sheer logistical nightmare of moving everything over, downtimes and dns issues being something we like to avoid. However, I think nows the perfect time to start more aggressively looking for a new host. If only Mediatemple had a faster mySQL system, but at least you can call them 24/7.

• Are you currently getting rough fucked by the Dreamhost? Is your account touching a negative thanks to Josh? Let me know how you feel. Also, if Dreamhost has spared you and you guys go to the movies and shit, I wanna know what a success story sounds like.

• P.S. - Dreamhost is “*extremely* sorry for the mishap.” Golly, those asterisks make me feel so much better.

• Dreamhost Status

Updates

• [11:15] - Panel still down, and now so is the Dreamhost Status blog.
• [2:23] - Just got word that we were overcharged $1200 and it went through… waiting on the reversal. Dreamhost says we shouldn’t worry because “we’re fixing it right as you read this (and maybe already have for your account)! The best move for you is to just sit back and pretend you never got those weird billing email(s) talking about owing lots of money!” HAHAAHA! Yea.. thats totally hilarious, we’ll just laugh this off you fucktards! Panel is back up though.

So what happened and what did we they learn?

It seems the total looting from the faulty script was valued at about $7.5 Million. However Josh, the man who we all hate right now, takes the blame on himself, and maintains that the billing system is completely robust and secure. Rubust and secure, but not human proof, which is where today’s Fubar came from. See, Josh was merely trying to catch up on old bills from 2007, and rerun the payment systems to retry for those that never went through on the last days of January due to a systems upgrade.  When he put the dates down, he put the year as 2008, instead of 2007. What happened was the secure and robust system ran exactly as he told it to, billing for December 2008 and making almost everyone’s account appear 11 months behind.

• The end to this story is that of course, I’m very very sorry, we’re very very sorry, and I’m sure you’re very very sorry this happened.

  A new service is running right now (in parallel on all the controllers) that fixes all those future charges, and if your credit card was automatically rebilled, refunds the payment automatically. You don’t have to contact us or your bank, and you’ll get an email when your account is finished fixing up. It’s going to take several hours to complete. There are a lot of you these days!

  If, because of this billing mistake, you somehow incurred some fees from your bank or credit card company, please let us know after tomorrow (today we are just replying to all 10,000+ billing messages with a generic explanation) and we’ll do our best to make it right for you.

  The moral of this story is that “flexibility” is rarely desired in programming! The less a program will accept/the less a program will do/the less options and preferences it has, the more usable it is/the more understandable it is/the more stable it is.

Twittertale snitches on your potty-mouthed Tweets.

I’ve got a bit of a potty mouth. In fact, a quick search in my blog reveals about 11 pages of choice worded posts. Alright, so I curse like a sailor, and I’ll never stop. I do tone it down a bit around the old folk, children under 2, and clergy that i haven’t slept with, but pretty much I’m a foul mouthed jerk. Deal with it.

My tweets are also a bit vulgar at times, and thats understandable, its my venting machine. I’ve noticed that a lot of my other twitter pals tend to do this as well. and there is a new site called Twittertale that rats us out, reposting the foul tweets.  It’s not suprising I found myself on the naughty list a few times, like today…

If you twitter and you tend to be a bit sassy, you might wanna search to see if you made the list. Regardless, if you enjoy the foul mouth rants of others, subscribe to the feed. Now fuck off.

• Twittertale

VibraExciter: cyberdildonic pleasure for the man who twitters a lot.

What do you get the guy who has every cellphone gadget imaginable? You get him the VibraExciter, one the the few cyberdildonic devices tailored for men. In short, it’s a cock ring with two eggs attached to a hands free unit that goes off for when your phone gets a call or a text. I’d be afraid to get this, with the amount of tweets i get on my phone, especially after @keithburtis or @jowyang gets on a roll, I don’t think I’d be able to maintain a flaccid state.

• Get this at LoveHoney for £24.99  pud, err pound, or about $50 US.
• via BOINKOLOGY 

Twitter Stats

Twitter (wiki) is one of those things that means nothing to some, something fun to a few, and the new way of life to the rest. Las February, I picked up twitter as a new wave, thought I get social with the new buzz. Little did I know that it would soon connect to be the perfect alt blog; an ability for me to send out shouts of information that I didn’t really need to make a blog post out of.  Twitter has proved with it’s API that it doesn’t matter the amount of information you have, its how you can use that information.

One great example has been the most recent Twitter Stats perl script whipped up by D.Cortesi, who wanted a way to find out what he’s been up to with Twitter over the past year.

Originally scripted in perl with use in Numbers on OSX, he posted the code and shortly thereafter, bugs were fixed, code reengineered and polished to work into ruby and googlechart and gnuplot. Here’s my stats below, thanks to @twistednexus for chrunching the script for me…

It turns out that I talk to my bear friends on twitter a lot (@steiger, @cantorum, @bearpupuk), as well as Beth (@kidkreativader) from Hero(@Herodesign), and my business partner Chris (@buffalogeek). I’m most active twittering from midday till after work; thursday is my biggest day to twitter.

Stupid Facebook.

I tried to be subtle about this, I didn’t even twitter it, yet. Unfortunately, when you start the wonderful process of changing profile statuses to “single,” and one of your social means is Facebook, subtlety gets hard. After about a half dozen im’s and emails from folk that are facebookers, I’ll make it public.

• Michael  and I are no longer a couple.

I really don’t want to hear how Michael was bad for me, or how I’m better off. Truth is, it doesn’t really matter. Not being with Michael was something that I had to do for a new year for myself.  This has been that hardest decision for me to make, because instead of something catastrophic to trigger this, I had to realize on my own that we weren’t meant to be past a year.

I’m just gonna take some time to myself, hang out with friends and focus on me. I’m not going to be dating anyone else from Buffalo for a while, the supply of decent single have long been exhausted and I don’t feel like trying to disprove that claim either.