The Internet on Computers?

I haven’t updated this blog in a while, but that’s not to say I haven’t been blogging pre-say. I realized a few months ago that most of my blogging had moved to Twitter.

Why? Well there’s a few reasons:

• via its gMail interface, blogging is as simple as sending a text message, making it very immediate
• the restrictions (160-odd characters, no images, short urls) make tight writing a necessity
• you don’t feel like you have to write 2-3 paragraphs (that’s me) when you can sum things up in a sentance
• the social aspects - it’s not Facebook, but that’s probably a good thing - really if i want post an album, I can use Flikr
• the 3rd-party apps - there’s a whole host of things built on Twitter’s api, from search engines like TweetScan to Twitbin there’s a lot of interesting things being built around it.
• it’s fun

Blogging certainly has its place, but if you’re looking for something less formal- and quite possibly the way things are going, give it a try.

It looks like Sitepoint noted YYZtech’s list of best books for web designers 2007 a few weeks back - thanks guys! Seriously, SitePoint seems to be one of those publishers that is really improving, I remember their one of their early checklist books, good information, but very functional layout, flip forward to something like their CSS Anthology and you see how far they have come.

While finishing up some reviews for NachoGrid, in anticipation of putting it up today, a search for Artful Dodger yields this lisiting on alltorontopubs.com. In fairness, their’s is on pubs in general, ours is a bit more nitch, but at least it shows there’s life beyond the big three Toronto restaurant guides.

Hats off to the folks at AllTorontoPubs.com - they’ve done a nice job on their site. We’ll just have to make our nicer

Just checking the stats for YYZtech.ca, oddly they’ve been down this weekend. Since most of the site’s visitors are Canadian, I’m thinking, “What? is this everybody getting ready for the Grey Cup or something?” So much for Hockey Nation - or does that I should be looking for another downturn in the spring, about the time the Leafs start falling (apart)?

Somewhere doing the day the name came to me: WeirdPro, kind of sounds like WordPro - ok, seriously dating myself here, but I swear I was about 9 when this was sota (State Of The Art). What it references is much older, the phrase “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” which is, of course, from the late Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing?… Johnny Dep?)

Anyways, this is going to be an occasional entry of lists of the weirdest, you can’t make this up stuff - kind of like what you can say about HotDocs - documentaries about these characters that if someone wrote them, no-one would say they’re beleavable.

So, now it’s 10:40pm, the Second Cup is closing and I’ve run out of time - so no list for today.

The last few weeks I’ve been selling off a bunch of older titles I had laying around (instead of working on this blog), one of them that almost went off to the local BMV was PHP 5 In Practise; Fortunately, I passed on that one and tonight, while trying to finish off a tag-generator for Halifax-Restaurants.com, it saved my tail at least once. When I originally reviewed it, I was impressed with the amount of material in it- it’s still one of the best books out there when you’re looking for something like- “how do I remove white-spaces from a string” and such basic but necessary things.

I’m sitting in a local Second Cup dashing (ok, bit faster than crawling) through my TTD (Things To Do) list, fueled by cold coffee (yes, more caffee - same price) and I’m thinking about the “Digital Bedouin” (so termed by a U.S. writer Dan Fost in his article WHERE NEO-NOMADS’ IDEAS PERCOLATE, written a few months back) and I’m wondering what it means- kind of like the team cybercrime or auto-crime (yes, apparently when cars where new, criminals who used cars where refered by their tool, much like there is crime and there is cybercrime - I give it another 10-15 years before it’s just called “crime” except for the old folks at CTV - yes, they still show temperatures in Fahrenheit, what 20 years on?).

Anyways, I’m thinking that it’s one of those things that people will just start doing without really thinking of it as anything special- go to a university campus and you’ll see students working on laptops far from the classroom - in a few years some of them will be working far from the boardroom- hopefully with newer laptops. Doubt most of them will describe themselves as Digital Bedouins as much as anyone called themselves a “computer user” past 1990.

In the mean-time, there’s a few good links over at Slashdot, ShannonClark, or Going Bedouin at Web Worker Dail if you’re looking to get into it anyways.