I’ve been playing around with Android 1.5 in the last months, using hacked roms and lately the Android Developer candidate release.. Now that the Cupcake update has pushed to all users, I’ve reverted back to the T-Mobile release of Android 1.5. The big thing with 1.5, besides stereo bluetooth, is widgets on the home screen. I’m not a huge fan of widgets, they take up icon space and can slow down the home screen, but I do use a couple to increase my productivity. My most recent and exciting find in the Market has been Twidgit lite. It impressed me so much, it kickstarted me into blogging about Android again.

I use Twidroid for my main twitter browsing and functionality, but Twidgit offers an at-a-glance view of the latest update from your friends’ feed. Tap on the widget to see the tweet in full, with options to reply, or create a new tweet. Twidgit gives you the option to set the update frequency to as little as once every five minutes, to once every hour, or even manually (there is a little refresh button on the widget for that).

Twidgit isn’t perfect; every so often it crashes, but it is very hard to make anything work with Twitter and keep running 100%. However, you can track the development and talk to its creator (Matt Woodfield) via twitter.

PS – Twidgit Lite is free.

I have dated John since February 2008, and I feel closer to him in more ways than I have with anybody else. I also live further away from him than anyone I have ever been with. How can I be so close, yet so far away?

Its the Internets baby.

My relationship with john was cultivated directly from social networking. We met on BearCiti, a friendly and well designed bear niche dating/hookup/oggling community. I oggled, he oggled back, “you’re My Type,” “OMG Woof!” From there we’d chit chat and IM, and bit by bit the urge grew to get on a plane to see a man I never met before, who’s mother thought I could be a crazy person (a valid fear I think). We met, fell in love, and then the realization hit that I would still have to live in Buffalo, and John (at the time) still had to live in Annapolis, and neither of us liked the idea of being apart. We had to give it a shot though. Luckily, with us both being geeks, we have a few tools that we use to build a relationship, 400 miles apart…

• Twitter – This is a lifestream spew of all my thoughts, rants, and aversions. John follows me on twitter and I follow him. We follow each others friends and have a comfortable network of people that share our thoughts. Twitter allows me to know whats going on with John, and vice versa. I know his thoughts in 140 characters. and he knows mine.
• IM – God we talk alot. Both of us use IM for work purposes, and all day we chitterchatter, rant and rabblerouse. Occasionally we get work done, but its good to know I have a link to him. IM is the good old standby.
• Blogs/podcasts - I blog (duh), and John does occasionally, but this is more than just our content. Its the content of the web. So many of my relationships have fizzled because we have ran out of things to talk about. The web is a series of tubes and they go on forever.  We share our web findings and our snark on a daily basis. From all this, I learn how John feels about things, his interests and opinions are a vital part of me feeling close to him.
• Flickr – This was something I wanted, whether together or apart. I wanted dinner parties and flickr sets. I get it all with John, and even though sometimes we quarrel over who gets upload rights, flickr archives it all. There has never been a trip with out a flickr set attached to it. Flickr doesn’t just benefit John and I, our friends and family see us in action (well, that set is private, actually) and provides a little validity, whether they need it or not.
• Phone Sex – This one’s a little bit archaic but Its the absolute most important thing besides physical contact: hearing your lover’s voice. John is the first person I talk to in the morning (I call and wake him up) and the last person I talk to at night. We have done this every day. I text a lot too, and with a smartphone I can manage and use all of the above social apps wherever I am. I admit to being a bit attached to my G1, but I’m also really attached to Scranto.  And as crude as it sounds, nothing is more fun than getting a dirty picture message out of the blue.
• Video Streaming – Here’s our most recent example: John and I aren’t spending christmas together due to logistics, but I still want to experience some bit of the Holiday Spirit with him. His present arrived a little early due to need, and he opened it last night over uStream. I watch and we talked as he unboxed it, smiled, and tried on his fancy new headphones. Sure it was a little weird, but you know what, it felt like I was with him. I got to see the look on his face, the joy of the gift, the appreciation. Thats what Christmas is all about right? That and spiked eggnog. I will admit we use video for other purposes, too… just not over uStream.

I don’t like long distance relationships, and neither does John. We do more than make it work, we thrive in it. All of it has to do with love, dedication, and a little web 3.o.

There a many other benefits of the web that can benefit long distance relationships. Think about finding cheap travel or job hunting. LDR’s used to get a bad rap because they were difficult to maintain and communication was limited to phone, or letters (something about paper, and stamps.. don’t know).  If you have hesitations about getting closer to that person who’s not so close, think long and hard about why you want to take the risk. Dating someone across the way can be heartwrenching, and no amount of twitter can help that. However, things have advanced in the ways of communication, and as long as you can maintain a strong connection, the miles don’t suck so much.

P.S – Its totally ok now to date someone you met on the internet. Don’t be a prude, update your snobbery book. kthx.

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

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

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.

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.

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]

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.

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

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