YALog(@"Boring");: May 2009

Gmail Problems

Not sure what is up (or down) with Gmail. The application was working a bit odd on Thursday. The problems continued on Friday, but it worked fine at the office. Yesterday and today the service continued to be nearly useless. I was able to change the theme yesterday, but that wasn't the problem (I saw a post somewhere about themes causing problems, so I thought that might help). Today I was able to delete the Spam, but was unable to respond to any message. Typical error messages: Loading.../Still working..../Trying....

Reports of Gmail down on Twitter have appeared but nothing like other outages. Is it an ISP (Time-Warner Cable) problem?

Time to start popping messages again? That seems to be working (at least for my wife).

Update June 1: Gmail worked fine at the office. It is now working at home. Hopefully the problems have been resolved.

The Reality of Blogging

From GraphJam. Obviously, this blog is in the red zone....

Reading: John Brunner, Traveler in Black

A little light reading. I hadn't read any of John Brunner's work in awhile. This is different than the other books I have read by him. The man in black is actually good, even if the cover makes him look like the Grim Reaper.

More Twitter

See Dave Winer's "Tweets of the rich and famous" for some insight into these toons. To see what the Top 100 are tweeting, 100TWT.com, a little site that Dave created a week or two ago....

The 5th Wave

The Joy of Tech

Twitter

Twitter has become very popular the last few months (in some ways, it has jumped the shark and there is a bit of backlash). Quite a few celebrities have been using it to broadcast their lives. Most of them are actually not very interesting.

The most entertaining is Barack Obama's teleprompter (@BOTeleprompter). A look inside the adventures of the president's most needed staff member!

I've also been following Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong), Larry King (@kingsthings), Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), and of course Oprah (@Oprah). Lance's tweets are the most interesting as he posts about his training and racing. Oprah started twittering after Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to a race to a million followers for a worthy cause.

For educational purposes, I've been following David Allen (@gtdguy) and Tony Robbins (@tonyrobbins). Both use Twitter to advance their businesses, but it's for the good and not overdone.

I also follow Dave Winer (@davewiner). He tweets quite frequently, but not as much as some.... He has recently created a website that tracks the 100 most popular people on Twitter (quite a few reality TV people).

Of course Twitter has been the subject of numerous cartoons:

Things Twittered