Happy February, to each and every one of you. The second month being the best, and all. Not just because it is – from what I’m told – the month of my birth (James too). No, February as so much more to offer. Truck Day is this Friday, Pitchers and Catchers report a week and fourteen hours from right now, and there’s a week’s vacation to celebrate – among others – one of my personal heroes, Abraham Lincoln.
That’s right: we were born in the same month.
This year’s edition also features some interesting new musical releases from the bands I frequent, including the Heartless Bastards, M. Ward, Beirut, Passion Pit, The Airborne Toxic Event.
Besides all of that good news, there’s a lot to talk about that’s actually relevant. Or so I believe. Before I get to this week’s individual posts, the rare Wednesday edition of the grab bag. Below are items that may or may not deserve their own posts, but aren’t getting them.
Bit.ly
On the recommendation of the Hype Machine’s Anthony Volodkin, I’ve been using Bit.ly in place of Twurl.nl as my URL shortener of choice. The compelling feature, for me, is the transparent statistics made available on the URL’s. Here, for example, is the data for a link to the Dopplr travel summary I mention below. Like Jeff, I’m concerned that they’re issuing multiple hashes for the same target URL, but apart from that it’s a very nice service.
Latitude
Can’t imagine any of the location based services are terribly excited about seeing Google enter their market with Latitude, but the interesting bit here, to me, was the launch platform. Obviously it’s not a surprise that they targeted the G1 out of the gate, but I am a little surprised as an analyst – and disappointed as an owner – that they delayed the availability on the iPhone. I think we’ll see more of this as time goes along, owing to the need to compete as well as the difficulties they’ve had negotiating the byzantine Apple iTunes Store approval processes.
Pidgin
Pidgin, the IM project some of you might be more familiar with in its former incarnation as GAIM, and others might be indirectly exposed to via Adium, is – for the very first time – killing me. I cannot keep sessions open, it crashes multiple times per chat session, and it’s generally become unstable to the point of being borderline unusable. Nor can I pinpoint the cause; there’s nothing obvious about the behaviors that trigger the failures, nor does running it from a terminal give me any session data to work with.
If it weren’t for the fact that Empathy isn’t ready for primetime, I’d be a former Pidgin user at this point, which makes me sad. It’s been a great application for me for years.
Travel
One of the silver linings I had hoped for from the grim economic climate seems to be somewhat realized: I’m traveling less. According to Dopplr, who would know, in 2008 I spent 113 days traveling on 48 trips whose distance would have taken me 31% of the distance to the moon. While that may be child’s play for some, it’s too much movement for me. Particularly these days, when I have good reasons for staying closer to home.
Already in 2009, however, there are events being cancelled or conducted virtually that would have seen me on a plane in years past. So while that will undoubtedly have its downside and create problems, I’m happy for the respite, however brief it might prove to be, because travel is far and away my least favorite part of this job.
Alex pointed to this excellent piece from Micah on unfollowing people on Twitter, and I must say that I subscribe to most of it. I’ve long pursued a different path with respect to how I manage Twitter, and many of the reasons he culled his followers are the reasons I don’t follow in the first place.
But that’s not the only way in which I’m a bit unusual in my Twitter usage. I do not retweet (though I’m happy to point to interesting links and give credit), mostly because the seem too much like spam for me. Nor do I use hashtags, because I find them aesthetically displeasing.
Not that I judge folks that do, or recommend that you follow my lead: to each their own, as always. I’m simply trying to explain why I do things this way, because people ask.
